Mr. Neukom,
I know the intellectually honest people who work at RADAR, a group dedicated to truthful reporting about domestic violence issues. You are the president of the ABA. RADAR tells me your ABA Commission on Domestic Violence flyer is full of falsehoods about domestic violence. RADAR says there are 11 falsehoods among 19 claims. I should say I am not surprised that false claims about domestic violence are out there and being amplified. There is so much to gain.
Among the very questionable statements the ABA has published in the flyer is the claim that “False allegations are no more common in divorce or custody disputes than at any time.” How can the ABA publish such laughable nonsense with a straight face? That’s like saying “Tax cheating is no more common around April 15 than any other time.”
Research shows that false allegations increase four-fold during custody and access disputes. Given the realities of family courts–and the huge windfalls of money and child-contact that are at stake–false charges are to be expected. Anyone who says otherwise is either very simple-minded or else interested advancing the deception himself. We need ways of dealing with false charges, and denying that they happen is reprehensible.
I attended a law school graduation recently–Northeastern–it’s a very liberal social activist law school. One speaker urged students to be activists and to “get on the Bar Association committees, because that’s where the change happens.”
I think what’s going on with this committee amounts to a bunch of activists trying to “make change happen.” But they aren’t doing it honestly. They are doing it with falsehoods and claims unsupported by research. This flyer represents a small, but crass nonetheless, political move by an ABA Commission to further bias the administration of family law and to force more children away from their fathers and into single-parent mother-headed households. And the lawyers on the commission may even have a financial interest in furthering this bias. You think that might be so?
Please withdraw the leaflet, Mr. Neukom; you at the ABA don’t have your facts straight.
[Neukom's address is abapresident@abanet.org.]
