Taken into Custody: The War against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family. By Stephen Baskerville. Nashville, Tennessee: Cumberland House, 2007. www. Cumberlandhouse.com. 368 pp. US $24.95. Canadian $29.95.

Stephen Baskerville, political science professor and past president of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children (ACFC), has published his first book, Taken into Custody: The War against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family. More profoundly and completely than any other book of which I am aware, Taken into Custody graphically shows us the nightmare to which feminism and political correctness have brought us, where—due largely to the actions of an unfeeling social work and government bureaucracy– good fathers are locked out of their children’s lives by the millions. Even many of us such as myself who have been toiling in the trenches of men’s rights for years may find their eyes opened by Baskerville’s unblinking portrayal of what may be one of the greatest and most far-reaching frauds ever perpetrated, with tragic consequences for countless families, children, and parents. The state is not a neutral party in marital breakdown, he writes, but has a tangible interest in promoting and broadening the definition of marital impasse. Child abuse is good for bureaucracy, which poses as being able to “solve” problems that it has played a leading role in creating. Moreover, the bureaucracy has proven itself highly skilled at convincing the public that the solution to the problems it generates is expanding its scope.

The author reminds us of the supreme importance to children of their dads’ presence in their lives: “Children from affluent but separated families are much more likely to get into trouble than children from poor but intact ones.” Statistics ostensibly showing that race is connected with crime, or that low income is connected with crime, are in fact markers for what is really going on: race and low income are connected with fatherlessness, and it is fatherlessness that is fundamentally connected with crime.

Baskerville speaks forthrightly: “In a free society, public tribunals exist to dispense justice… When they stop dispensing justice they begin to dispense injustice; there is really no tenable middle ground.” By contrast, in a truly Kafkaesque situation, “the one thing that cannot be debated in the [family] court is legal guilt or innocence—such as violating the marital contract or leveling false accusations.” “[A] father who has lost his children through literally ‘no fault’ of his own must prove his innocence against an accusation that may not even be clearly defined, without counsel, and without a jury of his peers.” A man’s children effectively become wards of the court, who can be placed in day care or other institutions without the father’s consent, and he can then be ordered to pay for it on top of his child support.

No wonder the author concludes that “with the exception of convicted [my emphasis] criminals, no group in our society today has fewer rights than fathers. Even accused criminals have the right to due process of law, to know the charges against them, to face their accusers, to a lawyer, to a trial, and to expect knowingly false accusations to be punished.” Current judicial practice actively excludes much of the otherwise relevant evidence. “[A wife] can have a half-dozen previous divorces, she can desert the marital home, she can abscond with the children, she can commit adultery, she can level false charges, she can assault the father, she can even abuse the children, and none of these (except possibly the last) can be even introduced as evidence in a custody hearing.” Moreover, courts “are also not above summarily jailing children who fail to cooperate with the criminalization of their parents.” One study found that a defendant in an accusation of domestic violence is never found innocent but always receives a punishment, either fine, jail, and/or treatment.

The author’s early suggestion that his book is the first to systematically examine the breakdown of fatherhood, marriage and family as a political phenomenon initially struck me as overblown but in the end I found myself wholeheartedly agreeing. As Baskerville himself visibly struggles to understand the very phenomenon to which he is devoting his first book, he speculates that “the very magnitude of the injustice may be the most formidable barrier to the acceptance that it is taking place.” Of course, part of the answer is nearly every barrier that can be erected to undoing this wrong is put in place, as when family courts fail to keep records on the gender breakdown of custody awards “because judicial [and feminist] interests lobby to prevent such records from being kept.” The author aptly sums up our current predicament: “What we call ‘divorce’ has in effect become a kind of legalized parental kidnapping.”

The book is so good that one is continually tempted to quote from it. “[M]arriage dissolution blurs distinctions our justice system was previously at pains to delineate carefully: private versus public, civil versus criminal, therapy versus justice, sin versus crime. When government stopped enforcing the marriage contract it began enforcing the divorce decree.” Constitutional principles such as parental rights as a fundamental Constitutional entitlement are simply ignored in cases of involuntary divorce. The “domestic relations exception” usually protects family cases from federal review even when violations of fundamental constitutional rights are involved. “Family courts typically operate behind closed doors and generally do not record their proceedings.” Later Baskerville revealed a fact I never knew—that Department of Health and Human Services agents can carry guns and issue arrest warrants, obviously in disregard of due process of law.

While Nazi analogies are badly overdone these days, the author does an excellent job of drawing an extended analogy between the tyrannies of family court, the Nazis, and the Communists. Unfortunately his rhetoric occasionally gets the best of him, as when he twice suggests that child support is “an entitlement for all [my italics] working mothers” despite the fact that we know fathers occasionally receive custody. Baskerville has a great talent for pulling disparate facts together, as when he notes that there are over 60,000 child support enforcement agents, or fully thirteen times the 4,600 drug enforcement agents worldwide. The author convincingly shows us the institutional face of true evil, whereby the federal government subsidizes middle class divorce and fatherless children, with states the beneficiaries. A few pages later we meet the personal face of true evil, Robert Williams, a paid consultant who helped draw up nationally accepted child support guidelines which he then exploited by founding a consulting and collection company earning multi-million dollar profits. While direct alimony is now too obviously out of step with feminist doctrine to persist, child support laws underwrite divorce.

As wonderful as this book is, it regrettably has one quite serious shortcoming that undercuts and comes perilously close to potentially negating its powerful message. The references are copious but are often erroneous or inadequate–secondary references when primary sources could easily have been found in many cases. (I made no particular effort to find such mistakes but simply noted them as I read the book.) Baskerville suggests without providing any citation or further information that a California bank program to share customer data to snare deadbeat dads is occurring in other states and is federally mandated. Ideally the program name and the citation to the federal mandate would be referenced. A statement about child support enforcement contracts being diverted to legislators’ firms and legislators even receiving kickbacks is referenced tersely: “see Chapter 1,” which is 45 pages long. Applicable laws, not secondary sources, should be cited as references for 1) a statement that it is now a federal crime for a father behind on child support to leave his state for any reason, even to find work; and 2) a British government’s newly instituted presumption that a “Child Tax Credit” should be automatically deducted from fathers’ pay packets and deposited in wives’ bank accounts. A federal regulation rendering “deadbeat” fathers ineligible for food stamps is referenced by a Federal Register cite rather than an infinitely more useful citation to the applicable regulation. The author writes that the British Labour Party “proposes” outlawing home paternity test kits, but the reference cites an article from 2000. The following note that “similar legislation has been proposed in Australia” cites an article from 2004. Clearly updating of both references as well as primary sources are needed, either for the laws or for the failed legislation. In citing a 2001 legal case, the author provides only the court filing number but not the citation of the published opinion, which I was able to quickly find online. Note 547 should be a single source but instead is a large cut-and-pasted block also correctly appearing as Note 548. A citation to the legislation should be provided for a German bill to arrest men failing to do half the housework, and particularly for a 2005 Spanish law mandating as much. The author is also evidently unaware that after significant protest, a PBS show was shown in 2006 to rebut the anti-father and anti-male 2005 program “Breaking the Silence; Children’s Stories.”

Warts and all, the author’s passionate words and committed perspective deserve to be widely read. Baskerville does not even necessarily need to include the individual stories he adds of victims of child support abuse and also of the related problem of paternity fraud, but add them he does. No matter how hardened one may be, one cannot help but be shocked to hear (or re-hear) of people such as eleven-year-old Rylan Nitzschke. Money Rylan earned from shoveling snow and doing chores was confiscated by the state because Rylan’s father allegedly owed child support (for Rylan) and the boy’s name was on the father’s bank account! And yes, even male victims of statutory rape, boys seduced by adult women, must pay child support to the criminals!

The author shows that through the routinization of temporary restraining orders and all the other abuses he surveys, fatherhood is being criminalized, pure and simple. Fathers’ natural desire to regain their children is labeled as “violence.” Anyone can see their children except for them. Judges, rather than being impartial as is legally required, become zealous advocates for women. Baskerville concludes with a few calls to action: Reasonable limits must be placed on “no fault” divorce when children are involved. Shared parenting must be a strong default, only departed from after compelling proof otherwise, in case of divorce or separation. Traditional parental rights to the care, custody, and companionship of their children must be vigorously restored. “The precise purpose of child support must be publicly determined, and enforcement programs must be narrowly designed to serve only that purpose…” I strongly recommend you read this excellent book.

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