What she saw was a family court system whose every action was driven by money.  The prospect of federal funds flowing to the state for every dollar of child support ordered and collected meant that ability to pay was of secondary importance to judges.  The more support ordered, the more was paid and the more money poured into Lansing from Washington, D.C.  Unsurprisingly, visitation orders have little importance to judges because they require court time, but don't produce revenue. 

And that attitude filtered down to all levels of the family court personnel.  If a person wanted information or forms or instructions about an issue like visitation, they might be lied to or have the information or forms withheld, because the flow of dollars was all-important.  A custodial parent seeking an increase in support were treated with kid gloves; non-custodial parents seeking downward modifications got the back of some bureaucrat's hand.  In the family court vocabulary, fathers were "payers" and considered to be unnecessary and probably dangerous to children.

All of this was enforced by clearly articulated instructions by superiors.  Failure to follow those instructions threatened jobs and 401k plans.

None of this is news.  The Office of Child Support Enforcement as much as spells it out in its own publications that plaintively suggest to state family courts that they might consider setting support at levels that obligors can actually pay.  Of course that would help fathers stay in their children's lives; it would help ex-spouses to reduce conflict; it would keep dads who can't pay out of jail.  In short, no one is served by too-high support orders, which non-custodial parents can't pay and which result in endless anguish, bad blood and litigation.  No one benefits that is, except those who rely on the system for their employment - people like the ones Carol Rhodes worked with every day for 20 years.

While you're at the website with the video of Rhodes' speech, why not sign the petition too?

Thanks to Maura for the heads-up.

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Her advice to deal with this pressure was that women should be content to either work part-time or drop out of the workforce altogether for a few years when their children are young.  The fact that few young women have the choice to spend years off the job seems not to have occurred to the 'realist' Berry.

I'm all for realism regardless of who's practicing it.  And adults giving sound advice to kids is also a good idea.  I do wonder, though, just how unrealistic Berry believes women are.  Certainly teenage girls may dream of "having it all," whatever that may mean to them.  That's what young people do before they actually start trying to do what adults do.  Then they tend to get realistic pretty quickly.  Believe me on this; I used to think I could be a shortstop in the big leagues.  Now I can't believe I ever imagined such a thing.

The point being that it's natural to mature from pie-in-the-sky teen to stable, realistic adult.  It usually takes about 15 years.  So why does Berry think these girls won't go through the same process?

What's more important is that, while calling for the girls to choose their marital partners carefully, Berry seems to believe that the girls will live their lives alone.  She tells the girls that life is all about balance but seems not to notice that men should be part of that.  She tells the girls to work part-time or not at all when the kids arrive, but never mentions the idea of negotiating a work-life balance with their husbands.

And she utters nary a peep about how laws, customs and social constructs of male behavior might contribute to - or tend to thwart - a balanced life for her students.  The notion that gender balance in parental leave laws, custody laws, adoption laws, etc. together with a wholesale swearing off of misandric, anti-dad popular culture might help women feel less stressed, never seems to occur to Berry.

In short, Berry continues down exactly the same road that's brought us to where we find ourselves.  For several decades, denigrating of men and telling women that they can have it all have gone hand in hand.  Predictably, they've driven men and women apart.  Telling girls that they can have a balanced life, while ignoring the male half of it is more of the same.  That message may have its virtues, but realistic it's not.

Thanks to Malcolm for the heads-up.

Help for Colorado Dads As someone who has personally experienced the heartbreak of divorce and family breakup, Brett W. Martin, Esq. works to advance the interests and concerns of fathers in domestic and family law litigation. Personal attention is given to clients to help them through a very difficult time in their lives. www.brettwmartin.com

The lurid and highly publicized bust of two female pedophiles in the United Kingdom earlier this year has raised the issue of female sexual abuse of children to an all-time high level there.  Shortly after those revelations, came the report of data collected by the charity Childline that reports by children of sexual abuse by women were up sharply.  Men still do the very large majority of sexual abuse of children, and the incidence of abuse is not itself rising.  What's rising is the number of children reporting their abuse at the hands of women.  Read more about it here (Daily Mail, 11/18/09)

That's corroborated by Detective Chief Inspector, Graham Hill of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre in London, who said,

"ChildLine's findings are very much in line with our own."

As I pointed out in a previous post, that's significant due to the fact that a daunting cultural taboo stands between children and reporting abuse by women.

'Years ago, people were very shocked to hear that children were abused at all,' says child psychotherapist Diana Cant, who works with the victims of female sex abuse.

'The same is now true about female sex abuse. People can hardly bear to think about it or get their minds around it. We want to push it away. It flies in the face of the image of mothers as carers.

Necessarily then, the increase in reporting by children, would  seem to indicate a breaking down of that taboo.  The image of mothers as Madonna, for centuries a vital part of our cultural construct of mothers and motherhood, may be a headed for a crack-up.  The myth of the all-giving, ever-loving mother is slowly giving way under the weight of facts.

And it's not just that cultural taboo that militates against children reporting abuse by a woman; grim reality does too.

This makes reporting such crimes even more difficult for child victims, who know that by doing so they may be kick-starting a process which will ultimate tear apart their family and, in all likelihood, see them being put into the care system.

Child psychotherapist Diana Cant adds,

'They stand to lose everything and they fear that, if they report it, everything they know, their family, will be taken away."

But whatever the reason for the increase in reports, it seems that children are leading the way toward a larger social understanding that women are indeed capable of great harm to children.  That greater understanding should lead to more sensible public policies that reflect known facts instead of accepted myths.  Acceptance that women can be sexual abusers of children should lead to the acceptance of them as physical abusers, which should lead to more effective responses on the parts of law enforcement and those charged with treatment. 

It should also lead to more even-handed treatment of men and fathers in a variety of circumstances.  Understanding and acceptance of the reality of female abuse of children should lead to a decline in bias against men in criminal court and fathers in family court.  It was just a few months ago that a woman was arrested for the murder of a child in California.  She had been an obvious suspect for some time, but police had failed to notice the fact.  When they finally arrested her, they admitted that they had been looking exclusively for a male perpetrator.

But until attitudes change it is also clear that female abusers will continue to hide behind the benign image of mother, aunt or family friend and that this tiny minority of wrongdoers will escape notice.

Thanks to Duncan for the heads-up.

Are You Facing a Parental Abduction? Parental Alienation? If you're faced with a Parental Abduction, Parental Alienation, or interstate child custody or child support problems, custody consultant Judianne Cochran can help. Cochran is a specialist with 30 years experience helping reunite parents and children. To learn more, click here, or email her at jbcochran44@msn.com.

This article reports on Indian men's protests on International Men's Day (DNA India, 11/20/09).  In Mumbai, men and women (often second wives) took to the streets holding signs and shouting slogans like these:

"Indian male - hapless animal"; "women empowered men unpowered"; "husband not an ATM machine", "options for Indian male - be henpecked or handcuffed"

According to them, Indian family law is much the same as it is in various western nations.  There as here, they say, dads are seen only as a source of funds and can be driven out of the lives of their children by their wives who need little more than allegations of abuse to do the job.  And the Indian Domestic Violence Act has a "Women Only" sign on its door.

But worse is the infamous Section 498A to the Indian Family Code.  No less of an authority than the Indian Supreme Court has called procedures under Section 498A "legal terrorism."  Read about Section 498A here.

Astonishingly, under Section 498A, a woman can not only have a man jailed based solely on her own allegations, she can have his family jailed along with him.  Into the bargain, once in the slammer, he can't get out because a charge under Section 498A is "non-bailable."  To say that that gives women a leg up in divorce actions is to understate the matter considerably. 

And what's true of domestic divorces goes double for international ones.  So if an Indian husband and wife live abroad and she wants a divorce, she can just grab the kids, decamp to India, file a 498A action and then a divorce case.  Presto! the man finds that if he sets foot in the country, his second step will be into jail, from which there's no exit prior to trial.

Not only that, but, as Bunty Jain, co-founder of the Indian Family Federation explained,

"Most cases where section 498A is invoked turn out to be false. Baseless allegations are made against men to extort money from them, and the law and the police support women, without making complete inquiries. The laws are wife-centric, not even woman-centric, because the husband's mother or sister is not taken into account," he said.

Sound familiar?  If it does, so will the parts dealing with alimony and child custody.

Are You Facing a Parental Abduction? Parental Alienation? If you're faced with a Parental Abduction, Parental Alienation, or interstate child custody or child support problems, custody consultant Judianne Cochran can help. Cochran is a specialist with 30 years experience helping reunite parents and children. To learn more, click here, or email her at jbcochran44@msn.com.

Not long ago, according to this article, in North Coventry, Pennsylvania, a father arrived at the West-Mont Christian Academy intending to talk to a kindergarten teacher about his child who is a student there (Daily Local, 11/18/09).  He talked to a teacher who walked with him to a public lobby where he was to wait to talk to his child's teacher.  While waiting, the man went upstairs and looked at some student artwork that was displayed in a hallway.  The kindergarten teacher arrived, they talked and the man left.

Now, if I were the school administrator, I wouldn't be too concerned about any of that.  But the administrator was Dr. James Smock and Dr. James Smock is a man who says "his lack of presence" when he means "his absence."  And that, if my rule holds true, means trouble.  Judge for yourself.

When confronted with the threat of a father talking to a teacher about his kindergarten-age child, and moreover a father who might have seemed agitated and who had left the premises, Dr. Smock took action.  He "locked down" the school, took the children out of classes and placed them all in the gymnasium.  He called the police, the K-9 Korps and the fire department.  The police called the Emergency Response Team.  They in turn blocked off the streets immediately surrounding the school.  Residents huddled in their houses afraid to set foot outdoors, as police officers swarmed over the buildings, grounds and rooftops, pistols unholstered and held aloft.

The man, of course, was never found, having left the premises long before.  In any case, he is known to school staff and "not considered a threat."

The "incident" began at 7:55 a.m. and ended almost three and a half hours later.  In other words, an entire morning was wasted.  How many police and fire department personnel were involved, we don't know.

Would a mother's presence (lack of absence?) at her child's school occasion such hysterics?  If a mother came to her child's school, spoke with a teacher briefly about little Johnny and then left, would the administration call the police and fire department, lock down the school and terrorize the neighbors?  Don't we all know the answer?

Students ourselves, we've learned our lesson well: men are dangerous to children.  Never mind that year after year, statistics show more children to be hurt or killed by women than by men.  The misandric part of our public discourse teaches us otherwise and there's essentially nothing that tells us the truth.

So after the whoop-di-do died down, Dr. Smock issued a press release that read in part,

Because of our cooperation with the police department here and our safety team that was in place, no children were at risk.

The truth of course is that the police, the dogs and the fire department had nothing to do with it.  No children were ever at risk.  Period. 

But Dr. Smock would never say that.

Thanks to Pankaj for the heads-up.

This letter to the editor reflects much the same thing (Metro Daily News, 11/18/09).  The writer is targeting a Massachusetts state representative, Alice Peisch, and a senator, Cynthia Creem.  He points out that voters in Peisch's district overwhelmingly support changing the Bay State's law to establish the presumption of shared parenting, but again, Peisch knows better than the people who vote for her.  She opposes equally shared parenting.

Creem is worse.  As chairwoman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, she wields considerable influence over bills heard there.  Unfortunately for residents of the state, that means that if they're going to benefit from real alimony reform, Creem has to agree.  And she doesn't.  She's substituted her own bill for one supported by many lawyers' groups, non-profits and again, voters in her district.

Unsurprisingly, Creem's law practice has long depended on family cases and most notably, alimony cases as its bread and butter.  As the letter points out, her conflict of interest in the matter is clear.

To succeed in our mission, fathers' rights advocates must be able to demonstrate political influence at the state level.  Clearly, that's what's behind the decision by Fathers & Families to employ a lobbyist in Sacramento.  But what's also needed is to show elected officials that they ignore fathers' issues at the risk of their jobs.  If the anti-dad forces in Australia succeed in rolling back equally-shared parenting legislation there, pro-fathers-and-children folks will need to bounce some of them out of office in the next election.

In Massachusetts, Creem, with her obvious multiple conflicts of interest and Peisch, with her disdain for the desires of her constituents, have painted large electoral bulls-eyes on their backs.

Are You Facing a Parental Abduction? Parental Alienation? If you're faced with a Parental Abduction, Parental Alienation, or interstate child custody or child support problems, custody consultant Judianne Cochran can help. Cochran is a specialist with 30 years experience helping reunite parents and children. To learn more, click here, or email her at jbcochran44@msn.com.

This article is another one to address the findings of the Mishcon de Reya report on the impacts of divorce in the United Kingdom (The Times, 11/17/09).  I discussed another article in the Telegraph in a previous piece, but this one adds information and some suggestions.

For example, the report found that more than one-third of children lose all contact with their fathers after divorce.  It goes on to report just why that is.

But what makes keeping in touch so difficult?

One answer could be suggested by a finding of the Mishcon de Reya report — one in five divorcing spouses admitted to having the primary objective of making the experience as unpleasant as possible for his or her former partner.

Parenthetically, I wonder what all those people who deny the existence of parental alienation of children have to say about that.  When 20% cite that very thing as their "primary objective" post-divorce, it's hard to figure how they can pretend parental alienation is a figment of some evil FRA's imagination.  My guess is that we'll never know since they'll probably give that datum a pass.

And given that it's fathers, not mothers whom children are losing, and it's mothers, not fathers who get primary custody in 85% - 90% of cases, it's not hard to figure out who's doing most of the alienating.

But the article goes on to site some fairly commonsense things divorcing fathers and mothers can do to make things better.  Unfortunately, many of those seem to assume some sort of residual goodwill between the exes.  And if that existed, the problems children have stemming from divorce would probably be much fewer and less severe. 

I suspect that there is a large percentage of parents who truly do their best to get along after they split and who mostly succeed.  I also suspect that there is some percentage who will remain out to get the other regardless of everything.  And I finally suspect that there are a lot of parents for whom counselling and mediation would be a great help.  It's not that they'll feel much better about the other spouse, but they can learn to focus on the child's wellbeing and understand that, while he/she may want nothing to do with the other spouse, the child doesn't feel the same way.

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So when it came time for the couple to split up, the judge granted primary custody to the dad, i.e. she applied family law in a gender-neutral way.  And feminists hit the ceiling.  This was, they cried, a slam against working mothers.  The mother was being penalized for working.  Somehow they contrived to overlook the fact that the judge who signed the order was herself a working woman.  Somehow they also overlooked the fact that this was what gender-equality looked like.  After all, for decades, the same thing had been done to millions of working men without a peep from the "gender-equality" crowd.

Now, what was only true occasionally back in the early nineties, may become more the norm.  Particularly with the recession having thrown so many men off the job, more and more men are becoming Mr. Mom out of necessity.  Their wives are bringing home the bacon and they're taking the kids to school, meeting with teachers, arranging sleepovers.  That's all pretty sensible.

Still, feminists can't quite seem to get their hands around the concept that, as long as we're still awarding custody to the main caregiver, mothers who've opted for a career may lose the children in a divorce.  Lisa Belkin's piece here is far calmer and more open to the concept of gender equality than was Pollitt's screed, but she's still got the sneaking suspicion that it's all a plot against - you guessed it - working women (New York Times, 11/17/09).

On the positive side, Belkin actually gets a figure correct - about 2.2 million fathers now have primary custody.  We should erect a monument to the event.  But the title of the piece ("More Fathers Are Getting Custody in Divorce") says, and the body suggests, that fathers are getting primary custody in ever greater numbers.  She calls this phenomenon a "new reality for working mothers."  To put it bluntly, Belkin, and the people at Working Mother Magazine who produced the information she's alarmed about, are making that up.

The facts, as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau, indeed show a shocking trend - toward sameness.  From 1993 through 2005, the numbers and percentages of mothers and fathers with primary custody essentially haven't changed.  As Belkin noted, about 2.2 million dads now have primary custody of their children.  Guess how many there were 16 years ago.  If you guessed 2.184 million, you were right. 

And mothers with custody?  In 2005 there were 11.406 million versus 11.505 million in 1993.

So, in 1993, 83.97% of U.S. mothers had primary custody of children.  By 2005, that figure had plummeted to 83.86%.  That's a drop of 0.13%!  No wonder feminists are sounding the alarm.

But apart from the actual data which clearly show that there's been no change whatsoever in which sex gets custody of children, there's the abstract issue of gender-neutral application of custody laws.  As I said, Katha Pollitt was outraged at the idea in the 90s, but Belkin seems a bit more open to the concept.  At least she questions his assertion when an attorney refers to gender-neutral application of custody laws as a "raw deal" for women.  But then she lapses back into this:

You could also argue that working women are held to a higher parenting standard than working men, paying a price for not conforming to the cultural expectation that mothers be more hands-on than fathers. 

Yes, and you could also argue that the sun revolves around the earth; it just wouldn't be very convincing.  In what way are working women held to a higher standard than are working men?  Belkin doesn't let on, preferring to rely on that time-tested feminist chestnut - the unsupported assertion.  But the simple fact remains that what's happened to men for decades can happen to women, and for the exact same reason.

All of which doesn't make this "sauce-for-the-goose/sauce-for-the-gander" approach sensible.  It makes it fair, but still not the best way to go about custody post-divorce.  The same arguments for equally shared parenting apply when the mother is the chief earner as when the dad is.  Children need both parents.  The fact that one parent spent more time at work than the other is largely irrelevant to the child and its needs.  Equally shared parenting is still the best idea for making sure that children don't lose a parent when the parents lose each other.

Maybe one day feminists like Belkin and Pollitt will get the message so many of us got long ago.

• Tens of thousands of children a year are losing contact with their fathers because of “failing” family court system;
• One in three children whose parents separated or divorced over the last 20 years disclosed that they had lost contact permanently with their father;
• Almost a tenth of children from broken families said the acrimonious process had left them feeling suicidal while others later sought solace in drink, drugs or crime;
• They complained of feeling “isolated” and “used” while parents admitted having used children as “bargaining tools” against each other;
• Lawyers said the study showed that the court system itself was making family break-up more acrimonious with children used as "pawns";
• [The lawyers] warned that so-called “no fault” divorces were encouraging warring parents to channel their “bloodletting” into disputes over contact.

In short, this British poll shows what many advocates for fathers and children have been saying for years - that our divorce system is bad for everyone involved, but mostly for the children who have to endure increased acrimony and the loss of one parent, usually the father.  The poll corroborates what Prof. Edward Kruk of theUniversity of British Columbia has said time and again, notably in this paper and this paper.  Children do better with a father and a mother in their lives; fathers who care for children are more likely to be employed, and less likely to be in jail or on drugs or alcohol than are men without children; mothers of children with an involved father have more time and energy to pursue a career.

Fathers, mothers, children and society are all on the same side in this debate.  All do better when children are raised by both biological parents.  When divorce happens, all do better when conflict is kept to a minimum and parenting afterward is equal or as close to it as possible.

We know these things.  But the gulf between known facts and established public policy is enormous.  Even a casual comparison between what should be and what is, is jaw-dropping.  An intelligent space alien would surely conclude that we are insane and bent on self-destruction.  Come to think of it, the word "insane" crops up time and again in discussions of family law and policy.  As well it should.

Still, articles like the one linked to keep cropping up.  Sincerely concerned adults will not stop trying to make right what has gone so disastrously wrong over the past 40 years.

Thanks to Jeremy for the heads-up.

"Men Should Be Encouraged to Be Full-Time Fathers" is not an idea I can support.  For decades now, feminists have rightly argued that full-time parenting tends to mean full-time dependency on someone else to earn the money it takes to support you.  If that's not a good idea for women (and it's not), it's not a good idea for men either. 

The goal I see is easy to understand - couples raising their own children with each earning part of the family's income and each doing part of the domestic work including childcare.  That certainly doesn't mean a slavish conformity to all tasks shared 50/50; obviously, couples will work that out themselves.  But what it does mean is that in the event of divorce, each adult would be able to support him/herself and care for the child.  Into the bargain, family law would respect the child's right to - and interest in - a relationship with each parent. 

Now, to me, that doesn't seem like a radical notion, but it seems remarkably hard for some people to grasp.  My guess is that the writer of the article, Anushka Asthana, probably does get it, although I'm not sure she really appreciates the many systemic barriers between fathers and children.  Like another Guardian piece by Richard Reeves, Asthana's fails to notice the fact that short-end-of-the-stick laws like those governing parental leave are just part of a vast array of laws, customs and societal notions of men and fathers that clearly show that we still see men primarily as earners and fathers secondarily, if that.

A recent study in the U.K. shows that men don't tend to take the meager parental leave the country offers them, and Asthana grapples with the reasons for that.  She seems to understand that social norms tend to produce parental leave laws that say loudly and clearly that mothers are valued at home with the kids and dads are valued at work.  Asthana sees that, until we change social and legal concepts of men and women, we won't change the roles we play.

Now, before anyone throws up his/her hands and cries out "But men and women are different; gender is not just a construct!" let me make myself clear.  Fatherhood is not a social construct.  Men's desire to be fathers is biological; our bodies produce the same hormones that are designed by nature to connect us to our children that women's do.  What I'm arguing for is not to construct a New Man in a Brave New World.  I'm arguing for society to get out of men's way and allow fathers to fulfill the role we're designed to play - that of hands-on, caring father.

And that means we have to stop telling men in all the ways we do - in law, popular culture, public policy, etc. - that fatherhood is unimportant to us and that we're no good at it anyway.  From conception to adulthood and beyond, our western English-speaking cultures tell men in countless ways that we are unimportant to children except as a wallet.  As long as we do that, men will get the message and even the meager parental leave we give them will be left unused.

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