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SOMEDAY HOLLYWOOD WILL make a movie of this, A father is sentenced to
prison for wanting to take his son to a ballgame. Up against him are his
ex-wife, the legal system, and various women’s groups, all declaring him a
deadbeat and a batterer, all of it untrue. But as a result, he’s in a cell
while his ex and her new boyfriend take little Johnny to a Mets game.
Improbable? Only in the sense that Hollywood would ever make such a movie.
Unfortunately it’s an all too real scenario that is taking place everyday
across the country.
THE CASE OF a man we’ll call Alan is fairly typical. Without warning
Alan came home one day to find his apartment cleaned out. His wife and
two-year-old girl were gone. Shortly afterwards Alan was summoned to court and
as a "defendant," was ordered to stay away from his daughter most of
the time and to begin making child support payments. His two-hour, thrice-weekly
visits with his daughter were supervised and she was not allowed to stay with
him overnight, since his wife alleged that he was dangerous and would kidnap
her. The accusations eventually proved groundless, and the supervision
terminated. After a year Alan was permitted one overnight visit with his
daughter per week. His wife, meanwhile, was never charged with making false
accusations nor has the fabrication counted against her in the custody
proceedings. Various experts testified that Alan is no danger whatever to his
daughter and that he is a devoted and loving father. All these findings were
ignored by the courts. More than four years after his wife left, the child
remains with her. He has spent a $160,000 inheritance on legal fees, not
counting about 40 percent of his income for child support, and now lives
hand-to-mouth.
Then there’s Bruce, who was a truck driver in Boston and who came home one
day to find his things on the street, the locks on his doors changed, and his
wife’s new boyfriend already moved in. Angry and bewildered, Bruce kicked in
the door and began shouting. (He did not strike anyone.) His wife called the
police, who arrived and took Bruce away in handcuffs. She got a restraining
order preventing any contact with his three children. When his son was
hospitalized with an illness, he was not allowed to visit. Eventually Bruce was
allowed to see his children at a supervised visitation center with his wife and
her boyfriend present in the next room.
Another man, Tom, tells of how he was living with his wife in California,
where they were raising their three children as vegetarians like themselves. He
thought she was content until one day, when she told him she wanted to move back
to her native Virginia. He agreed to the move. After establishing residency in
Virginia, however, she left with the children, and he was hauled into court.
Then, after an injury left him without an adequate income he found himself in
jail for failure to pay child support. Eventually he relocated in the Washington
area to find work. Tom now drives three hours each way to get his children from
his wife’s place in Virginia, twice every other weekend. His ex-wife
subsequently gave up her vegetarianism and obtained a court order preventing him
from discussing diet with his children. His children are used as informers to
monitor his compliance, and their relationship is now strained.
Tom now belongs to a father’s group that meets in Arlington, Virginia.
Almost every member has a similarly painful story. Some have not seen their
children in years. The children of a few will no longer speak to them. Others
regularly drive hundreds of miles to visit their children in hotels or
visitation centers. Several with no previous criminal records have spent time in
jail.
The group is currently involved with the case of Michael Mahoney, a father in
an Arlington jail awaiting sentencing for criminal contempt. Mahoney has already
lost his job, his home, his savings, his freedom, and most recently his health
(he has developed congestive heart failure, severe stomach ulcers, sleep apnea,
and has undergone brain surgery for subdural hematoma). His private life has
also been exposed to public view and he himself vilified on "Geraldo"
and at least one other nationally televised talk show.
And these fathers are angry. Alan describes the system as a legal
"child-kidnapping and extortion racket." Even more though, they are in
shock. Like virtually all men in their position, none realized that such a thing
could happen until it did.
Worse still, these men – and millions more like them – have suddenly
found that the assumptions they had made about wife beaters, child molesters,
"deadbeat dads," and O.J. Simpson are now being made about them. Many
see themselves as having been abandoned not only by their wives but by friends
and family members, who assume they "must have done something" to
deserve losing their children. What their children "must have done" to
deserve losing the care of even an imperfect father is seldom asked.
Fathers who attempt to contact their confiscated children or separated
spouses can be arrested for "harassment" or "stalking," an
offense that can be defined as "unwelcome conversation." "Stories
of violations for minor infractions are legion," the Boston Globe reported
in May. "In one case, a father was arrested for violating an order when he
put a note in his son’s suitcase telling the mother the boy had been sick over
a weekend visit. In another, a father was arrested for sending his son a
birthday card."
The practice of arresting fathers for attending public events such as their
children’s musical recitals or sports activities--events any stranger may
attend--is one many find difficult to believe, but it is common. Last year
National Public Radio broadcast a story on restraining order abuse centering on
a father who was arrested in church for attending his daughter’s first
communion. During the segment, an eight-year-old girl wails and begs to know
when her father will be able to see her or call her on the phone. The answer,
because of a "lifetime" restraining order, is "never."
At once the most extensive and well-concealed denial of civil rights in
America today, the plight of fathers and children is all-but-ignored by the
media and virtually unknown beyond the rapidly increasing circle of its victims.
Few people realize how easily and frequently children are now taken from fathers
who have committed no actionable offense and for reasons that have nothing to do
with the children’s wishes, safety, health, or welfare.
Contrary to common assumption, the prevalence of mother-custody is not a
matter of simple sex-bias against fathers in mutually agreed to divorces. As
American family courts now operate, a mother can have the father summoned to
court and, without producing any evidence of wrongdoing, request that he be
stripped of custody of his children and effectively ejected from his family, and
in almost every case the judge will duly oblige.
Despite formal legal equality between parents, some 85 to 90 percent of
custody awards go to mothers. One study in Arlington found that over a recent
eighteen-month period, maternal custody was awarded in a hundred percent of
decisions. This includes divorces in which the father has given neither grounds
nor agreement. Most people probably accept some bias against fathers in custody
cases when divorce is mutual. What is happening in family courts, however, is
very different. It is one thing to say that young children need their mother; it
is quite another to say a mother should have the arbitrary power to keep their
father away.
Yet current judicial practice throughout most of the United States allows her
to do just that. In fact, a mother can have had a half-dozen previous divorces,
she can have deserted the marital home, she can abscond with the children, she
can have committed adultery, she can level false charges, she can have assaulted
the father, and none of these can be introduced as evidence against her in a
custody decision. For a father, the simple fact of his being a father will be
used to keep him away from his children six days out of seven, deprive him of
any decision-making role, and dissolve his marriage over his objections.
Part of the problem originates in the advent of no-fault divorce in the early
1970s, which is often blamed by conservatives for leaving wives vulnerable to
abandonment,. Yet it has also left fathers with no protection against the
confiscation of their children. No-fault divorce laws did not stop at removing
the requirement that there be grounds for a divorce, so as to allow for divorce
by mutual consent; they also provided for what writer Maggie Gallagher calls
"unilateral" divorce and removed any consideration of grounds from
custody decisions.
Though changes in the divorce laws were legislative, it is the practitioners
of family law who have benefited both in terms of power and profit, and they
have not hesitated to exploit the opportunities to the full. Dickens’
observation "the one great principle of the...law is to make business for
itself" could hardly be more strikingly (or destructively) validated.
There is nothing in the no-fault laws that require a judge to honor a mother’s
initial request to remove the children from the father’s care and protection.
A judge could simply decide that, prima facie, neither the father nor the
children have committed any infraction that justifies their being forcibly
separated, that they have a fundamental human and constitutional right not to be
forcibly separated, and that neither the mother nor the court has any grounds to
separate them.
Unfortunately, not only is the legal machinery an accomplice; in some ways it
is the principal instigator. A mother who consults a divorce attorney will be
advised that her best chance of gaining custody is simply to take the children
and all their effects and leave without warning. If she has no place to go, she
will be told that by accusing the father of sexual or physical abuse, however
vaguely (often simply stating that she is "in fear"), she can easily
obtain a restraining order immediately forcing him out of the family home. She
will also learn that even if her claims are false, there are no legal
consequences she will face for making them; her trumped-up accusations cannot
even be used against her in a custody decision. In fact, they work so strongly
in her favor that failure to advise a female client of these options may
constitute legal malpractice.
Far from being punished for child-snatching and false accusations, then, she
is almost certain to be rewarded. Mothers who abduct children and keep them from
their fathers, with or without abuse charges, are routinely given immediate
"temporary" custody. But it is almost never "temporary."
Once a mother has custody, it cannot be changed without a lengthy (and, for the
lawyers involved, lucrative) court battle. The sooner and the longer she can
establish herself as the sole caretaker, the more difficult and costly it is to
dislodge her. Further, the more she cuts the children off and alienates them
from the father, slings false charges, delays the proceedings, and obstructs his
efforts to see his children, the better her chance for obtaining sole custody.
She can then claim child support and perhaps her own legal fees from the father.
In the absence of paternal wrongdoing, the Kafkaesque logic of family courts
readily supplies a rationale for summarily stripping the father of custody.
Usually it is said that the parents "can’t agree," so naturally the
parent who is trying to exclude the other should get the children and make the
decisions, even if the only thing the left-behind parent can’t agree to is the
taking of his children. Or the father is alleged to be planning to
"kidnap" his children back--usually with no evidence other than his
opposition to the initial abduction by the mother.
As for the father, any restraint he shows throughout all this is certain to
cost him dearly, as most discover too late. On the other hand, reciprocal
belligerence and aggressive litigation on his part may carry enough hope of
reward to keep him interested in the game. But the vast majority (about 90
percent who cannot pay the five- and six-figure sums required to fight a
full-scale custody battle are branded as having "abandoned" their
children and simply pushed out of the family.
Some fathers’ rights activists are now determined to fight fire with fire,
and imitate the techniques of mothers: If you think she is about to snatch,
snatch first. Then conceal, obstruct, delay, accuse, and so forth. "If you
do not take action," writes Robert Seidenberg, author of The Father’s
Emergency Guide to Divorce-Custody Battle, "your wife will." Thus we
now have the nightmare scenario of a race to the trigger: Whomever snatches
first survives.
FOR THE LEFT-BEHIND parent, the loss of his children is only the
beginning of his troubles. It may also be the beginning of ours as well,
for the legal and political implications of these decisions extend well
beyond the family. Other violations of basic civil rights and liberties
logically follow when courts successfully asserted the power to invade a
family remove children from the care of parents who have done no wrong.
Despite the protection of the First Amendment, family courts may decide what
religious worship parents may take their children to: The 1997 ruling by the
Massachusetts Supreme Court preventing a fundamental Christian father from
taking his children to services against the opposition of the Orthodox Jewish
mother was unusual only in that it made the papers. A judge in Virginia sparked
a protest, but little news coverage, last year when he enjoined a father from
taking his son to synagogue on Passover.
Parents’ discussions with their children about matters such as religion and
politics may also be controlled by family court judges. Tom’s court order
preventing him from discussing a vegetarian diet with his children is not
unusual. Another father in the group had weekend visits with his children
reduced when a judge decided that soccer was a more important Sunday activity
than church.
The Fourth Amendment’s protection against "unreasonable searches and
seizures" similarly seems to mean little to family court judges. Parents
who are accused of no crime and who have given no grounds or agreement for
divorce are routinely required to surrender personal diaries, notebooks,
correspondence, financial records, and other documents--all ostensibly to
determine their fitness as parents, even when it has never been questioned. They
are regularly interrogated behind closed doors about intimate family matters
that most parents would not normally discuss with strangers. If the strains of
losing their children or undergoing this legal nightmare are too great, they are
wise to conceal any contact with therapists, family counselors, psychologists
and psychiatrists, since these otherwise privileged consultations and records
can be subpoenaed and used to separate them from their children. Parents swept
into this litigation are terrified to discuss anything with their children or
spouses for fear that what they say will be used against them in court. The use
of children as informers is common.
As well, a custody trial will likely be held behind closed doors and without
any record of what is said, free of scrutiny by press and public. Delays of
months and years are common, as the parent with "temporary" custody
tries to stall. Since custody cases are not criminal prosecutions, they do not
fall under the protections of the Sixth Amendment, but given other abuses they
often amount to the same thing, being the first stage in the criminalization and
incarceration of fathers.
Indeed, while the same article stipulates a right to counsel in criminal
cases, fathers can be jailed without a lawyer. One of the most notorious and
common abuses in family courts is the incarceration of fathers for extended
periods without charge and without trial. The guarantee of "due
process" does not prevent family courts from jailing parents on civil
contempt for weeks, months, or even years without trial.
The notorious Elizabeth Morgan case in which a mother abducted her child and,
for refusing to reveal her whereabouts, spent two years in prison for civil
contempt, was publicized only because it involved a mother. Much more common
instances of fathers languishing in prison for years seldom receive any
publicity. Buried as a filler in the Washington Post last January was an
Associated Press report that Odell Sheppard, a father in Chicago who also would
not or could not reveal the whereabouts of his 2-year-old daughter, was released
after serving ten years for civil contempt. Despite what "may have been the
longest jail term for civil contempt ever in the United States," the case
seems to have prompted no comment in either the local or national press or among
civil libertarians.
Courts routinely order fathers whose children have been taken from them
involuntarily and with no grounds to support those children financially. They
can and do summon fathers to court so frequently that they lose their jobs and
then incarcerate them for failure to pay child support. Courts these days will
even order men to support children whom are acknowledged not to be theirs. In
1994 Maryland court of appeals refused to rescind a child support order against
a man who, according to DNA tests, could not possibly have been the father of
the child he was ordered to support. This was despite the fact that the mother
and the true father joined the falsely accused man in requesting the order be
changed. An October series in the Los Angeles Times reported that in Los Angeles
alone there are 350 new cases each month of men required to support children who
are established by DNA testing not to be theirs. Yet the Los Angeles County
District Attorney has insisted that he had no intention of seeking to overturn
support orders based on false identifications.
The Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of "cruel and unusual
punishment" does not stop family courts from summarily depriving fathers of
professional licenses, drivers’ licenses, and passports that bear no
connection with their alleged offence. Fathers who are alleged (but again not
formally charged and never proven) to be delinquent in child support payments
have had their cars booted and confiscated and their names published in the
newspapers.
Fathers are also ordered by courts into employment, the wages from which are
then confiscated. Last February the California Supreme Court overturned 100
years of precedent when it ruled in the case of Moss v. Superior Court that this
is not contrary to the Thirteenth Amendment prohibition on involuntary
servitude. In the past the Supreme Court has recognized that "Congress has
put it beyond debate that no indebtedness warrants a suspension of the right to
be free from compulsory service. This congressional policy means that no state
can make the quitting of work any component of a crime, or make criminal
sanctions available for holding unwilling persons to labor." Yet states now
routinely do precisely this.
In April 1998, a custodial father in Illinois who stayed at home to care for
his three children and who received no child support from the mother was
arrested under "a little known state law that makes it a felony for a man
to be ‘deliberately unemployed.’" "Men in Illinois have become the
target of a witch hunt," the man’s attorney told Reuters. "Men are
hounded if they owe child support and Mom is on welfare. Now Mom is the deadbeat
parent, and the man is hounded because he is on welfare."
As for the children, courts that piously proclaim their commitment to
"the best interest of the child" seldom hesitate to employ
heavy-handed methods against them as well. To take only a recent, documented
example, in April the Los Angeles Times reported that "three children,
whose only crime was their reluctance to testify against their father, were
jailed for 12 days in Los Angeles County’s overcrowded Central Juvenile Hall
and brought to court in handcuffs and leg chains."
For their part, a few fathers’ groups have countered by filing federal
class action suits claiming abrogation of civil rights "under color of
law", including denial of due process and equal protection. Violations of
the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Ninth Amendments are also alleged,
and some go so far as to invoke anti-racketeering statutes. There is a
substantial body of federal case law recognizing parenting as a basic
constitutional right and requiring its protection under the Fourteenth
Amendment: "The liberty interest and the integrity of the family encompass
an interest in retaining custody of one’s children, and thus a state may not
interfere with a parent’s custodial right absent due process
protections," according to the 1981 decision, Langton v. Maloney. Justice
Thurgood Marshall also held for the majority in the 1978 case Quilloin v.
Walcott that a divorced father could not be treated differently from a father
who is married and still living with his child. Yet such apparently unequivocal
constitutional principles are almost never applied by state courts, and the
federal courts steadfastly resist becoming involved.
As it is, some twenty-three million American children now live in fatherless
households, virtually half a generation. Nearly 2.5 million will join their
ranks this year, according to the National Fatherhood Initiative. The crisis of
fatherless children has been called "the most destructive trend of our
generation" by David Blankenhorn, author of Fatherless America. Even Bill
Clinton acknowledges that "the single biggest social problem in our society
may be the growing absence of fathers from their children’s homes," and
Al Gore has declared in more accusatory terms that "absent fathers are
behind most social woes." This opinion is shared by almost 80 percent of
respondents to a 1996 Gallup poll.
Indeed, nothing else accounts for as many major social problems. Recent
figures from the Department of Health and Human Services confirm that violent
crime, drug and alcohol abuse, teenage pregnancy, emotional and behavioral
disorders, teen suicide, poor school performance and truancy all correlate more
strongly to fatherless homes than to any other single factor, surpassing both
poverty and race. The overwhelming majority of prisoners, juvenile detention
inmates, high school dropouts, pregnant teenagers, adolescent murderers, and
rapists all come from fatherless homes.
The Washington Post, New York Times, and other major media bent over
backwards to avoid mentioning that Mitchell Johnson, instigator of the shootings
in Jonesboro, Arkansas, had been taken from his father, whom he was said to be
close to, and moved to another state. Even as the crisis of fatherhood gains
selective recognition by policymakers and the media, however, attention is
confined almost entirely to "the prodigal father" who has
"abandoned" his children. Fathers now get it from both sides, since
the conservative campaign for "responsible fatherhood" may unwittingly
reinforce the vilification of fathers in the media and by politicians and
feminists. The resulting message is that until proven otherwise, fathers are
presumed to be irresponsible louts whose eagerness to desert their families
accounts for all our social failures.
Yet Sanford L. Braver, in his recently published book, Divorced Dads:
Shattering the Myths, shows that far from abandoning their children, most
divorced fathers make heroic efforts against enormous obstacles to stay in touch
with them.
SCAPEGOATING FATHERS HAS predictably done little to alleviate any of the
problems associated with father absence. Indeed, it cannot even solve the
one problem in terms of which politicians most often proclaim their
commitment to father "involvement": the collection of child
support. With a massive army of some 59,000 enforcement agents (the Drug
Enforcement Administration has about 7,500), the Federal Office of Child
Support Enforcement perseveres in its losing battle to squeeze money out
of ejected fathers who more often than not are either unemployed,
impoverished, imprisoned, disabled, or dead. The General Accounting Office
found in 1992 that as many as 14 percent of fathers who owe child support
are dead, and 66 percent "cannot afford to pay the amount
ordered." Some 52 percent earn less than $6,200 a year, according to
the Poverty Studies Institute at the University of Wisconsin.
Far more useful than trying to shake down fathers with no money would be to
reform a legal system that forces so many fathers out of their children’s
lives in the first place. But in addition to wives and the judiciary, fathers
must also contend with feminist groups, who loom as the most formidable
opponents of joint custody laws and are now promoting legislation that would
openly legitimate the current epidemic of maternal child snatching. The
purported justification is domestic violence. An article posted on the NOW web
site asserts that preserving fathers’ rights to the care and protection of
their children "is dangerous for women and their children who are trying to
leave or have left violent husbands/fathers."
This of course begs the question of why children can be taken virtually at
whim from the vast majority of fathers by whom no violence is ever demonstrated
or even alleged, nor why it should be any more dangerous trying to leave truly
abusive spouses who can be prosecuted under existing laws and who are precluded
from custody under presumptive joint custody statutes. Yet in the present
climate such obvious questions are seldom asked. So successful is anti-father
propaganda now that even mainstream feminist organizations regularly use the
term "batterer" as essentially synonymous with "father." In
political terms, a NOW resolution asserts that the political activities of
fathers’ groups constitute "using the abuse of power in order to control
in the same fashion as do batterers."
Both domestic violence and child abuse are serious problems, but they are by
no means sex-specific. Moreover, accusations of child or spousal abuse are a
widespread method of winning sole custody. NOW claims that "false
accusations by women are in fact rare" (and opposes penalties for making
them), but saying this does not make it so. Statistically they are not rare at
all. Overall, more than two-thirds of child abuse reports are unsubstantiated,
according to the National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect Information,
and the proportion becomes overwhelming when custody is an issue. But more
tellingly, NOW itself would seem to be proving just how false they are with its
own legislative agenda. By legitimizing child stealing under the guise of
protecting victims of domestic violence, NOW is openly practicing on the
political level precisely what it claims is not happening in the family courts:
the use of "battering" as a red flag to separate children from fathers
who are guilty of no such thing.
THERE IS NO evidence that fathers commit any more spousal or child abuse
than mothers; in fact fathers in intact families are about the least frequent
perpetrators of either. The National Family Violence Survey, funded by the
National Institute of Mental Health and developed by Murray Straus and Richard
Gelles, estimates that men are slightly more likely than women to be victims of
severe domestic violence. Nor can "the high rate of attacks by wives"
be explained "largely as a response to or as a defense against assault by
the partner," according to one of the survey’s authors, Murray Straus, in
a contribution to the 1996 book Domestic Violence.
More to the point, mothers--especially single mothers--are much more likely
than fathers to abuse children. According to a major 1996 study by the
Department of Health and Human Services, women aged twenty to forty-nine are
almost twice as likely as men to be perpetrators of child maltreatment. "It
is estimated that...almost two-thirds [of child abusers] were females," the
report states. Given that "male" perpetrators are not necessarily
fathers but much more likely to be boyfriends and stepfathers, fathers emerge as
the least likely child abusers.
In fact, about the most dangerous place for a child then is the home of a
single mother. The HHS study reiterates the already well-established fact that
children in single-parent homes are at much higher risk for physical and sexual
abuse than those living in two-parent homes (up to thirty-three times higher
when a live-in boyfriend or stepfather is present). As Maggie Gallagher sums it
up in her 1996 book The Abolition of Marriage: "The person most likely to
abuse a child physically is a single mother. The person most likely to abuse a
child sexually is the mother's boyfriend or second husband.... Divorce, though
usually portrayed as a protection against domestic violence, is far more
frequently a contributing cause."
At one time this may have been considered common sense, since two parents
check one another’s excesses and the father was seen as the children’s
natural protector. Not only has this role now become politically incorrect; the
current system has managed to pervert it into a fault. What "male
violence" does occur may well be the result of custody disputes more often
than it is the cause, after all, since common sense would again suggest that
fathers with no previous proclivity to violence could very well erupt when their
children are arbitrarily taken from them. One is tempted to say this is what
fathers are for: to become violent when someone interferes with their offspring.
A 1997 study by Anne McMurray of the Griffith University School of Nursing in
Australia that began with the express purpose to "provide definitive
explanations for the violent behaviors of certain males," concluded that
"regardless of the male’s propensity toward violence" the
circumstances most conducive to it arose "during the process of marital
separation and divorce, particularly in relation to disputes over child custody,
support, and access."
"These men," McMurray continues, "from a range of
socioeconomic backgrounds and age groups, freely discussed episodes in which
they had either planned, executed, or fantasized about violence against their
spouses in retaliation for real or perceived injustices related to child
custody, support, and/or access."
Interestingly, while violence against wives is well publicized, the huge
increase in violent attacks by fathers against judges and lawyers has gone
completely unreported in the mainstream press. According to an article in the
National Law Journal the year 1992 was "one of the bloodiest in divorce
court history--a time when angry and bitter divorce litigants declared an open
season on judges, lawyers, and the spouses who brought them to court."
NOW and others further attempt to defend the power to take children from
their fathers by invoking popular but facile cliches about marital harmony,
saying that "most studies report that joint custody works best when both
parents want it and agree to work together" but that it "is unworkable
for uncooperative parents." This tautological reasoning is of course simply
an extension of assumptions that have long been invoked by parents of both sexes
as self-justification for their wish to divorce. As such, fathers who have
acquiesced in this casuistry have only themselves to blame now that it is being
taken to its logical next step to justify rewarding the most belligerent of the
"warring parents" and throwing the other out of the family altogether.
After all, if an intact family or joint custody requires "agreement"
and "cooperation" between parents, the most effective method for the
parent who expects sole custody to sabotage either is to be as belligerent and
uncooperative as possible.
In fact joint custody has repeatedly been demonstrated to reduce parental
conflict for precisely this reason. A study by Judith Seltzer of the University
of Wisconsin based on data from the National Survey of Families and Households
concluded that joint custody, even when imposed over the objection of one
parent, reduces post-divorce conflict. Similarly, a study team headed by Braver
found that "both child support compliance and paternal visitation were
highest in those cases where joint custody was awarded against the mothers’
wishes but in conformity with the fathers’ wishes." The author concludes
that these results demonstrate "the value of joint legal custody even when
the couple does not initially agree to it. Joint custody appears to enhance
paternal involvement, child support compliance, and child adjustment."
Perhaps most important, it takes away much of the incentive to snatch the
children in the first place. (Giving sole custody to the left-behind parent, as
some have proposed, would naturally create a stronger deterrent.) For similar
reasons, states with presumptive joint custody laws report significantly fewer
divorces.
As for the connected tautology that that parental conflict in itself
justifies divorce, this is seldom justified as far as children are concerned, as
any child will tell you. Children...can be quite content even when their parents’
marriage is profoundly unhappy for one or both partners," write Judith
Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee in their 1996 book, Second Chances. "Only
one in ten children in our study experienced relief when their parents divorced.
These were mostly older children in families where there had been open violence
and where the children had lived with the fear that the violence would hurt a
parent or themselves."
SPECIOUS JUSTIFICATIONS FOR a system that spawns massive corruption,
violates basic constitutional rights, destroys the homes and lives of innocent
children, and leads to serious social ills thus carry the day because of our
willingness to buy into cliches that disguise the reality and extent of what is
taking place. We have sanitized a breathtaking injustice with buzzwords such as
"divorce" and "custody battle" that imply mutual consent,
when in most cases no such thing exists. Yet however palatable we try to render
this abuse, there is no escaping the central fact that it has very little to do
with the needs of children and everything to do with the power of certain groups
of adults. But we either maintain a distinction between what is actionable in a
court of law and what is not, or we simply haul people into court because we don’t
like their methods of child-rearing or, for that matter, because of our wish for
a new boyfriend. Frightening as it may seem, using the courts and police to
punish spouses for what may be nothing more than ordinary family disagreements
now seems to be accepted without question, and the bottom line is that any
father may now find himself pursued by federal agents because he protests the
way his children have been taken from him. |
