ARTICLES & STORIES
FATHERS DAY 2000: Fathers Go To Washington!
WHY IS DADDY IN JAIL?: For the Crime of Wanting To See His Child
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RALLY PHOTOS: Last Years March On Washington DC
PROUD PAPA PHOTOS: Greg Romeo's Pride & Joy
LOST BOY: The Plight of Elian & Juan
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LINKS TO RELATED SITES
FATHERS DAY 2000: More Info On Fathers Rights
F.A.R.C.E.: Fathers Awareness of Rights and Custody Equality
RICHMOND VIRGINIA SUPPORT
FAMILY@RICHMOND.NET: Family
Resolution Council
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
( 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 guarantee of "due process" does not prevent family courts from
jailing parents on civil contempt for weeks, months, or even years without
trial.
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 ( 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."
Courts routinely order fathers whose children have been taken from
them involuntarily and with no grounds to support those children
financially.
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 ( 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."
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.
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 clichés
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 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 ( 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 clichés 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.
Stephen Baskerville teaches political science at Howard University.
(The irony of the aforementioned realities is that
they are more our fault than that of judges, feminists, lawyers, or greedy
ex-wives. Our fault because of the militant (some would day "bull-headed")
refusal of men's/fathers' group leaders to unite in opposition. This is
the REAL crime. A united front could FORCE reform. RFD)
). 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.
), shows that far from abandoning their children, most
divorced fathers make heroic efforts against enormous obstacles to stay in
touch with them.
), "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."
). "Only one in ten children in our study experienced
relief when their parents divorced.