"A father is a ATM Machine
provided by nature." -- Family Court Proverb
Why Is Daddy in Jail?
by Dr. Stephen Baskerville
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 is 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 fathers' 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 requires 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:
Whoever 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 assert the power to invade a
family and 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 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 who
are acknowledged not the 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 young 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 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#150;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. 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.
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