February 9, 2021 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors
At last, women in Australia are starting to hit back at the family (and criminal) law systems that privilege mothers, often at the expense of their children and former husbands. A new organization called Mothers of Sons has gone online and promises to be a resource for mothers and their sons who are fighting the lonely fight against a system that believes males to be the enemies of children and all allegations of domestic abuse made by women against men to be true.
Unsurprisingly, radical feminist groups are up in arms against any movement that might be beneficial to men or that could reduce women’s power in family courts (NCA Newswire, 1/29/21).
For years, we’ve seen the prospects for fathers and their children in Australia’s family courts grow ever dimmer. The most knowledgeable and respected attorneys in the country, like Augusto Zimmerman, can rail against the damage done to children when their fathers are taken from them based on zero or fabricated evidence. In vain. They can point out that the very concept of due process of law, of the requirement that actual evidence be produced before a person’s rights can be diminished by the state has been eroded to practically nothing before our eyes. Pointless. They can scream that the system bankrupts those with the money to fight cases that drag on year after year and denies justice to those without. No response.
And often lost among the hurly-burly of false allegations, courts and lawyers are the children who suffer horribly, not knowing whether they’ll see their father again and bewildered by a process that bewilders those far older and more experienced than they. The system that claims at every juncture to care only about the “best interests of the child” all too often does the opposite. It does so because it’s long been in thrall to a false radical feminist narrative that claims all women’s allegations of abuse to be true and all abusers to be men. With that as its basis, it’s no surprise that mere allegations made by a woman against a man can result in him losing all contact with his children, his home and his belongings for months at a time while the case is pending a hearing. That can be true even when the woman is known to have serious mental health issues, to have made false claims previously and her present claims are plainly false on their face.
The Mothers of Sons website includes a number of mothers’ stories of exactly those sorts of legal outrages. Here, for example is Jo Thomson-Jones:
The Family Court processes were continuing and at one point a Family Reporter carefully interviewed both parents and observed them both separately with Lyla. When it was time for Lyla to leave Nathan she dissolved into tears, screaming “No, No, I want Daddy!” The Family Reporter recommended Lyla be removed at once from the mother who should have supervised contact only.
But a second Judge refused to rule on what the Family Reporter had advised and said it would have to go to trial six months later.
Due to delays caused by Tamara’s false allegations it ended up taking 18 months for it to finally happen with the case taking five days in court and costing us over $70,000. An Independent Children’s Lawyer recommended Lyla be placed with the father. This third judge took another three months to make the decision that Lyla be returned to Nathan and made the fatal mistake of informing Tamara over the phone that she had four days to return the child to her father. The next day Lyla was murdered by her mother.
Yes, the child’s “best interests” were so important to a series of judges that, despite her mother’s patent instability and danger to her, they took literally years to make a decision, cost the family $70,000 and ended in the murder of the girl by her mother. Well played, family courts, well played.
What about Michelle Jones, whose son went to prison for months, had their family’s savings gutted and her own marriage destroyed by the stress placed on them all by the unquestioning acceptance, by police, prosecutors and courts, of claims by her son’s ex that were demonstrably (and eventually proven to be) false. All along Daniel and his parents had the evidence needed to disprove his ex’s claim, but for months the police, the prosecutor and the courts went with the prevailing narrative of male corruption and female honesty and innocence. Years later, Sarah Jane Parkinson went to prison for her crimes against Daniel and the criminal justice system, but no serious person argues that justice was done.
The whole process lasted five years, from the day the first AVO landed in December 2013 to the sentencing of Sarah Jane Parkinson in January 2018, to the charging of Scott White for perjury in 2018. It broke my marriage. It destroyed my family’s life’s savings. It stripped a year from my son’s life. And who really paid any serious price? No-one. John White, the ACT Director of Public Prosecutions, retired after the story blew up in the media.
Amy Knibbs, the prosecutor who put Daniel into prison, left Australia and is now a political activist in the United States. Scott Corcoran, who tried to stop the investigation into the conspiracy, was allowed to resign from the AFP despite multiple disciplinary issues.
Scott White, who moved in with Sarah Jane, was charged with perjury and weapons offences. He was suspended on full pay by the NSW Police. A slap on the wrist.
NSW Police Inspector Anthony Hill, who started the conspiracy by claiming he had “five Police witnesses” against Daniel, has, as far as I know, faced no discipline. Not even Sarah Jane Parkinson paid a high price. She was sentenced to three years in jail but will be out in 2021. She has married Scott White and will simply change her name and move on.
Meanwhile, radical feminists are aghast, as reported by NCA NewsWire.
But Caitlin Roper, PhD candidate and campaigns manager for feminist activist group Collective Shout, is sceptical of the website, which she says makes baseless claims…
She said it was far more common that truthful allegations were made about men that could not be proved.
Hmm. According to Roper, it’s frequent that “truthful allegations” are made about men that “could not be proved.” That of course raises the obvious question, “If they can’t be proved, how does Roper or anyone else know the allegations are truthful?”
But the NCA NewsWire article’s author didn’t ask Roper that obvious question. Coincidentally, that’s exactly what the family and criminal courts fail to do. Great minds think alike.