Author: Super User

By Ginger Gentile, National Parents Organization Deputy Director

Are we doing our best to mirror the behavior we want to see in our own blended families?

One of the key tenets of the Shared Parenting Movement is that shared parenting is the best solution even when parents are not on good terms, as it will buffer children from conflict by giving them access to both parents as well as helping to reduce conflict by sending a message that we don’t fight over kids.


As change agents, we need to mirror this concept when we deal with people who disagree with us, on social media, when lobbying and also when we work with other activists.

How do we make this happen in practice? The same way we co-parent (or “parallel parent,” meaning both share responsibilities but don’t communicate and have different rules in each household) with the mother or father of our children.

●      We don’t have to respond to every comment, attack or statement. If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all!
●      Asking for opinions to improve ourselves, not to gossip or figure out who said what.
●      Stop giving oxygen to fan the flames of conflict. The people who disagree with shared parenting are a very small minority–some polls place          it at 3%! Instead of talking about their arguments, let’s talk about our positive reasons to adopt shared parenting!
●      Collaborating with other shared parenting groups. Let’s share our victories–it isn’t about creating an organization that is an umbrella but                working together, each in its own niche.
●      Before you talk, ask: is it true? Is it useful? Is it kind? If it isn’t, don’t say it.

Since I have come on board as the Deputy Executive Director, I have begun helping all of our affiliates, board members and supporters speak from the heart and be lights of love and compassion for all the children who suffer from not having a fit, loving parent in their lives for no good reason. We will begin offering more workshops, webinars with hands-on tools and making sure our message is positive and effective. I look forward to working with everyone who is fighting for our children to have the best relationship possible with their entire family.

July 9, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The move toward more realistic child support policies is gaining momentum. That system has been called “broken” too many times to count for reasons this informative article makes clear (Foundation for Economic Education, 6/28/19).

The Abell Foundation issued a report authored by the former commissioner of the Office of Child Support Enforcement, Vicky Turetsky, who, during her time with the OCSE, worked tirelessly for reform.

The first problem with child support practices is that orders are often set at levels the obligor is unable to pay. That’s often because courts “impute income” to non-custodial parents. That is, they base their orders, not on actually earnings, but on what the court considers it possible for them to earn. The assumption being that parents commonly seek to lower their payments by reducing their employment. That of course may happen on occasion, but there’s essentially no evidence that it does so as a matter of course. After all, why would an adult damage his/her own standard of living just in order to damage that of the child he/she dearly loves?

The practice of setting support levels above what parents can pay became established in the 1980s due in part to an error in arithmetic by researcher Lenore Weitzman. She announced that her data showed women suffering a drop in their standard of living of 76% when they divorced. That alarmed other researchers whose numbers were nowhere near that. A decade later, Weitzman admitted that her data indicated a 24% decrease in living standards, but by then her research had formed the impetus for child support policies nationwide. State laws had been written to ameliorate a decrease in living standards that largely didn’t exist.

The FEE article quotes the Baltimore Sun:

“Child support orders set beyond the ability of noncustodial parents to comply push them out of low-wage jobs, drown them in debt, hound them into the underground economy, and chase them out of their children’s lives,” Vicki Turetsky wrote in the 55-page report. Much of the analysis is rooted in research by the Ruth H. Young Center for Families and Children at the University of Maryland School of Social Work.

That highlights another shortcoming of the child support system: its draconian methods of enforcement hit almost exclusively at the poor. As Turetsky’s OCSE reported, well over 60% of those in arrears on child support report earnings of under $10,000 per year. So the enforcement mechanisms deny parents mostly to poor children, i.e. arguably those who need them most.

Perhaps the most wrongheaded enforcement mechanism is the suspension of the driver’s licenses of those parents who fall behind. Countless commentators have noted the obvious – that doing so only makes paying harder.

 A report cited by the Abell Foundation,

states that 42% of individuals who had their licenses suspended jobs as a result of the suspension, 45% of those who lost jobs could not find another job, and 88% of those that were able to find another job reported a decrease in income.

Needless to say, making it harder on non-custodial parents to pay isn’t a sensible way to collect child support.

One of the best cures for what ails that system is equal parenting. When each parent has equal or almost equal time with the children post-divorce, the need for child support diminishes considerably. As long as a parent only has to support the child when little Andy or Jenny is in their care, there’s little need for either parent to pay the other, although sometimes it may be necessary.

Still, 50/50 parenting time isn’t always feasible, so child support will always be with us. That’s why it’s urgent to get right a system that supports children and doesn’t expect the impossible of parents. Hopefully, we’re headed in that direction.

Ginger Gentile, Deputy Executive Director, NPO

“It was just easier not to see her.” 

“They left it up to me if I wanted a relationship with my dad.” 

“My dad hates my mom. My brother hates my mom, and I can’t see either of them.”

For my upcoming documentary, Erasing Family, I interviewed children who had a parent erased from their lives after divorce. These children were suffering from divided loyalties and torn between two parents. In talking with so many children who have lost contact with a loving, fit parent after divorce, a pattern emerged. So profound is their need for stability that they will decide not to talk to a parent for years, even decades, in an attempt to keep the peace and love of the parent they have. These children are desperate to avoid conflict, which caused them to run away from the “other” parent. 


Some of these families had 50/50 child custody arrangements, but they were not honored by one parent and the courts didn’t enforce them. Family courts allow children to state who they want to live with but don’t investigate what led to that statement. So a tense family dynamic isn’t stopped by the courts, rather, it feeds on it. 

As we fight for default shared parenting, it is important to remember that we need to look at 50/50 custody holistically and make sure that parents have the tools to implement it successfully. Do they have parenting classes on how to stop arguing? Anger management programs? Free mediation to keep them out of court? Support services, like free child care and afterschool programs to allow a stayt-at-home-parent to transition into the workplace? Does our parental leave offer equal (and paid!) time off for both mothers and fathers?

Kids want to have a relationship with both parents after divorce and separation. Default shared parenting is the first step in this direction, but it is not the only step that must be taken by families and society.

National Parents Organization is excited to announce that Ginger Gentile has joined NPO as Deputy Executive Director. Ginger brings a broad range of talents, skills, and knowledge as well as a deep understanding of the problems that NPO is addressing.

A film director and documentary maker, Ginger is best known for her highly anticipated, forthcoming documentary film, Erasing Family, which examines the trauma children suffer when a loving parent is erased from their lives. You can watch the trailer for the film here and follow the film on Facebook here. When NPO saw the massive following that Gentile had amassed in advance of her film, and her advocacy about children deserving equal access to both loving parents, we knew that her talents and skills would help us widen our base of supporters, including young people adversely affected by the family court system. As the debut of her film drew nearer, we felt it was the ideal time to invite her to take her activism to the next level by joining NPO in a leadership role.

Welcome aboard, Ginger. Together we’re going to do great things for our children.

 
Making divorce and separation healthier for children is an issue close to my heart, as my work is driven by my own experience as a teenager as well as the countless families that reach out to me asking for help with their family court horror stories. A child losing access to a loving, fit parent after divorce is one of the largest public health crises of our day. But it is something that we don’t talk about. Our courts and legislatures are reluctant to create reforms that most people support, which is shared parenting and providing resources to reduce conflict.  

While I will continue to work on the distribution and impact campaign of Erasing Family, which will include creating resources to help kids “caught in the middle” and bringing the film to a wide audience, my role at NPO will allow me to create clear messaging for advocates working on the front lines of this issue. I hope that my role as Deputy Executive Director will bring new voices to the table and usher in an age of different groups working together with the shared mission of making divorce healthier for children.

Over half of the supporters of Erasing Family, and the stories we filmed, are mothers who cannot see their children. I look forward to working towards ensuring that children have the right to love both parents equally and ways to move the debate beyond moms and dads, to how to help the entire family heal.

I look forward to reaching out to not only members and supporters, but to different groups who are working on aligned issues. And of course, reaching out to those who disagree with NPO’s mission to find common ground. Together, we can raise a generation of children who will never be forced to choose, or have the choice made for them, of which parent gets to be a parent, and which gets to be at best a visitor, or at worse, completely erased.

June 18, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Prior to Father’s Day, some of the commentary consisted of the usual denigration of fathers that’s long been a regular part of the day that’s supposed to honor them.  But most of the media and pop cultural treatment of fathers was positive.

This Pew Research article was nothing more than a recital of the current data on fathers and their effort to do both paid work and childcare.  I suppose that, if those data had cast doubt on fathers’ commitment, competency, etc., then the article would have reflected same.  But, since the information is essentially uniformly good news, the article joined many others that reflect positively on dads.

The piece makes eight points.  1. More fathers are stay-at-home parents than before.  2. Fathers have come to see parenting as central to their identity.  3. Finding a suitable balance between work and family is hard.  4. Most Americans think fathers face a lot of pressure to provide income for their families.  5. Being the family’s sole breadwinner is less common for fathers now than previously.  6. Fathers are more involved in childcare than before.  7.  Fathers and mothers are viewed differently when it comes to childcare.  8. Although they’re doing more childcare, many fathers think they still do too little.

I won’t dwell on each point, but one thing they indicate generally is that We the People tend to be smarter and more accurate in our assessments of fathers, mothers and kids than the various elite policy-makers/pushers who dominate the news.

So, as to #2 above, Pew researchers Gretchen Livingston and Kim Parker have this to say:

Dads are just as likely as moms to say that parenting is extremely important to their identity. Some 57% of fathers said this in a 2015 survey by the Center, compared with 58% of mothers. Like moms, many dads also seem to appreciate the benefits of parenthood: 54% reported that parenting is rewarding all of the time, as did 52% of moms. Meanwhile, 46% of fathers and 41% of mothers said they find parenting enjoyable all of the time.

I call that an extremely important fact.  As long as fathers saw their role as secondary to Mom’s, they might be counted on to accept whatever parenting time a divorce court might give them when the two adults split up.  But fathers who see parenting as a big part of their identity are more likely to demand more of the divorce process.  They often won’t succeed, but the more of them who try, the more will succeed and the more courts will come to understand their point of view, i.e. that kids need meaningful relationships with both parents.

As to #4,

About three-fourths of adults (76%) said in a 2017 survey that men face a lot of pressure to support their family financially, while 49% said men face a lot of pressure to be an involved parent. In contrast, 77% said women face a lot of pressure to be an involved parent, and 40% said women face a lot of pressure to support their family financially.

That’s a pretty accurate assessment of the status quo faced by fathers and mothers.  And, as I mentioned above, it’s a lot more accurate than what we so often read and hear in the MSM.  That has a way of attending solely to the trials and tribulations faced by mothers and rarely those of fathers.  The usual narrative urges us to believe that, because fathers do less domestic work than mothers, they’re laggards and mothers are long-suffering saints.  The reality is different.  Both mothers and fathers face the same challenges, but deal with them in different ways.  Those different ways tend to match their preferences (cited by Robert Verbruggen and discussed in my previous posts) and complement each other.

As to #6,

In 2016, fathers reported spending an average of eight hours a week on child care – about triple the time they provided in 1965. And fathers put in about 10 hours a week on household chores in 2016, up from four hours in 1965. By comparison, mothers spent an average of about 14 hours a week on child care and 18 hours a week on housework in 2016.

So fathers are doing substantially more childcare and domestic chores than before, but still not as much as mothers.  Again, those data reflect the preferences of mothers and fathers.  As Verbruggen made clear, mothers tend strongly to want to care for their children and fathers tend to want to provide for their families.  And all of that reflects age-old sex roles that decades of effort by feminists and various and sundry others hasn’t much changed.

The Pew data are well worth attending to.  The reality of fathers far outstrips their depiction in the mainstream media and pop culture.  As usual, the facts are more interesting and revealing than are the fantasies cooked up by those who continue to want to cast aspersions on fathers.  That, fortunately, is a tide that’s ebbing.

June 17, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

I’m continuing today with Robert Verbruggen’s accurate and refreshing analysis of data on men’s and women’s work time, both paid and unpaid (IFS, 6/11/19).  Here’s a quotation regarding men’s and women’s preferences that I included in Saturday’s post:

As David Barash put it in his book Out of Eden, “there is no society in which men do more fathering than women do mothering.” And as Steve Stewart-Williams noted in The Ape That Understood the Universe, it is far more common not just among humans but in nature writ large for females to be the sex that invests more in children. The reasons for this are obvious and many. The mother is always present at a child’s birth, for instance, making maternal bonding an especially reliable way to ensure a kid is taken care of; moms also can be sure that the children they deliver are their own, and thus don’t risk “wasting” (in evolutionary terms) their parental investments on a child who doesn’t share their genes. At a minimum, we shouldn’t find it surprising or offensive if women indicate a greater desire to spend time with their children, even if it costs them at work. And they do.

It is inherently unlikely that human females in the 21^st century would behave very differently from human females of times gone by.  And sure enough, they don’t.  Women, like the females of essentially every other social mammal, tend to prefer caring for children than taking on the more traditionally masculine role of resource provider.  Needless to say, humans are extremely varied, so some women prefer exactly that, but overall and overwhelmingly, they don’t.  Indeed, as Verbruggen later points out, the more prosperous and freer the society, the more women tend to hew to their traditional roles.  Unlike other species, we can pretend that we’re not mostly expressions of our evolved biology, but a close look at what we actually do tells us otherwise.

Here though, Verbruggen’s train leaves the tracks for a bit.

Years ago, women were all but forced to stay at home while men worked, but this changed dramatically in the middle of the 20th century, and women flooded into the workforce until the turn of the millennium. 

No, women were not “all but forced to stay at home.”  The reality is that, until the mid-1930s, the United States was an agrarian nation, i.e. more people lived on farms than in cities.  In fact, it was one of the major changes wrought by the Great Depression that, for the first time in our history, that wasn’t true.  The precipitous drop in prices for agricultural commodities forced an unprecedented number of people off their farms and into cities.

That means that, prior to that time, most women lived on farms and the idea that farm women didn’t work is both untrue and absurd.  Meanwhile, in the cities, countless women worked at a wide variety of jobs.  They did so because men’s wages were often insufficient to support their families.  Women were not forced to refrain from gainful employment.

Second, women didn’t all of a sudden “flood” the workplace.  In 1950, 33% of women between the ages of 16 and 65 were in the workforce.  By 1970, the number had risen to 44%.  Today, it’s about 56%.  In short, it’s been a gradual, albeit continual, increase in women’s workforce participation.  That stopped several years ago and, as Verbruggen points out, along with men’s, women’s workforce participation rate has reversed slightly.

Throughout that time and up to this very minute, men have always been more likely to work for pay than have women.  That’s all down to their differing preferences.

And the gains to female employment stalled at a level at which men are still more likely to work than women. Among those 25–54, nearly 90% of men but only 75% of women are in the labor force.

Plus,

There’s additional insight in opinion polls asking women about their “ideal” work situation, which can tell us if the nation’s mothers do somehow have a repressed desire to do much more for GDP than they already do. In general, per a recent IFS/Wheatley Institution survey, just 28% of moms want to work full-time, 40% part-time, and 23% not at all (with the remainder saying they’re not sure).

Other surveys, like one done for Forbes several years ago, show that over 60% of working women – whether mothers or not – want to work less than they do.  And when it comes to the values of the general public, the same holds true.

Only 12% of the public thinks full-time work is ideal for moms, while 70% thinks it ideal for dads.

Stated another way, after 50 years of hectoring by feminists to turn away from children and family and toward the workplace, women have overwhelmingly said “no thanks.”  Women work and earn because it’s the responsible thing to do.  They well understand that the rent has to be paid and food set on the table.  But, where possible, their preference is to care for their children and their house.  Verbruggen makes the point:

A goal of pushing moms to do more at the office and less with the kids goes against the preferences of a lot of those very moms.

A few people will respond to these crystal-clear numbers with the claim that women are simply the witless dupes of a heartless and all-powerful patriarchy that seeks the subjugation of women.  For my part, I respect women far more.  I know women to be fully capable of ascertaining their own needs and desires and acting on them.

The upshot of all this being that men’s greater workforce participation and earnings provide the funds that allow women to act on their preference for childcare.  That, plus fathers’ increased time spent in caring for their children add up to a pretty flattering picture of fathers, which is what Verbruggen’s article is all about.  Good on him.

June 16, 2019 by Don Hubin, Ph.D., Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

“Happy Father’s Day!”

On the third Sunday in June, those words are welcomed by loving dads across the country. But for far too many of those dads, the annual celebration of fathers is a bitter reminder of what was taken from them and of the hole in their lives that cannot be filled.

I’m not talking about all fathers who are divorced or separated from their children’s mothers. Most of these fathers have been sidelined by our family courts that still see fathers primarily only as financial resources, not as loving and capable parents. But in most cases the standard parenting schedules, cruel as they are to children and fathers, at least allow the children to spend Father’s Day with their dads. These dads at least get to hear “Happy Father’s Day” from the children they love.

I’m talking about the dads who have been, either through court action or through court inaction, largely erased from their children’s lives.

How does this happen?

Sometimes courts, after awarding full custody to Mom, allow her to move the children far from the father. Sometimes there are compelling reasons for the move; tough choices have to be made. But often judges simply reason that the court can’t tell adults where they can live and, of course, Mom can take the kids with her because … guess what? … she has custody.

These fathers might at least get a phone call from their kids on Father’s Day. They might hear the words “Happy Father’s Day” through the tinny speaker of their cell phones. They won’t, though, be able to take their kids to the park, hug their kids, or feel their kids’ arms around their necks.

But some dads have it worse. Sometimes their children’s love and affection have been turned to hatred or fear by a selfish and destructive campaign of parental alienation by the other parent. Parental alienation goes far beyond an occasional negative comment about your children’s other parent made in front of the children. Parental alienation is a concerted effort to enlist the children to one’s own side of the divide by portraying the other parent as unfit, uncaring, or dangerous. It is horribly damaging to children. It is a form of child abuse. Sometimes when these children reach adulthood, the scales fall from their eyes and they reconnect with the targeted parent and blame the alienator. But, all too often, parental alienation leads to a lifetime rift between the children and one of the parents who loves them.

The sole physical custody arrangements still favored by our courts in contested custody cases contribute to parental alienation by designating one parent the primary parent and limiting the time that the other parent has to maintain a relationship with the children.

Some dads’ kids have been abducted, taken far away, sometimes to foreign countries, in violation of court orders. These dads won’t get even a phone call on Father’s Day and their separation from their kids may well be permanent.

Our courts and family law system don’t cause parents to abduct their children from the other parent. But they do precious little to help locate the child who has been abducted. There is an enormous governmental bureaucracy working to track down child support obligors who try to hide by moving away. We’re willing to go to great lengths to ensure that children are not deprived of the financial support that courts have ordered. And that is a good thing. But when parents’ children have been abducted in violation of courts’ orders, parents are largely on their own to try to correct this problem.

To those dads who can share the day with their children, National Parents Organization says, “Happy Father’s Day!” And, to those who have been wrongly deprived of this joy, we say, “We understand your pain; we understand the harm that is being done to your children; and we’re working hard to change the laws and court practices that made this destruction possible.”

June 14, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Imagine coming across an article headlined “Who’s Your Mommy? Don’t Ask a DNA Test.”  As you read it, it slowly dawns on you that the writer is suggesting decoupling the concept of motherhood from a woman’s biological relationship to her child.  After all, the article explains, plenty of kids have adoptive mothers, not biological ones; plenty have stepmothers too.  Some women go to prison or lose their parental rights due to drug or child abuse and often their kids go to foster parents.  And historically, countless mothers died, either in childbirth or long before their kids reached maturity.  So someone else had to mother them.

The point being that, since there are so many different ways in which children can come to be raised by women who have no biological connection to them, surely we should ignore that connection altogether.

You’d be astonished to read such a piece and of course you never have.  You’d be even more astonished to read it if it had been published just four days before Mother’s Day.

But, four days before Father’s Day, we have exactly such a piece about fathers that concludes,

Who’s your daddy? Perhaps science isn’t best positioned to answer, because this question arises from society, not nature. (The Telegraph, 6/13/19)

Which of course is a load of, er, nonsense.  Since hunter-gatherer times at least, the biological connection between adults and their children has been all-important when the question of who raises the kids comes up.  Of course for almost all of human history, a man’s biological connection to a child was a matter of guesswork.  Only with the advent of, first, blood-typing (that could disprove but not prove paternity) and, later, genetic testing have we been able to know for sure who a child’s father is.

So the article’s author, Nara Milanich, reaches back into history for examples of non-fathers raising children.  She does so to assert that, since for millennia we never relied on science to determine biological paternity, well, why start now?

The obvious answer to that question is that we should start now because, for the first time in history, we can.  Up to the mid-80s, we had no way to ascertain for certain the identity of the father.  Now we do.  Ergo, why not use the technology we have to get the matter right?

Tellingly, Milanich offers no good reason.  Her piece is filled with largely irrelevant cases, such as the two gay men who used a surrogate to produce a child, presumably fathered by one of them.  The surrogate was not a U.S. citizen, so the question of the child’s citizenship arose.  The State Department ruled that it cannot be considered a citizen of this country.

To which I can only wonder, “so what?”  The matter is terribly important for the child and the two men, but scarcely constitutes a compelling argument for abandoning the biological connection in fatherhood.

More importantly, Milanich simply doesn’t know her facts.  Those include tidbits like the biological attachments between parents and their children.  During pregnancy, that biological attachment comes into being and the same happens with the father then and shortly after birth.  The baby likewise forms attachments to its parents that are neurobiological in nature.  Those aren’t societal attachments, they’re biological ones.  Without them we wouldn’t exist as a species.  Indeed, no social mammal would.  The notion that we can simply declare someone a child’s “social” parent and dispense with the others is absurd and proves itself to be such with every passing day.

Is Milanich aware of the quite impressive science showing that children on average do better in the care of their biological parents than anyone else’s?  You’d think she might have consulted an expert or at least read a study or two on what is, after all, the core of her article.  But no. 

Hey, it’s Father’s Day, and what better time to cast doubt on the importance of fathers to children?  Needless to say, neither Milanich nor anyone else would ever do such a thing just before Mother’s Day, but dads seem to be a different matter.  While so many others are learning about and rejoicing over the increased share of parenting now done by fathers and the huge importance of fathers to children, a few still fight a rearguard action in an effort to, once and for all, separate fathers from children.

June 14, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Here’s a good article on domestic violence (Vancouver Sun, 6/7/19).  Apparently, Simon Fraser University criminologist, Alexandra Lysova, has been studying Canada’s General Social Survey that’s conducted every five years.

One of her main points – and one of the article’s – is that men too are victims of domestic violence.  Indeed, in Canada, they’re more often victims of DV than are women.  The latest figures show that 4.2% of men and 3.5% of women have been victimized in the past five years.  Now, to begin with, that’s good news.  Those figures have been steadily declining to the point that, on average, 0.7% of women and 0.8% of men have been victims of DV in the past year.  Canadians seem to be cleaning up their act at least as far as intimate partner violence goes.

A few points of interest in the data: when all physical violence, including sexual assault is considered, 2.8% of men and 1.7% of women report victimization.  As to severe violence with sexual abuse, 1.2% of men and 0.5% of women were victimized.

But the other issue emphasized by both the article and Lysova is that men’s victimization remains very much in the dark.  It comes as a surprise to most people that men and women are victimized about equally.

It shouldn’t.  The simple fact is that we’ve known that women are as likely as men to perpetrate DV against an intimate partner for well over 40 years now.  The earliest studies conducted on the subject revealed the fact and literally hundreds have subsequently. 

So why isn’t it common knowledge?  Because the press and the DV establishment haven’t publicized the fact.  As researcher Murray Straus said several years ago, simply reporting the facts about DV can get an academic attacked by those who, for whatever reason, have a stake in the status quo.  That status quo includes the idea that DV is a gendered phenomenon, that men commit DV to maintain power and control over their female partners and that only realization of that phenomenon can permit men to change their evil ways.

That essentially none of the above is true as a general principle troubles the DV establishment not a whit.  Year after year we see the same claims and with the same results.  Here in the United States, there are about 1,500 DV shelters for women and perhaps three for men.  In Canada, the article makes clear, there are none.

That’s not for lack of trying.  Several years ago, one activist, Earl Silverman, attempted to start a DV shelter for men, but was denied any funding by the national and provisional governments to do so.  Needless to say, shelters for women in Canada don’t lack for public funds.

Much like Nancy Shannon and Jennifer Harman, about whose article in the Lincoln Journal Star I wrote twice last week, Lysova calls parental alienation a form of domestic violence against the targeted parent.

While [psychologist Denise] Hines has found females are more likely to report being called names or prevented access to family income, male spouses more often said their partner tried to control their every move or denied them access to their children.

The latter is leading to increasingly common cases of “parental alienation,” Lysova said, in which one partner, particularly after a separation, unjustly poisons the reputation of the other spouse in the minds of their children.

Partly because so many people are uneducated about men’s victimization, men tend to shun the system that’s supposedly there to help victims of DV.  Among those ignorant of the realities about DV faced by men are the police, social workers and judges, i.e. the very people who might help an abused man in family court.

The issue of DV comes up frequently in contested child custody cases, so it would benefit men and make the process much fairer if those people knew the facts about domestic violence.

Perhaps they could start by reading Lysova’s work.  And of course there’s plenty more in the same vein.  And other news publications could follow the lead of the Vancouver Sun and publicize men’s victimization with the same vigor and diligence as they’ve publicized women’s over the many, many years.