Author: Joomlafreaks

January 15th, 2012 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
Cardiff council deputy leader Neil McEvoy has called for an investigation of organizations running women’s shelters.  He says he’s received information that they knowingly abet mothers who defy court orders allowing fathers contact with their children.  Read about it here (Wales Online, 1/14/12).

It wasn’t too long ago that McEvoy raised a firestorm of protest by simply saying the same thing – that women’s shelters help
mothers keep children from fathers by accepting at face value all allegations of abuse.  He was temporarily suspended from his council position because of his claims.  Now he’s calling for the Welsh Children’s Commissioner, Keith Towler, to investigate “third sector” groups. 

Those groups are analogous to non-profit organizations in the United States that operate women’s DV shelters.  The ones in Wales, as here, receive taxpayer money to provide services.  That of course raises the important question of whether the public purse should be used to thwart the orders of public courts regarding father-child contact.

In an open letter to the Children’s Commissioner for Wales, Keith Towler, Coun McEvoy writes: “I call on you now to initiate a commission or committee to look at how some of the third sector operates in the closed world of family breakdown, which involves children.

“The respected charity Families Need Fathers Both Parents Matter Cymru has confirmed that its clients claim that some third sector groups in Wales support mothers who are breaking court orders. Such groups are publicly-funded.

“Furthermore, such groups offer what is termed, ‘non-judgemental support’. Non-judgemental support essentially involves such groups believing and acting upon any allegation which is made. Reports are written and submitted to various agencies and yet no checking is done. False allegations can and are at times written as fact. This practice severely distorts the child having a fair chance of a reasonable relationship with both parents, as stated in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been adopted in law by the Welsh Government.”

Needless to say, all of that closely parallels the situation in the United States.  It was just last year that I reported on the abductions of a little boy by his mother, Wendi Lee Bartell-Dimm.  She had been married to a Canadian logger named Danny Dimm.  They split up and she got custody, but refused to allow their little boy to see his father.  When the court ordered an extensive period of time for father and son to be together, Bartell-Dimm simply abducted the boy. 

She was found within a few days, but, since the court refused to punish her wrongdoing in any way, the incident served only as a lesson in how to improve her abduction technique.  The next time she abducted the boy, she was far more effective.  In fact, she vanished entirely.  That led one Minnesota private detective who specializes in parental abductions of children to surmise that she’d be found in a domestic violence shelter.  And sure enough, she was.  A DV shelter in North Dakota had been harboring her for two months before she was found and arrested, and the child sent to live with his father.

That incident demonstrates a lot of what Neil McEvoy and many fathers’ rights groups are alleging.  Bartell-Dimm was in no way a victim of domestic violence; she had barely even seen Danny Dimm since they divorced almost two years previously.  But that didn’t stop her from being taken in by a DV shelter.  There, as in Wales, claims of being a victim of DV are taken at face value, no questions asked.  The unsurprising result is that DV shelters often take in women who aren’t victims of domestic violence.  That in turn means that women who are victims of DV often have nowhere to go; their beds are occupied by women like Wendi Lee Bartell-Dimm and others.

Why, for example, are only 25% of the homeless women?  I suspect that one of the reasons is that DV shelters are used by women who would otherwise be on the streets.  Now, it can be argued that those women need shelter regardless of the reason why.  That’s true, but domestic violence shelters are supposed to take in victims of domestic violence; that’s what the money is budgeted for.  If we want to budget money for the homeless, fine, but let’s admit what we’re doing. 

Likewise, those who donate to non-profit organizations that provide services to DV victims probably think they’re supporting, well, DV victims.  What we learn from certain studies, the Bartell-Dimm case and Neil McEvoy’s claims, however, is that money supposedly spent for DV services is in fact spent for other things.

Into the bargain, the Bartell-Dimm case shows exactly what McEvoy is alleging – that DV shelters help mothers separate fine, loving fathers from their children.  Danny Dimm was a good father who eventually got custody of his son, but a DV shelter in North Dakota went to bat against him.  It aided criminal wrongdoing by a mother; it helped deny a father to a child; it allowed a woman who was not a victim of DV to occupy space that could have been used by an actual victim; and it did all of that with your tax money and mine.

It’s that sort of thing that Neil McEvoy thinks is happening in Wales and his opinion is supported by the allegations of a great number of fathers who’ve had experiences similar to those of Danny Dimm.

So he wants an investigation, and I hope he gets one.  It’s always been one of the keys to the DV establishment’s ability to separate children from their fathers that DV shelters don’t investigate the claims of victimization of women seeking their services.  Taking all claims at face value is an absolute guarantee that some women will abuse the system.  How could it be otherwise?

So there’s ample justification for governments and non-profits to demand some sort of proof by DV shelters that the women they accept are actually victims of DV and not criminals on the run from the law.  And once governments start demanding that sort of accountability, the DV establishment is going to have to start behaving very differently from what it has all along.

Whatever happens with McEvoy’s request for an investigation, DV shelters play a vital role in depriving children of their fathers.  That has to stop.  Women who truly need a place to go to avoid violence by a partner shouldn’t be turned away because mothers are using the space to keep children from their fathers.

Coun McEvoy goes on to state that he firmly believes in the right to refuge and the right to be protected, adding: “I would comment, however, that we seem to have developed a family breakdown industry whereby organisations receive millions of pounds in public money and seem to be straying into areas which should not concern them.The issue of contact between a parent and its child should be dealt with by a court of law when disputes are irreconcilable. Organisations which involve themselves in contact disputes on the side usually of the mother in my view are acting ultra vires and are going beyond their remit.

“As you are well aware, a court order for contact is only awarded when an assessment has been done of usually a father and when a court of law has decided that it is in the best interests of the child to see its father. I have been made aware of a number of examples where a number of good fathers claim to have been denied contact, with their court orders being ignored, while the mother is being supported by a third sector group.

“I made you aware of three organisations in the family justice review that are alleged to be operating in this way.”

There are far more than that, I’d wager, and far, far more in the United States.  It’s high time that Congress stopped turning a blind eye to the abuses and misuses of public monies in the guise of helping female DV victims.  It’s long past time that Congress stopped funding the separation of children and fathers.

 

January 15th, 2012 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
The Ontario government agency charged with collecting and disbursing child support has been overbilling non-custodial parents, 97% of whom are fathers, for as long as 13 years.  Due to the agency’s errors, some 1,700 fathers have paid out some $5.3 million more than they should have.  Here’s one article (Vancouver Sun, 1/13/12).  And here’s another (Ottawa Citizen, 1/14/12).

Worse, this is just the latest in a long history of incompetence and disregard for parents – both custodial and non-custodial – the Family Responsibility Office has logged.

The Family Responsibility Office, or FRO, is responsible for ensuring court-ordered child support payments are made. More than 97 per cent of all payers overseen by the office are male.

The billing mistake is only the latest controversy to engulf FRO.

The office has come under repeated criticism for more than a decade, particularly for a flawed computer system that has still not been fully replaced.

In 2006, the agency abandoned a new IT system, despite spending $21 million and three-and-a-half years developing it.

That same year, the provincial Ombudsman criticized the office for a “lackadaisical” attitude toward collections, resulting in a “free ride” for many deadbeat parents.

In 2010, Auditor General Jim McCarter ripped the agency for its general ineffectiveness, saying enforcement was slow, taking on average two years between enforcement actions.

Despite moving to a new case-management system, McCarter said 80 per cent of people who phoned the agency never got through. He also said there was virtually no quality control at the agency, which employs roughly 430 people and deals with 190,000 cases annually.

Whatever your take on government, the fact that 80% of people calling the FRO never managed to speak to a human being there must astonish you.  It has to be a record of some sort.  All in all, it seems that the Family Responsibility Office has never been all that responsible itself.

Now, you’re probably wondering what’s going to be done about all that money.  In the United States, for example, if a non-custodial dad makes an overpayment – due to mistake, neglect, oversight, court error, whatever – the courts just pretend he meant to do it and it therefore constitutes a gift.  Never mind that the law on gifts has been clear for centuries or that it requires the giver to intend to give the gift.  Without that motivation, there is no gift, and any transfer of possession doesn’t constitute a transfer of ownership.

Well, when it comes to child support, all of that is tossed out the window.  Mom need repay nothing; she gets a windfall.

And it turns out that something very similar will be done in Ontario.  Again, Moms won’t be asked to refund the excess amounts they received despite the fact that they plainly knew they were receiving more than they were entitled to.  But at least the dads won’t be left holding the bag; that’ll be the taxpayer’s obligation.  It seems the public purse will be ransacked to repay the dads.

Of course those computations and repayments will all be handled by… guess who?  That’s right, the FRO.  And if it does as good a job of that as it’s done with essentially everything else it’s set its hand to, my guess is there’ll be about 1,700 fathers filing 1,700 lawsuits in the near future.

January 16th, 2012 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
Texas men have until September 1, 2012 to contest paternity of a child according to a statute that was passed last year.  Read about it here (PR Web, 1/12/12).

The new law allows a man to request genetic testing of a child and, if the test disproves paternity, cease child support payments.  It also allows him to continue his relationship with the child even though he no longer has to pay.

“For decades now, Texas courts and judges have forced men who were not the biological father to pay child support; even to the point of denying their real children food and shelter. The misery this has caused some families has been unbearable. Good husbands and fathers have been thrown in jail for not paying child support for children that everyone involved acknowledged were not their children,” continues Fuller.

This year, the Texas legislature finally acknowledged that this was just wrong, and passed a statute to right this injustice, but there is a very narrow window to take advantage of this change. Section 161.005 of the Texas Family Code was amended effective May 12, 2011 to allow men previously adjudicated to be “fathers” to petition the court for DNA testing. Under the amended wording of the statute, if DNA testing shows they are not the biological father of the child, the court must terminate the parent child relationship – and along with it – the child support order.

But there’s an important caveat.  Any man who knows, or who a court decides should have known, that a child was not fathered by him, has only until September 1st to request the test and be absolved of financial responsibility.  After September 1st, if he knows or should have known the child wasn’t his, he’s stuck paying support until the child reaches adulthood.

Men who believe they’re the father of a child born after September 1st will be fully protected by the law.  They’ll be able to request DNA testing any time and be relieved of the obligation to pay if the test shows they’re not the dad.

The new Texas law is a giant step toward sanity in child support cases.  Until its effective date, paternity fraud was essentially a free ride for mothers.  With a little artful story-telling, they could choose who would act as the father of their child whether he was or not.  That meant a mother could opt for the higher-earning man, the nicer man, the more adventurous man, etc. to whom to deliver the happy news “Guess what honey, we’re pregnant!”

Typically, he was either overjoyed or at least willing to take up the task of being a father with no questions asked.  If Mom became unhappy with him for some reason, it was a simple matter for her to dump him, keep the child and receive his support.  If she did, the bloom was off the romantic rose for him; it’s at that time that a man starts to notice that junior has dark hair while he’s a blond.  But, under the old law, by then it was too late.  If he’d formed a relationship with the child, courts were hesitant to allow him to opt out, even though he wasn’t the dad.  Of course many non-fathers elected to continue playing the paternal role because they and the child had bonded in ways too real and too important to destroy.

Now Texas law allows men to ask the pertinent questions at any time, but if a man has played the paternal role, he has only until September 1st to do so.  Still, the Texas law is that rarest of birds – a family law that gives power to men.

Texas men, know your rights!  The time for requesting a DNA test is passing.  September 1st may be too late for you to ascertain once and for all, whether the child is yours or not.  Act now!

January 18th, 2012 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
A 16-year-old boy can’t know the identity of his biological father for another two years a Chicago area court ruled recently.  That ruling is just the latest in a 12-year saga in which the boy’s mother has successfully blocked his father from having any contact with his son.  Read about it here (Chicago Tribune, 1/2/12).

It all started in 1993 when the woman and the father had a five-year affair.  Both were married to other people, none of whom can be named due to a court’s gag order. 
The boy was born in 1996. In 1998, her paramour filed suit to ascertain paternity and gain visitation rights if he turned out to be the father.

The threat of that suit prompted the mother to tell all to her husband who agreed to continue raising the child as his own, whether or not he turned out to be.  Eventually, DNA testing showed the non-husband to be the boy’s father, and that triggered a 12-year legal donnybrook that continues to this day.  Among other things, that legal dispute involved an effort by both the mother and her husband to adopt the child they’d already been raising and who was unquestionably the child of the mother.

The adoption effort went nowhere and at least one appellate judge thinks it was never meant as anything but a delaying tactic.  If so, it clearly worked given the fact that the case has entered its 13th year of life.  Its byzantine course has taken it through several trial courts, four appellate courts and to the state Supreme Court once.  It’s now back in the trial court and, although the linked-to article never says so explicitly, the biological father has been unsuccessful in having any contact with his son.  To date, he’s had no visitation rights and paid nothing in child support despite 12 years of trying.

That of course also means that the boy has never had contact – much less a relationship – with the man who helped bring him into the world and whose genes he shares.  Now Will County Judge Robert Baron has ruled that he may not be informed of his paternity for another two years.

Although expert testimony sharply conflicted on the question, the judge decided that informing the boy about his biological father would be too emotionally traumatic for him.  Exactly why that would dramatically change in two years is left unexplained.  And, reading the article, it’s hard not to conclude that the person being shielded from harm is less the boy than it is his mother.

At a hearing in late 2010, the boy’s mother testified that telling the truth now “is going to kill him, not to mention the strain it will put on our family.”

She said learning the truth will be the “most traumatic experience for (my son) so far in his life” and worried that he would be “very angry and hurt” toward her and the boy’s relationship with her husband might also suffer.

The boy’s older brother and sister said they had been shocked and dismayed when they learned the truth about their brother’s paternity.  Whether the knowledge damaged them emotionally or whether it affected their relationship with their mother – facts that are clearly pertinent to the issue – goes unmentioned in the article.

Experts said that, generally speaking, it’s better for kids to learn the truth from their parents in a controlled setting.

“Typically secrets are usually not a good idea,” said Linda Hageman, executive director of adoption services at The Cradle in Evanston. “The truth is going to come out eventually — it’s better to have it come out on your terms. That being said, most kids who are being raised in a warm, supportive environment can adjust to news that is potentially upsetting.”

I agree, and that’s why it looks to me that the person being protected here is the mother, not the boy.

I also have to wonder if the adults in the case aren’t engaging in a bit of wishful thinking.  Apparently this is a smart kid from a privileged background who does well in school, has lots of friends, etc.  His family has been embroiled in this highly contentious litigation for 12 years.  Do the adults really think he knows nothing, suspects nothing?  They’ve doubtless spent large sums of money and had endless conversations among themselves about the case.  They’ve spent many days in court and had extensive interaction with attorneys.  They’ve received mail from courts and lawyers.  All of that has gone on for 12 years and the kid doesn’t have a clue?  I don’t believe it for a second.

But the main point is that, from the day she learned she was pregnant with him, the mother has wanted to keep his paternity secret from him, his biological father and her husband.  She only told her husband the truth because her lover said he was seeking visitation.  Ever after, she’s done everything in her power to keep the matter from the most important person in the whole case – her son.  That’s been her choice and the courts have uniformly supported her despite the opinions of many experts.

The simple fact is that the boy could have been told about his “other” dad when he was three, the biological dad could have had contact with him, paid some child support and the boy would have grown up understanding that his situation, while odd, was workable and in no way unique.  Little trauma would have ensued, just a complex family situation brought about by his mother’s decision to have sex outside of her marriage.

But Mom didn’t want that and now that he’s 16, it’s all gotten a lot more complicated.

Paternity fraud hurts many people.  It hurts the man who’s not the father but thinks he is, it hurts the man who is the father but thinks he isn’t, and it hurts the child.  In this case, the adults have known the truth for a long time and the longer they delay telling the boy the truth, the worse will be the likely consequences.

But the larger picture is the willingness of courts to abet the dishonesty of mothers who claim for themselves the sole authority to decide who will parent their child.  When a woman lies about the paternity of a child, little good can come of it, but we can do a lot better than we do.

The simple fact is that, if she’d wanted his child support at any time, all she had to do is alert a court to his paternity.  Had she done so, that same court would have “awarded” him visitation.  Out of the blue, solely according to her desire, he would have become the child’s father.  That would have occurred not because he’d ever lifted a finger to raise the child.  He’d done no such thing because the mother decided that he shouldn’t know about his child.

Equal treatment of fathers and mothers by family courts demands that he too be able to come into his child’s life by the simple fact of his genetic connection.  The emotional wellbeing of the child won’t be harmed any more by him deciding to play the paternal role than it would be by her deciding that he should.

But courts and laws have a disturbing way of ruling that it’s not in the child’s interests when Dad wants a part in his child’s life, but when Mom wants him to have one, it is.  In so doing, they abet and encourage her fraud on two men and a child.  It is long past time we put a stop to it.

January 18th, 2012 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
Moises Garcia welcomed his daughter Karina back into his loving arms two days before Christmas.  Garcia is the Milwaukee physician whose wife, Emiko Inoue, abducted Karina to her native Japan almost four years ago.  She did that shortly after Garcia filed for divorce.  Here’s my original post on the case.

As readers of this blog are well aware by now, Japanese mothers who abduct their children to that country are home free. 
Japan has long provided a safe haven for them and an iron-clad guarantee that they will never be prosecuted, never have to give up custody or allow the child to have any contact with its father.  Japan has never signed the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction and its laws are radically anti-father.  That anti-father bent goes double for non-Japanese dads.

So how did Garcia manage to get his daughter back?  The answer is simple; Mom made a mistake.  After she snatched Karina and fled to Japan, Garcia went to court in Wisconsin and got a court order giving him custody of the girl.  Of course Japanese courts would never enforce such an order, but Inoue apparently didn’t want to give up her immigrant status, so she tried to sneak back into the U.S.  The moment she set foot in Hawaii, she was arrested by customs officials and eventually extradited to Wisconsin where she was put in jail.

There she was faced with a choice – either her parents in Japan would send Karina back to Wisconsin to live with her father, or Inoue would spend the next seven years in prison.  Inoue apparently decided dad-care wasn’t such a bad thing after all.  This article tells us that Karina has been returned to her father and Inoue has been released from jail (Yahoo.com, 12/24/11).

Nearly four years after his ex-wife spirited their daughter away to Japan and blocked nearly all his attempts to see her, a Wisconsin doctor welcomed his little girl home Friday — just in time for Christmas.

“My heart is pounding, I am very nervous. But ready,” Moises Garcia wrote on his Facebook page as he waited for Karina to clear customs and a psychological evaluation at Chicago’s O’Hare airport.

“It is all emotional! I can see the picture passing in my mind of all these four years. I get almost tears. I just don’t know how to react when I see her first. I will do my best.”

Previous news coverage of the case suggested that it marked a brave new world of Japanese cooperation with other countries in international custody disputes.  In my first post, I said that was nonsense; the only reason Karina was being returned was Mom’s mistake.  But for that, the girl would have remained with the some 120 other children abducted to Japan by their mothers.  In that event, Moises Garcia wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Now it seems at least some people are starting to see this case for what it is.

“To date, the Office of Children’s Issues does not have a record of any cases resolved through a favorable Japanese court order or through the assistance of the Japanese government,” the US State Department said on its website.

Congressman Christopher Smith, who has been active for years on child abduction cases, welcomed the news of Karina’s return but said the case was an anomaly as her mother had returned to the United States.

That’s more like it.  This case is indeed anomalous.  Now, it’s true that Japan has agreed in principle to sign the Hague Convention, but western scholars of Japanese family law don’t think that’ll make much difference in Japan’s performance in international child abduction cases.  We’ve seen in the past that judges who want to are perfectly able to distort the plain intention of the Convention to fit their own notions of the “best interests of the child.”  Those interests seem invariably to coincide with the wishes of the mother at the expense of the father’s and the child’s interest in a relationship with him.  If that can happen in England,  I see no reason why it can’t happen in Japan.

I suppose we’ll see.  But in the meantime, I’ve spoken with an expert on international child abduction to Japan who sees the situation in a much more positive light than I did before I spoke with him.  I’ll post a piece on that conversation in the near future.

For now, I’ll just say that it seems to me that Inoue has gotten off pretty lightly.  She violated civil and criminal law by abducting her then-five-year-old daughter.  She kept her from her father for almost four years, and, once caught, she spent a few months in jail before agreeing to turn over the child.  That’s the extent of her punishment.  I’d say her story would discourage precisely no one from doing as she did.

That brings up a couple of final questions that the news media covering the case haven’t thought to ask.  Has Inoue been ordered to pay child support?  If so, when was it ordered and what is the arrearage?  After all, if she was ordered to pay support at the same time Garcia was given custody, Inoue has been building up child support debt plus interest for almost four years.

The second question is whether she’s been granted some form of visitation, and if so, what kind.  Surely no sane judge would give her unsupervised visitation.  That would just be an invitation for her to abduct the girl again.

Hopefully, we’ll know the answers to those questions soon.

January 19th, 2012 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
I’ve criticized the State of Utah plenty for doing its utmost to come between single fathers and their children.  I thought I knew the extent of it, but this article shows I hadn’t plumbed the depths (Salt Lake City Tribune, 12/24/11).  To be clear, United States Supreme Court precedents make it clear that, in this country, biological parents have rights to their children.  And states can’t interfere with or diminish those rights without a finding of unfitness on the part of the parent.

That said, I’ve never fully grasped how putative father registries could pass constitutional muster.  After all, their concept of “notice” to the father that his rights can be terminated at any time in favor of strangers, i.e. adoptive parents, is that he had sex with a woman not his wife at some point in the recent past.  Because he did so, he is expected to know (a) that conception occurred, (b) that the woman didn’t terminate the pregnancy and (c) that she placed the child for adoption.  The simple fact is that he could know none of the three with any certainty.  Further, the fact that the state thinks and the Supreme Court agrees that he knows all of them and has no interest in the child says a lot about the anti-father nature of putative father registries.

In my own research and that of others, I’ve been struck by the lengths to which states with PFRs go to hide themselves.  A couple of years ago I did a post with a link to a piece by a young man in Ohio chronicling the kafkaesque things he had to do to comply with that state’s PFR law.  I use the term ‘kafkaesque’ advisedly; the fellow’s piece reminded me specifically of a particular scene in The Trial.

Texas simply ignores the parts of the law that require the state to make forms for registering paternity available in a variety of public places.  I went to those places and not a soul knew what I was talking about when I requested forms to file a claim of paternity.  The various courts and agencies were supposed to have the forms, but none did, not a one.

But, as usual when it comes to denying parental rights to fathers, Utah is the worst.  The linked to article takes off from a case I’ve reported on – that of Ramsey Shaud and Shasta Tew.  They had an affair, she became pregnant and he was overjoyed at the prospect of having and raising a child.  She was less so and fled their native Florida leaving him a note saying she was going to Arizona and Utah. 

Shaud was nervous about her intentions, so he filed with the Arizona PFR.  No problem.  Then he turned to Utah. 

That same day, Shaud had no trouble finding a form for Arizona’s registry online; he printed it, filled it out and mailed it in. But despite hours spent dissecting the Utah Department of Health’s website, which he figured was the logical place to look, Shaud was unable to locate a similar form or information about what he needed to do here.

That’s because Utah, unlike most states with registries aimed at unmarried fathers, doesn’t make a form or directions on how to proceed available online. In fact, the phrase “putative father,” used in state law to describe an unwed biological father, isn’t mentioned anywhere on the websites of the health department or Office of Vital Records and Statistics, the agency charged with maintaining Utah’s registry. Utah law requires that forms be made available through local health departments, but office policy is not to do so, according to Director Janice Houston.

“The state makes the form available at the [Utah] Department of Health, but you have to pick it up in person, which is impossible for a father who lives out of state,” said Joshua Peterman, an attorney who has three active cases involving unmarried fathers.

So, like Texas, Utah violates its own statutes regarding the availability of PFR forms.  Not only that, but they don’t even include the statutory term “putative father” on their website, making browsing for the forms dicey to say the least.  Then, if by some miracle the man actually finds out how to obtain the form, he learns that he has to come to the Utah Deparment of Health to get it.  They won’t mail one; he can’t download one off their site. 

Why?  Well, I’d argue it’s the usual reason – overt antipathy for single fathers.  If someone can suggest something else, I’m happy to listen.

So anti-father is Utah that its requirements to establish paternity and stop the adoption of one’s child are hard to meet even for attorneys who supposedly understand them.

Utah requires unmarried fathers to strictly follow a process that includes filing a paternity action, registering with the putative father registry, providing a detailed child care plan and paying or attempting to pay pregnancy-related expenses. Most often, fathers lose because they don’t meet Utah deadlines, as happened in Shaud’s case. A lower court judge ruled his consent to his daughter’s adoption was not required because he didn’t meet a filing deadline — a delay Shaud argues was caused by Utah’s four-day workweek and a federal holiday.

But some of the more than 25 higher court rulings in Utah since 1959 have turned on other missteps in the process, including some one justice described as “very minor issues of noncompliance.”

In 2008, Nikolas Thurnwald lost his case because he didn’t get an amended court document notarized or explain who would tend the child while he was at work. That same year, a father identified in court documents only as “C.C.D” declared he would assume full financial responsibility for the child but lost because he did not get a court order of child support or detail what would happen to the child if he were deported.

Given the, yes, kafkaesque nature of Utah law, it’s no surprise that people bent on taking a child from its father come from all over the country to do so.  Face it, if your goal is to cut a single dad out of his children’s lives, Utah just makes it too easy to win to go anywhere else.

Unsurprisingly, that’s developed quite a cottage industry among attorneys and adoption agencies who are personally unscrupulous enough to turn a deaf ear when transparent lies are told.

January 19th, 2012 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
A Chicago area judge has ruled Nunu Sung to be an unfit mother.  The trial will continue to decide whether the Burmese native’s parental rights will be terminated.  Read about it here (Daily Herald, 1/17/12).

Back in late 2008, Sung became pregnant by a Texas man.  But, according to reports, she kept her pregnancy secret due to her Burmese heritage that frowns on unmarried childbearing.  She apparently sought no prenatal care and, on June 12, 2009, gave birth behind a garage in her neighborhood.  She then left the newborn boy under a bush and walked away. 
The temperature was in the 50s and she left the child naked and alone while she sought shelter, cleaned herself up and warmed up.

As if by a miracle, the child was found by a neighbor who was walking his dog.  The boy was suffering from hypothermia when he was found.  Nunu at first denied to police that the child was hers, but later confessed.

Nunu told the court that she always intended to return for the infant, but she never did.  After being found, the child was given appropriate medical and parental care and is alive and well today in the care of foster parents who wish to adopt him.

Nunu was charged with obstructing justice and, under a plea bargain, given a three-year prison sentence, but she’s always wanted to have custody of the child.  Indeed, her plea bargain stipulated that prosecutors would not seek to terminate her parental rights.

But Kathleen Anderson, the infant’s court-appointed guardian, had no hesitation about moving to terminate Nunu’s parenatal rights.  She did so, and, according to Illinois procedure and a court order, it’s the district attorney’s office that’s required to prosecute the case against Nunu.

So, for the time being, Nunu’s attorneys pronounce themselves happy with the verdict of parental unfitness because it allows them to appeal the court’s ruling that the state seek termination of her parental rights.  They say that violates the plea bargain; the DA’s office says it has to do what the court told it to do.

My guess is that’s much ado about nothing.  Whoever ends up prosecuting the parental rights termination case, someone needs to.  If that’s the child’s guardian, fine.  If it’s the DA’s office, that’s fine too.  But clearly, a mother who behaved as Nunu did, looks like a very good candidate to have her rights terminated, however that’s accomplished.

Meanwhile, there’s the dad.  It’s universally agreed that he never wanted anything to do with his child by Nunu, but what no article I’ve read has ever said is how anyone knows.  Consider this statement from a previous Daily Herald article.

Authorities said Sung became pregnant while living in Texas but kept the pregnancy a secret after moving to Wheaton in February 2009. They said she never received prenatal care, and the child’s father never expressed an interest in pursuing custody.

So, she kept the pregnancy secret, and the father never pursued custody.  Maybe that’s because he didn’t know about the pregnancy.  After all, if it’s a secret, maybe it’s a secret from him too.  Why do “authorities” believe he knows about his child?  Did Nunu tell them?  Why would they trust her?

Of course maybe he does know.  Maybe Nunu told him; maybe child welfare authorities did.  It’d be interesting to know what his understanding was about contraceptive use.  Did Nunu intend to become pregnant?  Did he know she did?  Did she use contraceptives?  What did she tell him about that?

It’s long been my understanding that, when men are involved in the decision to have a child, and agree with it, they’re highly supportive of the child, the mother, etc.  Indeed, many men who aren’t involved in that decision willingly take up their responsibilities. 

But many of the men who don’t want to play the paternal role feel that way because the decision to bring a child into the world wasn’t discussed with them before the woman became pregnant.  Their refusal seems to have more than anything to do with the woman’s exercise of power over their legitimate right to decide for themselves about whether or not to father a child.

So I wonder if there’s not something of the sort going on in this case.  I suppose we’ll never know, because, in typical fashion, the press covering the case consigns the father to an anonymous afterthought.

Meanwhile, it seems almost incredible that a mother who came close to killing her newborn should have tried to get custody of it.  The decision to deny her any parental rights at all would seem to be too obvious to even mention.  Fortunately, the judge in the case apparently saw things in a clear light and ruled Nunu Sung to be an unfit parent.  From there it would seem to be a short step to terminating her rights.

We’ll soon see.

January 20th, 2012 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
An Israeli panel has recommended – and its Justice Minister has endorsed – abandoning the Tender Years Doctrine that automatically grants custody of children under the age of six to the mother.  Read about it here (Jerusalem Post, 1/19/12).

Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman embraced Wednesday recommendations made by a specially appointed panel to revoke a controversial custody law that favors mothers of young children in divorce disputes.

A spokesman for Neeman told The Jerusalem Post that while the minister had yet to fully adopt recommendations made by the Schnitt Committee, he did see the suggestions as a viable solution to the problem of determining where to place children when their parents get divorced.

He said that the recommendations, which were made by a panel headed by Dr. Dan Schnitt that has been meeting for the past five years to discuss the relevance of the 40-year-old law, would now be passed onto the ministry’s legal advisors to draft alternative legislation.

This comes after a committee of the United Nations recently criticized Israel for maintaining such an antiquated and anti-father system of child custody.  Fathers’ rights organizations have long criticized the law as well for coming between fit fathers and their children.

According to Ha’aretz, the report cited the need for “a new normative arrangement of parents’ relationships with their children.”  But apparently that goal may be thwarted in a couple of ways.

The first is the outright opposition of feminist groups to any change whatsoever in the Tender Years Doctrine.

Immediately after the ministry announced that it had received the recommendations, women’s rights group expressed concern that canceling this presumption in the law would further complicate divorce proceedings, making the issue of custody grounds for battle and drawing the children into the fight.

Women’s rights organization Na’amat released a statement saying that it would take all necessary measures to prevent the recommendations from being adopted.

Well, it can’t be denied that custody decisions become much less complicated when one of the parties presumptively has no rights.  After all, what could be simpler for a judge than ascertaining which parent is the mother and automatically giving her custody?

But what’s remarkable is the group’s frank dismissal of the wellbeing of the child.  Shoving the father out of a child’s life is all but guaranteed to have adverse effects on the child’s outcomes in a number of different areas including educational, emotional and psychological.  Kids without fathers tend to do worse in a wide variety of ways than do children with fathers, as an avalanche of social science accumulated over some 40 years has shown.  But the facts be damned; Israeli feminists are far more interested in being anti-father than they are in being pro-child.

Remarkable as well is the fact that, as far as I’m aware, no feminist organization anywhere any time has come out in favor of equal rights for mothers and fathers in child custody matters.  I’ve seen countless examples in which those organizations in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. oppose equality in custody cases, but never once has one said “fathers and mothers should be treated equally.”  Go to any feminist website, and you’ll see the claim made that feminism is all about gender equality.  Strange that, when it comes to fathers and mothers, the opposite is true.  They not only don’t support equality of the sexes, they outright oppose it.

The second reason to doubt the impact of the committee recommendations – even if they get by the opposition of feminist groups – is a stumbling block called the “tiebreaker.”  Apparently the panel making the recommendations labored long and hard over what courts should do when parents are equally qualified, equally fit, loving parents.  According to Ha’aretz, the acrimony was so great, one member of the committee resigned in protest.

Apparently too, it never occurred to the panel that, if both parents were equal, maybe equal custody would be the obvious solution.  No, the members never got away from the notion that one parent must have primary custody, and therefore there must be a “tiebreaker” to decide who would get it.  That of course is just loony.  Simply order equal custody to equally-qualified parents and the job is done.

But the panel, not content with requiring the concept of a tiebreaker in the new law, went on to be unable to decide on one.  So rather than do the obvious, fair, just and right thing – recommend equal custody for equal parents – the members clung to primary custody and then failed to let judges know how to decide who should get it.

The result will be no surprise to anyone who follows family law matters.  Judges will likely continue to err on the side of maternal custody.  My guess is that, in a society that still writes the Tender Years Doctrine into law, whatever the panel recommended would be largely ignored by judges.  But the opposition of feminist groups and the absence of any direction on the issue of a “tiebreaker,” virtually assures it.

Still, the issue is now part of public discourse.  Fathers’ rights groups have made their wishes known and the reasons for them, and feminist groups have dropped any pretense of gender equality.  So the issue is in the public domain and, once there, history suggests it won’t go away and that the interests of fathers and children will continue to grow and improve.

It’s a start.

January 22nd, 2012 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
A domestic violence case is unfolding in San Francisco that can teach us almost every lesson we need to know about what’s wrong with the way we deal with DV in this country.  San Francisco sheriff Ross Mirkarimi’s DV case shows how we get DV wrong, which is to say, in just about every way possible.  Read about it here (Washington Post, 1/20/12).

For the sake of this post, I’ll assume that Mirkarimi committed some form of DV against his wife, Eliana Lopez.  I certainly don’t know that to be a fact,
but there seems to be a videotape of her saying he grabbed her arm, leaving a bruise on it, so I’ll assume that’s true.

It all happened on New Year’s Eve.  Lopez went to a neighbor’s house complaining of a set-to with Mirkarimi.  But the neighbor she went to was not just any neighbor, she was one Ivory Madison, a feminist with a long history of attacking the usual feminist targets.  For example, while in law school, Madison complained about an article that was submitted to the school’s law review for publication.  Her complaint?  The article referred to its author reading Playboy.  To Madison, that constituted sexual harrassment.  Her demand that the review refuse to publish the submitted article was denied, but the incident gives us a fair idea of Madison’s bent when it comes to feminist issues.

So when Lopez showed up on her doorstep complaining about her husband, Madison whipped out her trusty video camera and recorded what Lopez was saying.

Now, Lopez apparently had no intention of going to the police, but, needless to say, Madison was happy to.  She waited four days to do so, but she alerted the police about Lopez’s statement.  Oddly enough, she refused to turn over the recording to them, but it was all enough to have Mirkarimi arrested and charged with domestic violence, child endangerment and dissuading a witness.  Mirkarimi has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Meanwhile, Eliana Lopez obviously never wanted any of this to go to the police.  When Mirkarimi went to the police station to be booked and released, she went with him, conspicuously hand-in-hand.  She has attempted at every turn to convince the police to not press charges.  At Mirkarimi’s arraignment, she testified on his behalf saying she has no fear of her husband.

But all of her efforts went for naught.

San Francisco’s new sheriff pleaded not guilty to domestic violence and other charges Thursday as a judge ordered him to stay away from his wife and toddler son despite her tearful pleas not to keep the family apart…

Judge Susan Breall issued a stay-away order requiring Mirkarimi not to have any contact with his wife, Eliana Lopez, or their 2-year-old son.

“The violence against me is that I don’t have my family together,” Lopez said repeatedly in court. “Let me have my family together. This is the only reason I am here is that I have my family with Ross.”

Mirkarimi’s lawyer, Robert Waggener, said his client had violated no laws.

“I don’t think there was a basis for a stay-away order. I don’t think the proper decision was made. We’ll come back and we’ll fight it,” Waggener said. “Mr. Mirkarimi did not commit domestic violence, he did not endanger his child, and he did not try to dissuade his wife from talking to the police or anybody else. That’s the bottom line.”

Indeed, the judge pronounced herself satisfied that Mirkarimi is “a good person and a loving father.”  But notwithstanding the facts that the alleged victim (a) wasn’t seriously hurt, (b) doesn’t want her husband prosecuted and (c) doesn’t want their son separated from his father, Big Brother knows best.  Taxpayers’ money and the time of the court and its staff, Mirkarimi and his wife and various and sundry lawyers and police will be taken for – what? – a bruise that may or may not have been put on Lopez’s arm by her husband.

So yes, this case hits most of the high spots about how we pretend to deal with domestic violence.  First, according to the DV industry, no case is so minor that it can be left alone.  The entire panoply of police, courts and lawyers must be thrown at every case irrespective of whether it’s serious or not.  That’s because our approach to DV stems from the movement’s ideology that holds that all DV escalates from minor pushes and shoves to serious injury or death. 

As with most ideology, the facts doggedly refuse to agree.  What countless studies and surveys show is that the vast majority of DV is both minor and a one-time or rare thing.  As a major study done by the government of Scotland revealed, 1% of those asked had been a victim of DV in the previous year that resulted in more than just “a minor cut or bruise.”

That’s exactly what happened to Lopez, assuming again that Mirkarimi caused the bruise.

Likewise, any and every allegation of DV is sufficient to cause a court to order the alleged perpetrator to stay away from his children.  Never mind that the child wasn’t harmed, never mind that neither wife nor child is in any danger as she herself has said many times.  No, the new vision of the DV industry is that, if Daddy grabs Mommy’s arm, the child is scarred for life and must therefore be prevented from seeing his/her father. 

Again, that’s arrant nonsense.  It’s true that repeated serious domestic violence between mother and father can cause psychological damage to a child and possibly contribute to violence by that child as an adult.  But the notion that Ross Mirkarimi’s child incurred injury by seeing (if he did) his father grab his mother’s arm (if he did) is absurd.  Still, the restraining order issued anyway, so for the time being, the child will be without his father.

Then of course there’s the fact that it’s all done without due process of law, and possibly without evidence.  After all, the one and only thing the police and prosecutors have to go on is a videotape of Lopez’s statements that are clearly hearsay.  If Lopez doesn’t want to testify, and she shows every indication of exactly that, there is very likely no evidence whatsoever against Mirkarimi.  And in any event, he’s had no opportunity to make a case in his defense.  Still, he’s unable to see or speak to his wife or his child, or live in his own house.

Finally, there’s the fact, often overlooked, that a husband’s allegedly grabbing his wife’s arm is treated as a criminal matter.  According to the law and the DV establishment, this incident is one to be solved by the police and courts.  But what much psychology – to say nothing of common sense – shows is that domestic violence is rarely a matter of perpetrator and victim.  On the contrary, it’s a family dynamic that can be addressed therapeutically if both parties are willing to admit thier roles and take part in changing that dynamic.

All of that is anathema to the DV industry that, like a windup toy, screams “blaming the victim” at any effort to inject actual science into the discussion of domestic violence.  Criminal law of course traffics in perpetrators and victims in exactly the same way and, because of it, should play little role in our attempts to reduce domestic violence.

January 23rd, 2012 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
The new article Seattle Weekly article Ripped Apart: Divorced dads, domestic violence, and the systemic bias against men in King County family court (1/18/12) details the way allegations of domestic violence are routinely used to separate fathers from children in King County (Seattle) family courts. In fact, there seems to be a cabal of judges, commissioners, custody evaluators and mental health professionals that target fathers in custody cases.

I recently suggested that Fathers and Families should give an award to a series of articles written by Jennifer Hemmingsen in The Gazette,
an Iowa newspaper.  Her series about Iowa’s child welfare system was excellent, but it may have to move over and make room for Nina Shapiro’s piece on Seattle’s frankly anti-father family courts.  Shapiro gets it right.  Hers is a must-read for anyone who wants an education about how family courts function in this country.

Put simply, a mother can use a claim of domestic abuse to thwart a father’s access to his children.  It doesn’t need to be founded on anything much, and certainly not actual violence.  Mere allegations of a push a shove, shouting or disagreements on how money is to be spent are routinely called “domestic violence” and used to remove men from their homes and their children’s lives.

And Shapiro brings that all to life in her descriptions of three fathers her pseudonyms for whom are Jim, Richard and Daniel.  The full insanity of how allegations of domestic violence are used to abuse fathers and their children is on display in Shapiro’s article.

Let me remind readers that a recent study done of results in Oregon custody cases found that, despite the clear intention of the legislature to reduce the number of sole custody rulings, the law it passed actually made no difference.  Why?  Allegations of domestic violence, the vast majority of which were leveled at men by women, trumped the intention of the statute.

The same is clearly true in Washington State.  Washington is the only state that meticulously tracks all custody decisions by its family judges and commissioners.  The data show about as clear a bias in favor of mothers as can be imagined.  Here’s the original piece I did on the Washington State data.

As but a few examples, in about 65% of cases, mothers get greater parenting time than do fathers.  By contrast, fathers get more in only about 17% of cases.

More telling are cases involving “risk factors.”  Those are parental behaviors like abuse or neglect of children, drug or alcohol abuse, mental health problems and the like.  So, when the parent had one or more risk factor, fathers were far more likely than mothers to be denied all access to their children.  For example, 75% of fathers who had abused or neglected their children were denied all access to them, while only 50% of mothers were.

Adding insult to injury, when the father had no risk factor and the mother had one, he got full custody in only 26% of cases.  When the sexes were reversed, she got custody 44% of the time.

So Washington’s own data show its family courts’ radical anti-father bias.  Nina Shapiro shows just how that happens on a day-by-day, case-by-case basis.

First, she interviews only female lawyers, at least one of whom describes herself as a feminist.  And those lawyers are clear that, despite the shift in parenting practices by both fathers and mothers, family courts doggedly favor mothers.

But parenting roles have changed. And the “judicial system,” says veteran family-law attorney Deborah Bianco, “is way behind the culture.” Bianco is one of a number of mainstream family-law attorneys—representing both women and men, and often female themselves—who now say they too see a bias against men.

Rhea Rolfe, an attorney who once taught a “women and the law” class at the University of Washington, recalls sitting with a male client in a commissioner’s courtroom one day. There were maybe seven or eight cases heard. “She ruled against every single man,” Rolfe recalls, “and two of them were unopposed.”

“In any other arena, the evidence gets you the ruling,” observes attorney Maya Trujillo Ringe. “But in this particular arena, the dad has a much bigger uphill battle.” So much so, she says, that she and other attorneys often joke that “if you put a skirt on the dad, same facts,” he’d win primary custody. “You can overcome the bias,” Ringe adds, “but it takes a lot of work and a lot of resources.”

Attorney Jennifer Forquer agrees, noting that “fathers will routinely be sent to parenting classes” by commissioners. “It doesn’t matter if they took paternity leave, if they changed diapers. If a mother makes an allegation that a father’s parenting is deficient, he ends up going.” If a dad wants to make such an allegation about a mom, she says, “you have to be careful how you present that.” Commissioners are not inclined to believe it, she says.

The first remark is one I’ve made myself countless times.  Plenty of people have noticed that fathers are much more involved in childcare than ever before.  They’ve also noticed the social science that overwhelmingly favors keeping fathers and children together where possible.  And finally they’ve noticed that fairness, justice and gender equality demand equal treatment of fathers and mothers in custody cases.  The only ones to take note of none of that are family court judges who, year after year, do the same thing – primary custody to Mom, every other weekend to Dad.

Articles like Shapiro’s will help to put an end to that.

I’ll post more on her piece later.