Author: Joomlafreaks

November 11th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
Britain’s Family Justice Review is barely a week old and already it’s been met with a fusillade of enraged opposition.  Indeed, of all the articles written about it, only one even comes close to agreeing with the review’s main conclusions – that fathers are not entitled to equal parenting of their children, that fathers are not entitled to a “meaningful relationship” with their children post-divorce and that grandparents have no right to a relationship with their grandchildren after the kids’ parents have split up.

It’s not just Tory Minister of Work and Pensions Iain Duncan Smith who’s ticked off, but other members of PM David Cameron’s cabinet as well.  Smith, for one, plans to scuttle David Norgrove’s review altogether.  I hope he succeeds.

But the press not only disagrees with Norgrove’s recommendations, it does so with a vehemence rarely seen.  And why not?  After all,England has had at least two decades in which fathers have been fighting for equal rights and highlighting the many injustices of family courts along the way.  Those messages have gotten a fair amount of  press coverage.

So have the consequences of fatherlessness that are on public display every day.  It was just a few weeks ago that Britain’s youth were seen rampaging through the streets setting fires and damaging shops.  They may as well have been carrying placards bearing the words “This is What Fatherlessness Looks Like!”  Cameron realized at the time the connection between the riots and family breakdown.

So now Norgrove is calling for more of the same – a family court system in disarray, fathers without children, children without fathers and youth without the discipline and respect for others that fathers instill.

Exactly what qualified Norgrove to head up the review is coming into question.  A businessman with no experience in family law, it can be fairly said that he has no grasp of what goes on in family courts, what needs to be fixed or how to fix it.  If he does, his review betrays no hint of it.

To give a hint of the type of brickbats being tossed in Norgrove’s direction, try this on for size (Daily Mail,11/7/11).  It’s Sonia Poulton who’s writing.

As a single mother from a single mother, I am decently equipped to comment on the issues attached to raising a child without the father – from both sides of the coin – and this report is a travesty.

Talk about sending out the message that family no longer matters. I am appalled by Norgrove’s refusal to see the error in his recommendations and I support IDS (Iain Duncan Smith) denouncement of them.

Unlike Norgrove, Poulton understands that children need both parents during marriage and after divorce.

Personally, and judging by my observations of decent family surroundings, including all three of my brothers and my sister, I am under no illusion that, generally, the best environment to raise a child involves a man and a woman in the paternal and maternal roles.

Boys and girls need both sides of the gender equation. They were created by man and woman and that is also the most naturally balanced condition for children to thrive in.

And to her credit, when she and her husband divorced, amid extreme acrimony, they always placed their child’s welfare above their own.

Even during times of recrimination, we have never lost sight of who is the priority in this – our child – and her right, yes HER right, to enjoy a relationship with both parents.

Amazingly, that one simple point is what’s lost on the anti-dad crowd.  One of the arguments we often hear against fathers’ rights is that “it’s not the parent’s right, it’s the child’s,” as if a child’s right to a father can, in some way they never explain, exclude the father.  As Poulton says, it’s the child’s right to both parents that’s vital to his/her well-being.  So if a child has a right to be parented by his/her father, then that means the father must be able to parent the child.

Unlike those opposed to the rights of fathers and children, Poulton sees and understands the havoc family courts wreak on both.

This group (Fathers For Justice) is comprised, primarily, of men who have been blocked at every turn, legal and personal, from retaining a decent relationship with their children.

So it is hardly surprising that they feel forced to resort to the type of headline-grabbing tactics that they do.

I have watched grown men obstructed from seeing their children weep long and loud. They have been on the receiving end of the justice system which almost exclusively operates in favour of the mother.

Poulton warns David Cameron that embrace of this family justice review she rightly calls a “travesty” could have profound consequences.

I think it’s time that someone had a word in David Cameron’s ear.

He needs to know that his plans to be ‘the most family friendly government ever’ is backfiring with a speed and intensity that he may want to be prepared for.

If that’s the platform Cameron campaigned on, he had indeed better put as much distance between him and misnamed Family Justice Review as possible.  So far, I’ve counted exactly zero calls for its adoption and a great many calls for it to find a home in the round file on the floor.

The closest thing to approval I can find is this article (The Independent,11/7/11).  But even it contains not a word of support for the Family Justice Review.  In fact, it only mentions the thing once and that’s to report the fury with which it’s been received.

Its author, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, rambles pretty much aimlessly from topic to topic, never pausing long enough to say anything substantive about any of them.  To the extent that she ever gets down to brass tacks, it’s to dredge up the old chestnut Poulton buried in her article.

We are caretakers of our young and have no absolute “rights” to them.

Fair enough, but again, children do have rights to parents, or should at any rate.  Indeed, many treaties and conventions say explicitly that.  So how does Alibhai-Brown contend children should exercise those rights?  You guessed it, by leaving it up to Mom.

I would not have co-parented my son with his father, but I never stopped contact. In the early years though, I kept my child away from the mistress, partly because it was unbearable for me and partly because his young heart would have been even more divided. It wasn’t rights, but responsibility that guided these decisions.

So unquestioningly entitled does she feel, that it seems never to occur to her that she’s the one making the decisions about her son’s access to his father.  “I would not have co-parented my son…”  “I kept my child away.”  “Because it was unbearable for me.”  The fact that she sincerely believes that she did the right thing is no defense at all when a child’s rights to the care, love and protection of his father are not in the child’s hands, not in the father’s hands, but in the mother’s.  A system that depends on the good will of irate mothers embroiled in bitter divorces is a system guaranteed to separate children from their fathers.  England’s does exactly that every day.

Allow me to make a modest proposal, considerably less extreme than Swift’s.  I propose that for the next 20 years, all family courts inEngland simply reverse their decision-making process.  That would mean that over that time, 90% of child custody would be given to men with 90% of child support paid by women.  Women would be given the same modest visitation rights as men are now, but, as now, that visitation could be thwarted with impunity by custodial parents.  Fathers would be able to make unsubstantiated allegations of child abuse and domestic violence for the purpose of keeping mothers from their children and, when their lies were uncovered by courts and police, those fathers would go unpunished.  If mothers complained, they’d be ridiculed by the press and figuratively told to “put on a Wonder Woman costume and go climb a building.”

After 20 years, I wonder if the Yasmin Alibhai-Browns of the world would sing the same tune they’re singing now.  Somehow I doubt it.

But of course realizing the simple symmetry of such a solution would require them to mentally see a side of things other than their own.  Unlike so many women like Sonia Poulton, they’re not good at that.

November 11th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
The seamy underside of adoption is the buying and selling of children to be adopted.  That’s what the Oklahoma case In Re Baby A is all about.  Here’s an article about it (NewsOK, 5/23/10).  And here’s the case itself (FindLaw, 5/4/0).

I’ve written a lot about adoption, particularly referring to the ease with which adoption laws cut fathers out of the lives of their children.  Utah is particularly bad about doing that, but 29 states have some form of putative father registry that are specifically designed to avoid notifying fathers when their children are being placed for adoption.

Putative father registries are the short way to keep a father from asserting his parental rights to his child.  They take the fact that adult men know that sex can produce babies and pretend that it always does.  That way the laws creating putative father registries can require every unmarried man who has sex with a woman to file a form with the appropriate state department claiming paternity of the child, whether there is one or not.  Failure to do so means he won’t be allowed to contest his child’s adoption, if the mother wishes that to happen.

Absurd as that may be, it gets worse.  Most states do little or nothing to publicize the fact of the registries, the effect of failing to file, how to file, etc.  The unsurprising result is that few men know about the registries or what their purpose is, so few men file the requisite forms.  So when their child comes up for adoption, the court looks at the records of the putative father registry for the state and, finding no filing, green-lights the termination of the father’s rights without notice to him.  Simple as that.

States with out PFRs have some form of requirement that the father have “abandoned” the child, and so it is in Oklahoma.  In those states, the father of the child is required to do certain things to prove that he hasn’t abandoned the child.  Those things include paying the mother’s medical expenses during pregnancy, providing money, food, clothing, housing, etc. to her.  Going to the hospital when she gives birth is good too.

The things a father must do to avoid termination of his rights should the mother decide to place his child for adoption are nowhere published and it’s entirely up to the discretion of a judge to decide whether the dad met his obligations or not.

So it should be clear that, whether a man lives in a PFR state or not, his ability to prevent the adoption of his child is not up to him, but to the mother.  In PFR states, the chances that he knows about the registry are slim and none, but even if he does know and files the correct forms, Mom can just take herself and her child to another state to do the adoption.  That state’s judge will dutifully check that state’s registry, if it has one, and, finding no dad for the child, will complete the adoption.  That’s exactly what the mom did in the Kevin O’Dey case about which I’ve written a couple of pieces.

In a non-PFR state, all she has to do is conceal her pregnancy from the father.  That’s usually easiest done by breaking off relations with him.  If he persists, she can call the cops and complain of harassment, stalking, or the like.  A simple lie to the court that she doesn’t know who the father is will be sufficient to deprive him of notice, and even if he learns somehow of the adoption, he’ll be deemed to have “abandoned” his child, so his consent to the adoption won’t be necessary.

But the even uglier part of adoption law is the buying and selling of children.  That of course is supposed to be illegal, but it happens anyway.  Here’s how:  every adoption case costs money.  There are fees for the lawyers, of course and court fees.  There’s always an investigation into the prospective adoptive parents to see if they’re likely to give the child a good home.  That’s all to be expected.  But there’s also a category of expenses that is wide open to the charge of buying and selling children – living expenses for the mother.

Mothers often decide to place their children for adoption long before they’re born.  So, during pregnancy, she can have her living expenses, medical expenses, travel expenses, etc. paid.  That money comes from the adoptive parents, who want the child and want the mother to be as happy and comfortable as possible.

Now, all of that might be hunky-dory if anyone paid attention to how much was being paid and for what.  Supposedly trial judges do that, but In Re Baby A strongly suggests that they don’t.

In Re Baby A is really about excessive attorneys fees, private investigator fees, etc.  The nut of the matter was that the lawyers in the case found an adoptive couple who were apparently pretty well-to-do, and, as happens so often with well-heeled litigants, the fees went up accordingly.  It cost the adoptive couple almost $150,000 to adopt the child.

And in all of that, only about $12,000 went to the mother for her living expenses.  That was for about 10 months prior to the birth, so, as the Oklahoma Supreme Court said, that doesn’t look to be excessive.

But, as the song says, “it ain’t necessarily so.”  That’s because, as in the Baby A case, the judge didn’t pay much attention to how much the fees were or what they were for, even to the extent of allowing fees prohibited by statute.

Worse, attorneys have been known to pay mothers under the table and charge it as something else.  Face it, a lot of these mothers are strapped for money and facing the costs of a pregnancy.  The line between paying her legitimate living expenses and paying her for her child is not a bright one and is easily crossed.

At one point, the practice got so bad in Oklahoma a grand jury was convened to look into the baby market called adoption.

Adoption costs have been a sticky issue in Oklahoma County for years.
Oklahoma County became known across the country as a place where birth mothers wouldn’t back out because they were taken care of, [public defender Bob] Ravitz’s assistants contended. The reputation allowed local attorneys to artificially increase rates to take advantage of well-heeled out-of-state couples.

In 2006, a state grand jury reported adoption judges were so indifferent or grossly incompetent in overseeing expenses that birth mothers basically were allowed to sell children for cars, televisions and vacations.

The grand jury found attorneys mislabeled improper expenses, often calling them toiletries. The hidden expenses included car parts, traffic tickets, criminal case fees, driver’s license fees and utility bills.

It’s what Oklahoma Supreme Court Justice Steven Taylor called “the subtle as well as the apparent buying and selling of children.”

In short, particularly where the adoptive couple is wealthy, there’s a pot of money there for the taking, and everyone in on the deal wants some.  Mothers know that placing a child for adoption is a sure way to get a larger piece of the pie than many have ever seen.  Attorneys and adoption agencies are happy to facilitate the “transaction,” and adoptive parents have no reason to do anything but turn a blind eye.

It’s the buying and selling of children, particularly newborns, and it happens often in this country.

Needless to say, a father who wants to care for his child just gums up the works.  After all, if the adoption doesn’t get finalized, a lot of people don’t get paid, and if they do, not nearly as much as if it did.  So it’s in everyone’s interest, as they see it, to keep Dad out of the picture altogether.  To that end, putative father registry laws get passed and fathers’ rights to their children get placed in mothers’ hands.

Adoption is mostly a good thing; it can give loving parents to children who would otherwise have none.  You can’t argue with that.  But adoption laws should make sure that every child who’s adopted needs to be adopted.  To force adoption on children with fit fathers who want to care for them deprives other children who desperately need them of loving adoptive parents.  That’s just plain wrong.

Adoption law as it stands in this country opts for the financial transaction over the rights of fathers.  Adoptive parents want a child and are willing to pay to get one.  Everyone else wants to get paid, and neither they nor the law will allow a father to stand in the way.  If fit fathers lose their children and children lose their fathers, well, as Madelyn Albright said in another context, “we think the cost is worth it.”

November 13th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
We recently reported on the Solomon Metalwala/Julia Biryukova divorce/child abduction case. Police now say that Biryukova’s story is “falling apart”– see Sky Metalawala Missing: Dad Thinks Boy’s Mother, Julia Biryukova, May Be Involved in Disappearance (ABC News, 11/11/11).

As you’ll recall, Metalwala and Biryukova are embroiled in nasty divorce and custody case.  They have two children, Maile, 4 and Sky, 2.  They went to mediation and hammered out an agreement in which Biryukova would have primary custody and Metalwala visitation.

But two days after they agreed, Biryukova contacted her attorney wanting to back out claiming she’d felt pressured to make a deal.

Then, Biryukova claims she was driving in her car with the two kids, taking Sky to the hospital.  She says the car ran out of gas, so she and Maile walked a mile to a gas station, got gas and called a friend to take them back to the car.  When they arrived, Sky was gone.

But police have been investigating her story, and no part of it matches reality.  For example, she says she needed gas, but she didn’t buy any.  Indeed, she seems to have simply wandered around a neighborhood near the gas station before calling her friend.  When police arrived, there was no gas can and the car started right up with no trouble.

Into the bargain, none of the places she went to prior to stopping her car has security camera footage with Sky in it.  That’s disturbing, but not as disturbing as the fact that Metalwala hasn’t set eyes on his son in many weeks.  And neither apparently, has anyone else.

Biryukova has been diagnosed with severe obsessive/compulsive disorder that doesn’t rise to the level of psychosis, but is still disturbing.  She apparently can clean house for 10 hours straight, all the while ignoring the children entirely, including failing to feed them.

Weirdly, police are now pointing to a television show that may have given Biryukova the idea for abducting, or even killing her son.

Investigators have serious questions about Biryukova’s story. They say her account doesn’t add up, and also say it’s remarkably similar to an episode of the TV series “Law and Order.”

The episode, which police say is “strikingly similar in nature” to Biryukova’s story, centered on a mother who tries to cover up the death of her child by saying he was taken from her car.

That detail also alarms Solomon Metalwala.

“‘Law and Order’ was Julia’s favorite show and the similarities are pretty similar and if she got that idea in her head that ‘I can make this happen,’ she’s not going to fear the consequences, because she doesn’t fear consequences,” he said.

Metalwala has agreed to take a polygraph test suggested by police, but Biryukova has refused to do likewise.

It’s time for CPS to place Maile in Metalwala’s care.  And it’s time for Julia Biryukova to come clean about Sky’s whereabouts.

November 14th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
False allegations of abuse have proved to be perhaps the most important single factor in keeping children and fathers apart.  As I’ve reported before, an important study by Douglas Allen and Margaret Brinig revealed that Oregon’s attempt to keep fathers in the lives of their children post-divorce was thwarted by its domestic abuse provisions.

The Allen/Brinig study showed that, far from keeping both parents actively involved in raising their children following a divorce or separation, the new statute produced more orders for sole custody than before its passage, not fewer. 
That anomalous result was due overwhelmingly to one thing – the use of claims of domestic abuse to keep a parent out of a child’s life.  In the five years following the law’s passage, 82% of abuse claims were made by women.

But domestic violence allegations can be used in a variety of circumstances, not just in child custody cases.  For example, many colleges and universities have unwittingly allowed female students and faculty to victimize innocent men via spurious claims of violence or unwanted sexual behavior.

The Duke Lacrosse team case is the most widely known, but there are many others as well.  For example, earlier this year, a female student a the University of North Dakota leveled charges of sexual abuse at a male student.  He was summarily tossed out of school and investigated by the police.  But at the same time that university officials found him guilty as charged, police discovered that his accuser was lying.  She went on the lam and is reported to be in California, while the young man has been reinstated as a student in good standing.

The point is that the university’s procedure for investigating claims of sexual abuse was so lax and so lacking in even minimal due process protections that they gave credence to a liar and smeared an innocent man.

Although the William McCormick III case is still ongoing, it has a distinctly similar odor.  There, Brown University student William McCormick was charged by a female student with attempted rape.  Without so much as a hearing, he was forced by university administrators to drop out of school and never return.  McCormick’s lawsuit against Brown has so far revealed shocking behavior on the part of the school’s administration.  As but one example, the school’s president met numerous times with the accuser’s father, a wealthy alumnus and donor, but never even spoke to McCormick, despite his repeated requests that she do so.

Now, all of that and more happened even though the schools had policies supposedly requiring substantial proof of guilt on the part of the accused.  Most schools use the standard of “clear and convincing” evidence of guilt before an accused could be disciplined.  That standard is midway between the highest standard used in criminal cases, “beyond reasonable doubt,” and the lowest used in civil cases, “preponderance of evidence.”  So even with a fairly stringent standard of proof, young men, charged with sexual impropriety by women can find themselves railroaded off campus with a permanent stain on their academic records.

It was against that backdrop that, astonishingly, the U.S. Department of Education (DED) actually lowered the standard of proof in cases involving charges of sexual assault required of all colleges and universities receiving any form of federal funding.  By fiat, issued apparently by a single bureaucrat in the agency, essentially all institutions of higher learning will be required to use the “preponderance of evidence” standard to judge those allegations.  That means that, if university panels investigating claims of assault find that 50.01% of the evidence suggests guilt, then the accused is to be found guilty.  Students will be tossed off campus, faculty will lose their jobs and possibly their careers.

The new standard, imposed without input from university administrators, faculty or students, has been met with a firestorm of protest.  The American Association of University Professors, the National Association of Scholars and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education all came out against the measure.  Nationwide, some 30 editorials did as well.

So it was with a mixture of rage and incredulity that those already combating the DED measure learned that Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) had proposed to make the lower standard the law of the land.  Remember, as it stands, all colleges and universities must now use the lower standard or face the loss of federal funding.  But what’s been done by bureaucratic fiat can be undone in the same way.

But Leahy’s proposed bill to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act would have made the lower standard a requirement of federal law, enacted by the elected representatives of the American people.  As such, had it passed, it would have taken another act of Congress to undo.

Fortunately, the opposition to the measure has prevailed.  Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE) has reported that Leahy has bowed to the pressure and removed the requirement of the preponderance of evidence standard from his proposed bill.

That’s a step in the right direction, but more needs to be done.  Specifically, the rule requiring the lower standard, promulgated by unelected bureaucrats must be rescinded.  After all, it’s not a law, but every college and university effectively must comply with it.

Simply put, the new standard is so unpopular and so clearly violative of due process rights that our elected representatives on the Senate Judiciary Committee refused to even vote on it much less vote for it.  Nothing that is that unpopular and at odds with the Constitution should be allowed to stand, even if Congress had voted on it and the President had signed it.  But when it’s all been done by the will of a few unelected and largely unknown employees of a federal agency, neither law nor morality nor common sense allows it to remain in effect.

November 15th, 2011 by Glenn Sacks

Best-selling author and Sports Illustrated columnist Jeff Pearlman

Sports Illustrated columnist Jeff Pearlman has written several best-selling sports books, and is perhaps best known as the author of an infamous interview with John Rocker in 2000. Earlier this year there was a war of words between Pearlman and our Board Member Robert Franklin, Esq. over a piece Pearlman wrote on fathers.

In Pearlman’s original CNN piece, A father’s day wish: Dads, wake the hell up! (6/17/11) he asserts that American fathers aren’t doing enough parenting. Franklin fired back at Pearlman here, stating:

Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey that shows that, when paid and unpaid work are added together, men and women do essentially identical amounts.  Men do more paid work, women do more domestic work including childcare.  No one’s the slave, no one’s the master, and no one has his feet up while the other toils.

He would have found that women are far more likely than men to hold no paying job, if they do have one it’s far more likely to be part-time and even when they work full-time, women still work fewer hours than men who do.  What all that means is that it’s men’s paid work that allows mothers to stay home with the kids.  Pearlman disdains that, but someone has to pay the rent.

Pearlman didn’t like Franklin’s criticism, responding here. But while Pearlman and Franklin aren’t likely to be enjoying a beer together any time soon, of much more importance is that during the scuffle Pearlman praised Fathers and Families and explained his support for Equal Parenting. Pearlman wrote:

Lastly, on a personal note—I love groups like the one Robert Franklin, Esq. belongs to. Read the website … scan the links. I’m being serious—the idea of equal parenting is wonderful, and great, and I’m as loud a proponent as you’ll find.

Which is great to hear, but not surprising–research clearly shows that the overwhelming majority of the public believe in shared parenting and oppose the sole custody for mom regime that is still the norm. Fathers and Families is taking using that public sentiment to build a strong, well-funded advocacy organization that is taking on the special interest groups which have blocked equality and fairness in family court.

November 16th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
We often see the superior sensibilities of everyday people to those of elite opinion makers.  Read almost any article on any subject and, taken together, the comments about it will frequently display greater knowledge of the subject matter and more balanced views than that of the writer.

That phenomenon is on display here (Los Angeles Times, 8/26/11).  The Los Angeles Times is one of the major papers in the country.  It has a large circulation and is generally well-respected.  So it clearly qualifies as one of those elite opinion-makers I referred to above.  And so, what appears on the editorial pages of the Times matters. 
If Noam Chomsky is correct, and I believe he is, that one of the jobs of the news media is to “manufacture consent” of the people for elite policies, the Times can be seen to be carrying out its mission.

Setting aside its barely literate prose, the piece is small monument to the type of “woe is us” feminism that no longer deserves a place in mainstream public discourse.  Put simply, it recycles claims and arguments that were long ago proven to be fallacious.

For example, before she really gets warmed up the writer unquestioningly refers to this transparently false concept: “Among the topics covered in Hanna Rosin’s article was how women came to dominate the workforce while men sat on the sidelines lamenting the loss of blue-collar jobs.”

Never mind the fact that Rosin’s piece, while seriously flawed, made no such blanket assertion.  Apparently, the Times writer isn’t comfortable with nuance, opting for outright falsehood as being more congenial to her theme.

“Women came to dominate the workforce, while men sat on the sidelines…”  Really?  A five-minute pass through the Bureau of Labor Statistics website would disabuse anyone of the notion that women or men do either of the things claimed.  In fact, there are between six and seven million more men than women employed in the United States.  In fact, of those women who are employed, about ten million more hold only part-time jobs than do men.  And in fact men earn more than women due in part to working more hours.

But the Times writer isn’t about to let facts intrude on her twin narrative of female nobility and victimization.  As such the article is nothing but a rehash of notions that are so outworn that even Lisa Belkin, when she was at the New York Times, abjured them not long ago.

And just in case you thought the piece had neglected misandry in its desire to mislead, you needn’t have worried.  Note the claim that men “sat on the sidelines lamenting the loss of blue collar jobs.”  You see, when men complain about government policies that ship their jobs overseas, they’re feckless wimps; when women complain about imaginary slights, they’re fearless warriors for gender equality.  Sometimes the hypocrisy is beyond belief.

The “observations and provocations” of the piece aren’t the author’s at all.  They’re retreads of Eve Weinbaum’s and Rachel Roth’s who in turn reprise the usual radical feminist nonsense.  The wage gap.  How many times must it be said that the wage gap is due to women’s behavior, not discrimination?  Women earn less because they work less, and at lower-paying jobs.  Period.  Those two factors account for almost all the gap between men’s and women’s earnings, as countless studies have shown.

The “second shift.”  The claim that mothers work a second shift, i.e. a full day at the plant or office and then must come home and do domestic work and childcare while hubby sits on the couch has been disproved by studies, surveys and databases for decades now.  The simple fact is that women pare back their hours at work in order to care for children, while men take up their earnings slack.  When paid and unpaid work are aggregated, men and women work the same number of hours.  That’s true not only in the U.S. but in all the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, as Dr. Catherine Hakim has demonstrated.

Again, women aren’t victims of callous men, however much feminist commentators would like them to be.

Then there’s something called the “motherhood penalty” and its counterpart, the “fatherhood bonus” that are just too silly to even discuss.  Neither term is ever defined, explained or justified, so we’re left to guess just what the authors might mean by them.  What’s certain is that women from all walks of life, including the best educated, opt out of paid work to do childcare.  When they do, they don’t get paid as much as when they’re working.  To some, that’s a “penalty;” to others, it’s a consequence of one’s own rational behavior.

I won’t say too much about the plainly nonsensical notion that there’s something called a “fatherhood bonus.”  Suffice it to say that losing his child in a divorce that he had no say in filing when he’d done no wrong and being made to pay for the privilege is not a “bonus” for any father.  But if I’m wrong, I know plenty of fathers who’d be glad to trade in their “fatherhood bonus” for their ex’s “motherhood penalty.”

After all, if mothers pay a penalty for motherhood, why do so many of them opt out of the workplace to do it?  Weinbaum and Roth seem to think women aren’t rational.  But there they are, almost six million stay-at-home moms according to the extremely conservative figures of the U.S. Census Bureau.  Then there all those mothers who drop out of the workplace part of the time to care for their kids.  If they’re being penalized, why would they do that?

Unsurprisingly, both the linked-to piece and the Weinbaum/Roth article are little but drawn-out whines about largely non-existent discrimination and the failure of everyday women to behave as the authors desire them to.

And so we come to the comments that, as I said, show a level of common sense, fact-based reasoning, fairness and balance that makes a striking contrast with the article itself.

Here’s “LindaB”:

And BTW, the overwhelming majority of the income disparity between males and females in modern America has nothing to do with gender discrimination. Rather, more women than men make CHOICES to take jobs and pursue career paths that offer them greater flexibility to balance family, work and other priorities.

“Disbelief” adds:

Personally…I choose not to have kids and to get ahead in my career. But I have total respect for a woman that chooses the opposite, or some combination of the two. And that might mean that she makes less money, but enjoys time with her family. Good for her.

Cries of “gender discrimination” are just ways to explain away one’s own personal shortcomings.

“Edward Norton” and “samstagskind” wonder why feminists generally and this article in particular don’t pay attention to human beings instead of only women.

Feminists would be given more credibility if the advantages and disadvantages of BOTH males and females were fairly weighed.  Instead, it’s all about how we can better the lot of females, and females only.  Even the name, feminism, signifies one gender only…

We’ve never pushed so hard to separate out into “groups of like people” to beat down and step on every other group and individual to declare the rights of our “groups of like people” as superior, or needing to be recognized, or more important than others.

As I said, the L.A. Times is an important piece of the apparatus for manufacturing consent.  Articles like Weinbaum/Roth’s are an attempt to do just that.  In the unlikely event the paper runs a counterpoint op-ed explaining its many fallacies and giving balanced views of the issues raised, I’ll retract that statement, but I won’ hold my breath.

What’s remarkable is that, despite decades of disinformation, people have begun to get the message – that feminist organizations and the feminist commentariat aren’t about equality but about “more for us.”  The victim card has worked well for them over the years, and there was a time that it was appropriately played, but no longer.  With each passing year it becomes harder and harder to convince people that privileged white women with college degrees and all the opportunity anyone could want are slaves to a pitiless patriarchy.  Feminism needs to change its tune or risk irrelevance.

Thanks to Paul for the heads-up.

November 16th, 2011 by Glenn Sacks

Dr. Phil (right) with Todd (left), a father accused of molesting his daughter.

Fathers and Families often receives painful calls and letters from fathers (and sometimes mothers) who say they have been falsely accused of abuse or molestation and have been driven out of their children’s lives because of it. The case featured in Dr. Phil’s recent show A Father Accused: Who’s Telling the Truth? sounds like many of them:

Todd says he was shocked and appalled when his ex-girlfriend’s mother, Diana, accused him of sexually molesting his 4-year-old daughter, Taniya, and turns to Dr. Phil to help clear his name. But Diana says she’s convinced he’s done the unthinkable.

Diana says that while babysitting her granddaughter, Taniya, the toddler detailed ways in which her father, Todd, inappropriately touched her. After learning of the accusations, Taniya’s mom, Latia, reported the alleged sexual abuse to a judge who immediately stripped Todd of his parental rights.

Latia says she has proof that Todd molested her daughter. And did the father’s girlfriend, Kristin, partake in the abuse?…

Todd says Diana and Latia brainwashed Taniya, and fabricated sexual abuse claims to win full custody of the child. “Latia is doing this out of spite; to take me away from my daughter,” he laments.

Diana, the grandmother who claims her granddaughter detailed Todd molesting her.

Todd has been on supervised visitation since the accusations and has had very little time with his child. (There also is a move-away involved in the case, though we’re not given any details.) Dr. Phil investigates the case, including having his polygraph expert Jack Trimarco examine Todd and Diana.

Who Is Telling the Truth?

Dr. Phil. concludes that Diana manufactured the allegations and that Todd is innocent. He basis this upon:

Dr. Phil believes that the details and terminology of the alleged molestation that Diana claims Taniya provided her are beyond the realm and understanding of a 4-year-old, meaning that they were fabricated by an adult, Diana, and inculcated in the daughter.

Trimarco, a  former FBI agent, said that during the polygraph examinations Todd answered the questions related to the molestation honestly. By contrast, he found that Diana did not. This is the second polygraph that Todd had passed.

Dr. Phil didn’t find Diana’s histrionic attacks on Todd.

There is another reason why the molestation accusations are suspicious, though Dr. Phil didn’t mention it. The mother and grandmother had a long list of bad things to say about Todd, (didn’t spend enough time with his daughter when they were together, didn’t pay child support, left the girlfriend for another woman, etc.)

The veracity of the first two wasn’t addressed, but to me it was an immediate red flag–the key issue is whether molestation occurred, and the mother and grandmothers’ other grievances, correct or incorrect, should not have been lumped in with them. The fact that they’re mad at him about these other issues–particularly the third one–certainly provides plenty of motive to make a false accusation.

Tearful father-daughter reunion between Todd and Taniya.

Still, I must say, however regretfully, that while I admire Dr. Phil’s investigation, one can’t be 100% sure that he’s correct. And that’s one reason why false accusations are such a terrible crime–it casts the falsely accused in a shadow world where he or she often can never fully exonerate themselves. Dr. Phil has created an advice page for those false accused–it can be seen here.

A Tearful Reunion

The best part of the show was the tearful backstage father-daughter reunion–it’s available here.

Dr. Phil’s Record

Dr. Phil’s work can also be problematic at times, as we detail in these two posts:

1. Did Dr. Phil Unwittingly Promote False Accusations on His Recent ‘Crisis in Family Court’ Show?
2. Dr. Phil: Wrong Again on Domestic Violence

Nevertheless, Fathers and Families commends him for his work on Todd’s case.

November 16th, 2011 by Glenn Sacks
False allegations of abuse are common in family court, and have been used to separate many fathers (and some mothers) from their children. The reasons for this problem are many, but one of the biggest is the low evidence standard for upholding abuse claims.

The common evidence standard for domestic violence restraining orders is “preponderance of the evidence,” often conceptualized as a mere 51/49% likelihood of guilt. By contrast, when someone seeks a civil restraining order, the more stringent and appropriate “clear and convincing” evidence standard is used.

In practice, this means that when neighbors Bob and Jim have a dispute over Bob’s dog eating Jim’s flowers, and Jim allegedly threatens to throw rocks at Bob’s dog, the courts demand that Bob provide solid evidence to support his claims of Jim’s threats. By stark contrast, if Bob’s wife decides to divorce him and seeks to throw him out of his house on a restraining order and cut him off from his kids, she has a much lower burden of proof on her claims.

Fathers and Families wants abused women (and men) to be afforded the protection they need. However, we have relentlessly publicized and fought the common problem of false allegations being used as child custody and financial maneuvers in divorce. And one of the key components in this fight is to replace the “preponderance” standard with the “clear and convincing” standard.

VAWA Re-Authorization Sought to Lower Evidence Standards

Recently there have been moves by the Obama administration to lower the evidence standard that universities and colleges use to adjudicate accusations of violence or abuse. According to Hans Bader, Esq.:

Historically, most colleges used a “clear and convincing” evidence standard in student and faculty discipline cases…this due process safeguard has come under attack, most prominently [by]…the head of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, Russlyn Ali, who has demanded that colleges dilute the presumption of innocence in sexual harassment and assault cases by instead using a “preponderance of the evidence” standard…

Now, the Senate draft bill to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act [by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT)] has inexplicably sought to expand the assault on due process. The draft VAWA bill would give OCR the power to set the “standard of proof” not only in harassment and rape cases, but also in other kinds of cases like “domestic violence,” “stalking,” and inappropriate behavior in dating relationships.

A Firestorm of Protest

Colleges and universities have often victimized innocent male students by validating spurious abuse or assault charges, as Fathers and Families Board Member Robert Franklin, Esq. details here. Franklin explains:

The new standard has been met with a firestorm of protest.  The American Association of University Professors, the National Association of Scholars and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education all came out against the measure.  Nationwide, some 30 editorials did as well.

As it stands, all colleges and universities must now use the lower standard or face the loss of federal funding.  But what’s been done by bureaucratic fiat can be undone in the same way.

But Leahy’s proposed bill to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act would have made the lower standard a requirement of federal law, and, had it passed, it would have taken another act of Congress to undo.

The good news is that Leahy has now scrapped these provisions in his VAWA draft in the face of these protests. We thank and congratulate all who were involved in opposing this harmful provision. To learn more, see Franklin’s post here and Bader’s article here.

November 16th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
The article Father sues CSB in death of child (Youngstown News, 11/8/11) highlights what appears to be another example of child welfare agencies preferring foster care over father care. Would little Tiffany Cross be alive today if Trumbull County Children’s Services had been less eager to cut her father out of her life?

Back in November of 2008, Thomas Cross had his parental rights to his daughter, Tiffany Cross terminated at the request of Trumbull County (Ohio) Children’s Services.  Tiffany was 15 months old.  We don’t know just why his rights were terminated, nor do we know where the girl’s mother was at the time.

What we do know is that Cross couldn’t afford a lawyer to represent him in his bid to maintain rights to his daughter.  He also wasn’t informed of his right to have counsel appointed for him.  Obviously, having an attorney to represent him might have made all the difference in the world to keeping or losing his daughter.

Whatever might have happened, we know what did happen.  Children’s services made sure Cross lost his daughter who, five months later, lost her life in foster care.

Tiffany Banks Cross was 20 months old when her foster mother, Bonnie Pattinson, 30, carried her to a neighbor’s house April 2, 2009, because the girl was not breathing. The girl later was pronounced dead…

The coroner ruled that the girl died of asphyxiation, and a county prosecutor said there were marks on the child’s neck consistent with the rings Pattinson was wearing.

Pattinson was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to serve nine years in the penitentiary.

More importantly, according to Cross, Trumbull County Children’s Services knew that Tiffany was in danger in Pattinson’s “care.”  Cross had supervised vistiation with his child for a time and so was in a position to know how she was faring.  He’s sued the child welfare agency for ignoring reports he himself made about the conditions in which his child was living.

In the lawsuit filed by Boardman lawyer David Engler, Cross said he warned children services that the girl might be in danger, telling children services he saw bruising on her and dog hair in her baby formula.

Cross’ lawsuit claims the child had multiple bruising, both old and recent, on her body when she died.  The county coroner disputes that saying the only indication of injury was what killed the little girl.  The coroner’s report suggests strangulation.

I’ll take a guess at what happened in this case:  I’ll say that Cross and Tiffany’s mother were never married, and that she played the part of single mother most of the time.  Somehow she lost her parental rights early on, possibly at the outset due to drug or alcohol problems or prior child abuse.  After all, she’s out of the picture by the time Tiffany was 15 months old.  She kept Cross out of the child’s life for the most part, although he made some efforts to be with the girl.  With the mother out of the way, children’s services made the argument to the judge that Cross had essentially “abandoned” the child by “failing” to be more of a hands-on dad.  He didn’t have a lawyer to represent him, so he was unable to effectively assert his rights and the child was whisked into the “care” of Bonnie Pattinson.

Would Tiffany Cross be alive today if Trumbull County Children’s Services had been less eager to cut her father out of her life?  We’ll never know.  But the pattern of child welfare agencies across the country is to bypass fathers when children are taken from single mothers.  That’s the express finding of a study done by the Urban Institute entitled “What About the Dads?”  Of course that practice by child welfare agencies is encouraged by massive federal funding for foster care.  The more children placed in foster care, the more money flows to the state.  That means the more children placed with dads, the less federal largess.

We’ll follow the case of Thomas and Tiffany Cross.  It’s not the first time a child welfare agency has been sued because it kept a child from its father with horrible consequences.  Sadly, it won’t be the last, either.

November 17th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
The discussion of parental alienation has taken a step forward with the publication of three books and positive reviews of same in the prestigious Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

By far the weightiest of the three is the book aimed at the mental health profession that’s edited by Dr. William Bernet of Vanderbilt University. 
It gathers articles and commentary from 70 mental health researchers and practitioners worldwide as well as citations to some 630 articles on the subject.  As such, Parental Alienation, DSM-5 and ICD-11 is the most impressive publication to date arguing for recognition of parental alienation as a treatable condition or disorder by mental health professionals.  (The ICD is the International Classification of Diseases of the World Health Organization.  It’s currently in its tenth edition.)

In her review of the book, Dr. Gabrielle Shapiro, M.D. gives a hint of her professional revelation of parental alienation.

During my training in child and adolescent psychiatry, the concept of parental alienation was a subject of great contention and debate, one that elicited strong affect-laden responses in many of my mentors similar to those prompted by multiple personality disorder.  Truthfully, it was only after working for many years performing custody evaluations that I began to “buy into” the diagnosis, recognizing not only its existence, but also its devastating and long-lasting impact on the development and attachments of children who are victims of high-conflict divorce.

In short, exposure to children embroiled in custody cases made Shapiro see the reality of parental alienation.  My guess is that the debate about parental alienation would move a lot faster if more of those opining on the subject followed in Shapiro’s footsteps.

Shapiro notes that parental alienation of children,

can lead to severe lifelong pathologic consequences for the child who has lost the reciprocal nurturing relationship with one of his primary attachment figures.  Often these dysfunctional relationship patterns persist throughout a lifetime, despite the best of therapeutic interventions.  The text makes the argument that parental alienation is not just a temporary symptom in the divorced family, but a disorder that deserves a psychiatric diagnosis.

So, according to mental health professionals who have studied parental alienation and the literature on it, PA is abusive to children.  It can have profound effects throughout the person’s life.  Courts should (and many do) give evidence of parental alienation their full attention and when it appears, move aggressively to stop it via their contempt power and their ability to alter custody arrangements.

One of the frequent claims made by those opposed to courts admitting evidence of parental alienation is that the concept was developed by Dr. Richard Gardner.  That’s largely because Gardner makes an easy target; he’s dead and therefore can be libeled with legal impunity, and that’s just what they do.

But Bernet’s book points out that in fact there were not one but six people working independently of each other back in the 1980s who developed the concept of parental alienation of children.  Needless to say, the other five aren’t mentioned by the anti-dad crowd because, unlike Gardner, they can’t be easily defamed.  Their approach is to try to make the term ‘parental alienation’ synonymous with ‘Richard Gardner’ about whom they can then lie without fear of legal sanction.

Parental Alienation, DSM-5 and ICD-11 offers a compelling and compassionate argument for the inclusion of the diagnosis in the DSM-5 and ICD-11.  The relational context in which our patients navigate their lives is rooted in their primary attachment relationships; focusing on only individual psychopathologies is an injustice to our discipline because it eliminates the importance of development and how adjustment and maladjustment of our primary attachment relationships can affect individuals and create pathology throughout their lives.  Bernet’s Parental Alienation, DSM-5, and ICD-11 should bring closure to the debate about the validity of the diagnosis of parental alienation and, I hope, pave the way for further research and for the development of new evidence-based treatments.

The second book reviewed by the Journal is less of a scientific treatise and more of a narrative of one man’s experience of parental alienation at the hands of his ex-wife.  But it’s more than that.  The narrative is that of Michael Jeffries who kept a meticulous journal of his own alienation from his children.  But about half of it consists of observations by his own psychotherapist, Dr. Joel Davies.

So A Family’s Heartbreak: A Parent’s Introduction to Parental Alienation gives a kind of stereoscopic view of the matter.  It’s part personal story, part scientific analysis.  Of course, as the reviewer points out, it’s only one man’s story, and his alienating wife’s side is never told.  Still, the reviewer recommends it exactly because the book shows the agony of the target as well as a clinician’s view of the parental alienation.

The third book reviewed is a novel about parental alienation and should of course be read as such.  The characters are fictional as is the action of the book and therefore, the work provides little of scientific interest, but may serve to put the reader “in the shoes” of an alienated parent.