Author: Joomlafreaks

November 18th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
The most horrifying case in recent memory is unfolding in Philadelphia at this moment.  At this point, no one except Linda Ann Weston knows the extent of the terror she inflicted on defenseless people.  No one knows how many people; no one knows for how long she and her three accomplices did it.

Just a few weeks ago, police entered Weston’s house, located a low door that led to a sub-basement and opened it. 
No light came from the small, windowless room with a dirt floor, but when they shined a flashlight, human beings started moving in the darkness.  These were the mentally impaired adults Weston had kidnapped and locked away from the eyes of the world.  They were injured, malnourished.  They had only a bottle of water and one of orange juice for nutrition.  One man was chained to a radiator.  Sanitary facilities consisted of buckets on the floor.  News media have uniformly dubbed the scene a “dungeon.”

Weston’s apparent motive was to collect their checks from the Social Security Administration that her captives received due to their disabilities.

But that was only part of the reason that, over possibly as long as 30 years, Linda Ann Weston gained control over children and the mentally disabled.  The other was torture.  What else can explain the fact that she starved her subjects, beat them, burned them with hot implements?  After all, if your interest is strictly monetary, you don’t kill the people whose checks you’re receiving.  On the contrary, you want them to survive for as long as possible.

But Linda Ann Weston is a sadist and she did kill at least one man.  Back in the early 1980s, she was charged and convicted of murder when she starved a man to death in circumstances eerily reminiscent of those police found in her home in October.  She served four years in prison for her crime.

It’ll be a while before we know the extent of Weston’s wrongdoing.  That’s because she seems to have led an itinerant life, probably running from the law, all the while terrorizing and brutalizing some of society’s most vulnerable people.  But Weston is now 51 and her own family reports she’s been doing this for years – to them.  Somehow, Weston has terrorized her own family with impunity.  This article tells a little about that (ABC News,10/20/11)

According to her younger brothers and sisters, Weston would force them to have sex with each other.

“She would force my younger brothers and sisters to have sex. She would have sex with my other brothers and sisters,” a brother told ABC News affiliate WPVI. “She said, ‘Look, make them have babies, we can get more money.’ It could be a brother or sister in her care.”

Refusal meant the risk of violent retaliation by Weston.

Family members told WPVI that it was the first time they had all been together in over 20 years after breaking free from the control of their sister.

“By calling her evil is speaking nice of her,” the brother said.

The family says they did not go to police because they were in fear of their sister.

“We were beyond terrified. We knew what she was capable of doing, so we never challenged any of it,” a brother said.

Weston’s interest in forced sex to produce children and therefore income from SSI wasn’t confined to her own siblings.  Apparently she also forced the mentally impaired adults in her dungeon to do the same.

[Police] are also investigating whether Weston forced the mentally handicapped victims in the basement to have sex with one another, which produced two children, ages 2 and 5. Police said the 2-year-old was so malnourished it had the appearance of a 6-month-old.

Why do I bring up Linda Weston and her house of horrors?  The main reason is that, despite her conviction for murder, she was able to get custody of a niece, Beatrice Weston, when she was eight years old.

On Tuesday, police found another family member of Weston’s who showed signs of torture and beatings. Beatrice Weston, 19, the niece of Linda Weston, was taken at the age of 8 and tortured for 10 years, according to police.

The girl was found locked in a closet on the third floor of the building that contained the basement dungeon, away from the other victims and children. She was pulled from the closet with her head wrapped in clothing, covering open wounds and scars. On the rest of her body, scars covered her face, a burn mark from a heated spoon was imprinted onto her skin, fractured bones had healed over incorrectly, and her ankles showed signs of repeated shooting from pellet guns, police said.

As this article shows, Weston and her sister Vicky had gone to family court several times in 2003 and 2004, and convinced a judge to grant partial custody to Linda (Philadelphia Inquirer, 10/23/11).  She then disappeared with the girl for years so that Vicky, Beatrice’s mother, had no knowledge of her whereabouts.

Legal experts say anyone seeking child custody is supposed to undergo a background check by the Department of Human Services, including a criminal-background check. DHS presents that information to Family Court judges.

“They must not have looked at her record,” [Vicky] said. “All they had to do was look it up on the computer and she would not have gotten the child.”

Of course they’re also supposed to do an assessment of the home environment the parent provides.  I guess they didn’t do that either.

How many people has Linda Ann Weston killed?  How many has she committed the most unspeakable tortures against?  No one knows.  We’ll probably never know the extent of her brutality.  But what we do know is that one innocent child, Beatrice Weston, could have been saved from 10 years of horror and pain if the Department of Human Services had done the minimum – run a single standard search of a database.  They didn’t and, in the not too distant future, the taxpayers of Pennsylvania will pay Beatrice Weston a lot of money because of it.

As I said, that’s the main reason for my posting a piece about Linda Ann Weston.  File it under “CPS Screws Up Again.”

The other reason is to attempt to refute the pervasive idea that women don’t commit violence in general and domestic violence in particular.  I well know that, even though hundreds of scientific studies show women to be as likely as men to commit domestic violence, studies rarely change minds.  But science coupled with true stories can do the trick.

So I want people to pay attention to the Linda Ann Weston case.  I want people to understand that men have no monopoly on depravity.  I want them to learn that, despite our persistent mythmaking of the “sugar and spice and everything nice” variety, men and women should be judged by the same standards because they’re equally capable of behavior that horrifies.

Last, dozens of articles have already been written about Linda Ann Weston.  Even though many of her victims were her blood relatives, so far, not one article has called her crimes “domestic violence.”  So I did.

 

November 18th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
It’s been almost two weeks since Julia Biryukova reported her son Sky to be missing and apparently abducted.  Since then, Bellevue, Washington police have said her explanation for the little boy’s disappearance has fallen completely apart.  Here’s the latest (Examiner.com, 11/14/11).

She claimed she left him in her car that had run out of gas.  When she returned to the automobile after a little over on hour, the boy had vanished.  But police have learned that she never bought gas and that, when they tested it, the car started without difficulty and drove normally.

Worse, apparently no one has seen Sky in weeks.  That includes friends and neighbors and his father, Solomon Metalwala.  He and police are concerned that Biryukova may have harmed Sky.  Given the fact that, despite extensive publicity about the boy’s disappearance and the passage of considerable time, police have essentially no leads regarding his whereabouts or whether he is alive or dead, I’d say their concerns are warranted.

As if all that’s not bad enough, it now appears that Biryukova had recently registered with a dating website called “Seeking Arrangement.com.”  The owner of the site, when contacted by Bellevue police, said Biryukova was seeking a sugar daddy, someone with money who would care for her and her kids. 

Worse still, Metalwala’s divorce attorney says that, during mediation, Biryukova offered to drop all claims of child support if Metalwala would allow her to take the children away, either to Russia or Arizona.  Metalwala refused.

But while the search for Sky Metalwala continues, the whereabouts of the couple’s daughter Maile is no mystery.  The four-year-old is in foster care.  Indeed, she’s been there since Sky disappeared on November 6th.  Not only that, but her father has been allowed no contact with her except a single brief supervised visit just two days ago.

Now, let’s be clear.  Solomon Metalwala has done nothing wrong.  No one claims he’s not a good, loving father.  We know that Biryukova has been hospitalized three times due to her extreme obsessive/compulsive disorder.  And of course we know that, even if she’s telling the truth about Sky’s disappearance – and I don’t think many people believe she is – the best that can be said about Biryukova is that her negligence allowed her son to be kidnapped.

By contrast, the worst anyone can say about Solomon Metalwala as a father is that once, two years ago, he and Biryukova left Sky asleep in their car while they shopped at WalMart.  Confronted by child protective services, Metalwala admitted that leaving the boy in the car was risky.  Charges were dropped against the pair and Metalwala says he learned his lesson.

So why is Maile not with her father?  Why is she in foster care instead of father care?  Why are Metalwala and his daughter being punished for the apparent wrongdoing of his ex-wife?

It’s all too common for children who are taken from mothers by child welfare agencies to be placed in foster care without even attempting to locate the father or ascertain whether he’d be an acceptable placement alternative.  The study done by the Urban Institute in 2006 found that to be the case in over half of the instances studied.

The reasons for that are likely (a) money and (b) anti-father bias.  The federal government pays states for each day in which a child is in foster care.  That means the more children in foster care, the more money for the state.  It also means the longer a child stays in foster care, the more money for the state.

Now, states are fond of claiming that they have to match those funds, so it’s no benefit to the state to place a child in foster care.  Every dollar a state receives it receives, it must match with a dollar paid out.  But, as we learned in a post on South Dakota, in fact the so-called “match” is only partial.  South Dakota child welfare admits to paying only about one dollar for every three received from Washington.  So in fact, the federal subsidy to state foster care is a gold mine for states.  Simply put, the federal government offers a huge incentive to state child welfare agencies to cut fathers out of the child care loop.  Not surprisingly, they do, as Solomon Metalwala is finding out.

As to anti-father bias, many CPS workers are graduates of social work programs at colleges and universities that are no friend to men generally and fathers in particular.  So, despite the fact that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families publishes an extensive booklet on the value of fathers to children and keeping fathers in their children’s lives, few CPS agencies comply.

But of course, Solomon Metalwala’s whereabouts are well known.  After all, he’s on the news almost daily.  So the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services could hand Maile over to him any time it wanted to. 

I spoke with Sherry Hill, Communications Director for the Children’s Administration that’s part of DSHS about why Solomon Metalwala doesn’t have custody of his daughter.  Within a forest of “that’s confidential, I can’t talk to you about that” answers, Hill provided no substantive reason for why Metalwala has been denied custody.  She further gave no timetable for the resolution of that matter in juvenile court.

So Maile is living with strangers; her father has essentially no contact with her.  And it’s plain that that’s a situation that will go on for the indefinite future, not because of anything Solomon Metalwala has done, but because of what his wife has.

November 20th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
The Texas Legislature has amended the state’s law on spousal support and it comes close to doing a fair and reasonable job of the matter.  Here’s a blog posting describing the changes (FindLaw.com, 11/11/11).

I’ve written before that much state law on spousal support is little more than thinly disguised misandry.  The vast majority of alimony obligors are men and the vast majority of obligees are women.  And, if you wanted to devise a scheme to encourage divorce, you couldn’t do much better than, for example Massachusetts alimony law.  But of course the Bay State is far from alone in its apparent desire to punish men and reward women who divorce.

Often, states allow alimony orders to exist indefinitely.  So a man who turns 65 can forget about retiring; he’s got those payments to make.  But doesn’t retirement mean a change in circumstances that would force a downward modification in his obligation?  Not necessarily.  If he’s able to keep earning at the same rate, the court will tell him his changed circumstances are voluntary, so no modification is warranted.

Is the woman capable working and earning?  In many states she need not.  She’s under no obligation to support herself or make much of an effort to do so.  What about educating herself so she can get a job?  She doesn’t have to do that either in many states.  Does she acquire a boyfriend whose income helps support her?  Often that’s deemed irrelevant if she doesn’t actually marry him.

In short, spousal support laws tend to encourage divorce and discourage remarriage.  They also discourage working for a living and encourage goldbricking.  It may sound strange, but those seem to be the policies of many states as revealed by their spousal support laws.  Those laws are artifacts of a view of women as incapable of caring for themselves and, in this day and time should be scrapped wholesale.

Now, I’ve said before that some spousal support is probably necessary.  There are certainly cases in which a spouse is very old or disabled and unable to work.  States rightly don’t want those people left out in the cold and particularly they don’t want them on the public dole.  So I have no problem with modest temporary support post-divorce in cases of need.

The State of Texas has always viewed alimony with a jaundiced eye.  The state’s constitution outlawed it altogether for decades.  So it’s no surprise to see Texas taking the type of sensible approach that other states might want to copy.

There is now a “rebuttable presumption” that spousal maintenance is not needed. A rebuttable presumption is an evidentiary burden that can be overcome (rebutted) if evidence is shown to the contrary. To rebut the presumption, the spouse seeking maintenance must lack sufficient property, including the spouse’s separate property, to provide for the spouse’s minimum reasonable needs.

Additionally, the spouse seeking maintenance must have been a victim of domestic violence within the past 2 years of the filing date of the suit or while the suit is pending or the spouse seeking maintenance is unable to provide for his or her minimum reasonable needs due to a incapacitating physical or mental disability, has been married for 10 years or longer and lacks the ability to earn sufficient income to meet his or her minimum reasonable needs, or is the custodian of a child of the marriage who is disabled and whose care prevents the spouse from earning sufficient income to meet the spouse’s minimum reasonable needs.

A rebuttable presumption against support makes sense.  It places the burden of proving need on the proper party.  The requirements of insufficient property, plus violence, at least 10 years of marriage, plus disability of the spouse or child all make proof of spousal maintenance difficult enough to weed out cases of opportunism.  They also make divorce for the sake of alimony unlikely.

The duration of spousal maintenance is now:

•Five years, increased from three, if the spouse making the payments was convicted of domestic violence, or they were married at least 10 years, but not more than 20.

•Seven years, if they were married between 20 and 20 years

•10 years, if they were married more than 30 years.

The law removes the requirement for “obtaining appropriate employment or developing an appropriate skill” and now ties the duration to “shortest reasonable period” that allows the spouse in need of maintenance to “to earn sufficient income to provide for the spouse’s minimum reasonable needs.”

 Again, there’s nothing too outrageous there.  I’d pare back the duration of payment a bit, but the law clearly requires the obligee to seek and find employment as quickly as possible, so those times are effectively subject to the work requirement.  My guess is that few alimony payments will last the maximum time.

The law also caps the maximum amount that can be paid.

The maximum monthly maintenance has also increased from $2,500 to $5,000. This is the ceiling on the amount of support the obligor (spouse who must pay support) can be ordered to pay. If the obligor’s gross income is less than $5,000 per month, the obligor can only be ordered to pay up to 20 percent of that spouse’s average monthly gross income.

Here are the factors that decide whether a judge grants spousal support or not.

In determining the nature, amount, duration, and manner of periodic payments, the court shall consider all relevant factors, including:

(1) the financial resources of the spouse seeking maintenance, including the community and separate property and liabilities apportioned to that spouse in the dissolution proceeding, and that spouse’s ability to meet the spouse’s needs independently;

(2) the education and job skills of the spouses;

(3) the length of the marriage;

(4) the age, employment history, earning ability, and health condition of the spouse seeking maintenance;

(5) the ability of the spouse from whom maintenance is requested to meet that spouse’s personal needs;

(6) the dissipation of any marital assets;

(7) the financial resources of the spouses;

(8) the contribution by one spouse to the education or earning capacity of the other;

(9) any pre-marital property;

(10) the contribution of a spouse as homemaker;

(11) Any marital misconduct of the spouse seeking maintenance; and

(12) the efforts of the spouse seeking maintenance to pursue available employment counseling as provided by Chapter 304, Labor Code. (Texas Code – Family Code – Chapters: 8.001-8.055)

Notice, for example, that fault in the divorce plays a part in deciding maintenance.  So if the wife played around on the husband, she may not get alimony.  And it’s not what she earns, but what she can earn that determines whether and what amount she’ll get.  So sitting back and letting hubby support you isn’t favored in Texas.  Interesting too is the fact that, if one spouse decides to divorce and goes out and runs up huge credit card debts that the other spouse gets to help pay, that militates against an award of alimony.

Finally, termination of alimony can happen if the obligee cohabitates with another person or has a dating or romantic relationship with another person.  There’s no need to show she’s actually receiving money from the new guy.

All in all, the Texas system isn’t bad.  It’s far worse in many states, and those states should take a lesson from the Lone Star State.  Encouraging divorce and idleness is in no state’s interest.  They should quit doing it.

 

November 21st, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
The willful blindness of the mass communications media to society’s  problems brought about by the erosion of the American family is nowhere more evident than here (New York Times, 11/20/11).

Thomas Friedman, in his op-ed piece takes on the generally poor state of American primary and secondary education.  He does so using a comparative study of the achievement levels of American students versus those of students of 13 other
countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.  That study – the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) – went further than previous ones;  it not only measured student performance, but correlated that with parental involvement in children’s education.  It gathered data on parental involvement by interviewing 5,000 parents.

And, to no one’s surprise, greater parental involvement was highly correlated with greater educational achievement.

“Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all. The performance advantage among students whose parents read to them in their early school years is evident regardless of the family’s socioeconomic background. Parents’ engagement with their 15-year-olds is strongly associated with better performance in PISA…”

For instance, the PISA study revealed that “students whose parents reported that they had read a book with their child ‘every day or almost every day’ or ‘once or twice a week’ during the first year of primary school have markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents reported that they had read a book with their child ‘never or almost never’ or only ‘once or twice a month.’

And the differences aren’t just among the well-to-do.  Even within socio-economic groups, hands-on parenting tended to produce better students.

Yes, students from more well-to-do households are more likely to have more involved parents. “However,” the PISA team found, “even when comparing students of similar socioeconomic backgrounds, those students whose parents regularly read books to them when they were in the first year of primary school score 14 points higher, on average, than students whose parents did not.”

Friedman goes on to refer readers to an American study showing very similar results.  It showed that parental involvement at home with their children’s education was more important than in-school involvement.  So helping with homework proved more beneficial than attending PTA meetings, school events, and the like.

Friedman concludes,

To be sure, there is no substitute for a good teacher. There is nothing more valuable than great classroom instruction. But let’s stop putting the whole burden on teachers. We also need better parents. Better parents can make every teacher more effective.

That all makes sense, but isn’t everyone missing something?  By “everyone,” I mean not only Friedman but the OECD and the Center for Publication that sponsored the second study, as well.

It seems curious in the extreme that none of those three seemed to think that the issue of single parenting came into play when considering the nexus between children’s educational achievement and parental involvement in their schooling.  After all, which family has more parental time, energy and resources to devote to children’s education, a single-parent or a dual-parent family?  Which one can sit down with junior and check his/her homework, make sure the test next day gets studied for, remember the appropriate school supplies, and set aside time to read together?

That’s right, it does really matter whether a child comes from a single-parent or a two-parent home.  It matters in countless ways as an astonishing array of social science has demonstrated for decades now.  It matters about the child’s psychological well-being, it matters about his/her involvement in crime and drug/alcohol/tobacco usage.  And it matters about the child’s educational development as many studies have shown.

And yet neither Friedman nor the OECD nor the Center for Public Education thought to wonder if there was a correlation between single parents and low achievement on the PISA.

The same is true of this article, although it gets closer than the NYT piece (Daily Herald, 11/20/11).  It gives still more data on the effects of parental involvement on children’s educational achievement, this time courtesy of the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation, which is dedicated to helping build better futures for disadvantaged children, has released a study indicating that children who are not engaged in reading and conversation with parents from birth to age 5 typically will enter kindergarten below level.

The article goes on to quote numerous experts on the value of parents reading to their children from the earliest part of their life.  But the closest anyone gets to pointing out the glaring fact that there are large numbers of children being raised by single parents who just don’t have the time to do what needs to be done, is this by family psychologist A. Lynn Scoresby:

“The first is the idea that family life is filled with distraction, and second, there’s a large number of families whose actual structure has changed by divorce, work issues or unwanted pregnancy,” Scoresby said. “There is an increased partitioning among people.”

“An increased partitioning.”  That’s one way of putting it.  Another is that, against all common sense, against all the science on the subject of families and the welfare of children, we’ve come to embrace single parenthood.  We know it’s bad for kids, but for some reason we can’t bring ourselves to say so.

In fact, we seem to bend over backwards to give single parenting a pass.  For example, the head of the United Way of Utah County, is deeply concerned about the problem, so much so that he’s spearheading a push to solve it.  His solution to children not reading at grade level?  Have the neighbors come over and read to them.

Now I’m sure that the man is utterly sincere about his desire to help.  But the solution to parents not reading to their children is not to have it done by proxy, even if the proxies have the time.

What no one wants to acknowledge is that single parenthood, however it’s brought about is a bad way to raise children unless the conditions are ideal.  That’s rarely the case of course.

So on we go, creating the conditions for children’s failure and then dreaming up ever more, ever more exotic and expensive ideas that have no chance of working to address a situation that can only be addressed at its root.  Intact families work for all sorts of things that single-parent families don’t, and children’s education is one.  Until we take steps to firm up the family, everything else is just talk.

November 21st, 2011 by Glenn Sacks
A Florida bill has been introduced to abolish lifetime alimony and clean up other abuses within the system, similar to the alimony reform bill recently passed in Massachusetts. One of Florida’s largest newspapers, the Orlando Sentinel, attacked the bill as a windfall for “wealthy men who cheat on their wives.”

Many Fathers and Families members have experienced the injustices of the current alimony system firsthand–we ask that you write a Letter to the Editor of the Sentinel by clicking here and/or comment on the bill here.

A Low-Rent Attack 

Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell employs anti-male stereotypes in his piece In new alimony bill, wealthy, cheating men could pay less, and informs us that the bill is “anti-woman,” ”unconstitutional,” “radical,” “Draconian,” etc. In a state where alimony obligors are often unable to retire at a normal age because they must continue to pay alimony, Maxwell is somehow unable to come up with any family law experts who like the bill.

Ritch Workman, the bill’s sponsor, is working with the group Florida Alimony Reform, and says he’s trying to make alimony fair, explaining, “[a] short-term marriage ending in long-term alimony is a mistake.” Maxwell feels compelled to tell us that Workman recently finalized his own divorce and that “several other local legislators are also divorced or currently going through one.”

Maxwell criticizes HB 549 because it “would allow previous divorce agreements to be reopened and renegotiated.” However, if this weren’t part of the bill, how could one end lifetime alimony for the aging obligors who are chained to it?

Maxwell tells us:

Orlando attorney Amy Goodblatt also expressed concerns about Workman’s proposal to automatically terminate alimony payments when the payer reaches retirement age.

“It’s clear this legislation has an agenda,” she said. “This statute is very, very much aimed at protecting men.”

True or not, Maxwell does not share with us why is a problem.

Fathers and Families’ Current Alimony Legislation

Fathers and Families has been involved in alimony reform in California and Massachusetts, with some success, and we are accustomed to seeing attorneys and misguided women’s groups mischaracterize efforts to balance the spousal support system

Our latest reform bill, California SB 481, will curb the common family court practice of issuing “double dipping” spousal support orders. ”Double dipping” is when the same stream of income is counted twice in a family law action — once for purposes of valuing that income stream as a division of property, then again for spousal/partner support purposes when the spouse/partner receives the income in the future.

NOW Opposes Alimony Reform

The National Organization for Women has come out against SB 481, but we’ve lined up a great deal of support from influential California political organizations who realize that this is not a gender issue, including: the Family Law Section of the California State Bar; the Association of Certified Family Law Specialists; numerous prominent family law and accounting firms; and others.

SB 481 comes on the heels of SB 1482, an alimony reform bill we helped pass last year. SB 1482 allows some alimony obligors to obtain court orders requiring vocational examinations for their exes, and mandates that judges follow the exams’ findings when determining spousal support levels. Both SB 481 and SB 1482 are sponsored by Senator Roderick Wright (D-Inglewood).

 

November 23rd, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
The inevitable has happened.  The woman who claimed Justin Bieber fathered her son in a backstage tryst last year has withdrawn her paternity suit against him.  Here’s the article reporting on that utterly unsurprising event (Today, 11/20/11).

What’s weird, though is that Mariah Yeater’s lawyer claims she’s going to pursue her case “out of court.”  Huh?  I wonder how he intends to do that. 
I can’t even figure out what that means.  Maybe she intends to keep making the claim in print until he pays her the money she so plainly thinks she deserves.  But of course he can file his own paternity suit and prove what essentially everyone believes – that he’s not the dad.

Yeater looks to be one of the least believeable people to try to shake down a celebrity.  Bieber’s the third guy she’s named and a previous boyfriend has said she’s out for one thing – as much money as she can get.  She also has a history of violent altercations with male friends that only adds to her lack or trustworthiness.

My guess is that we’ll never hear from Mariah Yeater again unless we pay particularly close attention to the police blotter.

Next up is this from Barbara Kay (National Post, 11/17/11).

This just in from blogger Mollie Hemingway:  “Why do we lie about female fertility?” Hemingway is a wife and mother of two children. She’s now 37 and would like a third child, but realized that at her age easy conception is the exception, nohe goes on to decry the fact that women in our society are lied to about fertility. They are led to believe that they can take years and years to devote to their education and career, deferring marriage and children until they are “ready” – and if they are only “ready” in their mid-thirties or later – no big deal…

Easy conception at an advanced age was certainly the “cultural message” Hemingway received “from school teachers, female faculty teachers and other mentors.” Hemingway didn’t add doctors to that list, but she could have. Doctors know the facts about fertility but for reasons of political correctness, are reluctant to convey them to their patients, as they do not wish to appear ideologically retrograde or judgmental.

But the misinformation about female fertility isn’t just a product of Hemingway’s imagination.  A study conducted for a biopharmaceutical firm shows “that women are woefully ignorant on this existentially gendered subject.”

In the poll of 1000 women aged 25-35 who had discussed fertility with doctors, seven out of ten basic questions about fertility were answered correctly less than half the time. A surprising number of women didn’t know how long it takes to get pregnant or even the fact that fertility declines with age.

So keep in mind that those are women who are likely to be better informed about fertility than most.  After all, they’ve thought about the matter enough to go to a fertility doctor.  They’ve also discussed the matter with that doctor.  So of all people you’d think they’d be the ones to know the most about fertility, and they probably do.  The point being that the study probably understates the level of ignorance about fertility among women generally.

Now, we know that, over the last 40 years, Americans have been putting off marriage more and more.  In 1970, the average age at first marriage for women was a little over 20 and for men a little over 22.  Now the ages are a little over 26 and a little over 28 respectively.  That phenomenon reflects later childbearing as well.

My guess is that ignorance about fertility is one of the factors at work in the rise of single-parent families.  After all, if a woman puts off conception until it’s almost too late, she’ll be less inclined to wait still longer for a suitable partner.  And anecdotally, we see that frequently – women who announce their intention to conceive and give birth without a husband and, often enough, without a father, i.e. via IVF.  Those women likely wouldn’t have to do that if they hadn’t gotten caught unawares by their fertility deadline.

And I don’t have to add that the whole thing is lauded as an act of courage on the part of the mother.  After all, we don’t want to criticize a decision that tends to be bad for the children involved, now do we.

You would think that these basic fertility facts would be an obvious part of any sex education curriculum in high school. But you would be wrong. In our culture, sex education for girls is almost completely focused on maximizing safeguards against conception while maximizing sexual pleasure and liberty.

Well, I’m all for liberty, but as with all kinds of freedom, the sexual kind is better exercised by knowledgeable people. 

The many deficiencies of sex education are beyond the scope of this posting, but, along with teaching girls basic facts about fertility, I’d argue for teaching them basic facts about not having children without a partner and the immorality of lying to men about paternity.  I’d teach them how destructive it is to children to keep fathers out of their lives either during or after marriage.

Those and many other important concepts seem to be obvious topics for sex education classes, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for a curriculum change.

November 23rd, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
For the first time in history, a child who was abducted to Japan by a Japanese mother will be returned to the United States.  Read about it here (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 11/21/11).

Dr. Moises Garcia is a native of Nicaragua who lives and practices medicine in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  He was married to Japanese native, Emiko Inoue.  They have a daughter, Karina, who is now nine years old.

When Garcia filed for divorce in February of 2008, Inoue responded by abducting the child to her native Japan, where they’ve been ever since. 
Well, almost ever since.

A family court in Wisconsin gave Garcia custody of his daughter after Inoue fled with the girl.  But, as we’ve learned in many cases over the past few years, Japan prefers maternal custody to the paternal kind and effectively provides a safe haven for Japanese mothers who abduct their children to that country.  Japan has never signed the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, so there’s no international legal requirement that it behave any differently.

Therefore, once she arrived in Japan, Inoue was safe and there was nothing Garcia or anyone else could do to return Karina to his care.

But it seems that Inoue didn’t want to give up her residency status in the United States, so she traveled to Hawaii to establish the requisite time inside this country.  There she was met by U.S. law enforcement officials with a warrant for her arrest on felony charges of interference with a custody order.  She was extradited to Wisconsin and jailed.

Facing over seven years in prison, she agreed to a plea bargain.  She’ll have the charge reduced to a misdemeanor and be released without serving additional time as long as Karina returns to Wisconsin to live permanently with her father.  That needs to happen within 30 days.  If it doesn’t, Emiko Inoue will spend the next seven years in a Wisconsin prison.

Karina has been living with her grandparents (Inoue’s parents) in Japan since her mother’s arrest in Honolulu.

Now, one aspect of the case that caught my eye is this:

Garcia was granted full legal custody in Milwaukee County Circuit Court in 2008. He’s gone further than most people in his situation, said his attorney, James Sakar, and won legal custody from Japanese courts.

An American father got custody from Japanese courts over the claims of a Japanese mother?  That’s never happened before that I’ve heard of, so I asked Sakar about how that came about.

Well, it turns out that the Japanese court was faced with the issue of jurisdiction.  How could it obtain jurisdiction of a custody case without the father’s being present and of which a U.S. court had already taken control and ruled on custody?  Well, however it managed that, the Japanese court ruled that it had “concurrent” jurisdiction with the Milwaukee court.

That placed the court in a box.  Since the Milwaukee court had already given custody to Garcia, the Japanese court was required to honor that ruling, so it did.

That was a huge victory for Garcia, right?  Well, not exactly.  The Japanese court went on to say that, since the child had been with Mom and without Dad for so long, it would not be “in the child’s best interests” for her to be returned to her father.

[Garcia] said Inoue, 43, has brainwashed his daughter and alienated her affections for him during the time in Japan, but he’s confident that if the child comes home, she will be able to get the help she needs to deal with the psychological impact of the ordeal.

As happens so often, Japanese courts ignored parental alienation when it’s done by a mother.  That, according to them is “in the best interests of the child.”

But the Japanese court did give Garcia substantial visitation which he of course couldn’t exercise given the fact that he lives thousands of miles away and has a medical practice to keep up here.  Even if he’d tried to visit Karina, Inoue would have been under no obligation to allow it.

The problem, Sakar… explained, is that the centuries-old Japanese civil legal system does not give those courts any enforcement powers.

In short, Japan’s is a perfect system for mothers who want to abduct their children.  It provides an iron-clad guarantee against fathers having any contact with the children who love and need them.

So far the media are ballyhooing this as a giant step into a new era in which Japan plays more nicely in the game of international child abduction.

If [Karina] makes it, the 9-year-old would be the first of what advocates say are more than 300 children around the U.S. abducted to Japan in violation of American court orders to be returned through legal intervention.

She also could become a poster child for how to solve a growing problem as international marriages increase in the global economy.

Put simply, that’s bunk.  There is absolutely nothing about this case that makes it a solution to the problem of child abduction to Japan.  Karina is coming back to her father (if she is) for one reason only – Mom screwed up.  She thought she could get back into the U.S. for a short time and then light out for the old country again.  She was wrong, and that – and only that – is why she’s in jail in Milwaukee and Karina will be reunited with her father.

If that’s a prescription for handling future such cases, I’m the man in the moon.

November 24th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
It’s the time of year when we pause to remember all the things we’re thankful for.  So, by all means, remember your loved ones and your friends.  If you’re in good health, remember to value that.  If you’re financially sound, remember that there are plenty of people who aren’t as well-off.  And above all, tell the people in your life, for whose love, caring and support you’re thankful, that you remember them and all the things they do to make your life better and fuller.

On that note, Fathers and Families founder Ned Holstein wrote me and others an email with an excellent insight. 
He asks us to remember that we are “doing truly vital, critical work that will rescue the family structure of America.  We should each feel grateful that we have the opportunity to make a difference.”  

I do.  It is truly an honor and a privilege to be able to help in one of the most important undertakings in American life – keeping parents and children connected.  Thanks to Ned for reminding me.  And thanks to everyone who helps us, contributes to us and who let us know every day that they value what we do.

Happy Thanksgiving!

November 25th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
The long-anticipated roll-back of children’s rights in Australia has happened.  The Australian Parliament has passed the bill aimed at scuttling the 2006 amendments to the Family Law Act that promised children greater access to their fathers.

The Howard government’s modest attempt at making shared parenting the rule in Australia was met with a firestorm of protest from anti-father forces across the country.  Lacking any comprehensive data for their claim, they nevertheless argued that the 2006 reforms endangered children. 
That of course was premised on the notion that fathers are uniquely harmful to children.  The fact that, in Australia as in the United States, mothers commit more abuse and neglect of children than do fathers is a concept the anti-dad crowd preferred to ignore.  They shouted to the skies their narrative of paternal violence, irrespective of known science.

And the political powers that be listened.  The bill that was offered and that has now passed is so virulently anti-father as to beggar belief.  More importantly, it’s anti-child, despite the claim that it’s done for their welfare.  It’s touted as protection for children because it places child safety as paramount when a court decides custody.  Read about it here (News.Com.Au./11/22/11).

What could possibly be wrong with that?  Don’t we all want our children to be safe both during marriage and after?  Of course we do, but what the Australian government has done is to place virtually limitless power to remove fathers from children’s lives in the hands of mothers.  Oh, it’s not as if they didn’t already have plenty, but this new law makes mothers’ power all but absolute.

It should come as no surprise that the tool by which children are to be denied any contact with their fathers is the concept of domestic violence.  Here in the U.S. we have sound science showing that, when one state attempted to bring greater equality to custody decisions, a single thing thwarted the effort – claims of domestic violence.  Over 80% of those were made by mothers and separate studies show custody evaluators estimating up to 70% of those to be false.  In Australia, surveys show that 46% of Australians believe that mothers make up false claims of abuse in order to improve their position in a custody case.

Under the new law in Australia, virtually any action by a father that a mother dislikes, or claims to dislike, will be held to constitute domestic violence.  That will set him up for the loss of his kids.  Essentially, all a mother has to do is convince a court that she had been made fearful by her children’s father for him to be swept out of their lives.  Just to make certain that courts don’t discourage the practice, there’s no punishment allowed in the law for false swearing. 

Claims of abuse are, then, a free shot.  Anyone can make them based on anything or nothing.  If it’s proven that they were fabricated, there’s nothing anyone can do.   The certain result will be a family court system inundated by claims of abuse, few of which can be objectively verified.  Any family attorney who fails to use even the most trivial infractions against a parent will not be doing his/her job.

So when courts hear evidence of domestic violence, it can be anything from the most savage assaults to “emotional manipulation” or “financial abuse.”  If the beloved family family dog is terminally ill and in constant pain, Dad, best not take her to the vet to have her euthanized.  If you commit that act of mercy, you can lose your kids under the new law.

Does Dad want sex too much?  He’s an abuser.  Does he want it too little?  Ditto.

Opposition members were clear in their criticisms of the new law, calling it “fundamentally flawed” and saying it “tips the scale back towards hell.”  But they weren’t enough to keep the bill from becoming law.

Let’s be clear.  This is an outrageous and baseless attack on children’s rights to real relationships with their fathers.  The new law will be used to enable mothers to keep fathers out of the lives of their children.  It will do so based on often spurious claims of “abuse.”  It invites the court to believe any and all claims that Dad behaved badly and translate those claims into fatherless children.  That a democratically-elected body should take such a swipe at innocent children today, when we know so much about the value of fathers to children, is beyond disgraceful.

The ironies are too many and too great.  This law will drive fathers out of children’s lives as predictably as the sunrise.  Children suffer without their fathers; that’s been proven too often to mention.  So a law that’s supposedly for the protection of children actually does the opposite.  It will result in the most common form of child abuse – preventing fathers from giving them the love, care, guidance and protection all children need.

Of course there will be those who point to the gender-neutral wording of the law and pretend that its terms can be used or abused by men as easily as by women.  That’s pure nonsense.  The fact is that, like all cultures I’m aware of, Australia’s treats mothers, but not fathers, with kid gloves.  Mothers’ claims of violence or abuse are routinely given more credibility than are men’s.  There, probably more even than in this country, mothers are given control over children’s rights to their fathers. 

The system of family law in Australia is virulently anti-father.  The culture of the family law system demonstrates that every day.  That’s why we see fathers climbing to the top of tall bridges protesting their treatment and 70% of Australians saying they approve of the action.  You don’t see mothers doing that.  No law, however gender-neutral on its face, will overcome the learned anti-father bias of the judges, attorneys, mental health professionals, etc. who populate family courts.

Count on it.  The hemorage of fathers from children’s lives will only increase as this law goes into effect.

Don’t believe me that Australian courts favor mothers?  Read my next piece and then decide.

November 25th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
Two Australian courts have endorsed a mother’s violations of a father’s visitation order.  Read about it here (The Australian, 11/24/11).

In my last piece, I told you I’d follow up with a post demonstrating the astonishingly anti-father bias of Australian family courts, and here it is.

A QUEENSLAND father has been banned from having any contact with his five-year-old daughter until she reaches 18 after the Family Court accepted that the child’s mother would “destroy” the relationship rather than agree to shared care.

In a decision that suggests the “shared care” law introduced by the Howard government was effectively dead, a full bench of the Family Court said “the mother would ignore any order for contact” and, as a result, it was pointless to order her to co-operate.

You read that right.  The father was given rights of access to his daughter by a family court.  They were very minimal rights, allowing him to see his child only two days out of every two weeks, but Mom decreed that to be too much.  Indeed, she ruled that any contact at all was more than she desired, and so she permitted none.

That of course violated the court’s order, so what did the court do?  Did the judge order her to comply?  Did he order custody changed?  Did he order the child brought to court and placed in the care of the father?  Did he force Mom to pay the father’s attorney?  Did he fine her?  Jail her?  No, the judge did none of those things, even though they’re all in his power.  On the contrary, he rolled over and let her do what she wanted.  Mom wanted to deny her daughter a father and the judge said “OK by me.”

So now this child will live her whole childhood without a father.  We know that’s bad for her.  We know she’ll suffer, probably her whole life long due to the lack of a male parent.  We also know that the court had it in its power to achieve another, better result, but chose not to.

Here’s what should have happened.  At the first indication that she was ignoring the court’s visitation order, the judge should have warned the mother and given the father “make-up” time, i.e. a single stretch of time with his daughter that made up for all the time the mother had denied him.  If that didn’t work, if the mother continued to deny access, the judge should have ratcheted up the sanctions to include not only increased time for the father but forcing Mom to pay his attorney fees incurred in bringing his action to enforce his rights under the court’s order.  At that time the judge should have warned her that future similar behavior would result in a change of custody.  If she still didn’t improve, the judge should have changed primary custody to the father with supervised visitation to the mother.

The reason for all of that is the need to keep both parents in the lives of children.  Amazingly, the court’s behavior came, not under the roll-back of the 2006 amendments to the Family Law Act, but under those amendments that clearly show a preference for dual parenting post-divorce.  I suppose I don’t need to point out the obvious – that if a judge can so flagrantly flout a child’s rights to her father under the 2006 amendments, imagine what courts will do under the new regime.

Let’s be clear.  Although the mother claimed the father abused the child, Judge Keith Wilson found that he had not.  The court found that the child had a “good and loving relationship with her father” and that she “plainly enjoys spending time with her father.”

Mr Wilson agreed that the loss of the girl’s relationship with her father “would be distressful in the short term and may also be emotionally damaging to her in the long term”.

So, the father has done nothing wrong, he loves his daughter and she loves him.  Moreover, she’ll suffer if her relationship with her father is severed.  By contrast, the bad actor in the drama is the mother who makes no secret of the fact that she won’t comply with any court order allowing the father access to his daughter.  Those are the facts.  The solution?  Give sole custody to the wrongdoer even though it will hurt the child.

Now, it’s true that Judge Wilson concluded that removing the father from the child’s life would be less harmful than removing the mother.  He also found that these parents simply can’t act together for the benefit of the child.  About that I say three things.

First, he drew the second conclusion without making any effort to find out if it was correct.  My thought is that if he’d transferred custody to Dad and given Mom only supervised visitation (because she looks like a parent who might abduct the child), Mom might have come to understand that the court wasn’t going to tolerate her bad behavior.  She might then have started to toe the line.  But the judge didn’t try any other parenting arrangement, preferring to conclude that none other than the one ordered would work.

Second, there’s always merit in punishing the wrongdoer and rewarding the one who behaves properly.  Now that I think of it, isn’t that what courts are there to do?   But the court did the opposite here.

Third, the notion that the child will have a good life and a proper upbringing in the sole care of a mother who behaves as this one has is suspect at best and likely outright wrong.  This woman is a child abuser plain and simple.  She is that because she refuses to allow her daughter any contact with her loving father, which will redound to her detriment her whole life.  And let no one be deceived; if the mother does this with the father, she’ll do it with anyone and everyone else.  She’s apparently pathologically possessive of the girl, and will continue to claim exclusive possession of her toward anyone, particularly males, the child seeks to get close to in the future.  Heaven help the girl’s first boyfriend!

In short, the court has set this child up for a very unhappy, dysfunctional childhood that will in all likelihood continue long into her adult years.

Now, what I’m saying isn’t rocket science.  Any impartial observer could see the same thing.  But it is part of my point that this judge, in keeping with Australian family jurists generally, is anything but impartial.  His whole reasoning, all of his behavior in the case indicate a radical preference for maternal care of children.  How else to explain his selection of a plainly unqualified, plainly abusive mother to be the sole caregiver to a little girl?

In fact, Wilson’s decision is all of a piece with Australian jurisprudence generally.  We’ve learned from Australian historian John Hirst that the family law courts of that country long ago explicitly abjured the enforcement of visitation rights.  We also know that 90% of non-custodial parents there are fathers.  Therefore, the refusal to enforce visitation rights is overwhelmingly a refusal to enforce fathers’ rights.  It is also a refusal to enforce the rights of children to their fathers.  To be clear, there is nothing gender-neutral about the behavior of family courts in Australia.  And that radical misandry is nowhere more obvious in the case discussed here.

As if in backhanded acknowledgement of what I’ve just said, Judge Wilson was at pains to deny the obvious.

[He wrote] he did not want people to think that the decision “demonstrates either an acceptance of the mother’s position, or a surrender to her unreasonable refusal to permit a relationship between the child and her father”.

He might not want people to think that, but that’s precisely what it is – ”an acceptance of the mother’s position” and a “surrender to her unreasonable refusal to permit a relationship between the child and her father.”  If not that, what?

Proving itself to be every bit as cowardly and abject as the trial court, the appellate court chimed in thus:

On the final page of its judgment, the full court also made a point of saying “our decision should not be interpreted as condoning the mother’s conduct”.

No?  Then who walked out of court with a smile on her face?  Who pumped her fist with a victorious “Yes!”?

The august jurists can write their 30-page opinions vainly trying to justify their anti-father, anti-child decisions, and they might succeed in fooling themselves, but they can’t fool me.  This is as radically anti-father and anti-child as it gets.

But I’m not the only one who will see this case for exactly what it is.  Mothers from Perth to Sydney will read the article and take careful note.  The lesson is clear; if you’re a mother, the worst possible behavior is acceptable, even preferable.  If you want sole custody of your child, this is the way to get it.  The matter is now one of judicial precedent.  Simply refuse the father all contact with his child and eventually the courts will accede to your wishes, however unreasonable, however violative of the court’s orders, however destructive of your child’s psyche.

And of course, it’s all done in “the best interests of the child.”

Now don’t forget; all of the foregoing is the good news.  That was done, you’ll recall, under the “father friendly” 2006 amendments.  I know you didn’t think it possible, but in Australia, it’s about to get worse.