Author: Joomlafreaks

December 7th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
The Verizon Foundation has joined with the National Domestic Violence Hotline to issue a misandric and factually false domestic violence video called “Monsters.” The 2:34 minute video is posted on the internet and can be seen here.

The video is an animated piece voiced-over by what’s meant to sound like a little girl. 
Needless to say, all the victims of DV in the video are described as female.  So, according to the video, the only children who are victims of DV are girls.  The same holds true for adults; only women are victims.

And of course the perpetrators are invariably men.

Then there’s the inevitable claim that “one in four American women are victims of DV.”  I’d like to say that’s simply false, but it’s in fact merely misleading.  It’s one of the salient features of the DV movement that its spokespeople and publications routinely define DV to fit their purposes.

So, if you define DV broadly enough, then certainly 25% of women are victims of DV.  Given some of the “definitions” of DV, I’m surprised the figure isn’t higher.  After all, when you define DV to include something called “financial abuse,” the sky’s the limit.  Did Dad ask Mom more than once to control her spending?  He’s an abuser and she’s been abused.

In Australia, euthanizing a terminally ill pet constitutes domestic abuse.  Just a few days ago I read a piece in a college newspaper that raged against “digital abuse.”  Yep, that occurs when a girl or woman is criticized on Facebook or some other social media site.  According to the indignant radical feminist author, that’s something that happens to women and girls, but apparently not to men or boys.  If it does happen to the male sex, she didn’t mention it and certainly doesn’t think it’s cause for alarm.

So when the DV establishment wants to flash a really large figure at the reading/viewing public, it defines DV broadly enough to include virtually any human behavior that someone might find unpleasant.  Of course they don’t tell their readers/viewers what their definition is, but that’s what it must be in order to come up with the inflated figure.

But when the subject is the effects of DV, they (again without saying so) define DV to include only the battering, controlling behavior the social scientists have taken to calling “intimate terrorism.”  That injurious behavior is committed by a tiny fraction of the population, against another tiny fraction, but the DV establishment doesn’t admit that.  It’s content to hide its dueling definitions and let readers/viewers believe that 25% of American women are battered and terrorized.

That of course is pure bunk, unsupported by any evidence and contradicted by much.

So that’s the Verizon Foundation’s video in a nutshell.  It, like so much of the public narrative about DV, is not aimed at combating DV but at demonizing men.  It’s aimed at convincing women that men are dangerous and particularly that the man they’re living with is dangerous.  Did he shout at her while under stress?  He’s an abuser and she’s abused.  Did she shout at him?  It’s not the same; she was stressed and it’s her right to express her discontent.  After all, women don’t commit DV, so her behavior, whatever it was, couldn’t be that.

The unsurprising result of all that is the separation of fathers from their children via the routine issuance of DV restraining orders by family and criminal courts.  There, the mere allegation that a woman was placed “in fear” by her husband, partner or boyfriend, is sufficient to get him kicked out of his house and removed from his children’s lives.

Don’t believe me?  Ask Bellevue, Washington’s Solomon Metalwala, whose mentally challenged wife accused him of child abuse during their custody dispute.  Despite the almost entire lack of evidence to support the charge and her well-documented record of mental illness, the restraining order was issued and was still in place a year later when Mom either murdered or abducted the couple’s two-year-old son.

By misrepresenting known facts about DV, by pretending that all abusers are men and all victims are women, Verizon Foundation not only purveys falsehoods, it actually promotes DV.  Reliable science shows that women who hit first are likely to be hit in return and suffer injury as a result.  If the DV establishment including Verizon admitted that women hit and tried to get them to stop, they’d save a lot of injury to women.  By refusing to admit the facts, they perpetuate the injury of women in DV incidents.

So why would an organization that claims to oppose DV actually end up promoting it?  The answer in the case of, for example, the shelter system is obvious – money.  The more the DV problem is inflated, the more federal and private money flows into the system.  Although the Verizon Foundation gives money away, it’s part of the same DV establishment that’s made big bucks peddling the “woman as victim, man as victimizer” narrative.  Indeed, according to foundation head Rose Kirk, it’s been doing so for 10 years.

And it’s not about to change.  Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (S.A.V.E.) has taken on the Verizon Foundation’s radically incorrect, radically misandric video “Monsters” asking that it be pulled from the airways and replaced by an accurate, non-gender-biased one.  VF has refused saying that national crime statistics back up their claims.

As attorney and vice president of the National Coalition for Men Marc Angelucci rightly states in response,

To begin with, when we mention soldiers in Iraq, we say “men and women” regardless of the fact that over 90% of them are men.  That’s to make sure the minority are not excluded.  Why aren’t domestic violence victims given the same respect?

Good question.  It’s one Rose Kirk and the Verizon Foundation don’t have an answer for.  They also can’t explain why almost 300 studies conducted over 35 years all show that men and women commit DV equally.

Interestingly, Kirk made a video of her own about Verizon and DV.  In it she touts Verizon’s “partnership” with the Liz Claiborne, Inc. in its take on DV.

That’s telling, because several years ago LCI commissioned a very large study of teen dating violence, but didn’t like what its own figures revealed.  As the scrupulous and thorough Richard Davis pointed out in this article, LCI’s Teen Relationship Abuse Survey (TRAS) found that teen boys and girls reported the following levels of violence and controlling behavior in their dating lives:

On page 11, the TRAS documents that 17% of boys and 13% of females report that their partner hit, slapped or pushed them…

On the top of page 3 of the TRAS survey it notes, “[P]ower and control actions and attitudes are pervasive in teen relationships – many young people have dealt with a boyfriend or girlfriend who tried to control their whereabouts.”

The survey asks if the boys or girls had partners who want to know:

Who were they with all the time, 32% of boys and 39% of girls responded yes.

Where they were all the time, 31% of boys and 35% of girls responded yes.

Tried to tell them what to do a lot, 33% of boys and 31% of girls responded yes.

Asked them to only spend time with him/her, 24% of boys and 24% of girls responded yes.

Tried to prevent them from spending time with family or friends, 22% of boys and 21% of girls responded yes.

Hence, the LCI’ sponsored TRAS clearly documents boys and girls equally attempt to control or monitor the whereabouts of their partner.

So LCI’s own survey revealed that girls actually commit violence in dating relationships more often than do boys, and that controlling behavior is statistically a dead heat between the sexes.  Fine; in that regard, the TRAS is like many other surveys of dating violence.

What’s different is that LCI, in its publicity about teen dating violence completely ignores female-on-male violence.  It commissioned the study and then ignored the parts it didn’t like.  The intellectual dishonesty of DV zealots has been known for a long time, but it doesn’t get much more blatant than that.

LCI of course is the Verizon Foundation’s “partner” in DV advocacy.  Great minds think alike.

The opposition to VF’s video has gone international.  Not only is S.A.V.E. opposing it with a write-in campaign, it’s now getting folks to leaflet Verizon stores.  The National Coalition for Men is doing the same thing.  That effort has taken root in several states.

It’s also happening in Canada as our good friend Paulette McDonald has informed us.

Close your Verizon account and encourage your friends to do likewise.  Help S.A.V.E and the NCFM force Verizon to take down its false and misandric video.

The demonization of men has gone far enough.

December 7th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
If you suspected the anti-parental alienation forces were getting desperate, now you know for certain.  This article and the film it’s about are proof positive (The Quad, 12/5/11).

As reliable evidence of the reality of parental alienation grows and as more and more gets published about it including Dr. William Bernet’s recent book giving the current state of the scientific data on parental alienation and Parental Alienation Syndrome, their opponents more and more grasp at straws in an effort to debunk the concepts.

Of course there is an ongoing and lively debate within the mental health community about whether to include PAS in the upcoming Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.  About that I make no comment because I’m not qualified to render an opinion.  But whatever the outcome of that debate, at least it seems to be one of intellectual honesty and integrity.  Various scientists and clinicians have differing opinions.

But outside the community of mental health professionals, at least one side of the debate makes no pretense of intellectual honesty or integrity.  That’s the anti-dad crowd that claims to one and all that PA and PAS are nothing but pro-father schemes to deprive mothers of their children.  According to them, fathers who abuse their children are routinely given custody of them by going to court and claiming that the mother is alienating the children from the dad.

It’s a measure of the intellectual dishonesty of that movement that even a cursory reading of the literature on PAS makes it clear that it’s simply not gender-specific behavior.  Some mothers do it; some fathers do it.  But you’d never know that from the mutterings of the anti-dad, anti-PAS zealots.

Now, throughout the entire history of this effort to turn back fathers’ rights to their children, the anti-PAS crowd has named countless cases in which they claim abusive fathers have gotten custody by duping courts into believing a mother has alienated a child.  The problem is that, in almost all of them, the claim is bogus as proven by court documents.

Has it happened that an abusive father got custody?  I suppose it must be possible.  After all, with over one million divorces in this country every year, it’s just not logical that judges don’t err in some of them.  Indeed, they err on the anti-father side with considerable frequency, so they probably sometimes get it wrong the other way as well.  It’s one of the wort aspects of the anti-father movement that it never notices abusive mothers with custody of their children.

In the Holly Collins case, however, the courts got it right.  Nevertheless, that’s the one the linked-to article and the film rely on to make their point.  The article presents Holly Collins the same way the anti-dad crowd presents most mothers; it assumes everything she says is true.  There’s a problem with that when it comes to Holly Collins.  As countless judges, custody evaluators, guardians ad litem, doctors, mental health professionals and her own mother, brother and sister make clear, Holly Collins looks very much like an inveterate liar.

To give a full idea of the extremes to which Collins and her supporters go, check out this link.  It’s the analysis Glenn Sacks reprised two years ago of the entire Holly Collins case.  It’s 13,000 words and totally destroys any claim that Holly Collins or her children were abused by their father Mark Collins.  Read what Glenn wrote and it becomes clear that Holly Collins utterly lacks credibility.

That of course is what all seven judges that considered the case found, and that is why they gave Mark Collins custody of his two children.  Holly’s subsequent kidnapping of the children was in fact a continuing act of parental alienation, but to the true believers in the anti-dad crowd, it’s an act of heroism.

I can’t begin to relate the Collins case in detail, but do yourself one favor; read the linked-to article and then read Glenn’s evisceration of Holly Collins’s claims.  The contrast between intellectual dishonesty on one hand and honesty, openness and integrity on the other is astonishing.

The article in the Boston University publication gets it wrong almost from start to finish.  Essentially all its claims have either been proven wrong before or are so flagrantly at odds with the truth you’d think no one would bother to make them.  For example, it quotes the maker of the film, Professor Garland Waller thus:

Professor Waller also cited the lingering gender bias in the family courts. “Courts do not have to consider domestic violence in their rulings,” she said.

No, actually they do.  In fact, the family laws of all 50 states explicitly require judges to consider domestic violence in deciding custody.  Into the bargain, so do the family laws of all the English-speaking nations on the planet.  It’s a good indication of the level of intellectual honesty of the anti-PAS, anti-dad crowd that they make such patently false claims.

But Waller wasn’t finished.

“After a nice review [of the film] in a Boston Magazine blog, many pro-father’s rights men were highly critical,” she explained, but “none of them had seen the film and none of them had access to all the thousands of pages of legal documents and medical records and correspondence from experts and FBI documents that we had.”

Again, that’s just flat not true.  Anyone who’d like to take two minutes out of her busy day could go to Glenn’s analysis of the Holly Collins case and find all the court documents right there.  Could it be that Waller is so intellectually lazy that she hasn’t done that simple exercise?  Or has she looked at Glenn’s blog and chosen to lie about it?  I can’t begin to guess, but either way it’s about as shoddy a way of dealing with an issue as you can get.

My main point though is less the well-documented dishonesty of the anti-dad crowd than its desperation.  Face it, when all they can come up with is a film that uses a thoroughly debunked, case from 20 years ago in which a mother wrongfully kidnapped her children to keep them from a father whom medical doctors and psychologists alike testified was a better influence on them than Holly Collins, there’s only one word to describe it – desperation.

On one point, I must agree with Waller, however.

Professor Waller concluded. “I want to live in an America that protects the children.”

So do I.  And, contrary to her many misrepresentations, that means recognition of parental alienation when it occurs.  It means taking children away from parents who alienate them from other parents who are fit to care for them.  The bottom line is this: children need both parents in their lives as long as both can adequately care for them.  Some like Garland Waller oppose that concept, preferring to allow parental alienators to get away with their abuse of children, as long as those parents are mothers.

That’s not desperate, it’s just plain wrong.

Thanks to Don for the heads-up.

December 7th, 2011 by Glenn Sacks
Washington Department of Social and Health Services seized Maile Metalwala, the 4-year-old daughter of Solomon Metalwala, away from her unfit mother, Julia Biryukova, and put Maile in foster care on November 6. It is a common but unjust practice for child welfare agencies to put children in foster care instead of giving them to their fathers. Moreover, the Washington court separated Maile from Solomon based on spurious abuse allegations from a now thoroughly discredited accuser.

On Tuesday November 29 Fathers and Families launched our Campaign to Reunite Solomon Metalwala with His Daughter Maile. Our goal has been to push WA DSHS and King County Superior Court to reunite Maile and Solomon as soon as possible. Many of our members and supporters wrote and/or called the relevant authorities, and our campaign has been covered by much of the Seattle media. DSHS issued a statement in response to our campaign on Friday.

On Monday, in part because Washington Department of Social and Health Services is now supportive of Solomon’s custody bid, Solomon won custody of Maile–for details see Seattle KING 5 News’ Solomon Metalwala one step away from regaining custody of Sky’s sister (12/5/11).

Better yet, as the Seattle Times explains, “A judge on Tuesday lifted the protection order against Solomon Metalwala, father of missing a 2-year-old boy, clearing the way for him to regain custody of his 4-year-old daughter.”

We thank all of the Fathers and Families members and supporters who wrote and called DSHS and the relevant court officials. We’ll never know to what degree your calls and letters and the widespread media coverage our protest garnered impacted the authorities. What we do know is that, within a week of your calls and letters to DSHS and the King County court, both agreed that Solomon should have custody of Maile.

We will continue to monitor the situation and keep our members informed of new developments. We salute Clay Terry, Esq., Solomon’s attorney, for his determined work towards reuniting Maile with Solomon.

We thank the Seattle TV stations KIRO, KING 5 and NWCN 2, KOMO News Radio, and the numerous other Seattle media outlets who covered our campaign for helping to highlight this important child custody issue. We also thank the Washington Domestic Violence Commission for their assistance.

Together with you in the love of our children,

Glenn Sacks, MA Executive Director, Fathers and Families

Ned Holstein, M.D., M.S. Founder, Chairman of the Board, Fathers and Families

December 8th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
This short entry caught my eye (NH Insider, 12/6/11).  Why wouldn’t it?  It’s by a woman named Samantha Haas who asks a simple question, “why wouldn’t shared parenting be supported?”  It turns out she’s the daughter of a divorced couple who did share parenting and she’s got some important ideas about the value it.

Here’s her piece in full.

Children deserve the very best from BOTH parents.  Parents have the Right to raise their children and make sure they are safe, educated, healthy and responsible.

If a parent of right mind understands the importance of both parents being equally involved with their children; then why wouldn’t that parent support it?

False allegations and domestic violence are far too common.  And it happens by women and men, and now more than ever, the Family Courts turn the other cheek.

In my experience as a daughter of parents who divorced and SHARED PARENTING; it is truly the most important decision you can make for your children.

You notice she’s unequivocal.  To her, it’s the most important decision divorcing parents can make.  Strong words, but she knows from experience.

Apart from her experience as a child of divorced parents, it turns out Haas has some hard-learned lessons about the parental side of divorce court.  It seems her husband is a non-custodial father whose ex-wife has refused to allow him to see or contact his children for two years.  Has he received any help whatsoever from the New Hampshire courts in dealing with that flagrant violation of his and his children’s rights?  He has not.

Into the bargain, the state child support agency screwed up the billing on his account.  So he’s ended up paying far more than he should have, and is still behind.  Has he received any help whatsoever from the New Hampshire courts in dealing with that flagrant abuse of his rights?  He has not.

I’ll let Samantha Haas tell it.  Here’s her letter to the Honorable Ed Kelly, judge of the court that should be doing something about her husband’s outrageous case, but apparently hasn’t.

Honorable Ed Kelly;

My name is Samantha Haas.  I am a wife and mother from Hooksett, New Hampshire.

Mr. Kelly, your Courts are destroying my family.

We have suffered severe emotional distress, financial hardship and estrangement from my two stepdaughters.

My husband was denied his right to Due Process as his Constitutional Rights have been violated and the essential base on the concept “fundamental fairness”.

A mathematical error in the Court on November 20th 2006 has followed my family ever since, with my husband always being held in contempt on an inability to pay.

Ignored or denied pleadings, a Guardian ad litem who withheld evidence of abuse on my husband and children by his ex-wife, turning into not seeing his two daughters since September 26th, 2009.

My husband has paid over $120,000 in child support in the last four years, has a $250,000 life insurance policy on his two daughters naming his ex-wife as the beneficiary, pays for the children’s medical and dental insurance, and pays for half of all uninsured medical and dental expenses.

Yet, he has not seen his daughters in two years.

Every attempt to see them has been blocked by his ex-wife, who has perjured your very Courts since 2006.

My husband and I have been damaged financially because of the ongoing litigation.  We have been getting food at our local food pantry and are on the verge of bankruptcy.

I am a full time student and my husband works in fund accounting for towns and schools, and is also a Hooksett Town Official as a member of the Budget Committee.

On June 17th 2011, my husband was falsely incarcerated at Manchester Family Division on his inability to comply with paying for the mathematical error from 2006.

Mr. Kelly,  I felt like I lost my life that day.  It was Father’s day weekend and my son (Nicholas’ stepson) and our daughter were without their dad because he was in jail.

It became my responsibility to find $10,000 cash bail to have him released.  It became my responsibility to fight for my husband’s freedom and his right to be a father and not be faulted for an error the court made.

We have filed with the Supreme Court.  We continue to file with Manchester Family Division with no response.

Why? Why are we being denied our rights? Our rights as people and our rights as parents?

Our family desperately needs relief, Mr. Kelly.

The longer this is allowed to continue, the older the children are getting and they already have a two year old sister they have never met.

Please show us what to do.

Respectfully;

Samantha & Nicholas Haas

That’s about as good a summary of family law in the United States as I know of.  It’s almost all there.  The screw-up by the child support system resulting in payments he can’t make.  The ever-increasing penalties.  The inability to get the judge to care or pay attention.  Impending bankruptcy.  An ex-wife who perjures herself, a pro-mother guardian ad litem who withheld evidence.  Refusal to enforce the visitation order.  Depriving the children of their father indefinitely.  And what must be counted the crowning achievement of the whole sorry affair, the father’s arrest on Fathers Day due to the court’s mistake.

About the only thing missing is for the dad to learn he’s not the actual father and to be made to keep paying anyway.

I hate to tell Ms. Haas, but she and her husband are far from alone in this.  Similar things are happening to fathers all across America; it’s as common as dirt.

If you wanted to design a system to separate fathers from children, you couldn’t do a lot better than the one we have.  Earlier this year, and not too very far from where Mr. and Ms. Haas live, a distraught father walked up the courthouse steps, poured gasoline on himself and lit a match.  I hope no one else ever does such a thing, but it is surely a measure of the disgrace that is our family court system that it happened.

Listen to Samantha Haas:  “Mr. Kelly, your courts are destroying my family.”

Judge Kelly didn’t listen; she got no reply to her heartfelt and deeply moving letter.  Nor has Kelly addressed in court the many issues she raised.  A bankrupt family, children without a father and no end in sight.  What an accomplishment.

December 8th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
Canadian columnist and staunch opponent of misandry Barbara Kay has picked up the challenge to the Verizon Foundation’s shockingly anti-male, anti-father video entitled “Monsters.”  Here’s her article (National Post, 12/6/11).

As usual with Kay, it’s a zinger.  All it takes to do that of course is to cite some actual facts about domestic violence, which, combined with an altogether appropriate tone of outrage make for a total take-down of the Verizon piece.

I won’t pollute the otherwise pristine waters of this post by reprising Verizon’s video.  Suffice it to say that it’s both wrong in essentially every detail and virulently misandric throughout.  However, Kay does point out one thing in the video that I neglected in my previous piece about it.  Its claim that domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women between the ages of 15 and 44 is false, utterly false. 

It would have taken the makers of the video possibly as much as three minutes online at the website for the Centers for Disease Control to learn that falls and auto accidents are actually the main causes of injury and death to women and girls in that age range.  But they didn’t lift the finger required to click the mouse.  The reason of course is that they have no intention of presenting the actual facts about DV.  If they did, their video would have been entirely different from start to finish.

That leads inescapably to the conclusion that Verizon’s goal is not to combat domestic violence but to denigrate and marginalize men in general and fathers in particular.  Their video is all of a piece with the rest of the anti-father movement.  The use of false and misleading statistics is only part of it.  Those are used with particular goal in mind – to separate children from their fathers.  The more people can be convinced that fathers but not mothers are dangerous to children, the harder it is for fathers to maintain a place in their children’s lives post-divorce.  As countless divorced fathers can testify, family court judges, custody evaluators, guardians ad litem and the like have absorbed the message all too well.  Verizon Foundation is hard about the task of making a bad situation worse.

Here’s Kay.

The latest, and perhaps the most outrageous example of this kind of extreme misandry is the Verizon Foundation’s new, widely distributed video entitled “Monsters,” which portrays the average American home as a secret chamber of horrors, in which a pleasant façade hides terrified mothers and children, stalked by the shadowy figure of the family “monster,” the husband and father. It is chilling to watch; any woman or child ignorant of the actual facts around domestic violence would walk away from it convinced that that they were in imminent peril, and that at any moment their beloved husband or father might transmogrify before their eyes into a veritable Mr Hyde…

That old canard that domestic violence is a one-way street refuses to die, even though authoritative sources such as Statistics Canada continually release data that clearly indicate that most violence is bilateral. And mostly low level – pushing, slapping, screaming, throwing small objects by both parties – certainly not pleasant or mature behaviour, but not life-threatening. If the video’s implications were true, our hospitals and morgues would overflow with women.

Reality check: domestic violence of all kinds is a chronic problem for about 7% of women and men in Canada. The overall homicide rate for women killed as a result of domestic violence is about 40 a year in Canada (about 20 men are killed by their intimate partners). That is a statistically trivial figure…

[Stop Abusive and Violent Environments] rightly castigates Verizon for ignoring abuse to half the population and perpetuating false stereotypes. The children in the video were portrayed as in fear of their father alone, but in fact mothers are more likely to physically abuse their children, and cause more deaths to children than fathers do.

What other identifiable group in society besides men is subjected to such calumny? The Verizon Foundation’s ad encourages hatred of men, and more important it will certainly sow alarmism in children who view it. Moreover, children exposed to this ad who have been subjected to abuse by their mothers will be confused and are likely to feel ashamed to report it, for the ad’s silence on abuse by mothers suggests it must be kept secret.

The ad is defamatory and inflammatory. Such overt bias is unworthy of a corporate giant like Verizon. The ad campaign should be withdrawn immediately.

So far, no one who’s written or called Verizon has received so much as the courtesy of a response.  That’s true of Kay as well who reports she’s called three times with no call-back.  Like a rat running from a terrier, Verizon’s gone to ground.

Meanwhile, S.A.V.E. has provided more contact information for people at Verizon.  Maybe we’ll have better luck with them. 

Bill Kula
Director, Media Relations
(972) 718-6924  
william.kula@verizon.com

Bob Elek
Manager, Media Relations
(813) 483-2541  
bob.elek@verizon.com
 
Ellen Yu
Manager, Media Relations
(908) 559-2818 
ellen.yu@verizon.com 
   
 
Cliff Lee
Manager, Media Relations
(518) 396-1095     
clifford.p.lee@verizon.com

Deidre Mulcahy Hart
Manager, Media Relations
(908)-559-3483       
deidre.m.hart@verizon.com

And I would add:

Binta Vann-Joseph
Verizon Foundation, Director of Marketing Strategy
binta.d.vann-joseph@verizon.com

December 9th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
The United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights met in Geneva during November and December, and the Israeli Coalition for Children and Families sent a 12-person delegation to give testimony.  Apparently the committee was impressed.  Members of the Israeli government were allowed to rebut the testimony and were asked questions by the committee.  As a result, the committee ruled that Israel discriminates against fathers and recommended that it change its laws and practices accordingly.  Read about it here (Israel News Agency, 12/6/11).

Mostly, that would mean an end to the Tender Years doctrine that is still in force in the country. 
Under that doctrine, any child under the age of six is automatically given to the mother regardless of all else.  According to the committee, Israel is the last country on the planet still clinging to that outworn doctrine.

“The Committee is concerned that, in the case of a divorce, custody of children up to the age of six is always given to mothers, and that fathers are often required to pay child support awards that exceed their income, and if not that their freedom of movement is seriously curtailed. The Committee is concerned that divorced fathers often are required to visit their children in supervised visitation centers during their working hours, which leads to the accumulation of work absences and the risk of dismissal.”

“The Committee recommends that the State party amend the Capacity and Guardianship Law so that custody of children up to the age of six is not always given to mothers, and ensure that child support awards do not lead to an inadequate standard of living for the father.”

But the UN committee left unmentioned many other problems that beset Israeli fathers.  While it’s true that the Tender Years Doctrine is particularly outrageous, the article linked to points out that nothing much changes after the child turns six.

What is not stated here is that even after the age of six, family courts and child welfare departments from Tel Aviv, Ra’anana and Haifa to Jerusalem, Metulla and Eilat maintain this gender bias discrimination. Discrimination which often leads to PAS – Parental Alienation Syndrome where the mother poisons the child against the father and the father eventually gives up and walks away – leaving the child with no father role model.

That results in, among other things, half of all Israeli suicides being divorced men.

Into the bargain, apparently Israeli law prohibits a man from leaving the country until he’s paid his ex-wife alimony for 20 years.

And just to make sure no one complains too much, Israeli family courts apparently issue gag orders on the parties as a matter of routine.  That meant that one father who testified in Geneva could only identify himself with the letter ‘J’.  Otherwise his testimony to the UN committee would have opened him up to sanctions from the family court.

Rubbing salt into the wound,

[The Coalition for Children and Families] was founded by Daniel Zer, a father who has not been able to see his own six-year-old son for over three years, allegedly because the child’s mother does not want him to see him, and the social workers in Israel agreed with her that the child has no need for a father in his life.

The father filed a motion to the High Court and asked it to declare that UN conventions forbid the state from denying a child the right to family life. The High Court refused to declare that fathers have rights to see their children, based on international law.

That’s odd.  European courts, construing the same international agreements have come to the opposite conclusion.

As bad as the family courts in this country are, they’re clearly worse in Israel.

December 9th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
The Public Relations Department of Verizon reports that it has removed its “Monsters” video from the Internet.  The radically misandric, false and misleading video had been criticized by Stop Abusive and Violent Environments, the National Coalition for Men, Fathers and Families, and others, and in commentary in Canada’s National Post and elsewhere.  For days the company refused all comment on the matter before finally taking the video down–thanks to SAVE and NCFM for spearheading the effort.

That of course is excellent news.  The level of mis- and dis- information about domestic violence is higher than for any other topic of national importance I can think of, so any improvement is a welcome step in the right direction.

But the mere fact that the Verizon Foundation has 86′ed a single video doesn’t mean it’s not still hard about the task of misrepresenting the facts about DV.  From what I can gather from its website and statements made by its president, Rose Kirk, its mission appears to be the continuation of the fictional narrative the DV establishment has been peddling for decades.  That narrative holds that only males commit domestic violence and only females are its victims.

The problems with that narrative go far beyond its intellectual bankruptcy.  Far worse than that, they lead inevitably to the conclusion that women and girls don’t need to alter their behavior in intimate relationships.  They don’t need to learn how to stop hitting their partners or trying to control their partners’ behavior.  Therefore, they don’t need effective services to improve their own behavior.  To suggest that they could benefit from those services, constitutes “blaming the victim.”  Such at any rate is the loony and deeply dysfunctional narrative of the DV establishment.

The great irony of course is that, while the very people repeating that narrative proclaim loudly that they’re protecting women and girls, actually, the opposite is true.  As I’ve said many times before, reliable studies show that one way women get hurt in DV incidents is by initiating violence.  Erin Pizzey learned that way back in 1971 when she started the very first DV shelter in the U.K.  And it’s been shown by an important study done in 2006 for the Centers for Disease Control.

So by refusing to acknowledge women’s violence against men, the DV establishment actually chooses to make women more vulnerable to injury.

That fact pretty much compels the conclusion that the DV establishment is more about demonizing men and boys than it is about protecting women and girls.  And of course that’s one of the most harmful results of their ongoing campaign.  The concept of domestic violence is one of the prime movers in the radical rise in divorce rates and the separation of children from their fathers.

From the very beginning of the DV movement, true believers took as an article of faith the radical feminist notion that the family was the seat of the oppression of women.  Destroy the family and you liberate women was the rallying cry of the time.  That ideology long ago ran aground on the shoals of known facts, such as the facts that married women are far safer than single ones and that children in homes with two biological parents are far safer than all others.

But old habits die hard, particularly when oceans of federal money encourage them to stay alive.

About five years ago, I was at a party and overheard a telling conversation.  Two women were talking.  I knew them both pretty well, but they had just met a few minutes previously.  One was complaining about her husband, albeit not about any form of violent behavior on his part.  The other was employed by a DV organization.  Having just met the other woman, having heard only a few minutes of her complaints, the second woman responded, “divorcehimyou’llgetthekids.”

I stepped over and rebuked her for encouraging the separation of children from their father and she sort of bit her tongue, but her response spoke volumes.  This was a woman she didn’t know.  She had no idea of her level of discontent, the ages of the children, the length or importance of their marriage, but apparently none of that mattered.

“Divorcehimyou’llgetthekids.”  It could be the motto of the DV establishment.

December 10th, 2011 by FAF Staff

KIRO TV in Seattle Highlights F & F’s Campaign to Reunite Solomon Metalwala with His Daughter Maile

Solomon Metalwala (left) distributing flyers with his son Sky’s photo on them as he and his supporters search for the missing boy.

Fathers and Families Executive Director Glenn Sacks, MA appeared on KIRO TV on Friday, December 2 to discuss our Campaign to Reunite Solomon Metalwala with His Daughter Maile–to watch the news segment, click here.

Sacks told KIRO TV in Seattle “We need to get this little girl out of the foster care system and back with the father she loves and needs.”

There have been two very positive developments in the case this week–to learn more, click here and see the updates.

 

December 10th, 2011 by FAF Staff
Fathers and Families Board Chairman Ned Holstein, MD, MS, and Executive Director Glenn Sacks have co-authored Rein in Orange County Department of Child Support Services (12/10/11) for the Orange County Register, a 300,000 circulation newspaper in the greater Los Angeles area. To comment on the piece, click here.

The piece discusses two recent abuses committed by Orange County Department of Child Support Services and lays out the case for Senator Rod Wright’s (D-Los Angeles) SB 375, a paternity fraud bill Fathers and Families is working to pass. The column appears below.

Angels’ third baseman Alberto Callaspo was unjustly targeted by OC DCSS

Rein in Orange County Department of Child Support Services
Orange County Register (12/10/11)
By Ned Holstein, M.D., M.S. and Glenn Sacks

The paternity case involving Angels’ third baseman Alberto Callaspo is the second instance in the past month where Orange County Department of Child Support Services unjustly intervened in a paternity case. Fortunately, a bill currently before the California Senate Judiciary Committee will curb these types of abuses.

In the Callaspo case, the ballplayer was skeptical of ex-girlfriend Mariangely Santana Perez’s claims that her son Ian was his. Nevertheless, he paid her $4,000 a month and paid for the hearing-impaired boy’s hearing aids.

Enter OC DCSS. Perez previously told the Orange County Register she was satisfied with the amount she had agreed to with Callaspo, but had contacted OC DCSS because she sought a written agreement and to ensure Callaspo made the payments each month.

The federal government reimburses states for every dollar they collect in child support. However, there is no reimbursement when the father pays the money directly to the mother, as Callaspo did.

OC DCSS, eyeing a potential windfall award going through their office to Perez, intervened, seeking to almost triple Callapso’s monthly obligation. Faced with paying nearly $2 million over the life of the child support order, Callaspo contested paternity, and DNA tests showed that the boy is not his.

Callaspo’s escape was narrow. Many men receiving such petitions fail to respond in time because they don’t understand the legalese, don’t have legal representation, or do not receive the petition at their current address. In such cases, default judgments can be entered against them. Moreover, had Callaspo been married to Perez, or had he signed a paternity declaration at the hospital based on the mother’s false representations, the time period for him to have challenged paternity would have already run out.

Paternity fraud victim Pedro Soto and his wife Gabriela.

OC DCSS’ actions in the recent Pedro Soto paternity fraud case are particularly egregious. In 1998, Soto, deceived by then-girlfriend Maricela Guerrero into believing that her newborn son Aaron was Soto’s, stepped up and did what he thought was right by signing a paternity declaration. In ensuing years he paid over $75,000 in child support, and had regular visitation with Aaron.

Later, Soto was shocked to learn that Aaron was not his biological child, and was living with Guerrero and the man he called “dad”– his biological father Francisco Serrano, who had another child with Guerrero. Soto’s attorney Richard A. Lowe explained in Soto’s petition:

“[B]y lying about the real father . . . Guerrero set up a scheme whereby she can fleece her innocent former boyfriend and have [OC DCSS] aid her in enforcing this . . . Aaron will always be welcomed in [Soto’s] home, however, he does not wish to continue the falsehood that he is Aaron’s biological father.”

OC DCSS conceded that Serrano, not Soto, is Aaron’s father, but still opposed Soto’s petition for relief, seeking to keep Soto — a man of modest economic means who is married with children – on the hook for another five years. Lowe conceded that, since the time to challenge paternity had run out, current California law is against Soto. Fortunately, in an admirable act of judicial courage, Orange County Superior Court Judge Paula J. Coleman ruled in Soto’s favor.

Most are not as fortunate as Soto and Callaspo, and there are many California men paying for children who are not theirs. Senator Rod Wright’s (D-Los Angeles) SB 375 will place some much-needed restraint on OC DCSS and its sister agencies. SB 375 widens the restrictive time limit for challenging paternity, so “duped dads” are not punished because they believed their exes’ false paternity claims.

Moreover, the bill will prevent judges from being coerced to, as the 2nd District Court of Appeal explained in the 2004 Navarro paternity case, “sully our hands by participating in an unjust, and factually unfounded, result.”

December 11th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
Did the antipathy of family courts and child welfare agencies for fathers cost Ramie and Timothy Grimmer their lives?

In what’s become a case of national notoriety, the children’s mother, Rachelle Grimmer walked into a food stamp office in Laredo, Texas, children in tow, barricaded herself in an office and, after a seven-hour standoff with police, shot both children and then herself.  Rachelle died at the scene, while the children were life-flighted to a San Antonio hospital. Ramie died the next day and Timothy, his father at his bedside, was taken off life support the next day.  Ramie was 12 and Timothy 10.

Here’s one article on the case (New York Times, 12/10/11).  Here’s another (CBS News, 12/9/11).

Since then, much coverage of the case has aimed at casting the blame on the Texas Department of Health and Human Services for denying her food stamps.  The Department answers those charges by saying that Grimmer, over some five months and numerous attempts to contact her, never provided the required information about her income.  Without that, of course, no one can qualify for food stamps.

Even at that, once she was in the Department’s office, holding a .38 caliber pistol, the agency agreed to provide her benefits amounting to over $3,000, but she killed herself and her children anyway.  So it doesn’t look like the callousness of state bureaucrats will suffice to deflect blame from Mom in this case.

Exactly who Rachelle Grimmer was seems a matter for debate.  Some people claim she had mental problems, but those who got to know her say otherwise.  One neighbor at the mobile home park she lived in with her kids described her this way:

“She was a very intelligent person and a very wonderful person, a very good mother. She was not mentally ill…”

A very good mother?  I don’t think so.  From what’s been published so far, she was a hobo and made hobos of her kids.  She grew up in Montana, but moved from place to place, including Ohio and Texas.  She apparently never had a job and lived exclusively off the child support her ex-husband Dale Grimmer provided.

At one point, the three were so poor they lived in a tent on the beach near Corpus Christi.  Child Protective Services was called out but concluded that the children had the requisites of life – food and shelter – and were not being injured by their mother.  Case closed.

Some time later, Grimmer moved to a mobile home park near Laredo.  There she sold their only vehicle meaning they had to walk everywhere they went and making any job search she might have wanted to conduct all but impossible.

Grimmer applied for food stamps, but was disqualified for emergency services because she received child support.  Still, non-emergency food stamps take only about 12 days to receive if proof of income has been given to the DHHS.  Grimmer never did that.  The agency sent her numerous letters requesting it and finally closed her file with yet another letter explaining that the reason was her failure to provide the documentation.

The next thing anyone knew, Grimmer was marching into the DHHS office with her two children, a pistol and 50 rounds of ammunition.  She took a hostage and dickered with the Department and police for seven hours.  Proof that she had been awarded benefits was slipped under the office door in which the three were locked.  Soon, she hung up the phone with which she was communicating to hostage negotiators, murdered her two children and took her own life.

Predictably, in all the many articles written about the horrific events of that day, the father, Dale Grimmer is barely mentioned.  But what we do know is that his mother has told reporters that her son tried three times before – twice in Montana and once in Ohio – to get custody away from his wife.  He was refused every time.

Likewise, Rachelle Grimmer was well known to state CPS agencies wherever she went.  That’s not hard to understand.  A woman who maintains her children in such a state of extreme poverty and deprivation gets people’s attention and some of them report her to child welfare authorities.  But as far as we know now, no such agency ever intervened on behalf of the children.

That seems to include the usual failure of CPS to contact the father when children are in want or in danger.  If any child welfare agency ever contacted Dale Grimmer, no one’s reported it yet, but he was obviously easy to find.  After all, a little over a day after his children were shot, he was at the hospital.  That likely means someone contacted him.  Likewise, he must be known to the Texas Attorney General’s Office because he regularly paid child support.

I certainly don’t argue that, in some way, CPS caseworkers should have anticipated Rachelle Grimmer’s mayhem.  But child welfare agencies in more than one state knew she was an extremely marginal parent.  And yet not one of them thought to ask “would the father be a better alternative?”

Into the bargain, what CPS seemed not to know, Ramie Grimmer knew all too well.  During the stand-off with police, Ramie posted to her FaceBook page the message “may die 2day.”

So what we seem to have is a terrible mother who did much damage to her children long before she killed them.  The children lived in extreme poverty and yet there’s no evidence that this highly intelligent woman ever worked for a living or ever attempted to.  Faced with that, we have a father who was responsible enough to pay his child support, but couldn’t manage to convince anyone – not family courts or child welfare authorities – that he should have custody of his children.

Now they’re dead.

Meanwhile, the news media covering the case show neither the insight nor the curiosity to consider Dale Grimmer.  They, like the family courts and child welfare agencies before them, don’t ask the simple, obvious question the Urban Institute asked five years ago “what about the dad?”