Author: Joomlafreaks

December 12th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
The more we see of international child abduction by parents, the less effective the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction seems.  The Convention is supposed to require signatory countries to return children to their non-abducting parent within 60 days of apprehension.  But the simple fact is that it seldom seems to work.

This may well be another example (Toronto Star, 12/10/11).

Stephen Watkins of Ontario lost his two sons – Alexander, 10 and Christopher, 7 – back in March of 2009.  They were abducted by their non-custodial mother, Edyta Watkins.  Stephen and Edyta were divorced and he had gained primary custody.

Stephen Watkins contends his ex-wife was suffering from post-partum depression and became abusive toward him six months after giving birth to their first child. After a court battle, a judge granted him custody of the children with his ex-wife having access to the boys on weekends.

Then, one Monday morning, his sons’ school called to say the boys hadn’t shown up for class.

A Canada-wide arrest warrant for abduction was issued for their mother, and her name appeared on the RCMP’s most wanted list. York Regional Police allege the mother and children drove into the U.S. and then flew to Germany.

After that, the trail went cold.

So, his first child is now 10 years old.  He was abducted by the mother at age eight.  Her emotional/psychological abuse of Stephen began six months after Alexander was born. 

After over two years, he’s finally located them in his ex-wife’s native Poland.  He traveled to Warsaw and visited briefly with his two boys who looked much the same, but behaved very differently than before.

The short encounter was bittersweet.

“When I see my kids, they don’t call me daddy,” said Watkins. “They call me by my first name.” He accused his ex of brainwashing them.

Another article reports it this way (CTV, 12/10/11).

“They looked the same after two-and-a-half years,” Watkins told CTV News Saturday in an interview from Poland. “But they looked very stressed out and they seemed very angry…I can understand it would be very confusing for children.”

In short, the mother, who emotionally abused Watkins badly enough to lose custody and then abducted the children, seems now to be alienating them as well.

Canadian authorities issued an arrest warrant for Edyta Watkins when she first abducted the boys, but Canada and Poland have no extradition treaty, so her criminal wrongdoing will go unpunished as long as she remains in Poland.

That leaves the Hague Convention as Stephen’s only recourse to get his children back and away from their mother who appears to be willing to abuse anyone in her family in order to deprive her ex-husband of his children.  Mental health professionals long ago identified parental child abduction as child abuse, and so it seems here.  After only a few minutes with his boys, Watkins could tell their abduction, separation from him and possible alienation were causing the boys emotional/psychological harm.

But the more we see of the Hague Convention, the more frail a reed it appears on which to rely to protect children from exactly the type of abuse the Watkins boys have experienced.  The Watkins case is a perfect example of one in which the Polish court should immediately order the children returned to their father.  He’s the parent with primary custody and there’s evidence that the mother is less than fit.  Into the bargain, she obviously wants to deny the children a father.

So the case is a slam-dunk win for Stephen Watkins, right?  After all, his is exactly the type of case the Convention is supposed to address. 

Not so fast.  In the first place, even if the court issues the right order this Thursday when it hears the case, it’s so far taken no action to prevent the mother from absconding with the children again.  You’d think that would be an obvious thing to do given the known facts of the case, but so far no order has been issued.

And when the court does hear the case, it can always decide that the children have gotten used to their new surroundings and it would therefore not be in their best interests to re-place them in their father’s care.  We’ve seen British courts do that more than once recently under circumstances that made clear that the words “best interests of the child” were just a proxy for pro-mother bias. 

What’s to prevent that in the Watkins case?  Nothing that I can see.  Maybe that’s why the title of the CTV article says the children are “in legal limbo.”  Face it, the Convention is clear and Stephen Watkins’ rights are clear; so are his children’s.  The only “legal limbo” is whether the Polish court will enforce those rights.  Or will it fall back on the excuse that the boys have been in Poland for two of their 10 and 7 years and so, in some way, they need to remain there rather than returning to the country in which they’ve spent almost their entire lives?

You wouldn’t think a court could ignore all the obvious reasons to return the children to their father and to their home country, but we’ve seen it done too many times to hold out a lot of hope for Stephen Watkins and his boys.

We’ll see.  So far, the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction seems to be violated by judges almost as often as by parents.

December 12th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
You’d think that defending paternity fraud would be a pretty tough thing to do.  After all, you have to think of justifications for lying to the man who thinks he’s the dad but isn’t, lying to the man who thinks he’s not the dad but is and lying to the child.  And all for what?  To protect a woman’s right to do all of the above.  If paternity fraud were a debate topic, I wouldn’t want the ”pro” side.

But there are those who do, as this article shows (Care 2.com, 12/10/11).

It’s an odd piece to say the least.  I suppose the most important thing a reader could learn from it is how entirely bankrupt are the arguments in favor of keeping men and children in the dark about paternity.  Still,  the writer, Annie Urban, gives it her best shot.

That she begins her piece with a complete irrelevancy lets the reader know that she’s grasping at straws.  She leads off with a reference to a case that’s recently made the news in which a father just discovered the whereabouts of his daughter after the mother abducted her 18 years ago.  What that has to do with paternity fraud Urban never mentions, for what must be obvious reasons.

To her credit, though, once she actually starts dealing with her topic, Urban is reasonably straightforward about why she thinks mandatory DNA testing of children to determine paternity is a bad idea.

[The Canadian Children’s Rights Council] argues that under the current system, women know for sure if they are the mother or not, but men don’t. This puts women at an advantage and men at a disadvantage.

If mandatory paternity tests are implemented, the tables will be turned. Women, who get pregnant while having an affair will be “punished” for doing so in all cases. Men, however, who get a woman pregnant while having an affair will only be “punished” for doing so if there is a way to track them down and test them in order to obtain a match.

Now, leave aside for a while the strange notion that providing men and children with accurate information about paternity constitutes “punishing” anyone.  Urban’s frank point is about power.  As things now exist, the power is all in the hands of women.  If a woman wants to deceive two men about the paternity of a child, she can usually do so.  Requiring genetic testing of children would mean “the tables will be turned,” and that’s a no-no to Urban.

What’s most remarkable of course about the piece is that it never once mentions the right of a child to know his/her true biological father.  The medical reasons alone should be sufficient to mandate testing of all children.  What person wants to live life falsely believing that a certain man is his/her father, and therefore believing – and informing doctors about – that man’s tendencies toward medical conditions, diseases, etc.?  That same person would of course also not know his/her true medical risks because true paternity would be unknown.  For that matter, what mother keeps a child in darkness about his/her medical heritage?

The answer is this:  the type of mother Urban wants to protect from any and all consequences of the choices she makes.  After all, the vast majority of mothers tell the truth about who the father of their child is.  More accurately, they don’t have to because the guy who assumes he’s the father usually is the father.  The simple fact about requiring DNA testing is that the only mothers who need to worry are the ones who are trying to pull a fast one on three different people.

One service Urban does is provide some interesting statistics.

For example, [the Canadian Children’s Rights Council] cite[s] a survey in Scotland where 50% of women said they would lie if they became pregnant by a man other than their partner if they wanted to stay with that partner. They cite another study from the BBC that indicates that one in 24 fathers is not the biological father.

That second statistic is about half of what I’ve estimated the rate to be in the United States.

And Urban makes one good suggestion.

If [the CCRC]’s proposal was going to be implemented, perhaps it should come with the option of in utero testing (which can now be done via non-invasive procedure at 12 weeks), so that the woman would still have time to consider her options or make arrangements if she is in fact going to be left alone to raise a baby.

Fine by me.  If pre-birth testing is preferable to a woman or a couple, I have no objections.  The point is to find out the identity of the father as early as possible so all parties can proceed accordingly.

One of Urban’s many straw men is the idea that if men get to know the truth about their paternity, women will have to raise the children alone.  That’s a strange argument to make in a culture in which 40% of children are born to single women.  But more importantly, she offers no support for the proposition.  The fact is that most fathers are passionately devoted to their children.  For that there’s a great deal of support from such researchers as Sanford Braver and the massive ongoing study called Fragile Families and Child Well-being.

So it’s not the lack of a father that Urban’s concerned about; it’s taking the selection of the father away from the mother that’s got her knickers in knot.  In that, her article is all of a piece with so much anti-father propaganda.   More and more, the anti-dad crowd shows its true colors which are all about mothers controlling fathers’ rights to children and children’s rights to their father.  Ultimately, it’s a losing argument; children need their fathers and anyone who’s truly pro-child will admit as much and fight for the connection between fathers and children.

Urban fights against that connection and in time history will bury her along with her threadbare claims.

 

December 13th, 2011 by FAF Staff
Fathers and Families opposes the “deadbeat dad” and “deadbeat mom” roundups that law enforcement agencies often conduct before Christmas or Father’s Day. All parents–fathers and mothers–should support their children both emotionally and financially, and it is certainly true that some fail to do so. However, most so-called “deadbeat” parents aren’t willful scofflaws–they are instead manufactured by an unjust, error-riddled, bureaucratic system.

From Hudson County Sheriff’s officers round up deadbeat parents in statewide crackdown (Jersey Journal/NJ.com, 12/13/11):

Dozens of deadbeat dads and one deadbeat mom in Hudson County, owing a total of $879,461 in child support, were busted last week by Hudson County Sheriff’s officers as part of a statewide crackdown on delinquent parents, officials said yesterday.

From Tuesday through Thursday, local officers participating in the Camden-based Sheriff’s Association of New Jersey’s annual statewide sweep arrested 51 people owing a total $723,760 and collected $13,059 in unpaid child support. On Saturday, they arrested nine more who owed a total of $155,700.

“It is unacceptable to evade or ignore a court-ordered child support payment. This is illegal and will not be tolerated,” Hudson County Sheriff Frank X. Schillari said in a statement.

“Those fathers who are still out there should not rest easy as my office is on the lookout for them every day. They will be found”…

Glenn Sacks, Executive Director of Fathers and Families, a national organization that advocates for noncustodial parents and is pushing to reform child support and custody regulations, says that many of those arrested are simply unable to afford to pay the debt.

“It is very hard to get courts to modify child support downwards after an obligor loses his job or suffers a drop in income,” Sacks said.

“There are many fathers who feel with abundant justification they were mistreated in family court,” he added. “If we’re concerned about collecting unpaid child support, the first thing we should do is ensure that fathers get fair child custody arrangements and that those arrangements are enforced.”

It is interesting to note that Hudson County Sheriff Frank X. Schillari specifically speaks of “fathers” who his “office is on the lookout for.” There are more fathers behind on their child support than mothers simply because mothers get custody.

According to US Census data, noncustodial mothers are 20% more likely to default on their child support obligations than noncustodial fathers. This is despite the fact that noncustodial mothers are less likely to be required to pay child support, and those with support obligations are asked to pay a lower percentage of their income in child support than noncustodial fathers.

To learn more, see the Fox News article “Moms Can Be Deadbeats, Too.” Also, we lay out the problems with the child support system in more detail in our column ‘Deadbeat Dad’ Raids Unfairly Target Hard-Luck Dads (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 6/19/10).

To comment on the Jersey Journal/NJ.com piece, click here.

December 14th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
Fred Martens met his seven-year-old son for the first time last week.  Read about it here (Herald Sun, 12/6/11).  Here’s my original post on him.

Martens is the Australian pilot who, up until 2004, had several thriving businesses in Papua New Guinea.  One of those, Pioneer Health Services, involved flying doctors into the country to provide medical care.  He also ran construction companies and a security company.  But then Martens got caught up in a bitter custody battle with his wife Raina, and it seems the playing field in family court wasn’t exactly level. 

That’s because the Australian Federal police conspired with Raina Martens to charge, try and convict Fred of the rape of a 14-year-old girl in PNG.  Those claims arose for the first time during his divorce and custody cases and were made by Raina, but one police officer, Tania Stokes became an enthusiastic participant.  She falsified evidence and submitted a false affidavit to the criminal court saying that flight records showed Fred Martens to have been in PNG at the time of the alleged assault.  In fact, they showed the opposite – that he was in Australia on the date in question.

But Martens’ legal team couldn’t pry the records away from the Federal Police until he’d been in prison, convicted of rape, for almost 1,000 days.  Eventually they were able to get the records, prove his innocence and get his conviction overturned.  Now he’s suing the Australian government for $45 million due to its malicious prosecution and incarceration of him.  That case is ongoing.

Mr Martens alleges the prosecution was organised by his ex-wife Raina Martens, with whom he was locked in a bitter custody battle, and the statement of claim alleges she arranged interviews between the girl and police.

In short, the police worked hand-in-glove with Martens’ ex-wife to falsely accuse and incarcerate him and deprive him of his children.

With his civil suit in progress, Fred Martens has finally gotten to see his son Lee who was born just three weeks after he was imprisoned.

A tearful Mr. Martens told reporters it was a remarkable experience to finally meet his child.

“There’s no words for it, no words,” he said.

Mr. Martens said he was in the process of getting his other children to Australia.

“I’ll get them all home, don’t you worry.  It might take a while, but I’ll get them all home,” he said.

Of Raina Martens, there’s not a word.  Likewise, there’s nothing about why it took Fred some three years to get to see Lee after his conviction was overturned.  With whom have the children been living?  Has Raina been punished for lying to courts and police?  Has her malicious behavior affected her custodial rights?  What about all the employees of Martens’ companies who surely lost their jobs when his businesses went under due to his incarceration?  Have they found work?  How did their families fare during their unemployment?

So far, the Australian press has been silent on those issues preferring to focus on Fred and his civil suit against the government.  Perhaps we’ll learn in time.

December 14th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
Our old friend Maryanne Godboldo of Detroit is back in the news.  Here’s the latest (Detroit News, 12/12/11).

Oh, I know you thought that case was over and it should be.  Indeed, it should never have been a case in the first place, but it’s gone on for many months now and, according to county prosecutors, it’s not over yet.  Cue the Yogi Berra quotation.

Godboldo and her daughter Arianna may be this year’s poster children for outrageous state intervention into family life.  If there’s a more extreme case of exactly that, I can’t recall it.

In a nutshell, Arianna was 13 when the case began.  She was having mental problems and Maryanne and their pediatrician tried the girl on anti-psychotic medication.  That seemed to Maryanne to only make matters worse, so she stopped the medication.

Somehow, Wayne County Child Protective Services caseworker Mia Wenk got wind of that and filled out a form order to remove Arianna from her mother’s care.  In what must be the most remarkable part of the case, she went to court and got it stamped by a clerk at the court.  As far as I can tell, the judge never even knew about the order that his court issued.

Let’s stop there and let the full impact of that sink in.  First, Wenk decided on her own to remove the child with apparently no consultation with anyone, not a supervisor, not Godboldo, not the doctor.  She then decided that the matter was an emergency, so Godboldo was never informed that a proceeding against her had begun.  Wenk went to court where apparently these orders are so routinely issued that the judge wasn’t even present, no evidence was produced and a clerk “signed” the order with a rubber stamp.  How much of that looks like due process of law to you?

The most outrageous aspect of the whole thing is that what was done is obviously routine for both CPS and the courts.  This time they got caught, but mostly they don’t.

So, having obtained her civil order, Wenk told the police it was a criminal warrant.  The police showed up at Godboldo’s residence and informed her that they were there to take her daughter away.  Remember, that was the first time Godboldo had heard that any action against her was under way.  Needless to say, she refused to give up her daughter, which prompted the police to take the child by force.

Apparently to cover their own wrongdoing, they arrested Godboldo, claiming she’d taken a shot at them.  The only trouble with that is that there was no evidence she’d done any such thing.  Apparently no bullet was ever produced, no shell casings, no holes in the walls or windows, nothing.

So Maryanne spent a few days in jail and Arianna spent two months in a mental facility where the doctors – wait for it – didn’t give her the medication Maryanne had refused to give her.  And sure enough, Arianna improved.  It turned out that Maryanne was doing the right thing after all.

Eventually, criminal charges were dropped and Arianna was returned to her mother’s care.

But, as is so often the case, doing the right thing as a parent isn’t good enough for CPS.  And having committed no criminal wrong isn’t good enough for the county prosecutor’s office.  The simple fact is that the wrongdoers in this entire case are CPS and the police.  To the bureaucratic mind, that means they can never cease attempting to cast blame on someone else, i.e. in this case, Maryanne Godboldo.

But the local courts aren’t having it.  Yesterday, two more judges told county prosecutors to go back where they came from.  In family court, the prosecutor’s office was representing CPS that is still determined to wrest Godboldo’s daughter from her.  Their latest claim is that Godboldo homeschools the girl.  That of course is perfectly legal assuming it’s done right, but CPS just can’t seem to let a decent mother be a decent mother.  They screwed up royally and they’re desperate to deflect blame.

And, Family Court Judge Lynne Pierce told Assistant Attorney General Deborah Carley, who complained it appears the girl has never received anything other than homeschooling her entire life, she is not barred from pursuing criminal truancy charges if she feels the parents are flouting state law that required the education of children.

“There may be some more evaluation to be done, but I don’t see any more need of this court’s continued involvement,” Pierce said.

That’s judge-talk for “Get your lousy case out of my courtroom.”

Meanwhile in criminal court, a second judge ruled that a previous one had acted properly in dismissing all charges against Godboldo.

Wayne County Circuit Judge Gregory Bill ruled in the morning against claims by the prosecutor that 36th District Judge Ronald Giles committed judicial error in August when he threw out the criminal charges. Bill said Giles was correct in concluding there was insufficient evidence to order Godboldo to trial.

“It is clear to me that he (Giles) doesn’t think the defendant shot at anybody,” Bill said, concluding if a shot was fired inside the house, it was fired at the ceiling and perhaps not by the mother.

Godboldo’s attorneys have known all along what the case is about.

Godboldo’s lawyers have said all along this was about parental rights to make medical decisions on behalf of their children, and the government abused its authority in obtaining an order to take the child without a court hearing.

That’s about the size of it and from what I can gather, that’s how most people see the case.  So what does CPS do?  They make a bad situation worse.  Instead of admitting that Wenk behaved wrongly, they want to cast blame on Godboldo, enhancing the perception of a public agency run amok.

Just in case anyone misses the point, county prosecutors have announced they’ll appeal the criminal court’s ruling again.  Four judges have ruled against them.  Now they’re going for five.

There’s a message here for all parents in the Detroit area.  It’s about the use of state power.  CPS is announcing loudly and clearly that parents, regardless of how fit and responsible, must obey the dictates of caseworkers, regardless of how arbitrary, abusive or outside the law.  Failure to obey will become a judicial nightmare for the parent whose financial resources will never equal those of the state.

CPS lost this one fair and square.  But all parents know that, when CPS comes knocking on their door, they might not be as lucky as Maryanne Godboldo.

December 15th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
Solomon Metalwala’s son Sky still hasn’t been found, although this story says police may have a lead (News.Gather.com, 12/13/11).

It seems a man in an Ikea store in Renton, Washington spotted a couple with a small boy in a stroller.  He thought the adults might be Russian or Ukrainian and that the child might be Sky.  He alerted police who are now studying the security video to see if they can identify the two adults who were in the store that day.

That seems like a long shot, but you never know.  I’ve believed all along that Sky’s mother, Julia Biryukova, stashed the boy with friends or relatives.  The most telling thing about her behavior to date is that she’s made no effort to find the boy.  While Solomon has been doing everything he can to locate Sky, Biryukova has done nothing whatsoever, including talking to police.  Is that the way a normal parent would behave when his/her child has been kidnapped by strangers as Biryukova claims?  Hardly.

So Biryukova clearly knows what happened to the two-year-old.

Meanwhile, Solomon Metalwala has gotten custody of his daughter Maile, 4.  Despite the fact that he’s clearly a fit and loving parent, it took him almost six weeks to wrest control of the girl from the Washington State Department of Health and Human Services.  She was in foster care all that time, which must have been traumatic for her given that her little brother had just vanished from her life.

Why wasn’t she turned over immediately to her father when Sky disappeared and Maile was taken from her mother?  One reason seems to be that that’s just the way the child welfare agency operates.  They seem to place children in foster care regardless of everything while they investigate the fitness of the parent to whom custody should be given.  That presumption of unfitness on the part of the parent, along with the parallel presumption of fitness on the part of the foster parent looks like a funny way to protect children, but there it is.

The more important factor in keeping Maile from her father was likely that there was an existing restraining order, issued in March by Commissioner Jacqueline Jeske at the request of Biryukova, keeping Solomon out of his children’s lives.

So when the juvenile court decided recently that Solomon should have custody of Maile, it did so with one reservation – that Jeske’s order be lifted.  Obviously, one court can’t order a parent to have custody when that parent is prohibited from even being near the child.  That would put the parent in the position of violating one order for the purpose of carrying out the other.

So Jeske promptly lifted her order keeping Solomon away from Maile.

And that raises an obvious question that so far no one has seen fit to ask: if the order was so easily lifted, why was it in place to begin with?  The original order that was issued last March had essentially no objective evidence to back it up.  It was requested by Biryukova who was in the middle of a bitter divorce and custody proceeding.  Biryukova had spent time in mental institutions, and that fact threatened her chances of getting custody of the couple’s two children.  So she hit back at Solomon with allegations of abuse that were utterly without foundation.

But the lack of evidence didn’t stop Jeske from tossing Metalwala out of his children’s lives.  And, as we so often see, that readiness to separate fathers from children can have the worst of consequences.  Children sometimes die, children sometimes are abducted because courts too readily believe that fathers are dangerous to them.

So the question needs to be asked; more importantly, it needs to be answered.  After all, if Metalwala was such a bad dad that he couldn’t be alone with his children back in March, how did he become such a good dad that he got all but sole custody of Maile in December?  He’d had virtually no contact with his children, so how could he prove his fitness?  What had changed?

The answer is that nothing had changed to encourage Jeske to rescind her order, but rescind it she did.  The glaring truth is that she shouldn’t have issued the order in the first place.  Her recission of the order is a frank admission of exactly that. 

Solomon Metalwala hasn’t changed an iota.  The only thing that changed between March and December is that Julia Biryukova has proved once again that she’s not to be trusted with children.  We knew that in March.  In fact we knew that for a year before that.  But Commissioner Jacqueline Jeske ignored known facts about Biryukova’s unfitness and Metalwala’s fitness as parents.  She did the thing that’s become standard operating procedure in family courts; she issued a no-contact order against a father based on the slimmest of plainly pretextual claims by a mother.  Predictably, that turned out to be the wrong thing to have done.

Jeske’s lifting of her order is an admission of guilt.  She should never have cut Solomon Metalwala out of his children’s lives.  If she had acted more responsibly, Sky might be with us today.

Lest anyone conclude that I’m singling out Jeske for censure, I’m not.  Indeed, if she were the only family judge issuing no-contact orders on little evidence, I wouldn’t be so peeved, but she’s not; far from it.  The whole point is that what Jeske did is the rule in family courts, not the exception.  Until real due process of law returns to those courts, until real evidence of abuse, endangerment or unfitness is required before no-contact orders can be issued, we’ll see more children killed and abducted.  It’s predictable as the sunrise.

December 15th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
I complain a fair amount about courts, child welfare agencies and the like overlooking fathers.  It seems that you can make book on the fact that, if a child is taken from a mother, CPS will put it into foster care rather than attempt to find the dad.  The same holds true in adoption cases, custody cases and the like.

Well, Michael Lorrigan can tell us that what’s true for the courts and CPS is true for the news media too.

Start by reading this article which is actually only one of many in the same vein(Daily Mail, 12/12/11).  It tells the story of a mother, Tess Lorrigan, a  British citizen living in Dubai, U.A.E.  She lived there for a time with her British husband, Michael Lorrigan, but their marriage fell apart, and they split up.  Then what do you suppose her callous husband did?  He used a local law forbidding married women from working without their husband’s permission to have her deported back to the U.K.  Worse, she was forced to leave their adopted daughter, Olianne, behind with him. 

A British mother has been deported from Dubai – and forced to leave her six-year-old daughter behind – for working without her estranged husband’s permission.

Secondary school teacher Tess Lorrigan was in her classroom with a group of 13-year-old children when she was arrested by immigration officials and thrown into one of the Middle Eastern state’s notoriously tough prisons for two days.

Tess claims he lodged the complaint after becoming bitter over their tug-of-love battle for Olianne.

What a cad!  Worse, he’s a typical male, lording it over his innocent wife who wants nothing more than to support herself and care for her child, right?  That’s the message of the 400-word article, about 60 of which refer at all to Michael’s side of the story.

But, as Paul Harvey used to say, now for the rest of the story.  Read about it here (Gulf News, 12/15/11).

It turns out that Michael offers a few details the DM neglected.  And that’s interesting because the Daily Mail’s reporter talked to him, she just didn’t let her readers know what he had to say.

Michael tells it this way.  He came back from a business trip to find his wife, his child, all their pets and all their furniture gone.  Having no idea of what had happened (she hadn’t had the courtesy to leave a note), Michael filed a missing persons report, and a few weeks later, Tess called.

“Over the next 10 months, my life turned into a nightmare. I was constantly pleading with Tess to allow me to see my daughter. I offered to pay her Dh70,000 a year for rent, plus the cost of our daughter’s education, in exchange for having access to my own child! But logic doesn’t work with my wife. Weeks would slip past without her answering my phone calls or replying to my messages.”

Michael said he then hired the service of a lawyer. “We found out that Tess was illegally employed in a British curriculum school in Sharjah, which is where she had also registered our daughter without my permission. Despite my lawyer’s hesitation, I contacted the school asking for help.”

In a letter to the headmaster, Michael wrote, “My wife has played God over the past few months in deciding exactly when and where I can have access to the things I love… My lawyer has consistently instructed me to … go to the Immigration and educational ministries to file complaints … I will do so next week if we cannot meet and discuss this matter and find a resolution… She has been told that unless she is reasonable in granting me access to my daughter and the animals, I will be taking action. She has chosen to ignore these comments.”

When all warnings failed, Michael complained to the concerned authorities. By May 2011 Tess was arrested and held overnight in police custody. Their daughter, meanwhile, was back with her father.

“I never did any of this to hurt Tess or separate her from our child. Despite all the times she denied me access to my child, I never once denied her access to our daughter. My only rule was that she would have to come home to see our daughter. She wasn’t allowed to take her out of the house. All the lies my wife has been spreading in the British newspapers are appalling.”

Michael said he acted as guarantor so that Tess could be released from police custody. “It was because I gave in my passport that Tess was allowed out of jail. And it was my passport that stayed with the police until last month when my wife was deported to the UK,” says Michael.

“Her allegations that it was my fault that she was deported are untrue. When she lost the case for illegal employment, I begged her to appeal. I said I would pay for everything. Against my lawyer’s wishes, I was ready to help Tess stay. But the more I tried, the more she pushed me away. She said she was fed up of Dubai. It was a blow to me. The absolute worst is that she’s now telling the world that I’ve abducted her daughter. Nothing could be further from the truth,” says Michael. “The truth is that Tess has conveniently misplaced our daughter’s passport. She says she doesn’t have it any more, but that ‘it must be somewhere.’ But until she figures out where that somewhere is, our daughter can’t travel to the UK. And my wife can’t come back to Dubai following her deportation. And that’s the honest truth.”

So Michael is in fact a bit less of a scoundrel than the Daily Mail would have readers believe.  In fact, according to him, all he wanted to do was see his child.  Tess consistently refused, but even then all he did was offer to pay her rent and for Olianne’s education, all in exchange for what he should have had all along – some face time with his daughter.  Despite his attorney’s prodding to be tougher, Michael warned Tess of the consequences, but still she ignored him.  Now she’s been deported according to the laws of the country in which she was residing.  And she, with the help of the Daily Mail, wants us to believe that Michael is Snidely Whiplash.

It’s a remarkable case, but an even more remarkable exercise in legerdemain on the part of the Daily Mail’s reporter.  How she can portray a man who wanted nothing but to see his child as the villain and the mother who did everything she could to prevent him doing so as the heroine is quite an accomplishment.  I’d like to say I don’t know how she did it, but I do. 

Like courts, she ignored the dad.

 

December 15th, 2011 by Ned Holstein,
MD, MS, Founder and Chairman of the Board All I want for the holidays is shared parenting in every state.  Give to make shared parenting the norm in America.

Fathers and Families is fighting to restore respect in this society for all that you do as fathers.  The love you shower on your children, the long hours you work on their behalf, the sacrifices you make to protect them.

Be a driver, not a passenger.  Stand up for yourself and for your children.

Give to treat mothers and fathers as equally important to the well-being of their children.

Shared parenting across America is the biggest step we, as a society, can take to improve the lives of our children.    Our children need us.  They long for us.  We are in their hearts.

Give today to improve the lives of our children.

For the love of our children,

Ned Holstein, MD, MS
Founder and Chairman of the Board

Glenn Sacks, MA
Executive Director

P.S. We are the strongest voice standing up for you, as a father, in the media and in the halls of the legislatures.  To see our accomplishments, click here.

PO Box 270760
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December 16th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
The roll-back of shared parenting laws in Australia is barely two weeks old, when this appears (Sydney Morning Herald, 12/15/11).

It seems that the Australian Association for Infant Mental Health has published “guidelines,” presumably for use by family court judges in deciding custody and visitation issues for children under the age of two.  The guidelines have no legal authority and there’s no indication of who, if anyone, asked the Association to publish them.

In a nutshell, they say that divorced or separated fathers should have minimal contact with their children prior to the age of two.  Oh, they don’t say ‘fathers.’  They employ the euphemism “primary parent,” but we all know who that is.  In Australia, over 90% of parents with primary custody are mothers.  According to the guidelines, that leaves dads out in the cold.

…Wayne Butler, executive secretary of the Shared Parenting Council of Australia, fears they will influence judge’s rulings.

”When parents are together, they care for the babies on a shared basis,” Mr Butler said. ”There’s no reason why there couldn’t be reasonable overnight contacts [after separation] when the parents are co-operative.”

Mr. Butler is right, of course.  From here on, there won’t be a custody case in the country regarding a child under two, in which the mother’s attorney doesn’t wave the guidelines in the judge’s face.  That’s because the guidelines say frankly that there should be only one primary parent during a child’s first two years of life.  And we all know who that is – Mom.  According to the guidelines, overnight visits with the non-primary parent “should be avoided unless necessary.”  What “necessary” means in that context is left unexplained.

So, if the guidelines are implemented, what does Dad get?

The guidelines recommend that non-custodial parents, nine out of 10 of whom are fathers, should instead see children under two during the day, up to three times a week, gradually phasing in overnight visits after the second birthday.

So the guidelines recommend that dad should see Junior during the day, i.e. when Dad’s at work earning to pay court-ordered child support.  As a practical matter, that means he sees his newborn rarely if ever until he/she is two and then he gets “gradually phased into the child’s life.”

I don’t know what planet the members of the Association inhabit, but the idea of that happening in the extremely anti-father world of Australian family courts would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.  The simple fact is that the guidelines will be used first to deny fathers real time with their newborn children.  Then, when the child reaches age two, courts will be told that Dad hasn’t spent time with the child and so hasn’t “earned the right” to parent in the future.

Whether that’s the intention of the Association, I don’t know.  In the absence of such information, I’ll attribute more benign motives to its members.  I’ll say, until I know differently, that these people are academic researchers with an imperfect grasp of what actually happens in family courts, and let it go at that.

Amazingly, the guidelines are based on a single study completed in 2010 by Dr. Jennifer McIntosh and others.  Here it is.

If you have the time, it’s an interesting read, mostly because its methodology and findings do little to back up the conclusions the Association drew.  The study deals with children from birth to five years old, with a special section devoted to those under two.  It sought to find out if those children undergo emotional stress from spending overnights with a non-custodial parent.  So it compares infants in intact families to those with various ranges of shared care.  Some of the non-custodial parents had essentially no contact with their child.  Others had between one and 11 overnight visits per year; still others had 1 – 3 nights per month; another group had 1 – 2 nights per week and the final group had up to five nights every two weeks.

The researchers gathered data in three areas – whether the child had been sick (with “wheezing”), its level of irritability and its level of visual monitoring of the primary parent.  “Wheezing” seems to be a proxy for anxiety, while monitoring the parent seems to indicate stress.

Now, all that is very worthwhile, but the study has some very obvious flaws and weaknesses, many of which are acknowledged in its write-up.  For example, the sample surveyed is tiny; only 258 children were considered.  But of those, 174 (67.4%) had little or no contact with their fathers.  That means that the entire cohort of children studied who had one or more nights per week with their father numbered 63.

More important, was how the data were gathered.  The researchers asked the primary parent for her observations about whether the child appeared anxious, followed her with its eyes, cried easily and was difficult to comfort, and the like.  So, with the exception of illness, 100% of the data are subjective.  If a mother reads anxiety in her little one, that’s what she reported.  If not, she didn’t.  But there was no effort to quantify or objectify any of the observations.  Mothers projecting their own anxieties were treated the same as those who weren’t.  The researchers might be able to make a case for that methodology if the cohort of subjects had been large, but it wasn’t.  That means errors in gathering and recording data could have resulted in signficant errors in the conclusions drawn.

Not only that, but no non-custodial parents were interviewed about their observations of the children they cared for.  That’s right, not one.  Of course almost all of the non-custodial parents of the children in the study were fathers.  If I read the data correctly a grand total of two fathers contributed information to the researchers out of the non-intact families.

Do the researchers think that might inject a bit of gender bias into their findings?  If they do they don’t let on about it.  And when you consider it, that’s a strange way to conduct a study.  After all, many of these fathers had almost no contact with their children, but 83 of them had a fair amount.  That means they were available to the researchers to be asked their views on their children’s level of stress or contentment.  But they weren’t asked.

Morerover, the mothers who took part in the survey bear little resemblance to Australians generally.  For example, from 0% to 3.39% of the mothers worked full-time, while 78% – 83% worked not at all.  An astonishing 79% – 90% of the mothers relied on government support for their income.  The mothers with infants under the age of two were overwhelmingly poor, underemployed and undereducated.

All that and more raise the obvious question ”were the babies stressed because they spent the night with their non-custodial parent or because their custodial parent was stressed?”  It’s a question the researchers neither asked nor answered.

Worse, if their data supports their conclusion, I can’t see it.  There seem to be significantly fewer children ill with wheezing who are in the exclusive care of their primary parent than those with more non-custodial parent contact.  But whether that actually is a proxy for anxiety or not looks like an open question.

But on the other two markers, irritability and visual monitoring, significant differences aren’t present at all.  Go to page 133 of the study and the two charts indicate only tiny differences among the four groups of parental arrangements.  Indeed, children with one or more overnights per week are exactly as irritable as those in intact families.  But the overwhelming conclusion is that keeping fathers out of the lives of their infants affects their stress level slightly if at all.

The researchers don’t notice it, but their findings could argue as strongly for breaking up intact families and turning over the infants to mothers as well as they do for keeping fathers out of the children’s lives. 

At the end of the study, the researchers take pains to point out its limitations and argue for more research to be done to iron out the wrinkles in their work.  One of the obvious problems they acknowledge is that parents who pass off children to each other for overnights may do so because the children are irritable, stressed and the parents need a break.  That is, the researchers may have mistaken an effect for a cause.

In short, this is a single study and a small one with many obvious flaws.  But that didn’t stop the Australian Association for Infant Mental Health from bootstrapping it into a set of guidelines that likely will result in the separation of still more fathers from their children.  That may or may not have been the intention, but it will probably be the result. 

Perhaps the last word should come from a parent who’s lived what the “experts” are recommending.

Caring for a toddler alone can be ”a tremendous burden,” Bunny Banyai, co-author of frank new parenting book Sh*t On My Hands, said. Her daughter Clementine was 18 months old when Ms Banyai separated and it was decided she was too little for overnight stays with dad. But now Ms Banyai regrets it.

”I was almost psychotic with tiredness and so my relationship with my daughter suffered,” she said. ”She was pining for her dad.”

December 18th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
The decline in the rate of marriage is an economic blow to both adults and children.  It’s a blow that has lasting, even intergenerational effects.  Ruth Marcus makes the point here and it can’t be made often enough (Washington Post, 12/16/11).

I’ve complained about the decline in marriage and its effects on children.  One of the reasons children suffer from being brought up in non-marital homes is that those adult relationships are far less stable than are married ones. 
That means it’s far more likely that a child of unmarried parents will lose one of them (usually its father) than a child of married parents.  That can be emotionally/psychologically devastating both in the short term and in the grown-up child’s ability to form healthy romantic relationships.

That’s always been my focus, but Marcus’ is different.  She emphasizes the economic impact of the decline in marriage, and she’s right to do so.  First, it should be obvious that two individual adults tend to be less well-to-do than if they form a couple.  When they do, their incomes remain the same, but their expenses decrease.

But that’s far from the only economic aspect of marriage.  In the United States, the well-educated and the financially well-to-do figured out long ago that marriage was the way to go.  It turns out that those who don’t marry are overwhelmingly those who are already poor and poorly educated.  The decline in marriage rates reflects their decisions far more than those of the better educated, higher earners.

In 1960, the most- and least-educated adults were equally likely to be married. Now, nearly two-thirds of college graduates are married, compared with less than half of those with a high school diploma or less. Those with less education are less likely to ever marry and more likely to divorce if they do.

So when we talk about widening wealth gaps in this country, one important thing we’re talking about is the decline of marriage.  With the Occupy movement bringing wealthy inequality into the national spoltlight, you might have thought something as obvious as marriage would have become part of that discussion.  As far as I can see, however, Marcus’ column is the first to raise the issue.

“Family structure is a new dividing line in American society,” Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution told me.

As marriage increasingly becomes a phenomenon of the better-off and better-educated, the incomes of two-earner married couples diverge more and more from those of struggling single adults.

More importantly, the failure to marry, with its attendant detriments, tends to transfer from parents to children, who, when they grow up, repeat the pattern.

Of even more concern is the generational impact of this increased inequality. Being raised in a stable, two-parent household is a strong determinant of educational achievement. In turn, educational achievement is a strong — and growing stronger — determinant of lifetime income. As a result, the marriage gap becomes a grimly self-perpetuating process.

And the converse is true as well.  People who don’t marry tend to have unstable adult relationships and lower living standards that those who do.  Their kids, having grown up in families where adult romantic partners come and go, never form the attachments necessary to stable adult relationships.

In short, marriage tends to perpetuate financial and emotional well-being which in turn perpetuate marriage; non-marriage tends to perpetuate the opposite.

It’s not only that those at higher education levels are far more likely to marry — they’re far more likely to marry each other. “Men used to marry their secretaries,” Sawhill observed. “Now they marry the woman they met in med school.”

As a result, Sawhill said, “These two-earner couples at the top are just making out like bandits and these single parents at the bottom have miserable lives. If the single parents were married, their life wouldn’t be so miserable. And at the top, if these high-earning professionals weren’t getting together and forming little collaboratives, they’d be worse off.”

About those collaboratives: More people are cohabiting these days, but as an economic matter, this doesn’t solve the problem…

[C]ohabitation is not the equivalent of marriage in terms of family stability. Demographers Sheela Kennedy and Larry Bumpass found that, by age 12, about two-thirds of children born to cohabiting parents will see them split up, compared with a quarter of children born to parents who are married.

Finally, divorce, or the failure to marry tends to obstruct upward financial mobility.

A different arm of Pew, its Economic Mobility Project, found that among children who started in the bottom third of income, only one-fourth of those with divorced parents moved up to the middle or top third as adults. By comparison, half of children with continuously married parents — and, somewhat surprisingly, 42 percent of those born to unmarried mothers — moved up the income ladder as adults.

A number of factors contributed to the sharp decline in marriage in the United States that’s occurred over the past 40 years.  A historically strong economy in the 60s and early 70s was one thing; the dawn of no-fault divorce was another.  And at the same time, radical feminism condemned marriage as the oppression of women, but as is so often the case, facts failed to line up behind that ideology.  Indeed, they contradict it outright.

Then there are the things that remain from earlier times that continue to promote divorce.  Spousal support laws couldn’t be clearer in their encouragement of women to divorce.  And custody laws that reward mothers with sole or primary custody have been shown to encourage those same mothers to initiate divorce.

We’ve experimented too long with the idea that marriage is unnecessary.  It’s not.  For the sake of children particularly but for adults as well and society generally, we need a resurgence of marriage.  I strongly doubt that legislation mandating or encouraging marriage is likely to do the trick.  That said, I would support making divorce between spouses with children more difficult.

But essentially no institution in all of society sits children down and teaches them the importance of marriage.  I think one should.  I think that children need to get the message early and often that marriage can enhance their emotional and financial well-being.  More importantly, they should be taught an array of things about being responsible for one’s own reproductive choices.  For boys and girls both that means preventing pregnancy until you have the emotional and financial wherewithal to care for a child.  For girls it means telling the truth about who the father of your child is.  Above all, children should be taught the benefits of marriage and commitment to children.  And, if divorce is necessary, people should be taught the value of maintaining both parents’ active involvement in the lives of their children.

One of the reasons there’s been such a decline in marriage is that we make no effort to stop it.

Thanks to Paul for the heads-up.