Author: Joomlafreaks

December 19th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
A veteran of the Iraq war has had his parental rights terminated despite having in no way wronged his child or the mother.  Read about it here (Booneville Democrat, 12/8/11).

The facts of the case are straightforward.  Edward Glover served in the U.S. armed services.  He was deployed to Iraq. 
His wife, Michelle, gave birth to a child, E.G., in November of 2008.  While Edward was serving abroad, Michelle took up with one Maliki Raheem, who had a history of domestic violence.  In April, 2009, it came to the attention of the Arkansas Department of Human Services that E.G. had been severely abused by Raheem.  Here is how one Arkansas Court of Appeals judge described the child’s injuries:

 The abuse was severe: E.G. had scalding on his chest and abdomen, bruising, blood inside his eyes, head injuries, perforation of his stomach, a liver contusion, three rib fractures, bilateral retinal hemorrhages, bruising around the eyes and scalp consistent with trauma, a possible lung contusion, and burns to the abdomen, shoulder, right thigh, and left scrotum.

Edward Glover obtained emergency leave and returned home, but was sent back to Iraq 10 days later.  Glover remained deployed oversees while legal proceedings played out.  The ADHS of course took E.G. into foster care and eventually succeeded in terminating Michelle’s parental rights.  At all but two hearings, Glover was neither present in person nor represented by counsel.

Irrespective of the fact that Glover had done nothing wrong and was never even accused of any form of wrongdoing toward anyone, the trial court, at the request of ADHS, terminated Glover’s parental rights. The Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling.  Indeed, if there was a claim by anyone at any time that Glover had ever in his life done anything to indicate unfitness as a parent, neither the trial nor the appellate court mentioned it.

So how is it possible for a father without a single black mark to entirely lose his  rights to a child, born during his marriage and therefore presumptively his? Apparently the reason the trial judge terminated Glover’s rights is that he didn’t follow the court’s orders to avail himself of certain ADHS “services.”

Now, remember, that ADHS is an agency of the State of Arkansas, but during most of the court proceedings, Glover was nowhere near Arkansas and therefore could not be ”served” by ADHS.  More importantly, the “services” ordered were clearly aimed at a parent who has abused his/her child.  Here they are:

-provide complete medical history for juvenile
-parenting classes
-anger management classes
-forensic psychological evaluation – follow recommendations
-random drug screens
-remain drug free
-remain alcohol free
-provide vital info for fetal alcohol syndrome assessment
-drug and alcohol assessment – follow recommendations
-medication assessment and follow recommendations
-maintain stable and suitable housing
-attend staffings at DHS
-cooperate with Department
-maintain contact with Department
-attend visitation with juvenile
-demonstrate improved parenting
-maintain reliable transportation or seek reasonable assistance from DHS
-complete affidavit of Financial Means
-refrain from criminal or illegal activity

So what we have is a state agency and four separate judges who couldn’t quite grasp the fact that, although there was an abused child and although there was a father in court, the father hadn’t abused the child.  Glover didn’t need any of the “services” ADHS said he needed.

Likewise, the fact that he was out of the country most of the time and in the hospital part of the time when he returned from abroad (after being honorably discharged from military service), and therefore unable to avail himself of the “services,” never seemed to make an impression on the judges or ADHS.

Late in the game, the court appointed counsel to “represent” Glover.  I use quotation marks around the word “represent” because the dissenting justice at the appellate court described that representation this way:

The quality of the appointed counsel’s representation at this late stage of the case supports an inference that the purpose of the appointment was not to assist Mr. Glover in negotiating his way through the juvenile courts to gain custody of E.G., but rather to facilitate his exit by terminating his parental rights.

The dissent’s description is given considerably more weight by the fact that Glover’s lawyer made no effort to assert at trial any of the very obvious legal issues presented by the termination of a fit father’s parental rights.  Having failed to assert them at trial, they couldn’t be asserted on appeal.  To make her malpractice still more obvious, Glover’s attorney filed his appeal but under a “no-merit” procedure.  That’s one in which the lawyer files the appeal because her client demands it, but tells the court it has no merit.  This was “zealous representation” by an attorney?  It’s more like a bad joke.

In short, the lawyer worked hand-in-glove with ADHS and the judges to cut the father out of his child’s life.  My strong belief is that ADHS wanted that all along.  That’s why its counsel convinced the judges to order the long list of “services” for Glover to comply with.  ADHS hoped that Glover wouldn’t comply due to his deployment overseas and failure to comply would lose him his parental rights.  And that’s just what happened.  Some people may call that justice.  I call it a conspiracy.

Not surprisingly, Glover lost his appeal.  The appellate majority said he hadn’t raised any of his issues on appeal, so there was no way he could win.  Fair enough.  Or was it?

On the contrary, the dissenting judge, Josephine Hart, completely destroyed the majority’s summary dismissal of Glover’s appeal.  She points out that, due to a case decided by the Arkansas Supreme Court (the Mahone case) during the pendency of Glover’s case, the state cannot interfere with the parenting rights of a fit parent.

 The Mahone court overruled Judkins and held that custody of a child taken from a custodial parent should result in first shifting custody to the nonoffending, noncustodial parent.

Importantly, the Mahone court relied on U.S. Supreme Court precedent in so ruling.

The United States Supreme Court has stated that it is a fundamental right to parent a child without interference by the state.  Accordingly, there first must be a showing of unfitness before the state may intervene.  The fact that one parent is unfit does not alter the state’s burden to prove that the other parent is also unable to care for the child before it may interfere in the family…   Without a finding of unfitness, the state has no constitutional authority to exercise that power.  Under current Supreme Court authority, the existence of a single fit parent, regardless of the acts of the other parent, negates the state’s ability to interfere in the family unit.

Those are, once again, Judge Josephine Hart’s.  She was writing at the appellate level in Mahone and, when the case got to it, the Arkansas Supreme Court agreed.

More importantly still, the trial court in Glover’s case had no jurisdiction.  In order to exercise any authority over his rights, it had to first find that he was unfit.  It didn’t because he wasn’t.  Therefore, the matter could be raised for the first time on appeal.

It can therefore be raised before the Arkansas Supreme Court.  From here, it looks like a slam-dunk win.

To date, however, the lesson Edward Glover’s case teaches us is just how determined child welfare agencies are to cut fathers out of the lives of their children and how willing courts are to comply.

December 19th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
Visitation orders should be enforced just as vigorously as child support orders.  That’s what this article says, and I agree with one exception (Beacon Journal, 11/6/11).

It’s a slow process.  Equalizing mothers’ and fathers’ rights in family courts should have been easy, but it’s proving to be anything but.  Most people seem to understand that children need two parents in their lives.  Once that basic concept sinks in, others follow.  One of those is that visitation orders should be enforced.

Actually, they should never be issued in the first place.  What family courts should do is issue orders about parenting time.  They shouldn’t name one parent as the custodial parent, the primary custodial parent, the managing conservator, the residential parent, etc.  Orders should simply say that Dad gets the kids every other week and Mom gets them every other week.  Or Dad gets them for the five weekdays and Mom on weekends. Or vice versa.

There should be no concept that one parent is superior to the other.  The order should be about parenting time.  Period.

But of course that’s not how things are done.  Courts are still stuck in the past when a father’s minimal visitation time was called an “award.”  Meager as that is – usually two days out of every two weeks – courts still refuse to enforce it in most cases, and for the most part, no one except the dads who are cut out of their children’s lives seems to care.

But Bob Dyer cares and he demonstrates a pretty firm grasp of the issues in his article on visitation.  Basically, he gets it.  He understands that fathers shouldn’t play second fiddle to mothers.  He understands that children need both parents and he understands the financial and procedural problems dads face in trying to enforce visitation orders.

It seems a non-custodial father named Matt Redovian contacted him because his wife was refusing access to their child.

If the mother of his son consistently defies a formal visitation order, shouldn’t he get help from the powers-that-be without having to spend a small fortune on legal fees?

As Redovian points out, when a man flatly refuses to pay court-ordered child support, the prosecutor’s office is on him like a bad rash, not only initiating felony charges but, in some cases, sticking his mug on billboards for all the world to see.

But when the shoe is on the other foot — a custodial parent blowing off a court order allowing the other parent to see the child every other weekend — nobody in authority rushes to that parent’s defense.

Here’s why: Our lawmakers have decreed that failure to pay child support is a criminal act, but failure to obey a visitation order is merely a civil matter. Therefore, neither the police nor the prosecutor’s office can do much about it…

Summit County Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh says that’s one of the most widely misunderstood aspects of her job, and the misperception bothers her — although she understands why it exists.

“The two [child support and visitation] can be pretty closely related,” she says. “It’s not uncommon that somebody is not paying child support because they aren’t getting visitation, or somebody isn’t giving visitation because they aren’t receiving child support.”

So shouldn’t the legislature equalize the penalties?

“It’s a tough issue,” Walsh said. Decades ago, the law said that “if the woman was denying visitation, she wasn’t entitled to child support. I suspect that got changed because really the issue is, ‘This is child support for the child.’ So you’re punishing the child for the behavior of the mother.”

But isn’t the child also being unfairly punished if he or she is being deprived of a relationship with the father simply because the father and mother can’t get along?

“I think there’s plenty of data to show that if the father is actively involved in his child’s life, it is a positive thing for the child,” Walsh said.

There sure is. When both parties are fit parents, the obvious goal is to find a way for the child to have meaningful relationships with both of them.

That’s why the Summit County Domestic Relations Court in many disputes tries to guide families into a host of diversion, educational and mediation programs.

But in a case where the custodial parent simply refuses to cooperate on visitation, the noncustodial parent has to file a contempt of court motion, pay a $215 filing fee and usually another $600 to $750 for an attorney…

Next comes a hearing. But that can be a long wait. Such is the current backlog that someone filing tomorrow morning would wait at least a month for a hearing with a magistrate. Although the magistrate could rule immediately, in cases where the facts aren’t immediately evident, the proceedings could last another six to nine months.

It’s a good article.  Dyer grasps the fundamentals.  Most importantly, the full force of state enforcement is provided free of charge to mothers with child support cases.  Fathers with visitation orders must do it all themselves including paying the piper.  And by the time they succeed, if they do, months have passed during which time their children, if they’re very young, may have forgotten all about them.

His main argument is that visitation enforcement should be a criminal matter enforced, not by family courts but by prosecutors.  Usually I’m against laws that dream up new criminal offenses.  We already incarcerate too many people and our freedom of movement becomes more restricted every day.  But what should we do about family courts that show little sign of doing anything to improve their woeful failure to enforce visitation?  If they were going to do so, don’t you think they’d have done it by now?

Still, I don’t think criminalizing the matter is the way to go.  For one thing, child support is easy.  The money either has or hasn’t been paid.  If it hasn’t, prosecutors can make their case quickly with hard data.

But visitation isn’t the same.  He said she didn’t, she said she did.  Or she said she wasn’t able to.  She was sick, the car broke down, the dog ran away and she had to chase it.  Anything and everything will be cited as an excuse for failure to comply, and prosecutors won’t want to get into an argument they can’t win.  How to prove that what she did was done with criminal intent?  It won’t be easy.

By contrast, family courts have a good deal more leeway in enforcing their orders.  For example, a family court doesn’t need to jail a mother to convince her to start obeying its orders.  It can make her pay the dad’s attorney fees, it can give him long periods of make-up custody, it can switch custody to him.  All of those things will usually be preferable to jailing a child’s mother, an outcome few fathers want anyway.

So the answer is for state legislatures to pass laws making it clear to family judges that they are to take child access as seriously as they take child support.  That’ll mean taking prompt action to stop visitation interference as soon as it starts.  It’ll also mean making enforcement of visitation orders free to non-custodial parents.

December 20th, 2011 by Glenn Sacks

Maile Metalwala, after being reunited with her dad Solomon Metalwala on Friday.

After nearly a year, 4-year-old Maile Metalwala has at last been reunited with her dad, Solomon Metalwala.
Maile was kept from Solomon by a combination of a restraining order based on discredited domestic violence charges and the Washington Department of Social and Health Services, who seized Maile away from her unfit mother six weeks ago and put her in foster care.

Fathers and Families’ highly-publicized Campaign to Reunite Solomon Metalwala with His Daughter Maile sought to push WA DSHS and King County Superior Court to reunite Maile and Solomon as soon as possible. We thank all of our members and supporters who wrote and/or called the relevant authorities. Special thanks goes to Clay Terry, Esq., Solomon’s attorney, for his determined work towards reuniting Maile with Solomon.

As Fathers and Families members and supporters are painfully aware, many children will be denied their fathers this holiday season. Thanks in part to your efforts, Maile will not be one of them.

December 21st, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
Those who promote ever-greater intrusion by child welfare authorities into family life might want to talk to Lilly Manning.  We’ve recently seen Arizona newspaper columnists enthusiastically calling for more and more children to be taken from parents.  They rightly cite the children who are severely injured or sometimes killed by parents or their paramours.  Those cases of course should be known and, if CPS failed in its duty to the children, heads should roll and damages paid.

But those same columnists never looked at the other side of the coin – the one with Lilly Manning’s face on it.

Manning is a young California woman who’s just filed suit against Sacramento County’s Child Protective Services.  Read about it here (UPI.com, 12/19/11).  She’s doing that because she alleges that CPS pushed her removal from her mother’s care and placement with Lillian Manning.  According to her lawsuit, CPS ignored the risks of adoption by Lillian Manning and, after years of abuse and even torture by Manning and her husband Joseph Horvath, ignored Lilly’s cries for help.

Just what caused CPS to take Lilly and her siblings from their mother’s care hasn’t yet been reported.  And it should come as no surprise that the father has been completely ignored by both the press and CPS.  Was he a possible placement alternative?  No one seems to know.  Did CPS lift a finger to inquire?  No one seems to know that either.  Of course, as the Urban Institute discovered five years ago, that’s the pattern.  When CPS takes children from single mothers, the agencies routinely bypass fathers as placement for the children.  Indeed, even when caseworkers know who they are and where they are, more often than not, they simply ignore the dads.

So I wouldn’t be surprised to find that happened in Lilly Manning’s case as well.  Maybe we’ll find out some day.

Here’s what we do know:

Recently released CPS and Juvenile Court documents show a CPS social worker aggressively promoted the Manning children’s adoption in the 1990s and lavished praise on Lillian Manning-Horvath while dismissing alarms raised by others, the Bee reported.

This article tells us what happened in Manning-Horvath’s “care.” (Sacramento Bee, 7/3/11)

Things seemed to go pretty well shortly after the adoption in 2005, but once Joe Horvath came into Lillian Manning’s life, things went downhill fast.

The abuse apparently was rooted in a family lie.

Lilly recalled that the vicious attacks seemed to start when she was about 9. Her adoptive mom became suspicious that her much younger husband was molesting the girl. If Joe said she was pretty, Lilly said, her mom would savagely beat her until she admitted to having sexual contact with him – which wasn’t true. Then Horvath would get furious and pile on.

The couple savagely attacked Lilly beating her with hammers, sticks, 2″ x 4″s, boiling water.  She was kicked, hit, burned and stabbed.  She was locked in a tiny closet.

At one point, Lilly concluded that her adoptive mother and step-father intended to kill her.  She waited until the two adults were gone, kicked open the door and escaped.  Amazingly, she left a note on the kitchen table for her mother, telling her that she’d left.  She hid in a shed near their house until she was satisfied that Lillian and Joe were gone.  Then she called CPS who told her there was nothing they could do.

But Diogenes Youth Services, a counselling and crisis center for teens, took her to a hospital where detectives with the sheriff’s office shortly appeared.  Lilly’s body was a ”how to” of abuse.  It bore some 100 wounds and scars in various stages of healing.  One elbow had been broken and had calcified at a 45-degree angle.  She had cauliflower ears and burn marks on her face.  Three teeth had been knocked out and her lips were permanently swollen from scarring.

Lillian Manning-Horvath and Joe Horvath were picked up by police.  Joe was convicted of 13 felony counts and sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison.  Lilly testified on his behalf at the sentencing phase of his trial.  She contends that Joe got swept up in Lillian’s anger, fear and hatred of her and was therefore the less culpable of the two.

Lillian pled guilty to 15 counts and was sentenced to a single life term plust 36 years.  The first six years of her sentence will be served in a mental institution.

We’ll learn more about just what CPS did and didn’t do as Lilly Manning’s civil suit progresses.  But the records reflect an eagerness to take her from her mother in the first place.  They probably reveal no effort to contact Lilly’s father as well.  They also show avid promotion of Lillian Manning as the best placement alternative, including her adoption of the children.

Would the results have been better in their mother’s care?  Would it have been better in their father’s care?  We’ll never know, but it could hardly have been worse.

Whatever the case, I’m sure those columnists in Arizona can tell us.

December 21st, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
Illinois State Representative Jack Franks wants the state to take vilification of parents owing child support to all new levels.  Read about it here (Northwest Herald, 12/20/11).  Predictably, he wants to foreclose still more employment opportunities to parents behind on their child support obligations.  What’s perhaps surprising though, is that he also wants to deprive Illinois voters of their choice of candidates.

By now you’ve probably guessed that Franks wants to prohibit child support debtors from running for any Illinois public office. 

House Bill 3932, filed Tuesday by state Rep. Jack Franks, D-Marengo, would prevent anyone who owes more than $10,000 in back child support from filing to run for office in Illinois. It also would ban such people from being appointed to a government board, authority, commission or task force if they also are found in contempt of court for failing to pay.

We all know about state laws that suspend the right of child support debtors to operate a motor vehicle.  The quixotic result of those laws is to make it far harder for a parent behind on child support to ever catch up.  If the parent has lost his (84% of parents who are the subject of child support orders are men) job, the lack of a driver’s license makes obtaining employment all the harder because it makes simply getting to a job interview far more difficult than it otherwise would be.  It also drastically cuts down the number of available jobs.  Jobs like truck driver, cab driver, heavy machinery operator and the like all become immediately impossible to obtain.  And if he succeeds in finding work, simply getting to the jobsite becomes problematical.  That in turn means he’s more likely to lose his new job than he would be if he had a driver’s license.

Obviously, Dad isn’t the only one who suffers from laws like that; the children he’s trying to support do too.  If Dad can’t get a job, he can’t very well pay the support he owes and his child needs.  Making it harder for him to find employment makes it less likely that his child will get that support.

So Franks now wants to lop a few more jobs off the list of possibilities.  Now, admittedly, not many dads are going to be running for office.  Fewer still will succeed if they do.

What’s most important about Franks’s bill is its radically anti-democratic impact.  Explain to me again why the voters of Illinois shouldn’t be able to vote for whom they choose.  Why do they need Jack Franks to winnow the population of acceptable candidates?  Any adult citizen who hasn’t been convicted of a felony and is of sound mind should be able to ask the people of the state for their votes.  Why the exception for those owing child support?

The entire concept of the law strongly suggests that Franks doesn’t know the basic facts about child support and child support debtors.  Does he know, for example, that, according to the U.S. Office of Child Support Enforcement, 63% of debtors report earning less than $10,000 a year?  And that report is from 2006, well before the current economic debacle threw millions out of work.

The same report states frankly that family judges often set child support payments higher than the obligor can pay.  It’s one of the report’s many remarkable recommendations that judges begin to issue support orders at levels the non-custodial parent can actually pay.  The uninitiated might think that would be an obvious part of the child support process, but the OCSE knows it’s not.  Franks apparently doesn’t.

Does Franks know how hard states make it to get downward modifications of child support orders?  Does he know that the most responsible, upstanding father can run up $10,000 in child support debt in the blink of an eye if he loses his job?  Does he know that, when a non-custodial parent loses his job, in order to get a downward modification, he has to hire a lawyer, pay filing fees and wait for months to get a hearing.  During all that time, child support debt plus interest pile up and up.  And how is a father supposed to afford an attorney when he’s just lost his job?

Speaking of interest, does Franks know that the great majority of the debt that’s called “child support debt” is actually interest?  In California it’s about 70% of the total.  In some states, monthly interest on a father’s debt actually exceeds the amount he’s required to pay meaning that, even though he pays in full every month, he falls further and further behind.  Does Franks know that?

My guess is that Franks neither knows nor cares.  Franks is a Democrat, so I’d say his bill is less about the reality of child support than it is about the nitty-gritty of politics in the Land of Lincoln.  Joe Walsh is the congressman from the state whose wife claimed earlier in the year that he owes her $117,000 in back child support.  So Franks’s bill is better seen as a reminder to Illinois voters of Laura Walsh’s claim in order to defeat the Tea Party incumbent.

Walsh, by the way, contends he’s not behind on his payments and the court has yet to rule on his ex-wife’s claims or hold Walsh in contempt.

I’m all for parents supporting their children; it’s an obligation that no one should shirk.  But the current system of ordering, paying and disbursing support is about as dysfunctional and anti-father as it can get. 

Come to think of it, Franks is a member of the Illinois Legislature.  That means he could help fix the many, many flaws in a child support system that daily turns decent fathers into criminals while denying support to their children.  But that would mean understanding those flaws and caring about making real changes for the better.  Given the choice, Franks chose grandstanding over meaningful legislation.

Until the flaws of the child support system are fixed, voters shouldn’t be deprived of their choice of candidates based on child support obligations.  The simple fact is that if a candidate is behind on his payments, the issue should be raised in the campaign and let voters decide.

Let the voters decide.  It’s not a radical concept, but it’s one Jack Franks doesn’t grasp.

Thanks to Michael for the heads-up.

December 22nd, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
There’s a new bill before the South Carolina Legislature that would create a rebuttable presumption of equally-shared parenting time when couples share legal custody of a child post-divorce.  Read about it here (Fox Charlotte, 12/18/11).

Here’s the text of South Carolina House Bill 4095.

If joint legal custody of a child is awarded to the parents, there is a rebuttable presumption that both parents have joint physical custody of the child. Joint physical custody of the child is defined as equal time-sharing. If a petition is filed challenging joint custody, the burden of overcoming the presumption rests on the parent challenging the presumption. The presumption may be overcome by demonstrating that joint physical custody would not be in the best interest of the child or by one parent waiving the presumption.

The person seeking to overcome the presumption would have to do so by clear and convincing evidence.  That standard falls above the ‘preponderance of evidence’ standard usually used in civil cases, and below that of proof ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ used in criminal cases.

Joint legal custody is ordered in most custody cases in which parents are deemed fit to care for children.

Now, we’ve seen many equally shared parenting bills come and go.  Many have solid support, but so far, not a single one has been passed by a state legislature and signed by the governor.  Despite their obvious fairness, despite their many benefits to children, those bills always fail.  They do so for a variety of reasons, or perhaps “excuses” is a better word.  Sometimes the claims by anti-dad forces that fathers pose unique dangers to children win the day; sometimes lawmakers seize on the idea that children would have to shift between households to excuse their ‘no’ votes.

That second one has always seemed an especially lame excuse for so dismally failing a state’s children.  The fact is that non-custodial parents usually have some sort of visitation rights, and that means that, every two weeks or so, the kids pack up and go to daddy.  So how much more packing up and moving would be involved if, instead of only staying with him two days, they stayed for two weeks?  Well, none actually.  The fact that opponents of children’s rights to time with their father pretend there would be speaks volumes about the sincerity of their claims.

So why might this bill’s fate be different?  Well, it seems that South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley backs it.  We’ve never seen an equal parenting bill with the support of the state’s governor at this early stage. 

Does Haley mean it?  Will she throw her weight behind this bill?  Or will she sit back and let the bill take the usual course of dying in committee, the victim of smear tactics against fathers and imagined drawbacks of shared parenting.

Whatever the outcome of the South Carolina House Bill 4095, the final answer to the anti-dad crowd will come at the ballot box.  When those office holders who oppose children’s rights to their fathers start losing their reelection bids because fathers’ rights advocates mobilized against them, those shared parenting bills will start passing like a football team behind by 20 points in the fourth quarter.

Until then, we’ll see.

December 22nd, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
A couple of posts ago I excoriated Illinois Representative Jack Franks for his effort to prohibit anyone owing over $10,000 in child support from running for public office, serving on government boards, oversight committees and the like.  One of the reasons I’m not very happy with Franks is that I suspect he doesn’t know the first thing about how fathers come to find themselves behind on their payments.  My guess is that he doesn’t have a clue about what it takes to get a downward modification in child support based on changed circumstances like the loss of a job.

So I’d now like to link to this blog (GeekZone, 12/20/11).  The posting was written by a New Zealander and describes oh-so-exactly the same screwed-up system in that country.  Entitled “Child Support… and the way you, too, can become destitute,” it tells the story of the writer, Mick Kapiti, and how he went from hard-working father of two to a man who’s considering leaving his country and his kids behind, just to avoid utter privation.  That privation comes to Kapiti courtesy of the country’s Inland Revenue Department that supposedly manages New Zealand’s child support system.

Change a few names and Kapiti could be writing about any state in the good old U.S. of A.

It seems that Kapiti has two children aged eight and two.  His ex hasn’t worked a lick since the older child was born, but Kapiti has.  He’s a truck driver and he put in 65-70 hour weeks making $17.50 per hour.  That works out to about $60,000 per year.  But the 12 – 15 hour days were catching up with Kapiti; he needed to work fewer hours.  So he found a job that promised him a 48-hour week at $2 per hour more.  That would cut his overall pay considerably – down to about $47,000 per year, but he figured it would be worth it to see his kids more.

Then he started actually working for the new company and instead of getting 48 hours a week, it was more like 38.  That lowered his earnings to about $37,ooo per year.

Then right about the time he changed jobs, he split up with his ex.  That meant he started paying child support, but he used the Inland Revenue’s calculator and figured out he could manage it.

How wrong he was.  First, when he calculated how much he’d have to pay, he used his new, lower salary.  That’s not how the IRD works.  They don’t care about the facts, they care about how they do things and that predictably is anti-father.

When IRD do your child support calculations, they base it on the previous year.

So for Kapiti, that meant trying to pay child support that’s based on his old $60k salary with about $37k in earnings.  A letter from the IRD said he’d be paying about half his earnings in child support, leaving him about $18,500 a year to live on.

Panicked, he called the IRD.

Of course, I rang them (warning: never ring child support, they will steal your soul) and was told… now this cracks me up…  “All good, just do an estimate, include a payslip and we will sort it!”

So he did and of course his request for a downward modification was declined.

DECLINED! “f***ing WHAT???”
Phone: “You haven’t had a 15% difference in pay so it’s declined… you earned lots at the start of this financial year”
Me: ” Um, that was at my old job… doing 65hrs a week.. I just sent you my payslip…”
Phone: “yeah, but we take an average and that estimate shows your wage will only change 12%”
Me: “But 12% is a lot of money and my car has just died”
Phone: “sorry, nothing we can do”
ARGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhh

It’s like I said; the reality is that he now earns $37k, about which the IRD cares not a bit.  They see that for part of the year he made much more, and therefore, the reality be damned.  It’s the way they do things and the fact that it in no way reflects the man’s real situation or his ability to pay makes no difference to them.  They arbitrarily divide his earnings up according to calendar years and if he made more 10 months ago, then for some unexplained reason, that goes into calculating his present-day child support. 

Kapiti explained to the IRD that, in two weeks of paying half his salary in child support, he’d be unable to feed himself, but they were unimpressed.

O…K…
I have now run every option through my head, including bankruptcy..
I have one option.

Move to Australia

and not see my kids…

It’s the only place that pays enough for me to not default on my loans, pay IRD and still eat.
That means selling everything… which is not really much , but meant a f**kload to me, and leaving behind MY KIDS!’

IRD… YOU have such a broken system, you are forcing a hard working adult to either become a dole bludger, or to leave the country.

Child Support? They don’t get supported!!! THEY LOSE A PARENT! Possibly forever… My youngest is 2.5… What memories is SHE gunna have of her dad? Loser? prick that ran away? Abandoned them?

He’s right of course.  The man works hard to support his kids; he always has.  But now, through the evil genius of the IRD and its utterly arbitrary regulations, he’s being driven out of their lives.  And just suppose we could talk to whoever heads the New Zealand Inland Revenue Department.  How long do you suppose it would take him/her to explain that  it’s all for the sake of the kids?

December 22nd, 2011 by Glenn Sacks

Elena, the 7-year-old daughter of a N. California Fathers and Families member, wrote Santa and told him this Christmas she wants flowers, earrings, and a puppy. But #1 on her list was “custady pappers that says I can see my dad more oftan.”

Elena has been separated from her dad without justification, by a family court system that simply does not respect dads.

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.

Please 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.

Please give today to improve the lives of our children.

All I want for the holidays is shared parenting in every state. Give to make shared parenting the norm in America.

For the love of our children,

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

Glenn Sacks, MA
Executive Director

P.S. Give to the strongest voice standing up for you as a father: Fathers and Families.  To see our accomplishments, click here.

PO Box 270760
Boston, Massachusetts 02127-0760
617-542-9300
www.fathersandfamiles.org
info@fathersandfamilies.org

December 23rd, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
To great fanfare, the Centers for Disease Control last week trotted out its latest survey of intimate partner violence.  Given its definitions, its findings were pretty much what we’d expect.  For example, any woman who decides to have sex, gets drunk or high and then has sex with a man has been raped, or so says the survey.  So it’s no surprise that the statistics on rape are greatly inflated.  Considering the definition, I was shocked that there weren’t more.

And what’s true of sexual assault is true of domestic violence as well.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘violence’ as “the exercise of physical force so as to inflict injury on, or cause damage to, persons or property.”  The CDC study is nowhere near as scrupulous.  As we’ve come to expect, domestic violence there can be anything from unpleasant remarks to murder.  So, as with rape, the figures are greatly inflated.

But the survey does, for the most part, apply the same definitions to men’s and women’s behavior.  Usually, it compares apples and apples.  So however inflated the figures may be, at least they’re equally inflated for men and women.  (That’s not altogether true.  In more than one category of sexual assault, in order to qualify as a victim the element of intent on the part of the perpetrator was required of men but not of women.  The obvious result was to diminish the number of male victims.)

And those figures are interesting, particularly in certain categories.  For example, within the past year, 6.5% of men and 6.3% of women said they were victims of violence at the hands of an intimate partner.  Another 18% of men and only 14% of women reported themselves the victims of “psychological aggression.”  And when it came to being a victim of “coercive control” by an intimate partner, males outnumbered females by almost a 3:2 margin, 15.2% to 10.7%.

That last is significant of course because the entire DV industry has for years told us that DV is all about power and control.  So isn’t it interesting that women do that far more than do men.

When it comes to lifetime violence (as defined by the survey), women do indeed report greater victimization, but the gap between men and women isn’t great.  For example, lifetime figures for physical violence victimization by an intimate partner are 32.9% for women and 28.2% for men.

Again, there’s not a lot new here other than the fact that the survey itself has just come out.

What’s also not new is the fact that the news media reporting on the survey completely ignored male victims.  In tried-and-true fashion, they reported only the statistics on women.  Indeed, Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (S.A.V.E.) analyzed the papers reporting on the survey and found none reporting the data that show more male than female victims.

Barbara Kay noticed the same thing here (National Post, 12/20/11).  As usual, she nails the culprits in the international organized crime of reporting on domestic violence.

One of first-wave feminism’s great achievements in the 1970s was to end the denial surrounding wife abuse in even the “best” homes. Resources for abused women proliferated. Traditional social, judicial and political attitudes toward violence against women were cleansed and reconstructed along feminist-designed lines.

But then a funny thing happened. The closet from which abuse victims were emerging had, everyone assumed, been filled with women. But honest researchers were surprised by the results of their own objective inquiries. They were all finding, independently, that intimate partner violence (IPV) is mostly bidirectional.

But by then the IPV domain was awash in heavily politicized stakeholders. Even peer-reviewed community-based studies providing politically incorrect conclusions were cut off at the pass, their researchers’ names passed over for task force appointments and the writing of training manuals for the judiciary…

The most extreme IPV is certainly male-on-female, but hard-core batterers and outright killers are rare. In violence of the mild to moderately severe variety that constitutes most of IPV — shoving, slapping, hitting, punching, throwing objects, even stabbing and burning — both genders initiate and cause harm in equal measure.

Every major survey has borne out this truth. In fact, the most reliable, like Canada’s 1999 General Social Survey, found not only that most male and female violence is reciprocal, but also that the younger the sample, the more violent the women relative to men. A meta-analysis of mor than 80 large-scale surveys notes a widening, and concerning, spread — less male and more female IPV — in the dating cohort…

By now there is no excuse for the failure of governments at all levels to follow through on — or at least acknowledge — the settled science of bilateral violence.

True, but domestic violence is perhaps the most misrepresented phenomenon in American society.  Essentially everything said in the mainstream media on the subject is either outright false or misleading.  That’s because the journalists writing on the subject get their “information” not from reputable studies, but from the DV establishment that has a vested interest in exclusively male perpetrators and exclusively female victims.  They’ve been making the same false claims for almost 40 years now, so it’d be embarrassing for them to all of a sudden say “never mind.”  More importantly, they’ve been on the gravy train operated by the federal government and numberless non-profit organizations for too long to admit the truth – that what they’re saying is wrong and what they’re doing makes the problem worse not better.

How else to explain the behavior of the Liz Claiborne Institute that commissioned a serious and large study of teen dating violence and, when girls turned out to be somewhat more likely than boys to commit an act of dating violence, simply buried the fact?  To this day, the LCI cries long and loudly about female victims of dating violence and completely ignores the boys.

By contrast, Kay cites the exellent work of Dr. Donald Dutton who rightly says that family violence is a product of individual psychology and family dynamics coupled with a history of family violence in childhood.  In short, gender has essentially nothing to do with it.  But if we were to listen to Dutton and the many others who are doing good, constructive work in the area of domestic violence, we’d have to refigure everything we’re currently doing to supposedly address the problem.  To date, there is nothing whatsoever to indicate that we’re contemplating any such thing.

Meanwhile, Kay’s last words are a fair summary.

Ironically, and unjustly, abused men today are where women were 60 years ago: their ill-treatment is ignored, trivialized or mocked; there are virtually no funded resources for them; and they are expected to suffer partner violence in silence. Which most of them do.

Who will have the courage to bell this politically correct cat? When will revenge end and fairness begin?

Thanks to Edward and Paulette for the heads-up.

December 25th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
Merry Christmas to all from the crew at Fathers and Families; we send you and yours our warmest wishes for the holiday season.  Please accept our deep gratitude for everything you’ve done to support us in our mission.  Above all thank you for trusting us to help you in the struggle for justice and equality in family law.