NPO Blog Archive

Below are some recent articles and items of interest from Fathers & Families’ latest News Digest.

State launching campaign to establish paternity (Associated Press, 3-4-08)

Women in NY prisons seek better child custody protections (Press & Sun Bulletin, 3-4-08)

Richards attacks Sheen over reality show (San Francisco Chronicle, 3-6-08)

With a little care, parents can share (Sydney Morning Herald, 3-6-08)

Divorce settlement spurs Paul McCartney’s iTunes marriage (New York Daily News, 3-7-08)

Judge recuses self in child-support payment (Associated Press, 3-7-08)

Bill wades into custody battles (San Bernardino Sun, 3-8-08)

More couples hiding wealth from each other (Telegraph.co.uk, 3-8-08)

Child-support lapses lead to 20 arrests (Statesman Journal, 3-8-08)

Bill would criminalize false abuse charges (Martinsburg Journal, 3-10-08)

Bermuda–“Parental Alienation involves taking advantage of the suggestibility and dependency of children for the sole purpose of destroying a loving relationship they once shared with a parent.”

The Parental Alienation Awareness Organization/ www.Parental-Alienation-Awareness.com is making progress in gaining recognition of Parental Alienation, as nine U.S. states and the British territory of Bermuda have declared April 25 “Parental Alienation Awareness Day.”

The Parental Alienation Awareness Organization is looking for volunteers to ask their local Governor, MP or government officials to proclaim or officially recognize April 25th as Parental Alienation Awareness Day. If you’re interested, click here.

Bermuda’s Proclamation declaring April 25th as Parental Alienation Awareness Day states that, “Parental Alienation involves taking advantage of the suggestibility and dependency of children for the sole purpose of destroying a loving relationship they once shared with a parent.”

The nine U.S. states are:

Florida – Governor Crist
Indiana – Governor Daniels
Connecticut – Governor Rell
Montana – Governor Schweitzer
Kentucky – Governor Fletcher
Nebraska – Governor Heineman
Iowa – Governor Vilsack
Maine – Governor Baldacci
Nevada – Governor Gibbons

The Parental Alienation Awareness Organization has a package and a well-organized program to help volunteers approach their states about declaring April 25th as Parental Alienation Awareness Day. To learn more about how to get involved, click here.

Los Angeles, CA–The Los Angeles Times article Next speaker enjoys broad support (3/2/08) details the rise of Karen Bass, the incoming leader of the California assembly and the first African American woman to be elected to lead a legislative house in the U.S. The piece was a nice example of the subtle and not-so-subtle societal bias against fathers and fatherhood. The article begins: “Anyone who knew Wilhelmina Bass might understand why her daughter Karen Bass, the Los Angeles Democrat elected Thursday as the next leader of the California Assembly, has devoted her Capitol career to making the state a better parent to its 80,000 foster children. “A former beauty salon owner who raised Karen and three boys in a well-appointed house in the Venice-Fairfax area, Wilhelmina Bass was a kind, poised, contemplative mother, and ‘the notion that people would come into this world and not have loving parents has always caused Karen pain,’
said Sylvia Castillo, Bass’ district director and a friend for three decades.” We all know the script: heroic, overwhelmed black mother raises her kids herself, and now one of them has done mama proud by making good in the world. Yet, believe it or not, Bass actually had a father, too. It is only much further down in the story, after we are already assuming that Bass was raised by a single mom, that we are told, “She credits her father, DeWitt, a mail carrier, for making her a ‘news junkie’ — Bass said she used to wake at 4:30 a.m. to listen to the radio with him before he began his route.” In fact, in the autobiographical information that Bass herself provided the Democratic Party, she wrote, “Karen has dedicated her life to improving our neighborhoods. Her father, DeWitt Bass–a letter carrier for 40 years–and mother, Wilhelmina, raised Karen and her three brothers in the Venice/Fairfax neighborhood.” In other words, Bass saw herself as being raised by both parents, and it even seems like she was at least a bit of a daddy’s girl. Why did the Los Angeles Times choose to place far more importance on her mother than on her father? To write a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times, click on letters@latimes.com. Nancy Vogel, the Los Angeles Times Staff Writer who wrote the story, can be reached at nancy.vogel@latimes.com.

Los Angeles, CA–Background: I’ve started a blog-based collection of bedtime stories for children, both stories I’ve told my kids and stories that other parents (and grandparents) tell their kids. If you’ve got a good bedtime story, please send it to me for consideration in this collection.

The core of these stories will be those I tell my 9-year-old daughter. She’s pretty demanding–sometimes I pretty much have to come up with a bedtime story every night, which isn’t easy.

My daughter is very interested in racism (which she’s studied in school), baseball, and daddy’s childhood, so many of the stories reflect those. She’s only 9, but she enjoys learning about adult issues. Sometimes if I tell her a story she thinks isn’t sufficiently adult, she’ll say, “C’mon dad, that’s just a baby story.”

The stories I tell are usually just things that I remembered, sometimes recent but often from 20 or 30 years ago. Some of them are stories my father told me when I was a kid. I write these down as I told them, and they are NOT up to my usual standards of journalistic accuracy–given the limits of human memory, many (if not most) probably have at least one factual error in them, sometimes far more. They are also simplistic. I’m not going back and fixing them to make them more accurate or nuanced–they are here as I told them.

If you have a bedtime story you’d like to add to my collection, please send it to me at glenn@glennsacks.com. With your submission, please let me know how you want to be identified, if at all. To read all of the Daddy’s Bedtime Stories so far, click here.

Sometimes people need to stand up for themselves, no matter how powerful or rich or famous the person treating them badly is. Kids need to respect adults, such as their parents and teachers, but sometimes kids need to stand up for themselves too. Let me tell you of one example I saw of a kid standing up for himself. I was so surprised I could hardly believe it at the time. Many years ago one of the best players in baseball was an outfielder named Andy Van Slyke. He played for the St. Louis Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Pirates during years when those teams often made the playoffs. He was a very good hitter and a very good fielder, and was also very fast.

One time I went to a game at Dodger Stadium and was sitting in the bleachers in the outfield when he was playing. It must’ve been maybe 1987 or 1988.Now before each inning all of the players warm up. The pitcher throws to the catcher, the first baseman throws ground balls to the shortstop, to second baseman, and to the third baseman, and they throw the ball back to the first baseman. However, there are three outfielders, and they are too far apart to play catch. So what happens instead is that the centerfielder will play catch with one of the other outfielders, and a bat boy will play catch with the third outfielder, in order to warm him up.

Well, we were watching this at Dodger Stadium one day, and this bat boy, who was probably 10 or 11 years old, was warming up Van Slyke. However, the boy could not throw the ball all the way to Van Slyke. Instead, he would throw it on one hop. This is not a big deal, but Van Slyke apparently got annoyed with it. So Van Slyke, to show his irritation, started tossing the ball back to the boy on one bounce.

Van Slyke was strong enough to throw the ball from deep centerfield all the way to home plate on the fly, so he wasn’t doing this because he couldn’t. He was doing it as a dig at the bat boy.

Well, even though the bat boy was young, he understood what was happening. After the second ball came to him on a hop from Van Slyke, he caught it, turned his back on Van Slyke, and walked back to the dugout. Van Slyke called after him, with his hands extended, asking him to come back. The bat boy wouldn’t hear of it, and instead ignored Van Slyke–a Major League baseball star who earned millions of dollars a year–and walked back to the dugout.

My friends and I were watching this and one friend of mine said, “Did I just see what I thought I just saw?” It was a small incident, but I always respected that kid for standing up for himself.

Sacramento, CA–Background: The historic, one-of-a-kind conference “From Ideology to Inclusion: Evidence-Based Policy and Intervention in Domestic Violence” was held in Sacramento, California February 15-16 and was a major success. The conference was sponsored by the California Alliance for Families and Children and featured leading domestic violence authorities from around the world.

Many of these researchers are part of the National Family Violence Legislative Resource Center, which is challenging the domestic violence establishment’s stranglehold on the issue. The NFVLRC promotes gender-natural, research-based DV policies.

I have been and will continue to detail the conference and some of the research that was presented there in this blog–to learn more, click here.

John Hamel, LCSW, is a court-certified batterer treatment provider and author of the book Gender-Inclusive Treatment of Intimate Partner Abuse. A leading authority in the field, John was one of the principle organizers of the Sacramento domestic violence conference. Springer publications did an interview with John (pictured, photo by Kevin Graft) which encapsulates many of the major themes of his work. It is reprinted below.

An Interview with John Hamel

Both of your books are based on the concept that men and women are equally capable of abuse against each other. This runs completely counter to conventional thinking, which insists that men are always aggressors and women are always victims. What first led you to this line of research, and what prompted you to begin writing about it?

In 1991, I took over a domestic violence caseload and was trained in a variation of the well-known “Duluth’ model. In the Duluth theoretical framework, domestic violence is caused by a patriarchal society that sanctions violence by men against their female partners. Women are assumed to be either victims or, when they are found to aggress against their male partners, to be doing so in self-defense.

In group, many of the men I was working with claimed that their female partners were equally or more abusive than they were, and wondered why I wasn”t treating them as well. I had been trained to automatically disbelieve such claims as victim-blaming. However, while many of my clients did in fact seek to displace responsibility for their actions onto others, I found other claims to be quite credible, so I changed my assessment procedures and began to insist on interviewing victims separately. According to the victims themselves, the majority of these cases did indeed involve mutual abuse and, and some featured a dominant female perpetrator whose partner was arrested after fighting back. This clinical data contradicted much of what I had been taught, and led me to conduct an extensive review of the research literature. What I found more than corroborated my clinical findings.

Would you say that the idea that both females and males can be both aggressors and victims is becoming more accepted among those in the field? Why or why not?

These notions are not new; they had found support as far back as the 1970″s, in the work of Murray Straus, Peter Neidig and other researchers. For years, studies conducted by these mavericks were dismissed, and in some cases suppressed, because of the long-dominant patriarchal paradigm advanced by victim advocates.

California–From Carl, a reader:

I’m in the military. Divorce took place the month I departed California. I was there for training and was not a resident. CA. took complete jurisdiction. Kids and ex were in Florida at the time. Ex took kids to Mississippi same time divorce was filed. Divorce took place Oct 06, and is still open.

Since then my wages are garnisheed at 65% and I’m still in arrears by $400 monthly. My ex will not let me see the kids regardless of California court orders. California will not enforce the order, Mississippi will not enforce the order. It seems no agency will help me to see my children.

Also at this time I’m in jeopardy of losing my job of six years because of the arrearages. I’m on salary–I can’t make the amount California wants.

Everyone says I have to get a lawyer, but I have no money. I make enough for food, shelter, and gas to get to work, usually with less than $100 in my bank at any given time. Any help suggestions appreciated.

Sacramento, CA–Background: The historic, one-of-a-kind conference “From Ideology to Inclusion: Evidence-Based Policy and Intervention in Domestic Violence” was held in Sacramento, California February 15-16 and was a major success. The conference was sponsored by the California Alliance for Families and Children and featured leading domestic violence authorities from around the world. Many of these researchers are part of the National Family Violence Legislative Resource Center, which is challenging the domestic violence establishment’s stranglehold on the issue. The NFVLRC promotes gender-natural, research-based DV policies. I have been and will continue to detail the conference and some of the research that was presented there in this blog–to learn more, click here. Dr. Donald Dutton (pictured, photo by Kevin Graft) is one of the premier domestic violence authorities in the world. He co-founded the Assaultive Husbands Project in 1979 and has published more than 100 papers and books, including the Domestic Assault of Women, The Batterer: A Psychological Profile, The Abusive Personality, and his latest work, Rethinking Domestic Violence. Dr. Dutton can be reached at dondutton@shaw.ca. At the Sacramento conference, Dutton criticized the way the domestic violence establishment–of which he was once very much a part–has distorted the research to minimize and ignore female and mutual domestic violence. He also criticized feminist “Groupthink,” but what I found most interesting about it is that his analysis could easily apply to elements of the men’s and fathers’ movement, too. According to Dutton, Groupthink occurs “when an activist group with a predetermined direction confers in isolation from dissenting views.” In these situations, Dutton says: 1) Status is gained from taking more extreme positions (in the pre-determined direction). 2) People with strong needs for dominance will advance more extreme positions in order to gain status, power and control of the group. 3) These traits will then be projected onto the outgroup (“battering is all about power and control’). In our movement, one can certainly find people who seek to gain status “from taking more extreme positions.” One can also find people projecting the worst traits onto the outgroup, in our case, the feminist movement. Personally I have no use for the ludicrous pretense that our side is always good and right and virtuous and their side–the feminist side–is always bad and wrong and evil and sleazy. As I’ve noted on many occasions, as our movement expands and builds, I hope we won’t simply replace one set of Groupthink with another.

Sacramento, CA–Background: The historic, one-of-a-kind conference “From Ideology to Inclusion: Evidence-Based Policy and Intervention in Domestic Violence” was held in Sacramento, California February 15-16 and was a major success. The conference was sponsored by the California Alliance for Families and Children and featured leading domestic violence authorities from around the world. Many of these researchers are part of the National Family Violence Legislative Resource Center, which is challenging the domestic violence establishment’s stranglehold on the issue. The NFVLRC promotes gender-natural, research-based DV policies. I have been and will continue to detail the conference and some of the research that was presented there in this blog–to learn more, click here. One of the presenters at the conference was Claudia Ann Dias, MSC, JD, who provides education and training in the fields of substance abuse, family violence, cultural awareness, sexual harassment and communications skills to both public and private sectors. She has been featured on 20/20 and Oprah for her work with male and female family violence perpetrators. Dias (pictured, photo by Kevin Graft) said that she had a 10 year contract with a Sacramento County Jail to counsel newly arrested male domestic violence perpetrators. She says that within six months of mentioning the problem of female abusers and of mutual abuse, her contract was canceled. She had some interesting things to say about the way kids handle domestic violence she says that when kids are four or five years old, they will often try to step between warring parents and stop them from fighting or hitting each other. By age six or seven they begin finding hiding places when mom and dad are fighting. By age 11 or 12 the kids come back out and intervene in the conflict. Sometimes an 11 or 12-year-old child will hide the younger sibling down the hall from where the parents are fighting. Interestingly, Dias says that regardless of who is at fault in the fighting, children will intervene on mom’s behalf. She says it is inherent. One of the significant aspects of this is that because kids will inevitably intervene on behalf of mothers against fathers, even when it is the mothers who are instigating and engaging in abuse, kids often have a skewed and distorted description of the violence. In other words, kids will remember their mom being abused, even if the abuse was mutual, or mom was the real instigator or perpetrator.