NPO Blog Archive

I’ve been hard on child support officials for their ridiculous pretense that when fathers don’t pay their child support, it must mean that they have the money but are being stingy with their kids. Research shows just the opposite–usually the fathers who can pay, do so. Most who don’t pay, can’t. To learn more about the problems with the child support system, see my co-authored column When Beating up on ‘Deadbeat Dads’ is Unfair (Houston Chronicle, 1/7/07), or click here.

In this article, Doug Thompson, deputy director for Ohio’s Office of Child Support, says:

“When you’ve got a parent in front of you who says, ‘I want to pay child support but I need help,’ before we lock that person up, before we put them on TV, we want to give them that opportunity to do the right thing.”

I’m not laying up nights waiting for child support enforcement bureaucrats to do the right thing, but there does seem to be an increasing recognition of the unfairness of the “deadbeat dad” raids and the child support system as a whole. In August, David Engle, director of Ohio’s Washington County Department of Social Services explained that one of the biggest barriers to paying support is unemployment. He said:

“The No. 1 reason why people can’t pay their support is they’re not able to find a job, or a job doesn’t give them sufficient funds to pay the support,” he said.

On a separate note, I absolutely do not condone violence, but with so many men being unfairly persecuted, I’ve often wondered about the possibility for violence against arresting police officers. Apparently Bob Cornwell, executive director of the Buckeye State Sheriffs’ Association, is worried about it, too. In the article, he says:

“When you give people advance notice that, ‘I’m coming out tomorrow to pick everybody up because we’re having a big roundup,’ it gives some people an opportunity to lay in wait.”

The article is below. Thanks to child support expert Jane Spies of the National Family Justice Association for the first article. Jane discusses problems with the child support system in her recent article The Myth of the Successful Child Support System.

State ends annual deadbeat-parent roundup
By ANDREW WELSH-HUGGINS
Associated Press, 12/27/07

The state has ditched a decade-old program that rounded up deadbeat parents one day or week each year to draw attention to people late with their child support payments.

The Department of Job and Family Services said people behind in support payments don’t always deserve to be handcuffed on TV. The state also can’t say whether the arrests generated overdue money for children.

Sheriff’s departments said they had safety concerns about the program. Counties said they couldn’t always pull together the employees to administer the arrests.

“When you’ve got a parent in front of you who says, ‘I want to pay child support but I need help,’ before we lock that person up, before we put them on TV, we want to give them that opportunity to do the right thing,” Doug Thompson, deputy director for the state’s Office of Child Support, told The Associated Press.

The arrests aren’t going away, and many counties arrest dozens of people each day for failing to pay child support. But Thompson said the state is working with counties to figure out new ways to get parents to make regular payments.

Texas criminal defense attorney Paul Stuckle (pictured), who specializes in defending men falsely accused of domestic violence or sexual abuse, wrote me recently concerning the Domestic Violence Benchbook used for judges in the state of New Mexico. It is put out by the Rozier E. Sanchez Judicial Education Center of New Mexico, which was established under a federal grant to provide education and training to the judges, administrators and other staff of the New Mexico judicial branch. The Benchbook contains numerous gems, including this one:

“Domestic violence perpetrators can be men or women involved in heterosexual or same-sex intimate relationships, and New Mexico’s laws against domestic violence make no distinction based on the parties’ gender or sexual orientation. Nonetheless, the discussion in this chapter will assume a heterosexual relationship with a male abuser unless otherwise indicated. The discussion uses this assumption because most domestic violence research has been done in this context.

“Violence in same-sex relationships and in heterosexual relationships with female abusers has not been much studied to date, and is not well understood. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey (1992-1996), about 85% of victims of intimate violence are women. Although less likely than men to experience violent crime overall, women are 5 to 8 times more likely than men to be victimized by an intimate. Greenfeld, et al, Violence by Intimates, p. 1, 4 (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1998).”

As I’ve explained on numerous occasions, crime surveys dramatically and consistently undercount male victims of domestic violence, for reasons that are logical and understandable. (To learn more, see my co-authored column New DOJ Domestic Violence Study Undercounts Male Victims, Baltimore Sun, 1/12/07). Domestic violence research clearly shows that women are at least as likely to attack their male partners as vice versa, and that one-third of domestic violence injuries are sustained by heterosexual males.

The Domestic Violence Benchbook even cites and treats as good coin research from Dr. Lenore E. A. Walker’s The Battered Woman Syndrome (aka the “How to Murder Your Husband and Get Away with It” defense).

This is another example of the importance of the California Alliance for Families and Children’s upcoming conference “From Ideology to Inclusion: Evidence-Based Policy and Intervention in Domestic Violence.” The dissident domestic violence authorities and researchers speaking and directing the conference are challenging the domestic violence establishment’s discredited yet pervasive “man as perp/woman as victim” model of domestic violence. To learn more, see my recent post Group of Domestic Violence Dissidents/Authorities Sponsors Historic Conference.

[Note: If you or someone you love is being abused, the Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men and Women provides crisis intervention and support services to victims of domestic violence and their families.]

Background: Feminists often portray the pre-feminist (pre-1970) era as one in which women were not valued or seen as being fully human. To cite one example of thousands, recently the National Organization for Women wrote on their website: “Are women human? Do women deserve full human rights? The U.S. Senate isn’t sure.”

My belief is that while 1960s/1970s feminists had plenty of legitimate grievances, their insistence that society never valued women is false. In reality, men made enormous sacrifices to provide for and protect their wives and children–a testament to the average man’s respect for women.

While reading one of Bill James’ baseball books recently, I stumbled upon a couple examples of how society viewed women 100 years ago. In one, George Davis, a turn-of-the century star baseball player, and his teammates rushed into a devastating apartment fire to save the lives of its female inhabitants. To learn more, see my blog post From 1900: Another Example of How Our Society Never Valued Women or Saw Them as Human.

From Bill James, describing an incident involving Tommy Corcoran (pictured) and Orville Woodruff, major league baseball players over 100 years ago:

“In St. Louis in 1903 Corcoran was walking around the town sight-seeing with a teammate, Orville Woodruff, when a horse, frightened by an automobile, reared up, creating panic. According to Lee Allen in The Cincinnati Reds, ‘pedestrians scattered in all directions, Corcoran was pinned against a building and badly hurt, but Woodruff emerged from the affair a hero, picking up a woman who was lying right in the path of the horse and carrying her away from the danger in the nick of time.'”

Background: Tim Russert’s Wisdom of Our Fathers has hundreds of stories men and women tell about their fathers. It’s a remarkable book–to learn more, see my co-authored column America’s Father Hunger (World Net Daily, 10/13/06).

This story is “He loved his family too much to say good-bye,” from Carole Harris Barton of Burke, VA, about her father, coal miner Samuel Sterling Harris (1911-1983).

“Daddy never said good-bye. I first noticed it the year I turned five, when he used to drive Mother, my brother John, and me from our shanty at the coal mine into Madisonville, the heart of the West Kentucky coalfields. ‘Be good babies,’ he would say to John and me before he left us to wait with Mother in the car when he went inside to night school, where he was earning a certificate in mining safety that would entitle him to a raise.

“He had gone to work in the mine when he was fourteen, three years after his father died and left the family destitute. When the foreman learned that Daddy was underage, he sent him home; Daddy waited two years and went back to the mine. He had been there ever since. He didn’t complain about his lot, but he was determined that his children would have more education than he did. He worked days and studied nights to get a better job, so he could save enough money to move us away from the mine, where there was no high school, into town, where there was.

“He never said good-bye when he left for work. ‘Be a good baby,’ he would say, throwing me a wave. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Other kids had dads who said good-bye. Why wouldn’t mine?

“Finally, Mother explained. Daddy never said good-bye because he was afraid of a fatal mining accident. He thought if he never said good-bye, there’d never be one.

A couple years ago my 80-year-old father received a slew of Victoria’s Secret charges on his credit card. He was able to get it straightened out, but said something along the lines of “it’s amazing what these idiots do–they could’ve caused somebody a divorce with an error like that.”

No surprise–a North Dakota child support enforcement agency just did a similar thing. According to this recent Bismarck Tribune story, “A Chicago man says he was shocked to find out a North Dakota child support agency had notified his boss that it was looking for information about him in what turned out to be a case of mistaken identity.

“Edward Jackson…learned from his employer earlier this week that he had been named by a woman in North Dakota as the father of her daughter…His employer…got a three-page questionnaire from the Lake Region Child Support Enforcement Unit…

“Jackson said having his boss hear from North Dakota officials was embarrassing. He also had to tell his wife of five years.

Boston College researchers find that children whose nonresident fathers are involved in their lives are less likely to abuse drugs or alcohol, commit violence or property crime, or to have problems in school. According to Boston College:

“Fathers who do not live with their children can still have a positive effect on them if they stay involved in their lives, according to researchers at Boston College.

“A study in the January/February issue of the journal Child Development found that when nonresident fathers are involved with their adolescent children, the youths are less likely to take part in delinquent behavior such as drug and alcohol use, violence, property crime and school problems like truancy and cheating.

“‘Nonresident fathers in low-income, minority families appear to be an important protective factor for adolescents,’ said Rebekah Levine Coley, professor of applied development and educational psychology at Boston College and the study’s lead author.

“Greater involvement from fathers may help adolescents develop self-control and self-competence, and may decrease the opportunities adolescents have to engage in problem behaviors.”

I’ve criticized Christian conservatives on numerous occasions for their often meager efforts to defend marriage and fatherhood from the ravages of our current family law system. I’ve also criticized them for focusing on sideshow family issues like gay marriage, as well as their sometimes mean-spirited attitude towards gays. For some examples, click here.

I’m pleased to say that there are indications that some leading religious figures are starting to address real family issues, such as divorce, custody, and the way millions of fathers have been driven out of the lives of the children who love and need them. One of them is Michael McManus, the founder of Marriage Savers. His group works with troubled couples, and his program is said to have helped save 100,000 marriages over the past couple decades.

I’ve previously praised McManus for his efforts to help struggling couples and prevent divorce–for one example, click here.

Over the past 12 or 18 months, McManus has been increasingly vocal about the need to meaningfully address the family law system and divorce, and he has endorsed Shared Parenting. In McManus’ new Marriage Savers Report Card 2007, he writes:

“If parents agree to a divorce, they should have equal access to children – Joint Custody or Shared Parenting. Today’s norm of Sole Custody removes one parent from the lives of their children, I argued. However, of the six states that passed the strongest Joint Custody laws, five experienced the largest drops in the divorce rate: Montana, Kansas, Connecticut, Idaho and Alaska. Why? ‘If a parent knows they will have to interact with the child’s other parent while the child is growing up, there is less incentive to divorce,’ says David Levy of the Children’s Rights Council.'”

McManus also notes:

“America’s divorce rate is the world’s highest because the law permits one partner to unilaterally end a marriage even with no allegation of adultery or abuse. What was begun by two people willingly is terminated by one person against the will of the spouse in 80% of cases. This is called ‘No Fault Divorce,’ because no fault need be alleged to get the divorce. Result: innocent children are scarred for life; they are three times as likely as those from intact marriages to be expelled from school or to have a baby out-of-wedlock, five times as apt to live in poverty or to commit suicide, and 12 times as likely to be jailed. Also, the divorced live 4-10 years less.”

His solution is one which has both merits and problems–Mutual Consent Divorce. He writes:

“In my newspaper column I called for a change in the law in cases involving children to ‘Replace No Fault Divorce with Mutual Consent Divorce.’ Either spouse could file for divorce on grounds of adultery, abuse, etc. But if no such fault is alleged, both parties would have to agree. ‘Government has an interest in the future of children, and they’d be best served if parents worked out their differences,’ I asserted. Attorney John Crouch, President of Americans for Divorce Reform, estimates that change would cut divorce rates by 30%.”

McManus also notes that the National Association of Evangelicals passed a resolution this year identifying “‘easy divorce’ as a social evil to be challenged, and committed NAE to improve ‘marriage and divorce law.'”

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

Keen interest in gentler ways to divorce (Associated Press, 12-19-07)

Briggs says he’ll do right by daughter (Chicago Tribune, 12-20-07)

Hasselhoff agrees on divorce terms (Associated Press, 12-21-07)

New power to seize passports (UK Online, 12-23-07)

Divorce class helps parents (The Gainesville Sun, 12-23-07)

Military divorce on rise (Salt Lake Tribune, 12-23-07)

Illinois enacts deadbeat-parent strategy (Associated Press, 12-24-07)

Job loss, divorce forces mom to look for fresh start (The Detroit News, 12-24-07)

Agencies partner to help Illinois collect $420,000 in past-due child support (Chicago Tribune, 12-24-07)