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Augusto Zimmerman Speaks Out on Family Law in Australia

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August 17, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

In Australian Family Law, Augusto Zimmerman is a heavyweight.  He’s a highly-respected academic, former Law Reform Commissioner and current President of Western Australia’s Legal Theory Association.  When Zimmerman talks, people listen.  I hope they do in this case.

The linked-to article is adapted from Zimmerman’s presentation to the current Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Family Law System that’s once again looking into how to make family law fair to children and parents (A Sense of Place, 7/27/20).  He doesn’t mince words.  His words positively seethe with indignation.

For example, the first section of his presentation is entitled “Child Support Payments, Parental Alienation and Adult Male Suicide – an Undeniable Link.”  Strong stuff, and he backs up every word.

In a nutshell, child support levels are determined by Australian courts based on the number of days a custodial parent has the child in her care – the more days, the more dollars.  Unsurprisingly, “it is entirely reasonable to expect that a primary carer may be very tempted to withhold access for solely monetary reasons.”

Stated another way, when we offer a person monetary incentives to take a certain action, we aren’t surprised when the person takes that action.  Money can have that effect.

And, given those incentives and the fact that custodial parents (the huge majority of whom are mothers) often fight to keep non-custodial parents’ parenting time to a minimum, the expedient of parental alienation often becomes the weapon of choice.  After all, why not get little Andy or Jenny to reject Dad outright and so reduce his parenting time from minimal to nothing at all? 

Finally,

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reports that the suicide rate for men aged 20 to 39 years has risen by 70 per cent over the last two decades.

This finding has been highlighted in an academic paper by Susan Beaton and Peter Forster. Published by the Australian Psychological Society, these two experts in suicide preventions explain that ‘suicide is the number one killer of men under 44 years’ in Australia, and that the dramatic increase in male suicide is at least partially due to marriage breakdown coupled with ‘poorer social support among divorced males’

According to sociology professor Augustine Kpsowa of the University of California at Riverside, divorce following the loss of contact with their children is undoubtedly a major factor of male suicide. ‘As far as the divorced man is concerned, he has lost his marriage and lost his children and that can lead to depression and suicide’, Professor Kpsowa says.

In short, child support law begets parental alienation that begets male suicide.  Or sometimes it’s just the loss of a father’s children and his status as father that drives him to despair.  Of course, fortunately few fathers actually take their own life, but the point is less that particular tragedy than the profound and powerful impact of the family law system on the emotional/psychological well-being of non-custodial parents.  Is the devastation wrought on children who lose a father and fathers who lose their children truly the best Australian family law can do?

Augusto Zimmerman thinks not and he’s doing his utmost to wring sensible reform from a family law system that’s long been in thrall to the false notion that children having meaningful time with their fathers can only mean violence for mothers.  It’s an absurd idea based on flaky data, but to date, it’s held sway.  Maybe the Joint Select Committee will do better than the last effort at reform.  We’ll see.

I’ll have more to say on Zimmerman’s piece next time.

  

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DCS Attack on Donald Williams: Unconstitutional From the Start

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August 12, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

Last time I posted a piece about Donald Williams, Jr., the California man who narrowly avoided having Arizona child welfare officials shanghai his daughter Melody away from him and into foster care and then adoption.  The process took over four years, but Williams finally prevailed in the Arizona appellate court.  His daughter now lives with him and he’s rightly suing the Arizona Department of Child Safety for deprivation of his constitutionally-guaranteed parental rights.

Today I want to delve into that case a bit deeper.  Here’s the appellate court’s decision that makes all too clear what DCS agents were up to.  Judges write in a very circumspect manner, but beneath that calm veneer, it’s easy to see the unanimous panel seething.  What DCS did was outrageous by any stretch of the imagination.

Most importantly, it was from the start.  DCS knew they had a child of a father who was both impecunious and lived out of state.  Getting his child away from him and into foster care and then to adoption surely looked like the easiest of slam-dunks and DCS lost no time in seeking to remove Williams from Melody’s life.  From the very beginning they violated long-established U.S. Supreme Court precedent that’s written into Arizona statute law regarding state power and parental rights. 

Put simply, the state cannot legally intervene into families in which parents are fit and children aren’t being abused or neglected.  Everyone in the Arizona child welfare bureaucracy knows the law (or should), and everyone in Williams’ case violated it.  In short, they did so intentionally and the juvenile court that ruled on the matter took part.

The very first hearing in the case took place solely to decide whether Melody was “dependent,” i.e. whether she needed the state to step in and care for her.  She didn’t.  Williams had contacted the department and let them know he wanted to care for his child.  The department had no evidence that he was an unfit parent, and of course produced none at the hearing.  Given that, Melody should have been pronounced not dependent at the first hearing and handed over to Williams.

But that’s not what happened.  DCS filed pleadings claiming that he was (a) unfit and (b) had abandoned his child.  As to (a), they had no evidence and as to (b), they knew he’d done no such thing.  So their pleadings that were intentionally false as were the affidavits of caseworkers in support of those pleadings.  As the appellate court said, in its understated way,

The lack of factual support for the allegations in the petition relating to Father’s unfitness creates significant concerns about the ethical propriety of filing the dependency petition claiming Father abused or neglected and abandoned Melody.   

“Ethical propriety,” indeed.  That’s an open invitation for an inquiry into the ethics of the lawyer who filed the pleading and the DCS employees who signed the affidavits.

Still, the judge, who presumably knows the applicable constitutional law, pronounced Melody dependent and the case was off and running.  With the dependency finding in hand, DCS managed to string out the case for an astonishing four years.

Less than six months later, the State of California conducted an investigation of Williams at the request of Arizona DCS, pursuant to the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children.

The ICPC social worker in California interviewed Father in his home, then separately interviewed his ex-wife, children, and a friend. The report noted that Father’s ex-wife stated: “[he] was a good father, who cares and provides for his children.” After interviewing Father’s children at their school, the social worker further noted that “[i]t is obvious that [the children] feel loved and cared for by their father and that he is very involved in their lives.”

The ICPC concluded: [Father] had good references and all stated that [he] is an excellent parent to his children. From observation it appears that he has a positive relationship with his children and they look to him for attention and affection.

In short, Williams was the very opposite of how he was portrayed by DCS in its pleadings and affidavits.

Williams should have had custody of his daughter immediately after contacting DCS and being proven to be her actual father.  That didn’t happen.  Ten months later, DCS had the ICPC report from California.  It should have then and there handed Melody to him.  Nothing prevented it from doing so, but instead it set up roadblocks to him seeing her.

Recall that Williams had little money with which to finance travel between Sacramento, where he lived, and Phoenix, where Melody lived.  So he got the court to order the state to reimburse him for his travel expenses.  Despite being ordered to do so by the court, DCS never did so on time.  Williams depended on each reimbursement to fund his next trip to Arizona.  When the money wasn’t produced, he couldn’t make the trip.  And that’s exactly what DCS wanted.

Armed with that “evidence,” they told the juvenile court that he was failing to keep his scheduled visitations with Melody and therefore had abandoned her.  That spurred the court to finally terminate his rights, an order that the appellate court overturned.

The entire case is one of the most egregious attempts by a child welfare agency to snatch a child from a father it knew to be not only not unfit, but in fact a “good father,” “an excellent father” and one whose children obviously feel loved and cared for by him.  To do so, the agency didn’t hesitate to lie to the juvenile court and to drag its feet for over four years and all in the service of wresting a small girl from her loving father. 

Heads should roll at DCS, but they won’t.  No, Williams will win his lawsuit against DCS, but the money will be chalked up by the agency as just another cost of doing business.  Meanwhile, other fit parents had best be on the lookout. DCS will stop at nothing.

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Dad Files Suit Against Arizona DCS

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August 11,2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

Donald Williams, Jr. is suing the ironically named Arizona Department of Child Safety and several individual officers thereof for $25 million (AZ Central, 8/1/20).  I hope he gets every penny of it.  He won’t, but I still hope he does.  Williams’ case is a lesson for anyone who wants to learn about the depredations of child welfare agencies.  It provides a good look at what they do and the assumptions they make.

Williams lives in Sacramento, CA.  Back in 2014, he had a brief relationship with a woman who soon moved to Arizona.  She gave birth to their daughter, Melody, in 2014, but the child was taken from her at the hospital because she tested positive for illegal drugs.  She’s not been a part of the case since.

Somehow Williams learned about the child and contacted DCS telling them he thought he might be Melody’s dad.  That didn’t sit well with DCS officials who plainly thought they had (a) a child who should be in foster care and then adopted and (b) all the federal money that goes with both.  Williams was an obstacle they hadn’t counted on.

So DCS embarked on a four-year campaign of sidelining Williams in his daughter’s life.  First, she was placed in foster care and then the state began making it as difficult as it could for Williams to form a bond with his child.  Williams is poor, so travelling back and forth between Sacramento and Phoenix was difficult for him.  But he had regular phone and Skype calls with his little girl. 

Moreover, DCS asked California authorities to investigate Williams’ parenting abilities.  To their dismay, the investigation found him to be a devoted, loving and capable parent to his children.

Now, as DCS authorities well know, the U.S. Supreme Court case of Troxel v. Granville holds that the state has no interest in interfering in the parenting of children unless the parents have demonstrated unfitness.  Clearly, Williams had done the opposite, but Arizona DCS was determined.  They had a goal and they weren’t to be turned aside easily.

To complete Melody’s assignment to foster care and then her adoption, DCS had to somehow convince a juvenile court that Williams was unfit or had abandoned his child.  Given that it was hard for him to travel to Arizona very often, DCS set up a schedule of visitation that he couldn’t keep.  Then it went to court and told the judge he was unfit or had abandoned the child because he didn’t show up to visit with her often enough.  One DCS official also gilded the lily by lying about Williams’ phone calls with Melody.

All that took over four years, during which time Melody was growing up with a foster mother, the only parent she’d ever known. 

Four different juvenile court judges heard Williams’ case and eventually one of them granted a DCS motion to terminate his parental rights.  Williams appealed and has recently prevailed.  A unanimous state appeals panel ruled that, astonishingly enough, DCS had produced no evidence of parental unfitness and done everything in its power to deny Williams contact with his daughter.  His “failure” to do so was then presented as evidence of unfitness.

It’s not easy for the party with the burden of proof to prevail in a lawsuit when it produces no evidence.  So the fact that DCS did so in Williams’ case is remarkable.  It simply filed certain conclusory pleadings, i.e. that assert without factual support the necessary elements of the case.  DCS said Williams was unfit and that’s all it took for one juvenile court judge to rule in its favor.  Amazing, but true.

The appellate court ruling was issued early this year, at which point, Williams finally took custody of his little girl who doubtless was utterly bewildered about why she was no longer living with her foster mother.  He’s recently filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging deprivation of his constitutionally protected parental rights.  Again, I hope he wins and wins big.

His case once again demonstrates what we see all too often with CPS agencies – the willingness to aggressively pursue termination of parents’ rights even when there is clearly no reason to do so.  DCS knew that Williams was a good parent.  Officials there also knew that forcing adoption on Melody, who’s never needed it, would mean the loss of one good adoptive parent.  That in turn would mean another child who did need adoption might go without.  But still they bent heaven and earth to deny to Melody her loving father.  Truly a disgraceful chain of events and one that never should have taken place

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Nebraska: An Answer to Ray Keiser?

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August 6, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

This article performs an excellent public service (Lincoln Journal Star, 7/27/20).  It once again informs us about the bankruptcy of the arguments made by anti-shared parenting activists, this time in Nebraska.  This is all they have to offer?  If so, there is in fact no argument of any substance against equal parenting.

Readers may recall that, not long ago, I posted a piece on the pro-shared parenting op-ed in the same publication by Ray Keiser.  Well, the linked-to piece is supposedly an answer to his.  It’s almost touchingly naïve.  From its ungrammatical headline to the final word, the article could have been written by a high school freshman.  And, tellingly, while it’s written by two lawyers, neither of them has any background in family law.  Is there really not one family lawyer in the state who can be convinced to trot out the usual nonsense that poses as reasoned opposition to shared parenting?  Apparently not.

The two authors, Pam Carrier and Deb Gilg offer three basic arguments: (1) Nebraska judges really sincerely try to do a good job, (2) the “best interests of the child” standard is an objective one and (3) courts are more and more ordering equal parenting time, so there’s no need for reform.

As to #1, I have no reason to believe that Nebraska judges are any more cynical or uncaring than judges of any other state.  I’m sure most of them do their best.  The question being, “is that good enough?”  And of course the answer is that, if they’re not ordering equal parenting in most cases, it’s not.  Seven years ago, when the state legislature ordered a review of family court cases, the data revealed that fewer than 6% of cases found any form of parental unfitness, child abuse or domestic violence.  In short, most parents who divorce are fit to care for their kids.  But time and again, one of them is prevented from doing so by a family court judge.

Second, the best interests standard is quite plainly anything but objective.  It is in fact the classic case of statutory language that most resembles a bucket into which a judge can dump his or her biases, prejudices, half-baked theories, etc. about what’s good for kids.  Given that few judges are educated in the literature on shared parenting – literature that strongly suggests that a child’s best interests and having as much time as possible with each parent are much the same – it’s inevitable that even the best-intended judges often get their parenting time orders wrong.

The matter actually gets laughable when we read the second comment to the linked-to piece.

Ms. Carrier and Ms. Gilg assert the “best interest of the child standard” is an objective standard. However, that’s simply not true. Numerous lawyers and legal scholars (including Hilary Clinton) have observed this standard provides no meaningful guidance to judges, which is why there often are very different outcomes in otherwise similar cases. The Nebraska Supreme Court also agrees. The Nebraska Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Ms. Carrier’s father, held the “best interests of the child” standard was unconstitutionally vague.

Yes, Pam Carrier’s own father served on the Nebraska Supreme Court and penned the opinion in the case calling the best interests standard – you guessed it – unconstitutionally vague.  But his daughter nowhere mentions that case in favor of blithely stating that, to the contrary, the standard is just fine, thank you.

The actual data on parenting time orders go a long way to rebutting Carrier’s and Gilg’s third claim.  What’s their evidence that courts are moving toward equal parenting?  None.  They surely know about the 2013 study performed in their own state, but nevertheless fail to mention it.  That may be because it rebuts their third point.  The Saini study revealed no trend toward equal parenting over the ten-year period studied, and, since there’ve been no subsequent studies performed, Carrier’s and Gilg’s assertion stands naked.

That’s even more clear when we see the figures on child custody in Nebraska.  Those show that over 70% of custody cases give primary custody to mothers and relegate fathers to the sidelines.  Fathers got primary custody in 13% of cases.  Most often, that means the standard every-other-weekend plus a couple of hours during the week visitation, i.e. not enough to maintain the father-child bonds that are so vital to the child’s well-being.

As with so many of its predecessors, the Carrier/Gilg piece has nothing to offer.  Kids everywhere, not just in Nebraska, need to maintain close relationships with both parents post-divorce.  Time and again, judges thwart that simplest and most vital of needs.  It’s time they stopped.  And it’s time anti-shared parenting advocates admit that they long ago stopped producing principled, fact-based arguments for their claims.

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Learn From Shared Parenting Experts for Free!


August 5, 2020

Dear National Parents Organization Supporter

I’m writing with exciting news! National Parents Organization is making available, free of charge, video recordings from the most significant shared parenting conference ever held.

NPO, in collaboration with the International Council on Shared Parenting (ICSP), brought together the world’s leading researchers on child well-being and separated parenting in order to address the most pressing questions about shared parenting when parents live apart:

  • We know that shared parenting is correlated with better outcomes for children but is that because it actually causes those better outcomes or is just correlated with factors that do so?
  • Is shared parenting good for children even when the parents are experiencing (nonviolent) conflict and don’t both agree to a shared parenting plan?
  • Is shared parenting appropriate for infants and toddlers?
  • Is there a benefit to children of having a legal presumption of shared parenting?

The renowned experts addressing these, and other, questions about shared parenting include, among others:

  • Malin Bergström, PhD, Psychology, Karolinska Institut, Sweden
  • Sanford Braver, PhD, Psychology, Arizona State University
  • William Fabricius, PhD, Psychology, Arizona State University
  • Jennifer Harman, PhD, Psychology, Colorado State University
  • Edward Kruk, PhD, Sociology, University of British Columbia
  • Michael Lamb, PhD, Psychology, University of Cambridge
  • Linda Nielsen, PhD, Education, Wake Forest University
  • Richard Warshak, PhD, author

The groundbreaking research of these, and other participants in the conference, clearly supports the conclusion that, if we make the well-being of children our priority, shared parenting should be the norm when parents live apart.

It is vitally important to the well-being of children whose parents live apart that the best research on separated parenting be appreciated by parents, legislators, judges and divorce professionals, as well as the general public. Because of this, NPO has chosen to make the videos from this important conference available to all at no cost. We just ask that viewers register on the website.

Here’s the link!

We urge you to watch these videos and to share them with others, especially legislators, attorneys, mediators, guardians ad litem, and others. Help NPO bring the best research available to the attention of those who most need to be aware of it!

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Ireland: Still Marginalizing Unmarried Fathers

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August 4, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

In Ireland, the frank discrimination against unmarried fathers and the children they seek to parent continues.  And it will do so into the foreseeable future (Irish Examiner, 7/28/20).  Amazingly, it’s all part of a public policy that pretends to further marriage.  The Irish might want to rethink that.

In the Emerald Isle, if a man who fathers a child isn’t married to the mother of that child, he has no parental rights.  She has full parental rights, he has none.  With luck and the goodwill of the child’s mother, he may be able to acquire those rights, but otherwise, he can’t.

Here’s how it works:  For the first three months after the child is born, the unmarried father has no parental rights.  Period.  It doesn’t matter how good a partner he’s been to the mother, how much he’s done to support and care for her or how much he wants and loves the child.  He has no parental rights.

After those first three months, he can set about seeking parental rights.

The unmarried father can only obtain guardianship rights after the birth of the child, and even then he can only do so if he is cohabiting with or on good terms with the child’s mother – otherwise he must apply to the court to be appointed a guardian of his child.

Clearly, an unmarried father must jump through many legal hoops if he wants to obtain his parental rights.  Unmarried mothers need do no such thing.  Worse, unmarried mothers have considerable power over the rights of the men who father their children.  If she doesn’t want to marry, she needn’t, and he’s relegated to second-class citizen, at least as far as his child is concerned.  If she doesn’t want to live with him, ditto.  If she doesn’t want to even live on “good terms” with him, the same holds true.

In those cases, he has to pay money to hire a lawyer and go to court.  Sound easy?  It’s not.  Read here and here about Roisin O’Shea’s study of Irish family courts and the judges who rule in them.  Needless to say, Irish judges tend strongly to be disposed against fathers, and I suspect they’re particularly so regarding unmarried ones.

For example,

The study, carried out by Roisín O’Shea and funded by the Irish Research Council, shows that the ‘standard access’ for married separated fathers is a few hours once or twice a week along with “a couple of hours” every fortnight.

And,

Family law researcher Roisin O’Shea observed 493 judicial separation and divorce cases in 2010 which are ordinarily held in private.

She didn’t find a single case where the wife was ordered to pay maintenance for children or a spouse and had only seen the courts order joint custody in two cases.

So it’s not as if Irish judges are even-handed when it comes to the rights of fathers and mothers.

Now, the linked-to particle points out that Irish statute law is supposedly aimed at promoting a provision of the Irish Constitution that expressly favors marriage.  The theory being, I suppose, that providing equal rights for mothers and fathers who aren’t married would encourage non-marital childbearing.  So it’s worth asking “how’s that working out?”

The answer: “It’s not.”

Ireland is a country of a little under five million people.  They have about 61,000 births there per year and a little over 40% of them are to unmarried women.  That’s right in line with the average for the rest of the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.  The percentage of non-marital births in Ireland has been rising for many years.  So the treatment of unmarried fathers is no small issue in Ireland.

Plus, the Irish marriage rate is 18th in the European Union out of 29 countries and it decreases pretty much every year.

So the law doesn’t seem to be promoting marriage or marital childbearing very well.  Why would it?  By giving mothers such great power over fathers’ parental rights and access to their kids, the law encourages them to avoid marriage.  Giving unmarried fathers some realistic say in their children’s lives could only increase the chances that women would opt for marriage.  After all, if fathers’ rights were the same whether married or not, why not opt for the greater certainty, security and prosperity that married couples enjoy?

And of course there are always the children to consider.  Kids do better in households where the adults are married and, if they aren’t, they do better when they have equal access to each parent.  But Irish law does the opposite.  It bends heaven and earth to marginalize fathers in the lives of their children and probably does so in violation of a couple of European conventions.

We’re well into the twenty-first century.  The Irish should know better and do better.  But I see no indication that they’re even considering doing so.

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A Teacher Instructs Teachers About CPS

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July 30, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

When it comes to suspected child abuse, teachers are among the many “mandated reporters.”  That is, if they have reason to believe a child is being abused or neglected, they’re required by law to report their suspicions to the nearest child welfare agency.  Failure to do so can result in the loss of a mandated reporter’s job.  As I’ve said before, that none-too-subtle threat is one of the major reasons for the vast over-reporting to CPS agencies.

So it’s interesting to read this article (We Are Teachers, 11/18/19).  It’s written by one Brette Sember, a teacher who’s instructing other teachers on what to do when they suspect abuse or neglect of a child.  Most of it is fairly sensible.  So, for example, readers are urged to not take the lead in investigating the case, but to simply report their suspicions to CPS or the CPS liaison at the school.

But then there’s the not-so-sensible about the piece.  For example,

“More than three million children in the US are abused each year.”

Uh, no there aren’t.  Not even close.  In fact, there are about 3.2 million reports made to CPS agencies of suspected abuse and/or neglect, but about 80% of those are determined to be unfounded without even an investigation being conducted.  That’s according to the U.S. Administration for Children and Families that collects data from state child welfare agencies nationwide.  And the great majority of reports that are founded are not of abuse, but neglect.  About 180,000 kids per year are found to have been abused.

So the linked-to article is written by a teacher who failed to educate herself about the most basic elements of her chosen topic.

The author’s first piece of advice is this:

“You don’t have to be absolutely certain that abuse is taking place.”

That’s of course true, but it also reflects an attitude of “err on the side of reporting.”  Such an attitude doesn’t come as a surprise, given the penalties faced by mandated reporters for failing to report suspected abuse or neglect.  What’s the problem?  One is that CPS agencies are chronically understaffed, so the more reports they receive, the more personnel are required to field the calls and the fewer there are to deal with kids who actually need their help.  The other is that more reports mean more state intervention into the lives of parents and families, whether or not it’s needed.  The state’s heavy hand is rarely welcomed by parents and the mere fact that the complaint turns out to be without merit hardly lightens the blow.  Even an unfounded report lets parents know that Big Brother is watching them.

It’s a problem of which the writer seems blissfully unaware.  Item #7 on her list tells teachers to

“Designate one staff member to communicate with the family.”

She adds that parents often aren’t happy to have been reported to CPS and that, when they telephone the school, they should be told that their communications aren’t confidential.  Fair enough.  But what Sember fails to mention is anything regarding parental rights.

Now, I don’t know the law on this subject, but I suspect that a “mandated reporter” who makes a report of suspected child abuse or neglect to a child welfare agency can legally be construed as an agent of that state entity.  That would be particularly true of a public school teacher who’s already employed by the state.  If so, all constitutional protections for individuals vis-à-vis the state are effective when the parent talks to the school about the report that implicates them.  Again if so, that means Miranda warnings should be given at the start of any conversation with the parent.  My guess is that they never are.

But in Sember’s article, there’s not a word about parental rights or the fact that the mandated reporter may be considered an agent of a state entity that may want to take the child from the parent.  Given that Sember is trying to educate teachers on their responsibilities in the child protection system, I call that a remarkably negligent omission.

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Why Don’t More Fathers Seek Child Support Orders?

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July 29, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

This piece comes to us from the Sacramento County Department of Child Support Services (Spotlight, 7/2/20).  As such, its chirpy, “all is well” tone is only to be expected.  The countless problems of the child support system won’t get an airing on that site or any like it. 

Still, the article does offer an important tidbit.

For many years, I’ve wondered why so few custodial fathers have a child support order in effect.  The U.S. Census Bureau’s latest compilation of data says that just 41.4% of those fathers have such an order.  That’s compared with 51.4% of custodial mothers who do.  More telling is the fact that it’s the highest rate recorded by the Bureau in 26 years.  The low, 28.8% came in 2011.

So why do dads tend so strongly to not have a support order?

One answer I’ve come to is that, when fathers manage to wrest custody from intractable family court judges, it’s often because Mom is seriously deficient in some way as a parent.  She’s addicted to alcohol or illicit drugs, she’s in prison, she abuses the children, etc.  Needless to say, such people are unlikely to have much in the way of resources with which to pay support, so the dads don’t even try.  They raise the kids as best they can alone.

But the linked-to piece adds to our understanding.  It reports on a young man named Alec Poe, who became a custodial father at age 18.  At first, Mom didn’t have a job, so he didn’t seek a support order.  But once she got one, he did.  Still,

“The biggest obstacle in his path was the sense of shame he felt about pursuing a child support order.

“For men, there is a stigma that we shouldn’t take money from the mother,” Poe explains. “Pride is an issue and there is a stigma for men receiving child support from the mother. We have these assumptions that we won’t get anything. I never went and pursued it because I didn’t think that I would get anything.”

That makes sense.  Given that, I suspect that a good number of custodial fathers don’t seek support from the mother of their children because it’s not considered manly to accept support from a woman, even one who legally owes it.

And that matches nicely with a welter of other information that strongly suggests that our traditional sex roles are very much still with us, that men still act like men and women like women, despite decades of hectoring to do otherwise.

That’s nowhere more apparent than in men’s and women’s differing approaches to financial support for their families.  As many sources tell us, when a couple have children, men tend strongly to work and earn more than before and women tend to do the opposite.  That also appears in the data compiled by Dr. Catherine Hakim, who found women to be far more interested in family and children than in working and earning.  Men were the opposite.

So Alec Poe’s statement comes as no surprise.  Men, including fathers want to be self-sufficient financially and they want to be the resource providers for their families.  They want to bring home the bacon and perceive themselves as doing so.  And if that means not asking a judge to issue an order of child support, then so be it.

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Vancouver Dad Takes on Child Welfare Authority and Wins

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July 23, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

Thanks to the ever-excellent Lenore Skenazy for this article (Magic Valley, 7/19/20).  Skenazy has long been one of the most effective advocates for parents in their conflicts with child-protective authorities.  Her article is one example.

Vancouver resident, Adrian Crook had custody of his four children who, at the time in question were aged 7 – 11.  Crook seems to have been an excellent and responsible father, because his kids were themselves responsible kids.  So he allowed them to ride public transportation to and from school.  Everything went off without a hitch.  Indeed, one bus patron once emailed Crook to tell him what well-behaved children he had.

But then an anonymous tip to the British Columbia Ministry of Child and Family Development complained that the kids were unsupervised.  Stated another way, they were behaving like the capable, responsible, autonomous individuals they were and are.

As such, and despite the fact that they weren’t being abused or neglected by Crook or anyone else, the MCFD swung into action.  But there was a problem.  They couldn’t figure out anything that Crook had done or not done that required their intervention.

[A]fter the MCFD was notified about the unsupervised kids and the authorities came to Crook’s home to investigate (he’s divorced), a supervisor on the case reported that Crook had gone “above and beyond” in training his kids to be responsible.

But a fine parent with fine kids, none of whom had been harmed in any way, didn’t deter the MCFD.

But, unable to believe their own eyes as to the kids’ competence — why wasn’t that enough? — the ministry officials started digging around for any guidelines as to whether children are officially allowed to be independent public transit riders. Finding no specific rules, it eventually deferred to a court decision from 2015, wherein British Columbia’s Supreme Court ruled that no child under 10 can stay home alone, even for a couple of hours after school with a latchkey.

Armed with that ruling and, I suspect, the Sword of Damocles wielded by every child welfare agency – the power to take away your kids – the MCFD forced Crook to sign a “safety plan” under whose terms, Crook’s kids had to be, at all times, in the presence of someone 12 years old or older.  It’s an interesting age, given that Crooks eldest at that time was 11.  Where’d the MCFD get that number?  Not from the case law they cited, so where?  I suspect they made it up strictly because none of Crook’s children had reached that age.  If his oldest child had been 12, I suspect they’d have chosen 13.  But that’s just a hunch on my part.

Whatever the case, Crook’s life as a single father changed radically.

Crook “had to return to taking the bus with them” — 45 minutes each way, twice a day. You can see how someone trying to work full time, or someone with a couple of babies at home, would be crippled by such a rule.

Crook didn’t have little ones at home, but still, with a job to do to put food on the table, taking time out twice a day to ride the bus with his kids, who can do so perfectly well on their own, didn’t make Crook’s life any easier.  But he did it.

He also contested the MCFD’s “safety plan” in court and, after three long years, prevailed.

Crook kept fighting, and finally, last week, he had his day in you know where. In writing the opinion of the court, Justice Barbara Fisher said that the MCFD and its social workers “had no authority to require the appellant to supervise his children on the bus (or elsewhere). It follows that this purported exercise of statutory power was unreasonable.”

Good for him.

But before we celebrate, let’s remember that he and his kids were under the thumb of MCFD for three years.  How much did it cost him in time, money and stress to fight the government for all that time?  Skenazy doesn’t say, but the simple fact remains that, however affluent, educated and dogged Crook was, not everyone is.  Most people have neither the time nor the money to fight a government agency through multiple courts over multiple years.  So a win for Crook is a fine thing, but readers of this blog know, as do caseworkers for the MCFD, that for every one of those the agency loses, there are countless others in which the parent simply doesn’t have the resources to fight.

Therefore, the heavy weight of child welfare agencies falls most on the poor and poorly educated.  That’s not the only problem with those agencies, but it’s certainly one of the worst.

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Another Failed Attack on the Concept of Parental Alienation

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July 23, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

On one hand, this article is more of the same (The Marshall Project, 7/8/20).  It’s intended as a hatchet job on the idea of parental alienation.  We’ve seen the sort many times before and all run to type.  They take one or two cases the author hopes will cast the notion of PA in a bad light, quote Joan Meier, refer to her recent study, cast aspersions on Richard Gardner, state that the DSM-V doesn’t mention PA and portray fathers as abusive and mothers as protective.  Any nod they give to the extensive literature on PA is extremely limited, pejoratively phrased and, often as not absent altogether.  Their point is invariably that the idea of parental alienation is dubious and used only by fathers to illegitimately wrest custody from mothers.

The linked-to piece has all of that, but is a bit more scrupulous and balanced than the rest.  It even avoids quoting or referring to Joyanna Silberg, which alone must count as a major accomplishment.

The Marshall Project piece reports on a single family – that of Ed Cunningham, Tara Coronado and their kids.  The vast majority of the quite high wordcount is devoted to the allegations and counter-allegations between the spouses during their interminable court battle and the conclusions drawn by a battery of mental health professionals.

During the custody case, Coronado leveled several allegations of physical abuse at Cunningham.  None of them were verified, but she did present physical evidence, such as bruises, to back up her claims.  Cunningham adamantly denied all the allegations, but eventually signed an admission in exchange for the ADA’s agreement to discontinue the criminal DV case against him with no penalty and nothing on his record reflecting guilt.

Two mental health professionals found Coronado to have significant mental health issues including borderline personality disorder.  Each concluded that Cunningham should have primary custody of the children and, for two years, he did.  But there were serious problems with the way their conclusions had been arrived at.  For example, one of them never interviewed Coronado, only the father and the children.  Eventually, one of the two gave up her professional licenses in lieu of discipline by licensing authorities and the other vowed to take no new family law cases.

None of that of course establishes whether Coronado alienated the children or not.  Certainly, much of her behavior strongly indicated alienation and the very borderline behavior that was diagnosed.  But the shoddiness of the psychological work makes it impossible to know whether the kids were victims of that type of abuse.

Likewise, there’s nothing to definitively say whether Cunningham physically abused his wife or whether, if he did, he should have seen his parenting time limited because of it.  There were no claims of child abuse made against him.

Plus, in keeping with other articles of the genre, the Marshall Project one essentially never offers the point of view of the countless professionals who are expert in PA, it’s diagnosis and treatment.  Professor Richard Warshak is quoted in brief, but the article focusses mostly on his paper on false positive findings of PA.  Extremely short shrift is given to those who know all too well the realities of PA – that it’s all too common, that it’s child abuse, that it’s not a clever scheme on the part of fathers, that fathers and mothers alike commit PA and that articles that seek to prove otherwise inevitably encourage overlooking the child abuse that is PA.  In an article that verges on 10,000 words, it’s astounding that the writer never bothered to pick up her phone and call Warshak, Amy Baker, Linda Gottlieb, William Bernet or the countless other professionals who actually know a great deal about the subject of the piece.

But there’s one other thing the linked-to article has in common with all the others.  The writer couldn’t manage to find a case that proves the point.  The trope offered by those who seek to cast doubt on the actuality of PA is that every year there are thousands of cases in which protective mothers are denied custody by abusive fathers claiming PA.  Now, if that were the case, wouldn’t you think that finding one such case would be simplicity itself?

But they never do.  Having read the article, it’s simply impossible to say whether Coronado alienated her children.  Certainly the mental health professionals did an abysmal job of figuring that out, but just as certainly, their failure to behave professionally and fairly in no way means she didn’t.  The case is muddy in the extreme about both the allegations of PA and DV.

So the question arises “Is this the best they could come up with?”  It must be; otherwise they’d have used a case that more strongly made their point.

And so it goes.  It seems there’s always someone who’s dead set on casting doubt on the fact of PA despite the mountains of evidence supporting it.  But more and more, it seems that the parade is passing them by, that the science on PA and its regular appearance in family court ignores them and their threadbare claims.  So should we all.