Category: Blog

October 25, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Yesterday’s piece ended by asking why opponents of the shared parenting bill currently before Italy’s Parliament seek its defeat. In that piece I detailed the usual tired claims by opponents that were faithfully reiterated by Washington Post writer Anna Momigliano (Washington Post, 9/18/18). As usual, none of those arguments withstands even casual scrutiny and Momigliano mentioned not a single reason to support shared parenting. Her piece was 100% negative.

But of course she gave plenty of space for opponents to make their claims. The question though becomes, why do they oppose shared parenting. The answer, it turns out, is both entirely predictable and utterly quixotic, at odds with even the interests they pretend to promote.

[T]he left-leaning opposition and women’s groups fear that the bill would harm women.

Nadia Somma, a representative of Demetra, an anti-domestic-violence center in Turin, wrote for the newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano that the proposed law would “turn back the clock 50 years on women’s rights.” Sen. Valeria Valente of the center-left Democratic Party said it would make “life impossible for mothers.”

Hmm, really? If opponents’ assumptions include notions like women being first and foremost mothers and that women should avoid the workplace if at all possible, then perhaps they have a point. After all, a law that would give fathers at least 40% of the parenting time following divorce would tend to thwart the aspiration of mothers to do the whole job themselves.

But then the WaPo piece and the Il Fatto piece it links to (sorry about the barely comprehensible translation) go completely off the rails, contradicting the above. Here’s Momigliano in the WaPo:

In Italy’s conservative society, less than 50 percent of women work outside of the home, and most of the burden of child-rearing falls upon mothers.

That’s right. And with fathers taking on up to 50% of the parenting time, how might the number of women in paid work be affected? Might it free those women to work, earn and save more and, in the process attain greater autonomy? Yes, it would. When mothers bear the lion’s share of parenting, it hamstrings their earning ability. See how that works?

And here’s Nadia Somma singing the same tune in Il Fatto:

This law more than a reform is a counter- reform . A blow to the rights of women and children. The law in fact does not take into account the economic and employment disparities between men and women that still characterize Italian society. Italy is second to last in Europe  for female employment and is second to even Malta . The precarious employment  severely penalized working mothers who risk losing their jobs. 

Well, the law is anything but a blow to the rights of children. Allowing them to maintain healthy, full relationships with their fathers and mothers both is far, far from a blow to them or their rights.

But Somma’s real gripe is, as she says, the disparities between men and women in employment. But the answer is the same: the law would give women greater opportunities to even out those disparities. It would place more of the burden of child care on fathers, freeing mothers. What about that obvious fact do Momigliano and Somma not grasp?

I think they grasp it all too well. Here’s Momigliano again:

Because women with children struggle to find stable employment, critics argue that the abolition of child support would raise the poverty rate among divorced mothers and could make them unable to provide for their children.

Yes, and those same “critics” bay at the full moon, but we don’t give them credit for doing so. The point is that, as Hildegard Sunderhauf said at NPO’s conference on shared parenting, the real aim of radical feminism is to continue the flow of wealth from men to women and child support is an important part of that aim. (So, of course, is alimony. Gender feminists oppose any effort to reform alimony laws too.)

That reveals several important facts.

The first is that, as feminist opponents of shared parenting see it, child support is Mom support. They’re right about that. As countless people have pointed out, child support guidelines throughout the English-speaking world often dramatically overstate what it takes to raise a child. As I’ve mentioned recently, states in the U.S. pay foster parents less to care for a child than child support guidelines call for. In Texas, for example, foster parents receive about $700 per month per child. If child support guidelines followed the same formula, that would mean a non-custodial parent with no parenting time at all would pay the other parent $350 per month. A father with 20% parenting time would then pay about $280 per month. And yet the average child support order for men in the U.S. is about $474 per month.

Therefore, some of that money goes to Mom, not little Andy or Jenny. Gender feminists understand that and so oppose any move to equalize parenting time.

Second, by any stretch of the imagination, that just doesn’t make sense. That is, it doesn’t make sense if your aim is the betterment of women. After all, why encourage women to take on the overwhelming majority of childcare duties when doing so dramatically reduces their earnings? That’s doubly true when we realize that, in all but the most extreme cases, no amount of child support will ever replace what a woman can earn on her own.

When women are owed on average $5,690 per year in child support, it’s impossible to pretend that they’re better off than if they were working and earning. Most women can earn in a month or two what the average child support pays in a year.

So when Momigliano, Somma and the rest of their ilk bleat about reducing child support, what they’re really saying is that they want to (a) keep women dependent on men and (b) keep them earning and saving less than they could if men did more of the childcare. It’s a remarkable stance for anyone who claims to be promoting the welfare of women and girls.

And that of course says nothing about their opposition to the well-being of kids.

October 24, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Is it possible that, with all that’s been written and said about shared parenting in so many parts of the world, that it will be Italy that leads the way?  It is.  Indeed, it appears likely.

Now, this Washington Post article about the bill that’s pending before the Italian Parliament is little different from the usual claptrap published by those who oppose children maintaining meaningful relationships with both parents when the adults split up (Washington Post, 9/18/18).  That of course means that it’s simply wrong on several fronts and misleading on the others.  Plus, writer Anna Momigliano tosses in a rich disregard for Italian mothers in her zeal to mischaracterize the bill, its probable effects and its supporters.

What would the bill do?  First, it emphasizes the need for mediation in child custody cases.  More importantly, it establishes a presumption of equal or nearly equal parenting following divorce or separation.  Of course it also provides an exception when a parent abuses a child.  So how does Momigliano characterize the bill?

Children of divorced couples would spend the exact same amount of time living with each parent… 

No, actually they wouldn’t.  Momigliano would know that if she’d read the bill.  Here’s how the bill is described (in an admittedly poor translation):

[T]he new structure provides, in an innovative manner, the right of the child to maintain a balanced and continuous relationship with the father and mother, to receive care, education, education and moral assistance from both parental figures and to spend with each of their parents adequate, equal and equivalent times, except for cases of material impossibility. Equal times are guaranteed if even only one of the parents requests it. In any case, the stay of not less than twelve days per month, including overnight stays, is guaranteed with the father and with the mother, unless there is a proven and justified risk of prejudice to the psycho-physical health of the child in strictly identified cases.

So what Momigliano calls “the exact same amount of time” is actually anything from a 50/50 split to a 40/60 one.  But we’ve seen that sort of misrepresentation before.  One of the standard objections of the anti-shared parenting crowd is that such a law would “tie judges’ hands,” i.e. prevent them from dealing with each case individually.  So, in the service of that argument, Momigliano casts her “exact same amount of time” slur.  It’s simply untrue.

Another part of the usual, off-the-shelf claims against shared parenting is that advocates don’t care about children, but simply want to reduce child support payments.  And so, in her sole reference to pro-shared parenting arguments, Momigliano offers this:

The bill’s supporters contend that this would make child support obsolete…

I’m not kidding.  In an article of 700 words or so, that’s the only reference she makes to the countless fact- and science-based arguments in favor of shared parenting.  To Momigliano and the usual walking dead at the WaPo, shared parenting is all about child support.  Never mind the manifold benefits of shared parenting to kids; never mind that fathers do a better job of paying what they owe than do mothers; never mind that child support systems are riddled with incompetence, theft, false paternity and the like; never mind that they’re often far more about Mom support than about child support; and never mind that their draconian enforcement mechanisms fall most heavily on the parents least able to endure them.  No, all of that is to be ignored in favor of continuing the transfer of wealth from fathers to mothers.  Indeed, that last is precisely the policy of radical feminists in Europe as described at NPO’s conference on shared parenting by German lawyer and former feminist Hildegard Sunderhof.

Yes, the child support system is ripe for root-and-branch reform, but that’s not the point of shared parenting.  The point of shared parenting can be located in the wealth of scientific literature that finds it to be by far the best arrangement for kids following their parents’ divorce. 

Do I need to mention that nowhere in Momigliano’s article does she mention that science?  You’d think that, in any such piece, children’s welfare might rate a comment, but of course this is the Washington Post, so…

What Momigliano does mention is parental alienation syndrome.  Of course she does.  This is an anti-shared parenting screed, so naturally PAS is included.  Just as naturally, it’s misrepresented.

PAS holds that a parent can belittle or bad-mouth the other parent to the point that their child becomes hostile and no longer wants to spend time with them.

Well, that’s quite the golden gloss on PAS.  A more accurate statement would have been that PAS and parental alienation are child abuse, that children (particularly very young ones) exposed to either can actually become disoriented to what is real and what is not.  When Mommy tells little Andy or Jenny that Daddy is an ogre and doesn’t love them, but when they’re with him, they experience no such thing, kids can become deeply confused as the nature of reality.  That nudges them uncomfortably close to psychosis. 

So, as usual, those like Momigliano, who seek to cast doubt on the existence of PA or PAS inevitably find themselves defending that sort of child abuse.  Why do such an unconscionable thing? 

Find out tomorrow. 

October 22, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

It’s like reading the history of a defeated army retreating but fighting rear-guard actions along the way (Psychology Today, 10/10/18).  I refer of course to Professor Edward Kruk’s description of the tactics used by anti-shared parenting advocates over the years as, one by one, their justifications for their opposition fell before the advance of science and sound reasoning.  And now, they’ve come up against the impassable river, the unscalable mountain.  They’re stuck, hemmed in on every side by the onslaught of scientific achievement.

According to Kruk, there’ve been three waves of justifications advanced by opposition forces against shared parenting.  The first wave consisted of three smaller ones.

First, it was asserted that children have one primary attachment figure to whom they become bonded, almost always the mother, and that any period of separation from the primary attachment figure will damage children’s development and compromise their well-being.

The only problem with that was that it was wrong and coming to be known to be wrong at the very time anti-shared parenting advocates asserted it.  More recent research shows no hierarchy of children’s attachments to father and mother.

A second line of argument was then put forward, stating that child development would be compromised when children move back and forth between two homes, “bounced around like a yo-yo,” with constant movement, two sets of home rules and different parenting styles.

No-nothing family lawyers opposed to shared parenting still make that argument today.  It too is unsupported by empirical evidence.  Indeed, as Kruk points out, children themselves never seem to complain about “living out of a suitcase,” seeming to prefer the contact they maintain with both parents to living in a single place.

Finally, a third argument was made that it is harmful to child development to disrupt the caregiving status quo, and that mothers should thus retain their role as the primary day-to-day caregivers of children.

Again, the empirical evidence contradicted the claim.  As elsewhere, maintaining meaningful relationships with both parents far outweighs any harm occasioned by giving the kids time with Dad they otherwise wouldn’t have had.

So it was on to Wave Two.

[I]t was argued that shared parenting after divorce exacerbates parental conflict, and that children would be drawn into the conflict if shared care arrangements were imposed on families. Shared parenting, therefore, is only suitable for parents with little or no conflict and who get along well as co-parents.  

What I’ve pointed out many times was true in this instance.  Opponents of shared parenting never get around to mentioning what they’re arguing for, only what they’re arguing against.  After all, if not shared parenting, then what?  That “what” is the status quo, i.e. sole or primary maternal custody in the great majority of cases.  What does that “winner-take-all” system do to parental conflict?  It enhances it greatly, as anyone would expect.  After all, when faced with the prospect of losing one’s children, fathers with the means to do so can be expected to fight.  And when presented with the “silver bullet” (i.e. allegations of domestic violence or child abuse) with which to fight back, many mothers don’t leave it unfired.

[R]esearch demonstrated that children do better in shared care arrangements even if there is conflict between the parents, and that sustaining both relationships is a protective factor for children in high parental conflict situations. Not all conflict is bad for children.

Retreating still further, the anti-dad crowd tried another tack.

[I]n high-conflict families, shared parenting exposes victimized parents and children to family violence and child abuse, and a legal presumption of shared parenting will allow abusive parents to continue their reign of terror in families.

Unfortunately for them, that argument failed in two ways.  First, every shared parenting bill ever filed has included an exception for child abuse or domestic violence.  All anyone has to do is read them, but, when you oppose shared parenting and all the evidence is against you, you find yourself repeating outworn and long-debunked objections.  Of course the principled thing to do would be to admit that the facts support shared parenting and therefore become a shared parenting advocate.  But it seems principle isn’t these people’s long suit. 

And of course, when we review actual divorce filings in which child custody is an issue, we find that even allegations of DV or child abuse are vanishingly rare, much less actual findings thereof.  So why make child custody policy based on the few exceptions rather than the rule?  The anti-dad crowd never gets around to answering that one.

The last-ditch defense of sole/primary maternal custody was actually just ridiculous.  It claims that, however beneficial shared care may be, we shouldn’t establish a legal presumption of it because that would tie judges’ hands.  Unmentioned was the fact that, of all the existing judicial presumptions, no one ever makes such an argument against them.  Unmentioned as well is the fact that a presumption in the law is just that, i.e. a position taken that requires opponents of the position to produce evidence to rebut it.  If they do so, the presumption disappears.  In short, the judge’s hands aren’t tied; the presumption is simply the obligation of the person objecting to what usually benefits kids to show why it shouldn’t be used in the case at bar.

Plus,

Without a legal presumption, judges make decisions based on idiosyncratic biases, leading to inconsistency and unpredictability in their judgments.

Indeed they do, as many studies of judicial attitudes adequately demonstrate.

It may be asked, then, after 40 years of debate, whether we have now reached a tipping point, when researchers can conclude with confidence that the best interests of children are commensurate with a legal presumption of shared parenting responsibility after divorce. Summarizing the state of current research in two recent special issues on shared parenting in the Journal of Divorce and Remarriage and the Journal of Child Custody, leading divorce scholar Sanford Braver asserts, “To my mind, we’re over the hump. We’ve reached the watershed. On the basis of this evidence, social scientists can now cautiously recommend presumptive shared parenting to policymakers…shared parenting has enough evidence [that] the burden of proof should now fall to those who oppose it rather than those who promote it.”

About that, I must disagree.  Caution is admirable in a scientist and I highly respect the intellectual scruples expressed by Dr. Braver. When assessing the scientific evidence for or against shared parenting, one must always be cautious and considered.

But we have now come to a time at which academic caution has done what was needed.  We now have to demand that the anti-shared parenting advocates put their cards on the table.  It is time they stopped trying to undermine the science that supports shared parenting and provide us with the science that supports the only two alternatives – sole and primary parenting.  And in doing so, they must adhere to the same strict standards they’ve always demanded of the science they invariably seek to discredit.

Of course they’ve already shown their hand, and it’s a loser.  They have nothing with which to support their claim that sole/primary parenting is better for kids than shared parenting. 

Their emperor is naked.  There is no longer any reason to be cautious about saying so.

October 21, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Here’s a case that’s sadly not uncommon (U.S. News, 10/9/18).  So why write about it?  Two reasons that I’ll get to later.

A case manager for the Iowa Department of Human Services has been found to have lied under oath and otherwise fabricated evidence in order to strip a mother and father of their parental rights to their four children.

Gray delivered fabricated reports and trial testimony that helped convince a judge to terminate the legal rights of the mother and father of four northern Iowa children, District Associate Judge Adam Sauer ruled on June 12. The judge said Gray’s testimony was riddled with “lies and misrepresentations.”…

Gray, who had served as the case manager for the family, claimed that she attended monthly visits with them as required by DHS policy but failed to do so, Sauer found.

Gray also claimed to have spoken with the kids’ teachers regarding troubling behaviors they were exhibiting at school. The teachers later said they were never contacted by Gray, and Sauer ruled that “that false testimony is of grave concern.” Gray also gave false information about whether the mother had complied with the terms of her probation and tested positive for drugs…

Nichole Benes, an assistant Cerro Gordo County attorney, notified the court last spring after discovering discrepancies in Gray’s testimony and reported them to DHS and the attorney general’s office. She later told the court that that a review of Gray’s cases had been completed and uncovered 10 known instances in which she gave false information.

It’s a new case, but not a new issue.  Some child protective employees seem to feel entitled to lie under oath and in other ways in order to meet whatever goals they or others have set for them.  I should be clear of course that presumably most do not.  It’s fair to assume that the great majority of case workers play by the rules.

Still, it’s hard to forget the video image of a hapless Orange County, California county attorney trying to explain to an incredulous three-judge appellate court that caseworker Marcia Vreeken and the agency she worked for should be excused for her lying under oath and fabricating evidence.  According to the lawyer, Vreeken shouldn’t be expected to know that false testimony is wrong.  It’s just as hard to forget Houston Judge Michael Schneider ordering two CPS caseworkers to write essays for him demonstrating that they understood the constitutional rights of parents.  They’d repeatedly given false testimony to the effect that children should be taken from their parents without a prior hearing. 

And of course there are countless others.  So what’s significant about Chelsie Gray?  Just this.

Chelsie Gray left DHS payroll on Sept. 23, two weeks after The Associated Press asked about her status, department spokesman Matt Highland confirmed.

He said Gray wasn’t fired or forced to resign, and therefore the agency cannot disclose any information about her departure under Iowa law. The agency also declined to release the findings of a review of Gray’s cases that the state launched after learning about her false testimony last spring.

Yes, Judge Sauer ruled Gray’s testimony to be “riddled with lies and misrepresentations” all the way back on June 12.  And of course she’d been reported to the District Attorney and DHS long before that.  And yet she remained on DHS payroll until September 23^rd.  Indeed, it appears likely that she’d still be there but for the inquiry made by the Associated Press into whether she was still working for DHS.

That’s a lot of intentional wrongdoing by Gray that seemingly went unpunished by DHS.

It makes me wonder where she got the idea that, after working for the agency for barely two years, she could get away with such blatantly illegal and unethical conduct.  Or maybe I already know.  Perhaps she’d seen others do the same or heard tales.  And of course, until the AP started snooping around, it looks like she was right.  It looks like DHS had no intention of disciplining her for a little thing like multiple perjuries.

It also looks like the District Attorney has no intention of filing charges against her.  Perjury isn’t always easy to prove, but in this case, it should be easy.  Gray testified to having done things she hadn’t done and that are easy to prove she hadn’t done.  That makes them lies under oath.  The only additional element of the offense of perjury is that they be material to the issue at hand.  And those lies were clearly material to the issue of whether the parents should have their rights terminated or not.  Ergo, Chelsie Gray should be charged with perjury and likely convicted.  If she were, DHS employees might be encouraged to tell the truth when they testify.

That’s reason number one for writing about the case.

The second aspect of the case that’s worth mentioning is, as usual, the secrecy that cloaks almost everything child welfare agencies do.  So what happened in those 10 other cases in which Gray may have violated the law and/or agency regulations?  We’ll never know because the law says we’re not entitled to know what the agency was up to in those cases.  Did managers or supervisors wink at Gray’s wrongdoing?  We the People aren’t entitled to know.

And, as I’ve said so often, that essentially guarantees that similar outrages will occur in the future.  And that means I’ll write future “ho-hum, more perjury by CPS” pieces.

Friends and neighbors, this is no way to run a railroad.

October 19, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The living arrangements of children in the U.S. seem to have become pretty stable in the past 18 years or so.  That’s the takeaway from the linked-to piece by Wendy Wang who is director of research at the Institute for Family Studies and a former senior researcher at Pew Research Center.

So, for example, about 65.3% of all kids under the age of 18 now live with both of their married biological parents.  That’s down from 68% in 2000, so not a lot of change.  Just 3.6% live with both parents who aren’t married and 4.2% live with one of their parents.  Both of those are down from 2000, but not greatly so.  Overall, since 2000, living arrangements for kids have generally stabilized after 30 years of declining rates of marital childcare.

Of course, all that varies by race and/or ethnicity.  Some 44% of black children live with a single parent, usually their mother and that is by far the most common living arrangement for them.  Just 36% of black kids live with their married biological parents.  By contrast, 74% of white children and 85% of Asian ones live with both of their married parents.

Single parenthood of course is associated with a wide range of poor results for children.  And, since cohabiting couples are significantly more likely to break up than are married ones, cohabitation tends to equal instability for children. And that instability too is a problem.

The growing share of children living in a cohabiting family, whether with their own parents or with one of their parents, adds another layer of complexity to American families today. Children can struggle in adapting to parents’ new living arrangements and navigating the relationships between their parent, his or her partner, and their other parent who does not live with them. Cohabitation is also associated with greater family instability, as most cohabitations in the U.S. are short lived. And family instability, in turn, is strongly linked to poorer child outcomes. Nevertheless, more and more children today find themselves living in a cohabiting family—at least for a time.

In short, we want couples who choose to have kids to be married.  It’s by far the best arrangement for the children and adults alike.

Unsurprisingly, adults who’ve attained higher levels of education tend to have kids within marriage rather than while single.

 It is well-documented that a parent’s higher education, especially a mother’s, is associated with better child outcomes. One of the reasons is that highly-educated and economically better-off adults are more likely to marry and stay married, which provides a relatively more stable environment for their children’s development.

Having a college-educated mother is associated with a much higher chance that children live with two married parents. For children whose mother is college educated, 86% live with two married parents in 2018, down slightly from 2007 when it was 88%.2 In contrast, 60% of children with high-school educated mothers live with married parents in 2018.

Children of college-educated mothers are less likely to live in a cohabiting family: only 4% live with cohabiting parents, and about 10% live with a single mom. The share is higher among children whose mothers do not have a college degree. For example, 11% of children with high-school educated mothers live with cohabiting parents and 28% live with a single mom.

Given the ever-increasing levels of education in this country, perhaps we can anticipate lower levels of unmarried childbearing and couples with children cohabiting in the future.

I guess we’ll see.

October 18, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The new front in the family law wars appears to be here (BuzzFeed, 10/5/18).  It’s a longish article that makes but a single point – that a woman who’s been the victim of her husband’s domestic violence shouldn’t have to pay him alimony when she divorces him.  Now, readers will note my gendered language that appears nowhere in the article itself.  But, whatever the wording, the gist of the article is clear – that domestic violence is almost exclusively a gendered phenomenon and so the issue of whether alimony should be paid by a victimized spouse is also gendered.

Indeed, of the article’s half-dozen or so examples of a victimized spouse paying alimony to a perpetrator, all of them are women paying men.  And there’s this:

When it comes to the price of domestic violence, divorce courts are free to make the victims — almost always women — pay up.

That of course is (a) utterly untrue and (b) right out of the domestic violence industry’s playbook.  After over 40 years of research showing women to be as violent or more violent than their male partners, the DV industry still repeats the canard that 95% of DV is perpetrated by men.  Just last year Stats Canada came out with their every-five-years data on interpersonal violence.  It showed 55% of perpetrators to be women and 45% men.  Lesbian relationships had about twice the violence as male-female ones and three times that of gay male relationships.  And of course there are literally hundreds of studies debunking the DV industry’s claims. One of those, on teen dating violence, just came out recently and I reported on it yesterday.

This being BuzzFeed, no one will be surprised to discern an ulterior motive in the article.  On its face, it presents a seemingly credible contention.  Why should someone brutalized by a spouse have to pay them alimony?  It’s a fair question, but it raises many more.

For example (and the article mentions this), since divorce in every state is a no-fault matter, why should we now insert fault into the alimony issue?  And if we’re inserting that aspect of fault, why not insert others?  What about paternity fraud?  Why not include adultery as a reason for voiding the right to alimony?

Indeed, that last (and many others) has been raised by husbands for a long time.  “My wife broke up our marriage by having an affair with another man, and now I have to reward her behavior?”  It’s a pretty convincing argument and one that’s been scrupulously ignored by the likes of BuzzFeed and gender feminist groups over the years.  Some might count that as strange given that men commit adultery at about the same rates as do women.  So wouldn’t it serve higher-earning women to pass laws that prohibit them from paying alimony in that situation?

The answer reveals the true motive behind the Buzzfeed article’s contention. 

As is well known and as Professor Elizabeth Saewyc said clearly in yesterday’s blog post, males are highly unlikely to report being hit by a woman.  It’s true of boys in dating relationships and it’s true of men in married ones.  This is not news.  So if men are reticent about DV, and they are, then it stands to reason that the result of a law banning alimony to perpetrators of DV would redound almost exclusively to the benefit of women.

Such a law would tend strongly to continue the flow of wealth from men to women, but not vice versa.  Unsurprisingly, that’s precisely the policy adopted by gender feminists long ago.  As former feminist Hildegard Sunderhof made clear at NPO’s conference on shared parenting, radical feminists back in the 80s abandoned the goal of parental equality in favor of sole child custody plus child support and alimony to mothers.

Confining the alimony “out” to incidents of DV that men rarely report despite being at least half of DV victims looks very much like part of that same program.

And that’s not all.  As I’ve said many times, except in comparatively rare instances of spousal disability due to age or some medical condition, there should be no reason for alimony at all.  Nothing prevents women from getting and keeping jobs and equality and fairness demand that they do so, that they and they alone be responsible for their own support outside of marriage.  But of course the BuzzFeed article never makes that point, never calls for the abolition of alimony despite its very existence frankly contradicting the feminist talking point that women are strong, self-reliant individuals.

And here’s a reality also ignored by the BuzzFeed piece: 97% of alimony payers are men.  And here’s another: at least half of DV victims are too.  That means to a virtual certainty that there are many, many men out there who were victimized by their wives and are still required to pay them every month, in many cases for the rest of their lives.  But since they don’t report it, they’re unlikely to benefit from a law protecting DV victims from paying alimony.

Yesterday’s blog post dealt with dating violence.  It rightly pointed out that males are unlikely to report same to anyone, much less anyone in authority.  It attributed that reticence to the fact that men don’t complain much about whatever hardships they face, because men are raised to keep “a stiff upper lip” about such matters.  It neglected to point out the evolutionary basis for that behavior, but I won’t quibble about that here.

But Saewyc left out a very important second reason for men’s unwillingness to complain – there are little-to-no resources they can access to help them out of their predicament.  DV shelters?  There are three in the entire country.  A judge who will treat a male victim as sympathetically as a female one?  Few and far between.  The police?  Ditto.  A psychologist?  They’re now often trained to believe that men have the power in relationships and therefore can’t be victims of women’s DV.

So, given that our society offers male victims of DV little assistance for their problem and, likely as not, ridicules them for being victims of women’s violence, why would a man speak up?  Few do and that appears to be exactly as BuzzFeed likes it.  As long as they don’t, we can rely on the fact that the flow of wealth from men to women will continue.  That of course is what Buzzfeed is promoting.

October 17, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The latest news out of Canada is that girls are more likely than boys to physically abuse a dating partner.  That’s news of course only because the survey was recently conducted.  But the fact that girls are more likely than boys to be violent toward a date has been known for decades.

Here’s one article on the Canadian survey (PJ Media, 10/7/18).  In it, the august Warren Farrell recalls his research for one of his books published in the 90s.

“I uncovered eighteen studies of teen dating violence, ranging in time from the early ’80s to mid-’90s. About fourteen of the studies found the women to be more frequently violent, and especially more likely to be violent in more severe ways,” he recounted.

“In one study, by Jan Stets and Debra Henderson (published in Family Relations in 1991), women were 15.8 percent more likely to admit to using physical violence, and were about 8 percent less likely to be victims,” he added, citing this study.

The new Canadian survey contained these findings:

Boys are “50 percent more likely to report physical dating violence” said Saewyc, and that’s “a gap that has been more or less consistent for the last two decades.”

Of course that 50% figure looks huge, but it obscures the fact that actual dating violence is fairly rare.  Just 5.8% of boys reported being hit, slapped, etc. and 4.2% of girls did.  And of course that 1.6 percentage point difference doesn’t amount to 50%, but about 38%.  Plus, the overall trend for both boys and girls is down.

Still, lead researcher Elizabeth Saewyc of the University of British Columbia makes some important points.

“Think about how generally unacceptable for boys and young men to actually haul off and slap a girl. But for girls, there isn’t the same social sanction for hitting a guy, whether they’re dating or not,” said Saewyc.

Violence against men “doesn’t raise the same outrage,” she added.

“So, the other part of this is thinking about for boys, a lot of social scripts say boys are supposed to be stoic, in charge, and tough. If you’re a boy and you’re experiencing physical violence from your girlfriend, there’s a lot of extra shame that goes with that.”

So boys who find themselves in violent relationships may be especially reluctant to tell an adult. “Who’s a young boy facing violence going tell? Who’s going to be sympathetic and supportive instead of shaming?”

Some of those thoughts were expressed in the study of domestic violence by Bates, Graham-Kevan and Archer in 2014.  They said that one possible reason for women being more likely to initiate domestic violence against men (than vice versa) is that males are trained from very early age to “never hit a girl,” but females receive no such messages about boys.  It’s a painfully obvious explanation and only remarkable because it took DV scholarship so long to figure it out.

Saewyc calls her findings “counterintuitive.”  That is, we cling to the preferred narrative of the domestic violence industry that holds a self-evident truth that all, or the vast majority, of DV is perpetrated by men and against women.  That those claims have been debunked literally hundreds of times and no responsible social scientist takes them seriously concerns the DV industry not a bit.  The cottage industry they’ve established over the decades hasn’t wavered in its claims and receives hefty funding from federal, state and private coffers because of it.  Why admit the truth after so long when falsity pays so well?

And it’s that narrative of male perpetration and female victimization that many outside the DV industry itself are all too happy to perpetuate.  I’ll have more to say about that tomorrow.

For now, suffice it to say that narrative has been so often used to deprive children of their fathers.  It’s a truism of family courts that allegations of domestic violence can be used to enhance a mother’s chances of getting sole or primary custody.  With those incentives and with few if any consequences for false reporting, why wouldn’t a mother shoot off a “silver bullet” or two?

For now though, we’ll keep Saewyc’s survey in the archive and pull it out to counter future false claims of the DV industry and, in so doing, perhaps push the equal parenting ball a bit further down the field.

October 15, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

For decades now, we’ve seen claims about children’s risk of abuse/harm/abduction/etc. ballyhooed by the press and popular culture.  During that time, many people understandably formed the impression that children were in constant danger, that a killer lurked behind every tree, in every family, school, public park, and on and on.

Submerged deep beneath the overblown verbiage was the fact that children have literally never been safer.  Countless datasets show children to be healthier and safer from abuse and crime than at any time in our history.  The hysteria about child sexual abuse in pre-school environments ran its course, but not before many adults had their lives destroyed by, among other things, district attorneys keen to make a name for themselves at the expense of justice, decency and common sense.

As outrageous as the McMartin Pre-School, Fells Acres Day Care cases and others were, as many lives as they ruined, perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the entire charade was the astonishing gullibility of adults.  Somehow, when barely verbal children had been convinced by adults to tell adults that they had been raped by adults living in trees wielding butcher knives or, on occasion in space ships, adults managed to believe them.  It wasn’t the kids who did the damage, it was the supposedly responsible adults who put the words in their mouths and then claimed they reflected the truth.

One result of about three decades of disinformation about children’s safety and well-being has been the dramatic increase in the power of the state in the guise of children’s protective agencies.

That brings us to a current mini-event (Colorado Springs Gazette, 10/7/18).

When one Colorado hospital reported 50 percent of babies born in a single month had marijuana in their systems, a public health hysteria took root, with the image of a statewide epidemic of high newborns embellished in each retelling.

Half of newborns!  Mothers addicting their babies to pot!  Call CPS and the police!

The problem is, few people who use the statistic put it into context.

Actually, it’s not just the context that’s missing, it’s the facts.

St. Mary-Corwin Medical Center in Pueblo reported in July 2016, when it still had a labor and delivery unit, that “nearly half of the newborns born in March 2016 at St. Mary-Corwin who were drug tested due to suspected pre-natal exposure tested positive for marijuana.”

Ah, comes the dawn.  Those magic words “who were tested” got left out of the preferred narrative that there is an “epidemic” of pot babies.  Inquiring minds, like those of the writer of the quite admirable Gazette article, wanted to know what percentage of babies were tested.

[O]f the 52 babies born at St. Mary’s that month, only 11 were drug tested, and of those 11, five were positive for THC.

Oh.  So in fact five out of 52 babies born at St. Mary’s had pot in their systems.  That’s 9.6%, not 50%.  Numbers sure can be tricky.

But as is so often the case, facts often stand in the way of a good narrative, and sure enough, District Attorney Dan May was happy to try to fan the flames of the hysteria.

 “In 2016, they asked all the hospitals, are you seeing more babies born with marijuana? Every hospital in the state of Colorado reported that it had an increase … The hospital down in Pueblo reported 48 percent of the babies were born with marijuana in their system at birth. That’s 50 percent of babies in Pueblo.”

So, what about May’s claim that there’s an upward trend in newborns with THC in their system?  A spokesperson for St. Mary’s Hospital claimed the same thing.  But, as the article makes clear, there’s simply no support for that proposition.

[The hospital has] no data to back up whether the percentage is higher or lower than other years.

Plus,

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, the state’s public health record keeper, said it does not “receive or track data” on THC-positive infants across the state because there is no consistency between the hospitals about who gets tested. 

The Gazette did what’s increasingly rare among journalistic publications.  It committed journalism.  It didn’t stop with St. Mary’s Hospital, but got data from three others and, lo and behold, they’re much like those of St. Mary’s.

In the absence of statewide data, The Gazette reached out to the three other hospitals that deliver babies in El Paso and Pueblo counties to see whether their data reflected an alarming trend of THC-positive babies, but their statistics are similar — less than half of the babies born are tested, and those that are positive for marijuana account for 5 percent or less of the newborn population.

Meanwhile, there’s at least some anecdotal information that state child welfare authorities have seized on the false reports to increase interventions into families.

Colorado law requires that parents whose babies test positive for the drug be reported to social services for investigation of child abuse. Most of the time those reports are quickly ruled unfounded, but [NORML’s Ashley]Weber said more parents this year are calling frantic that their county’s social services agency is threatening to remove their children from the home because they tested positive for marijuana at birth. She worries “misleading information” might be driving the trend.

It’s impossible to know the extent of that perceived phenomenon, since the Colorado Department of Human Services doesn’t keep records on children taken from parents specifically based on pot exposure.

Is marijuana dangerous to newborns, in either the short or the long term?  Apparently, there’s too little information on the subject to draw sound conclusions.

The Colorado health department says on its website that using marijuana during pregnancy or while breastfeeding “may make it hard for your child to pay attention and learn, especially as your child grows older. This would make it harder for your child to do well in school.”…

Very little is known about the effects of marijuana exposure on infants. Most research depends on anecdotal information provided by parents after the fact. But [Dr. Sheryl] Ryan says “based on the limited data that does exist, as pediatricians, we believe there is cause to be concerned about how the drug will impact the long-term development of children.”

Until the long and short-term medical facts are established, I would recommend abstention from marijuana use during pregnancy.  There may be no ill effects from using it, but why take the chance?  My un-educated guess is that pot could impair the development of the brain of a fetus or newborn and is therefore better left alone.

But whatever the case turns out to be, there is plainly no grounds for the type of hysteria certain law enforcement and children’s welfare personnel seem to prefer.  Let’s not make legal pot grounds for another witch hunt.

October 14, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

It seems that many of the problems U.S. parents experience when dealing with child welfare agencies aren’t unique to this country.  Norway is now reporting some of the same difficulties (Science Nordic, 10/1/18).

There as here, it’s mostly the poor who find themselves confronted by child welfare caseworkers.

The researchers found that unemployed parents or parents with no steady income were overrepresented in the study: Nearly a third of all mothers in the project were not in work.

They also found that parents reported very different experiences depending on their level or education or type of employment.

We see that frequently in the U.S.  Indeed, reading between the lines, it’s possible to conclude that caseworkers spend so much time dealing with the poor and poorly-educated that it doesn’t occur to them that a given case might involve different types of parents. 

The Meitiv case in Montgomery County, Maryland is a good example.  There CPS clearly believed they could run roughshod over the parent’s civil and parental rights, the way they so often do with poorer parents.  But the Meitivs are both highly educated and scrupulous parents.  They understood their rights as citizens and as parents and quickly turned the tables on the agency, not only preventing their children being taken from them, but suing CPS for their high-handed and extra-legal tactics.

What rights parents have in Norway vis-à-vis child welfare authorities, I don’t know, but the dynamic appears the same – it’s the poor who bear the brunt of agency power, whether appropriately exercised or not.

Parents who are out of work or hold ‘working class’ jobs have far more negative experiences with child welfare than parents of a higher level of education and income. Working class parents often feel unseen, unheard, and do not feel that they are taken seriously.

“These parents often feel that child welfare isn’t being transparent and that information is withheld from them,” says Kojan.

That’s no surprise and it’s likely more than simply “feeling” that they’re treated less well and condescended to.  Child welfare agencies are arms of government and they exercise one of the most awesome powers anywhere – the power to take children from parents.  Often we see them exercising that power arbitrarily and in some cases threateningly.  That’s easier to do when the parents aren’t able to know their rights or understand how to fight back.

Understandably then,

People who are out of work are less likely to initiate contact with child welfare services. They more often tend to disagree that child welfare services should intervene and they have less confidence in public authorities. Many of them may also be afraid of child welfare.

One way those feelings are engendered by caseworkers is through their use of language.

Even though only sixteen per cent of participants in the survey were not native Norwegian speakers, many more, including native speakers, reported that the language used by child welfare was unfamiliar.

Previous research has shown that the language used in child welfare records has become more academic, says Kojan. Frequently used terms come from the field of psychology an neuroscience.

“But most people don’t understand these words. This creates a knowledge gap – and that breaks down trust,” Kojan says.

To some extent, that’s understandable.  Necessarily, every professional discipline creates its own terminology and slang.  Medical terms, legal terms, engineering terms simply aren’t part of everyday use and many of them aren’t known to people outside the discipline.  That specialized language also tends to create a sense of in-group identity among those who practice the specialty.  And in so doing it creates within the in-group and those on the outside a sort of “us-versus-them” mind set.  Those who speak the language become a sort of club that excludes those who don’t.  Unsurprisingly, those on the outside feel the effects.

Of course, as most responsible professionals understand, that all creates the requirement on their part to develop the ability to speak to those outside the profession in plain language.  Sadly though, many of them don’t. 

Plus, in the U.S. at least, CPS agencies often actively cultivate that “us-versus-them” mentality.  The secrecy in which all of them operate naturally enhances the tendency as does use of their specialized language.  Many’s the time I’ve read CPS caseworkers protesting that the public and the press simply don’t understand what their job entails.  My guess is that we understand far better than they think, but even if they’re right, perhaps the solution to the problem is to open up the agency and let us know what it does and how.

It’s a radical concept, I know, but a useful one.

October 12, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The Kansas case, In re Adoption of C.L., that I’ve written about the last two days, demonstrates the abysmal awfulness of putative father registries.  In so doing, it makes the points about them I’ve made many times before – that (a) far from enhancing fathers’ rights, they do the opposite and (b) they place the burden of finding out about a pregnancy on the wrong party, i.e. the father.

Kansas law today is much like that of all states prior to the advent of PFRs.  In order for a court to dispense with the father’s consent to the adoption of his child, those seeking to finalize the adoption must prove that the father abandoned the child.  Kansas adds another possible ground for doing so – that, once the father learned of his child, he took no reasonable steps to support it, establish a relationship with it, etc.  That of course is much the same as abandonment. 

The point being that, in order to prove abandonment (or that second ground just mentioned), there must be clear and convincing evidence that the father knew about his child and intentionally ignored it and its needs.

By contrast, PFRs dispense with the need for the father’s knowledge of his child’s existence.  To do so they make some truly remarkable assumptions.  They assume that the father knew his sex partner had become pregnant, that he was its father, that she hadn’t terminated the pregnancy and that the same had been carried to term.  They assume all that from the fact, routinely recited in the preambles to the laws establishing the PFRs, that men know that sex makes babies.

And of course no state and indeed no jurisdiction anywhere requires any woman at any time to simply inform the man that he’s the father of her child.  PFR’s demand that he, in some way, ascertain the fact.  And, as I’ve said in a previous post, they also demand that he know about the PFR despite the state’s making no effort to inform men of its existence or effect on their rights.

Given that Kansas isn’t a PFR state, the father of baby C.L. was able to assert his rights and finally win custody of his child.  The adoption agency and its lawyers didn’t make it easy, but he prevailed.  He was able to do so because the burden of proof was on the party attempting to terminate his parental rights to demonstrate that he’d made no effort to support or communicate with his little son.  This they couldn’t do and all their dogged efforts to keep him from doing so were both noticed by the Supreme Court and used to defeat the adoption.

What if Kansas had had a PFR?  The overwhelming likelihood is that Father would have known nothing about it and therefore not filed the appropriate forms with the appropriate state agency.  Absent his having done so, the court would have checked with the agency that operates the PFR, found no claim of paternity and proceeded without giving him notice of the adoption.

What would that have achieved?  First, a child who didn’t need adoption (because he had a fit father who wanted to care for him) would have had adoption forced on him.  Second, another child who did need adopting would have gone without parents.  At any given time, there are far more children who need adoption than there are qualified adoptive parents.  C.L.’s adoptive parents apparently passed muster with the adoption agency and the lower court.  So, in the absence of a PFR, they’re now free to adopt a child out of foster care or whose parents have died or are otherwise unable to care for it.

That of course is what adoption is supposed to be about – the provision of good homes to children who don’t have one of their own.

PFR’s are a blight on families, parental rights, good sense and justice.  The U.S. Supreme Court case that first greenlighted them, Lehr vs. Robinson should be overturned and sanity restored to the adoption process.  We’ve done the bidding of profit-driven adoption agencies at the expense of children’s best interests far too long.