Category: Blog

Sacramento, CA–I recently discussed the way that the research showing that women are just as complicit in family violence as men has been suppressed and obscured in this blog post. In the blog posts below, researcher after researcher details the impediments they faced in conducting and/or publicizing scientifically sound and honest research on women’s family violence:

Claudia Ann Dias, MSC, JD (pictured, photo by Kevin Graft): ‘I had a 10-year contract but within six months of mentioning female abusers, my contract was canceled’

Dr. Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling: ‘Every time we tried to say that women’s intimate partner abuse is different than men’s, the evidence did not support it’

Dr. Don Dutton: Dissident Domestic Violence Researcher ‘Banned’ from the State of Georgia

John Hamel, LCSW: ‘Many men claimed their female partners were more abusive than they were…I had been trained to disbelieve such claims’

Dr. Don Dutton: Violence is more common in lesbian relationships than in heterosexual ones

(The Sacramento Domestic Violence conference From Ideology to Inclusion: Evidence-Based Policy and Intervention in Domestic Violence in February featured leading domestic violence authorities from around the world. The conference was sponsored by the California Alliance for Families and Children–to learn more, click here.)

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

Devon, England–“Her life has been blighted by years of enforced separation from the father she clearly adores.

“‘Most people look back on their childhood and remember family days out at the seaside and birthday parties,’ she says. ‘My recollections are of Mum, sour-faced in a suit, heading off for yet another court appearance and endless interviews with social workers and child psychologists, all telling me that I didn’t have to see my dad if I didn’t want to.'”Has the case for family law reform ever been laid out better? From Justice 4 my father, says daughter of rooftop protester (Daily Mail, 6/9/08):

On Sunday morning, just hours before he scrambled on to the roof of Harriet Harman’s home dressed as a superhero, Mark Harris kissed and hugged his daughter Lisa and set off from the South Devon home they share.

‘I told him I was proud of him,’ says Lisa, a 21-year-old wages clerk. ‘I said that however long he managed to stay up there, I would be cheering him on and sending him my love.’

In the end, Mark, who staged his weekend protest with fellow Fathers 4 Justice campaigner Jolly Stanesby, stayed on the roof of Ms Harman’s elegant period home in Herne Hill, South London, for ten hours – an hour for every year that his own case wasn’t resolved by the courts.

When he climbed down on Sunday night, he was immediately arrested and detained by police, leaving Mr Stanesby perched precariously on the slates, stubbornly insisting he wouldn’t descend until Mark had been released.

But then as Lisa points out, brushes with the law are nothing new to her 49-year-old father. During the decade he spent fighting for full access to his three daughters after his wife walked out and took them with her, the driving instructor faced 133 court appearances before 33 different judges, two stints in jail and went on a hunger strike.

The irony is that Mark’s case is now resolved: Lisa, his eldest, now lives with him. So does his 17-year-old daughter. Another daughter, aged 15, lives nearby with her mother, but visits at least twice a week. He now has everything he fought for.

But he still donned Superman’s leotard, tights and cape because while he is free to talk about the horrors he suffered at the hands of the British justice system, other fathers are not…

‘He hasn’t forgotten what he went through,’ says Lisa. ‘He still has a lot of anger about it and he wants to do what he can to help other fathers in the same position.’

If it seems strange that Mark is still angry about his own ordeal, then as Lisa is quick to remind anyone who asks, until she was 16 – and legally able to choose for herself which parent she wanted to live with – she hardly knew her father at all.

Her life has been blighted by years of enforced separation from the father she clearly adores.

‘Most people look back on their childhood and remember family days out at the seaside and birthday parties,’ she says. ‘My recollections are of Mum, sour-faced in a suit, heading off for yet another court appearance and endless interviews with social workers and child psychologists, all telling me that I didn’t have to see my dad if I didn’t want to.’

Read the full Daily Mail article here. Mark and Lisa are pictured above.

Nashville, TE–Stephanie Hernandez gave birth to a baby girl in Nashville’s Baptist Hospital on August 31, 2007. She was not married at the time. No father’s name was listed on the birth certificate, meaning that the father had no legal paternity rights or obligations. 

Deadbeat Dad?  Nope. Her fiance, whom she later married, was at her side the entire time. Hernandez, a US citizen, and her undocumented immigrant fiance, were prevented from placing his name on the birth certificate by Tennessee law. The law requires an unmarried dad to produce government-issued ID to appear on the birth certificate, but this is denied to undocumented immigrants.

Meanwhile, Tennessee appears to have no qualms about immigration status when it comes to child support collections. Calls to a local child support office and a Tennessee observer knowledgeable about these issues confirmed that an undocumented mother can indeed collect child support.

We also learned that all Tennessee mothers are automatically listed on the birth certificate, regardless of immigrant status. And, marriage status operates on an honor system — birthing couples are not asked by hospitals to produce a marriage certificate. Both names are placed on the birth certificate, no questions asked. Thus, the problem starts with the assumption of a lesser status for the unmarried father.

Claiming paternity, beyond the usual reasons, is also necessary if the unmarried couple wants the child to assume the father’s last name. The problem for undocumented fathers in Tennessee is that they can’t get a notary’s stamp without proper identification. And the state now bars undocumented individuals from getting driver’s licenses, which would have satisfied the notary requirements.

The end result? Said Hernandez, “My daughter has a father who loves her and no legal rights where she is concerned, no legal responsibility and no legal recognition that he gave her life.” (The Tennessean, 6/1/2008)

In the same article, Vanderbilt University sociologist Katherine Donato states, “What they are doing is constructing paternity around legal [immigration] status.”

Hedy Weinberg, executive director of the Tennessee chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, states in the article, “Do people really think there are men sneaking into delivery rooms wanting to claim paternity?” … “What you will have is fathers with no access to their children’s school records, health records or being formally involved in their lives.”

Since the change in policy, Tennessee birth certificates without a father’s name have increased by 10%.

While we take no position on the broader immigration debate in the US, we absolutely believe that mothers and fathers should be treated the same under the law in almost every respect. And, we believe that state and other governmental entities are far too quick to insert government power into the family, as most parents who’ve been through family court can attest all too well.

Stephanie Hernandez subsequently married the father, but the marriage certificate is still not good enough for Tennessee’s vital records office to put Dad”s name on the birth certificate. Their remedy for the family? Get a paternity test and then petition family court to establish paternity and to change the child’s last name.

Los Angeles, CA–My wife and I were at one of Hollywood PR guru Michael Levine’s dinner parties the other night and had an interesting conversation with Dennis Zine, a Los Angeles City Councilman. One of my former employees is one of Zine’s key people, so I’ve followed his career some. He’s an interesting guy, and something of a maverick.

Anyway, at the dinner he was talking about Los Angeles’ gang problem and how to deal with it. I put forward the notion that the key issue with gangs is fatherlessness. Zine was caught a little off-guard. I mean, I’m sure he’s aware of the linkage between fatherlessness and troubled youth but, like many politicians, he’s saddled with so many immediate problems and having to put out fires that there’s often insufficient time for long-term solutions.

I inflicted my co-authored newspaper column on fatherlessness and gangs on Dennis and he said he’d read it. I don’t think reducing fatherlessness has to be that much of a long-term solution–there are things California could do in the short term. Two good places to start would be:

1) helping fathers, including low-income, unwed fathers, get meaningful joint custody

2) reining in the child support system which victimizes low-income minority dads

The column is below. I also recommend my blog post ‘The first thing one notices about the gang world is this: There are no fathers’, which is about Sudhir Venkatesh’s research on gangs.

CA Anti-Gang Bills Miss Central Truth About Kids & Gangs
By Mike McCormick and Glenn Sacks

Gangs were responsible for 70% of the shootings last year in Los Angeles, and local lawmakers are proposing numerous measures to address the gang crisis. One package of bills, recently endorsed by Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, Sheriff Lee Baca, and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, would make it more difficult for gang members to get firearms. Another, introduced by Compton Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally, would create Gang Alternative Education Programs in selected inner-city areas.

While these measures have merit, one central truth is being ignored–the presence of fathers, including nonresident fathers, greatly reduces the likelihood that a teen will become involved in crime or gangs.

A study just released by Boston College finds that when nonresident fathers are involved in their adolescent children”s lives, the incidence of violence, crime, substance abuse and truancy decrease markedly. Most of the families in the study, which was published in the journal Child Development, are low-income African-American and Hispanic families. The study’s lead author, professor Rebekah Levine Coley, explains:

“Nonresident fathers in low-income, minority families appear to be an important protective factor for adolescents…Greater involvement from fathers may help adolescents develop self-control and self-competence, and may decrease the opportunities adolescents have to engage in problem behaviors.”

The study also found that when teens begin to slide towards delinquency, nonresident fathers increase their involvement in response. The researchers found such involvement to be effective–the impact of father involvement was the greatest on the kids who had previously been the most troubled.

The new study”s findings are consistent with a wealth of research on the impact of fathers. One study published in the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency concluded that fatherlessness is so predictive of juvenile crime that, as long as there was a father in the home, children of poor and well-to-do families had similar juvenile crime rates. A University of Chicago study of crime in the African-American areas of 171 cities found that fatherlessness was the strongest predictor of violent juvenile crime.

The link between fatherlessness and crime has long been axiomatic for law enforcement officials. Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox says he”s examined hundreds of pre-sentencing reports detailing the family histories of convicted criminals, and found one common denominator:

“Uniformly, there was a parent, usually the father, missing from the home.’

The devastating impact of fatherlessness is clearly understood behind prison walls.

Little Rock, AR–Kelly, a reader, sent me the interesting story below, noting “Here a mom used tough love like a dad, and people are second guessing her.” What do you think? The story is below.

Public Punishment for Boy Accused of Bullying
fox16.com
6/01/08

You may have seen 12-year-old Montavious Lewis outside Saturday wearing a sandwich board. His mom made him stand near the street for bullying a classmate over an i-Pod. The poster board punishment was a surprise for Montavious Saturday morning, right down to the detail of a hat with the letter “d” on it for dumb.

Early tears turned to boredom. As mom worked, Montavious wore his public punishment. But the bell ringing was less than enthusiastic as Montavious thought about why he was out there.

“We got into an argument, and then that’s when I robbed him,” says Lewis.

“He’s very embarrassed. And I told him, I said the way you feeling right now, I’m embarrassed, too,” says Bertreice Dixon.

Around three in the afternoon, Dixon decided to move the punishment to Broadway so even more people could read the poster boards. People like retired principal Max Dearing thinks more parents need to do this. “I asked him a while ago if he thought this was gonna teach him a lesson and he said yes sir, so I hope he’s not pulling my leg,” says Dearing.

Bertreice hopes he’s not either. “By, you know, be tough in front of his friends, and like I told him, you gonna have to change your ways or else you’re gonna go down a road where you gonna end up in prison or dead,” explains Dixon.

“I apologized for what I did,” says Lewis.

“This, right here, is showing him how much I love him, and hopefully he’ll take it into consideration and don’t do it again,” says Dixon.

Montavious admits to everything. The school’s making him cut the grass this summer and he says he did it because he doesn’t have an I-pod, and he wants one.

Bertreice says she didn’t get any negative feedback Saturday from anyone.

London, England–Child support enforcement agencies with broad powers and little judicial oversight enforcing error-riddled orders–sound familiar?

From Joe Willis’ new column Dads – the new terrorists? (The Northern Echo, 6/2/08):

It could almost be anti-terror legislation – the power to take money from bank accounts without consent and without a court order, the power to freeze accounts, seize the proceeds of house sales, impose curfews, and confiscate passports and driving licences.

However, this is not a new law to help MI5 tackle extremism. The powers are contained within the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill and have been designed to help the authorities recover money from non-resident parents – usually fathers – owed for their children’s upkeep.

The Government announced a major overhaul of the child maintenance system last year and the legislation is currently working its way through Parliament and could be given Royal Assent within weeks. The bill will see the much-maligned Child Support Agency (CSA) replaced with a new more powerful body, the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission (C-MEC).

Few people would question the need to abolish the CSA, which has been dogged by controversy and complaints ever since its launch in 1993. However, a leading North-East solicitor has warned the extent of the powers due to be handed to the new commission will only increase the heartache for separating families – and lead to even greater confrontation and friction.

Kim Fellowes, from North-East-based solicitors Dickinson Dees, sits on the National Committee of Resolution, a 5,000-strong association of family lawyers committed to the non-confrontational resolution of marital and domestic disputes.

She believes the commission’s ability to take maintenance payments without prior approval from a court could prove extremely controversial. She says: “For fathers, this means the safety net of the court has been removed. Someone might not agree that they have been sent to prison for a criminal offence, but at least they know they have been tried before a court.

The difference here is that there is no court scrutiny.

“And if the father believes he is being unfairly pursued or harassed, that could mean a severe backlash for the mother as she will get the blame. The risk is that even a separation that was previously fairly amicable could become strained.”

One of the most worrying aspects, according to Miss Fellowes, is that the powers are being afforded to the successor of an organisation like the CSA – which has a well-documented history of making mistakes. One report compiled during the agency’s early days found errors in 86 per cent of cases.

Improvements were promised. But a fresh report carried out by the National Audit Office in 2006 revealed a one-in-five chance that payments were inaccurate. Miss Fellowes and others believe the powers included in the bill are so momentous that they may even breach human rights regulations. She predicts strenuous legal challenges once the powers begin to be applied, possibly in the autumn.

Read the full piece here.

Los Angeles, CA–“In cases where the mother continually excuses and tolerates the children”s infantile, aggressive, or inappropriate behavior, then the father can come across as much too uptight, inflexible, or demanding.

“Especially as teenagers, children in such situations sometimes pull away from their father after the divorce in part because he has higher expectations for them and is willing to discipline and to stand up to them when they are out of line.“– Dr. Linda Nielsen, President of the American Coalition for Fathers & Children

ACFC President Dr. Linda Nielsen, author of the book Embracing Your Father, wrote an academic paper for the Journal of Divorce & Remarriage called Disenfranchising, Demeaning, and Demoralizing Divorced Dads : A Review of the literature several years ago. One of the paper’s most interesting sections is about the differences in parenting styles between mothers and fathers. It is excerpted below.

Nielsen has many citations to support her arguments–I have removed them but they can be found on page 6 of her paper.

Mother”s and father”s parenting style
Dr. Linda Nielsen

The father”s relationship with his children can also be influenced by how different or how alike his style of parenting is to their mother”s. When both parents are similar in terms of setting limits and disciplining the children, then the father isn”t as likely to end up being criticized or shunned. But in cases where the mother continually excuses and tolerates the children”s infantile, aggressive, or inappropriate behavior, then the father can come across as much too uptight, inflexible, or demanding. Especially as teenagers, children in such situations sometimes pull away from their father after the divorce in part because he has higher expectations for them and is willing to discipline and to stand up to them when they are out of line.

The bad news for many divorced fathers is that many mothers abdicate too much power and control to their children – especially if the mother hasn”t remarried and especially if the child is a boy. And sadly, these children often end up less socially mature, less self-reliant, less self-disciplined, and less psychologically well-adjusted than their peers.

These differences in parenting styles after divorce are not especially surprising, however, since it is often the father who is primarily responsible for setting the limits, encouraging self-control, and disciplining the children in married families. Moreover, even well-educated mothers with ample money after their divorce often provide too little supervision, household order, and discipline as single parents.
 
And regardless of income, education, or marital status, the woman who did not have a secure, loving relationship with her own parents while she was growing up is the most likely to be overly indulgent and overly submissive with her own children. This certainly isn”t to say that divorced mothers are always more indulgent and more lax than divorced fathers. In fact, whichever parent feels the guiltiest about the divorce is often the one who does the worst job when it comes to setting limits, saying “no’ to, or disciplining the children. And whichever parent is guilt-ridden often goes to great lengths to deny that a deeply troubled child has any problems whatsoever.

Michigan–As I’ve previously noted, Michigan shared parenting groups have been fighting to pass HB 4564, a shared parenting bill, and have gained considerable support in the process. Several Michigan shared parenting advocacy groups, including Dads and Moms of Michigan, an affiliate of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, testified in the Michigan House Judiciary Committee’s May 7 testimony-only hearing.

To learn more about the shared parenting bill, see my recent co-authored column, Shared Parenting Bill Will Help Michigan”s Kids, Overburdened Court System (Oakland Press, 5/5/08), or click here.

This week the Oakland Press‘ editorial board wrote an excellent editorial in support of the bill. In Legislature must quit stalling parenting bill (6/4/08), they write:

A bill that exemplifies many traditionally American values – such as fair play, equal rights and family – is being held up in the state Legislature for all the wrong reasons.

House Bill 4564 sits in the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Southfield Democrat Rep. Paul Condino. It doesn’t appear to be going anywhere, and that’s a shame. The bill is really an attempt to correct an injustice that has existed in our nation for decades.

The bill sets into law a reasonable request – it calls for equal parenting time for fit parents….

It’s a shame a bill like this is needed. Historically, fathers have been on the short end in court cases involving custody and visitation when the parents divorce.

The best interest of the child should always be the top priority, but too often that leaves fathers out of the equation.

Judges have expressed concern that the bill may take away some of their judicial discretion.

In fact, among the two groups that oppose the bill are the Michigan National Organization for Women and the State Bar of Michigan, which have submitted arguments against it, saying mandatory joint custody takes discretion away from the judge and also may not be in the best interest of the child.

But we believe the excuse is weak.

We can’t understand why these groups would oppose the bills.

If we didn’t know any better, we’d say the bar association was more concerned about maintaining long custodial court battles and the high attorney fees that accompany them.

As for NOW, we thought it was an equal rights organization, but it appears the only “equal rights” they’re concerned about is for women. True, women should be their primary concern, but you would think that they would favor what’s fair for everyone.

Reverse discrimination and winning your rights at the expense of someone else is a biased, self-righteous and self-centered position to take. Here, the prejudice is against fathers and their rights…

We think anything that helps good fathers stay “good dads” is worth passing. If the law has to be tweaked so that some judges don’t feel so put upon, then make the necessary changes.

But it’s also time the state Legislature stood up for fathers. Dads have some rights, too.

Read the full editorial here. To write a Letter to the Editor of the Oakland Press in praise of this editorial, click on vop@oakpress.com.

London, England–In my blog post Arrest of UK F4J Protester–Much Ado about Nothing in March I wrote:

One problem for dads in divorce is that they can often be arrested and get bad publicity for things which really are quite trivial and meaningless. As an example, take the recent UK headline Spider-Man arrested for harassing ex-wife.

Sounds bad, right? Yet all that really happened is that fathers’ rights activist Ray Barry (pictured as “Spiderman” at a Fathers 4 Justice protest) “was quizzed [by police] after distributing a leaflet containing details of his marriage split.” According to Barry:

“The leaflet details my belief that the family courts do not deliver justice and so I have to seek it differently, through the public. The leaflet was not much different to one I had been using for the past four or five years.”

The “58-year-old claimed not to have seen two of his three children for eight years and had only fortnightly access to the other.”

So his crime? Distributing a leaflet complaining about his mistreatment in family court and by his ex-wife. Big deal.

For a variety of reasons I don’t like it when protesters target judges’ homes or their ex-wives’ homes, and it isn’t generally done. But here Barry has been unlawfully cut off from his children for 8 years and–gasp–distributes a leaflet complaining about it in the neighborhood, and he gets arrested?! Sounds pretty cockeyed to me.

And why have there been no legal consequences for the wife cutting Barry off from his children?

The article is Spider-Man arrested for harassing ex-wife (Birmingham News, 3/17/08). I met Ray at the Men’s Equality Congress in Washington DC last year–seemed like a nice guy.

Surprise, surprise–the man who was accused of nothing has now been acquitted. Ray sent out this press release about it:

Spiderman acquitted

The Birmingham Evening Mail ran a story about me on the 17th of March, headlined:

“Spider-man arrested for harassing ex-wife.”

I would be nice if similar coverage were given to my acquittal yesterday. I was found not guilty yesterday by Judge Qureshi at Wolverhampton Magistrates Court of harassing my ex-wife. I was charged with harassing her by distributing booklets about her. My defence was that the High Court had previously ruled I could do so, and that I was arrested for doing exactly the same thing in 2001, and on that occasion, the CPS read the booklet and
said there was nothing unlawful in it.