Category: Blog

Atlanta, GA–Dana Fowle (pictured, center) of Fox 5 News in Atlanta recently did a two-part series on the abuses committed by a private child support collection agency. According to Georgia officials, one of the collection agencies operating in Georgia deceived both custodial mothers and noncustodial fathers into thinking that they are a government agency with state power. According to the station, the agency “Threatens to throw [fathers] in jail–even when they’ve paid,” and builds in numerous hidden “fees” so that little of the money the fathers pay actually gets to the custodial mothers.
The fees are in addition to the 35% they take of everything they collect. The first TV report deals with the problems faced by mothers, and the second one focuses on the problems the agencies create for fathers. To watch, click here and here.

Genesee, MI–“When child support payments pile up, parents who owe money often stay away from their children for fear of being arrested.

“Genesee County is offering a solution: Turn yourself in between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and you won’t be arrested.

“It’s a new amnesty program the county is trying out. It’s called Parent Safe Surrender.

“Sitting in a cell, they wouldn’t be able to pay, so the people at Genesee County Friend of the Court thought, ‘Why not just let them turn themselves in?'”

This temporary child support amnesty program from the Genesee County, Michigan Friend of the Court is a good idea, I guess, although I trust Michigan child support about as much as I can dance ballet. I would also add that in a state hard hit by economic troubles like Michigan, a large percentage of the alleged “child support arrears” are fake, and are instead caused by fathers’ inability to get their child support modified downward after being laid off.

However, one thing in the story did interest me–the statement, “When child support payments pile up, parents who owe money often stay away from their children for fear of being arrested.” Child support enforcement often criticizes child support debtor dads for not being in their kids’ lives or they say “at least they should have paid some,” but the reality is that the state’s punitive measures often drive the fathers away. It is nice to see this acknowledged.

I made this point during my debate with Ohio Butler County Child Support Enforcement Agency Executive Director Cynthia Brown last year. Butler launched a highly-publicized campaign which put mug shots of the County”s “Most Wanted Deadbeat Parents’ on pizza boxes. She said the “deadbeats” she was pursuing and publicly humiliating “had been gone for years.” I replied, “Maybe they’re gone because you’ve been chasing them.”

The full story is Turn yourself in between Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, you won’t be arrested (WJRT, 05/09/08)–thanks to Cecilia, a reader, for sending it. To watch my debate with Brown on FOX News, click here.

Seattle, WA–An interesting new study from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the Group Health Center for Health Studies on male victims of domestic violence. In the study, “The researchers defined domestic violence to include nonphysical abuse–threats, chronic disparaging remarks, or controlling behavior–as well as physical abuse: slapping, hitting, kicking, or forced sex.” I think the results would be more meaningful had the researchers separated the two, or only counted physical violence.

Still, the researchers’ press release cited five “myths” about male victims of domestic violence, including “Few men experience domestic violence,” “Abuse of men has no serious effects,” and “Abused men don’t stay, because they’re free to leave.”

Men experience domestic violence, with health impact, Group Health study debunks five myths about abuse of men
(5/19/08)

SEATTLE–Domestic violence can happen to men, not only to women, according to Group Health research in the June American Journal of Preventive Medicine. “Domestic violence in men is under-studied and often hidden–much as it was in women 10 years ago,” said study leader Robert J. Reid, MD, PhD, an associate investigator at the Group Health Center for Health Studies. “We want abused men to know they’re not alone.” His findings confirm some common beliefs but also debunk five myths about abuse in men:

Myth 1: Few men experience domestic violence. Many do. In-depth phone interviews with over 400 randomly sampled adult male Group Health patients surprised Dr. Reid and his colleagues: 5% had experienced domestic violence in the past year, 10% in the past five years, and 29% over their lifetimes. The researchers defined domestic violence to include nonphysical abuse–threats, chronic disparaging remarks, or controlling behavior–as well as physical abuse: slapping, hitting, kicking, or forced sex.

Myth 2: Abuse of men has no serious effects. The researchers found domestic violence is associated with serious, long-term effects on men’s mental health. Women are more likely than men to experience more severe physical abuse, said Dr. Reid. “But even nonphysical abuse—-can do lasting damage.” Depressive symptoms were nearly three times as common in older men who had experienced abuse than in those who hadn’t, with much more severe depression in the men who had been abused physically.

Myth 3: Abused men don’t stay, because they’re free to leave. In fact, men may stay for years with their abusive partners. “We know that many women may have trouble leaving abusive relationships, especially if they’re caring for young children and not working outside the home,” said Dr. Reid. “We were surprised to find that most men in abusive relationships also stay, through multiple episodes, for years.”

Myth 4: Domestic violence affects only poor people. The study actually showed it to be an equal-opportunity scourge. “As we found in our previous research with women experiencing domestic violence, this is a common problem affecting people in all walks of life,” said Dr. Reid. “Our patients at Group Health have health insurance and easy access to health care, and their employment rate and average income, education level, and age are higher than those of the rest of the U.S. population.”

To read more, click here.

Selmer, TN–“My girls are my girls, and I’m their mother. We were just put back together, and we picked up where we were separated.”–Mary Winkler, from Mary Winkler Breaks Her Silence (WREG-TV, 5/16/08)

Yes, Mary, you just pick up right where you left off. Please don’t let the fact that you shot these children’s father in the back and then allowed him to slowly bleed to death — even pulling the phone out of reach so the man couldn’t dial 911 to save himself since you wouldn’t — interfere in your relationship with your girls. Just get the girls back and it will be just like old times.

And of course television reporter Brian Kuebler can’t bring himself to utter one word questioning this happy scene or implying that anything could be wrong. His e-mail address is brian.kuebler@wreg.com. The full article can be seen here.

To learn more about this case, see my co-authored column No child custody for husband-killer Mary Winkler (World Net Daily, 9/14/07).

Trenton, NJ–The family courts are schizophrenic about letting you return to court after they have decided your case. On the one hand, they say that any factor that affects the best interests of the child can be brought before the court at any time. On the other hand, they don”t want everybody coming back, and coming back, and coming back. So they say there must be a “material change in circumstances’ before they will agree to hear the case. In an April 17, 2008 decision, the New Jersey Appellate Division decided that the aging of a child in and of itself was a sufficient change of circumstances to warrant a change in the father”s parenting time. (Swicinski v. Maul). The original parenting time decision was made in 2003, when the child was six weeks old. The father had the infant every week from Sunday morning until Monday at 6:00pm. The father came back for additional parenting time in 2007. Both the Trial Court and the Appellate Division agreed that parenting time for an infant should be different than parenting time for a four-year old, and gave Dad more time.
Non-custodial parents are often given very little time with infants. Often, there are no overnights. So this decision could be an important tool to help fathers get more time with their children, including overnights, once the children grow into toddlers. Although not addressed in this decision, additional parenting time presumably could be obtained once the child enters school, or reaches other developmental milestones. Researchers on child development have understood for quite some time that children”s parenting needs change as they age. Perhaps the courts are finally beginning to catch up. Let me know what your experience has been by leaving a comment below.

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

29% US men are domestic abuse victims (Times of India, 5/20/08)

Dads ‘not needed” in fertility revolution (Metro.co.uk, 5/20/08)

Texas had no right to seize sect children, appellate court says (LA Times, 5/23/08)

Heather Mills splashes out £250K on exotic ‘divorce party’ (Sunday Mirror, 5/25/08)

Turner triumphs in custody battle (Dayton Daily News, 5/25/08)

Program finds jobs for child support (Lexington Herald-Leader, 5/26/08)

State to retain custody of newborn sect child (Houston Chronicle, 5/27/08)

Phony emails target child support cash (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 5/27/08)

Revealed: how split families get along (Sydney Morning Herald, 5/28/08)

Sacramento, CA–Research consistently shows that women are at least as likely as men or initiate and engage in domestic violence, and that a significant minority of the injuries sustained in domestic violence are suffered by heterosexual men. This research is increasingly coming to light, for a few reasons:

1) Dissident domestic violence experts have worked hard to stick to science and solid research methods in the face of tremendous pressure. Many of these attended the Sacramento Domestic Violence conference From Ideology to Inclusion: Evidence-Based Policy and Intervention in Domestic Violence in February. (Dr. Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling, one of the speakers from that conference, is pictured above. To learn more, click here. Photo by Kevin Graft.)

2) The feminists’ media stranglehold on gender issues has weakened somewhat.

3) Advocates for male victims of domestic violence have done fine and effective work.

4) As Shakespeare noted in The Merchant of Venice, “At the length truth will out.”

When confronted with the unwelcome news that women are as much a part of family violence as men are, feminists use several evasion tactics. One is to claim that the data is faulty, though that has largely worn thin and has been replaced with claims that female violence is “different,” or more justified. That one is also starting to wear thin, too. (See Dr. Langhinrichsen-Rohling’s views in ‘Every time we tried to say that women’s intimate partner abuse is different than men’s, the evidence did not support it’)

Another one–not new, but increasingly prominent–is to say that evidence of women’s violence is being misused to promote a misogynist agenda. A subset of this latter argument is what I’ve described as the “Feminist Intentional Walk”–when feminists ignore credible men’s advocates and instead quote some obscure loony in order to discredit all of us.

One example of this can be found in Janice Kennedy’s recent Ottawa Citizen opinion column We can’t help victims of violence if hatemongers hijack the agenda (5/25/08). Kennedy grapples with the fact that a recent study found that a significant amount of men are victims of domestic violence.

Kennedy could have quoted or cited any one of dozens of credible advocates on the subject, but since her intent was to stigmatize rather than edify, she reached way, way down and came up with an individual named Kirby Inwood. No, I’d never heard of him either, but his website features gems like this:

“I have consistently found women lawyers to generally be the scum of the earth”

“If you don’t like what I say, you must be a blind, feminist bigot or a male collaborating white ribbon wimp.”

Kennedy adds that Inwood was once convicted of “assault on his wife and infant son.” (I don’t know the details on the case, and it is possible it was one of those domestic violence railroad jobs.)

Anyway, in palming off Inwood’s comments as somehow representative of men’s activists, she writes “There are many public purveyors of misogyny, but one colorfully venomous Canadian example sums them up. Kirby Inwood.” She adds, “the ‘men’s rights’ activists, are going to gobble [the new report] up and spit it out again in a malignancy of poisonous deceit.”

So instead of quoting the many, many experts who have researched and quantified women’s family violence, we’re instead supposed to focus on this obscure loony. That’s weak journalism on Kennedy’s part, to say the least.

Washington, D.C.–“When it comes to domestic violence legislation, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and Senator Joe Biden (D-Del) owns an asphalt company.

“Biden”s latest domestic violence bill is the National Domestic Violence Volunteer Attorney Network Act, which amends Biden”s Violence Against Women Act to create an extensive network of volunteer attorneys to help abused women. The attorneys would provide free legal help in forging divorce or separation agreements and in winning child custody…

“S.1515 will do some good in aiding abused low-income women. The problem is that the bill will also greatly exacerbate the already widespread problem of false domestic violence claims being used to strip decent, loving fathers of custody of their children. There is no mechanism within the bill to distinguish between false accusations and legitimate ones.”

Rush Limbaugh discussed S1515 on his show last week after a men’s activist called in and told him about it. The bill will enlist 100,000 volunteer attorneys to help purportedly abused women win custody of their children from their alleged abusers. I criticized the bill in my co-authored column Biden”s Misguided S1515 Will Exacerbate Domestic Violence System”s Problems (Philadelphia Daily News, 12/7/07).

The National Organization for Women has a campaign in support of the bill, and the bill is also supported by the American Bar Association and the Family Violence Prevention Fund. The bill can be seen here. Biden’s pitch for the bill from his defunct presidential campaign can be seen here.

Shared parenting advocate Ron Grignol (pictured), who in 2005 ran for the Virginia state legislature and made shared parenting one of the key issues of his campaign, recently sent out an update on the bill. Grignol writes:

“The bill S1515 has price tag of 55.5 million over 5 years. I checked the language of the bill and calculated 55.5 million.

“I was talking to a Senate Judiciary Committee staffer yesterday about VAWA and she told me that Senator Coburn (R-OK) raised objections on the price tag. She said even Biden didn’t believe it was 55.5 million until he was shown that this was in fact the case.

“Coburn started a debate but the bill passed out of committee. It looks like the bill passed with a voice vote which is what committee members do when they don’t want their vote to be recorded. However, the bill still has a long way to go to become law.”

Las Vegas, NE–“Andrew Brownson, one of the Republicans challenging Allen, said it would not be appropriate to ask or force her to resign for her ‘personal habits.’

“‘I don’t believe in that,’ said Brownson.”

According to the UPI, “Assemblywoman Francis Allen (pictured), R-Las Vegas, is accused of using a steak knife to stab Paul Maineri in the forearm…[Allen] said she stabbed her husband because he embarrassed her in front of friends…Maineri told police his wife of seven weeks refused to get help for him so he drove himself to the hospital.”

Nevertheless, Allen’s male colleagues don’t seem to be holding it against her. Joseph K. Cooper interviewed Allen’s fellow legislators and also Allen’s rival candidate in an upcoming election in his upbeat article Facing felony charge, Allen continues legislative work (5/21/08). Asked about Allen’s arrest for battery with a deadly weapon, no legislator expressed concern over the stabbing victim or even alluded to the seriousness of domestic violence.

To be fair, one can understand and appreciate the legislators’ hesitance to rush to judgment about their colleague. But I doubt if a male legislator were arrested for stabbing his wife his colleagues would be so upbeat and positive. And were a male legislator to refer to the stabbing as a “personal habit” he didn’t think should be made an issue of, one can bet there’d be a storm of feminist protest, and the legislator would be forced to make a humiliating public apology.

[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.]