Category: Blog

Birmingham, England–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 excerpted below. I met Ray at the Men’s Equality Congress in Washington DC last year–seemed like a nice guy. Spider-Man arrested for harassing ex-wife By James Cartledge Birmingham News, 3/17/08 A FORMER Birmingham civil servant who occupied a church roof dressed as Spider-Man has been arrested on suspicion of harassing his ex-wife. Fathers’ rights activist Ray Barry, who worked at Jobcentre Plus, in Hagley Road, Edgbaston, was quizzed after distributing a leaflet containing details of his marriage split. He twice scaled St Peter’s Church, Wolverhampton, in 2005, as part of the Fathers 4 Justice campaign and now plans to stand for election on a family law reform ticket. “The leaflet details my belief that the family courts do not deliver justice and so I have to seek it differently, through the public,” Mr Barry said. “The leaflet was not much different to one I had been using for the past four or five years. “The questions I was asked by the police seemed really rather innocuous.” Mr Barry, of Windsor Gardens, Castlecroft, Wolverhampton, distributed the leaflet around Tettenhall in the city, near his ex-wife Liz’s home. 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. He said he planned to stand in this year’s Wolverhampton City Council elections for the Equal Parenting Alliance, which campaigns to reform family law. Mr Barry now runs an insurance and personal injury consultancy is demanding greater openness in family court proceedings. West Midlands Police said a 58-year-old man had been arrested and bailed on suspicion of harassment.

Los Angeles, CA–I can do without some of the man-blaming in Adam Voiland’s U.S. News & World Report article Why Men Are So Good at Dying (3/14/08), which is not to deny that he’s partly correct. Voiland writes:

“Until about 15 years ago, it was women who lacked information; traditionally, the standard patient in all kinds of medical research on disease and treatments had been the white male. In 1991, the Women’s Health Office was created in the Department of Health and Human Services to promote gender equity in research and raise awareness about conditions such as breast cancer, osteoporosis, and depression. Since then, men’s activists have been grousing that it’s men who aren’t getting a fair shake from the federal government. A bill calling for the establishment of a Men’s Health Office to tackle such urgent male concerns as prostate cancer, accidents, and suicide has been languishing in congressional committees for years.

“Considering the statistics that supporters of the men’s office brandish, you’d think it would be an easy sell. According to the Men’s Health Policy Center, for example, men die at higher rates than women for many leading causes of death. That includes, for example, a death rate for men that’s 50 percent higher than that of women for cancer; twice that of women for ischemic heart disease, and three times that of women for HIV/AIDS. On average–as it’s often pointed out–men live a total of 5.2 years less than women.

“Yet, the bill has been the victim of controversy about funding between the men’s health activists who argue that in the past 20 years medicine has tilted too far toward Venus and feminists unprepared to give up an inch of their hard-won territory. Men’s health advocate Glenn Sacks, for example, makes the case in this column that men’s health is underappreciated and under funded by the federal government. It’s true that women’s health initiatives have seen a boost in funding, says the Wall Street Journal. Yet, there’s a good argument to be made that that’s no reason to start a gender war…”

My column that Voiland cites is When Men’s Health Doesn’t Count (Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 10/9/02)–it appears below. I hardly think the Men’s Health Act has been the victim of a male-created “gender war”–the Men’s Health Network, and its associated activists are supportive of the Office on Women’s Health, as was my column. We see a need for similar efforts for men, and have cited the Office on Women’s Health’s success as something we’d like to emulate for men.

Read the full U.S. News & World Report article here. My column, co-authored with Dianna Thompson, is below.

When Men’s Health Doesn’t Count
By Dianna Thompson and Glenn Sacks
Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 10/9/02

Learn more about major areas of men’s health like how to protect against Male Prostate Cancer. there are even more subtle issues specific to men’s health like Health Supplements which meet the nutritional needs specific to men.

Congress is sending a message to American men: men’s health doesn’t count.

The disturbing health and mortality disparities between American whites and blacks are well known, but most people do not realize that the health and mortality disparities between women and men are just as great. For example, the gap in life expectancy between whites and blacks is six years, while the gender gap is 5.7 years. Adjusted for age, men are 1.6 times as likely as women to die from one of the top 10 causes of death, and blacks are 1.5 times as likely to die from them as whites.

Despite this, it is women’s health, not men’s, which continues to receive government attention and funding. For example, the National Institutes of Health–the federal focal point for medical research in the U.S.–spends nearly four times as much on female-specific health research as on male-specific research. And though the average man is as likely to die from prostate cancer as the average woman is from breast cancer, the Department of Health and Human Services’ National Cancer Institute spends three and a half times as much money on breast cancer research as on prostate cancer research.

Martinsburg, WV–As we’ve previously discussed, false charges are a major problem in divorce and custody cases. Men and Women Against Discrimination, the West Virginia affiliate of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, has been making progress on the issue. Both houses of the WV legislature just passed a bill that “slaps criminal charges on those who falsely report child abuse or neglect in order to influence a custody case.” The article is excerpted below. Bill would criminalize false abuse charges By Michael C. Lewis The Journal, 3/10/08 MARTINSBURG–Nine times, one aggrieved father says he fought to protect his name and his relationship with his daughters after he was accused of child abuse in a custody dispute.
The man, whose name we will not use to protect the identity of his daughters, said he is pleased that West Virginia legislators last week passed a bill that slaps criminal charges on those who falsely report child abuse or neglect in order to influence a custody case. On Thursday, state senators passed House Bill 3065, after the measure met overwhelming approval in the House of Delegates last week. The bill charges those who makes a false abuse report with a $1,000 fine, or forces the plaintiff to pay for the defendant”s legal fees. The misdemeanor crime would also carry a punishment of up to 60 hours of community service. The man, previously a resident of Huntington who now lives in Burlington, Ohio, said in 2003 and 2004, he was accused of breaking and entering, assault and sexual and physical abuse against his two daughters. Faced with serving at least one year in jail and losing custody of his daughters, the man fought the charges. “They were never proven to be false. They were said to be ‘unsubstantiated.” They found me not guilty. But I know I”m innocent. I want the satisfaction of knowing that on my record it was a lie, but I”ll never get that,’ said the man, who said he spent thousands of dollars in legal fees to prove his innocence. “People have no idea how much time and money this wastes in the system.’ In West Virginia, from March 2007 to March 2008, West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources Child Protective Services received and did paperwork on 37,165 incidents of child abuse. From those, 26,904 cases were further investigated, said John Law, spokesperson for WVDHHR. Only 3,998 cases were found to be substantiated, or less than 20 percent of all investigated incidents.

Etobicoke, Canada–Another false rape claim, another admission that police rarely file charges over such claims. Perhaps the best part is this–most of the story is dedicated not to the men who could have been targeted, or the men who have been the victims of false rape claims, or even to the waste of police time, money and resources. Nope. Most of the story is dedicated to how difficult it is for rape victims to come forward–as if we were discussing a real rape.

Also, nice quotes from a feminist professor:

“Cheryl Regehr, a professor of social work at the University of Toronto, said that only makes sense, because such fabrications are almost always ‘a call for help in many cases.’

“While she said false rape charges are ‘exceedingly rare,’ they usually draw a disproportionate amount of publicity.

“‘They become highly sensationalized and highly publicized, because they’re so rare,’ said Prof. Regehr. ‘And usually they’re pretty lurid stories.’

“But the effect they can have on real victims of sexual assault can be chilling, she said. ‘Since the dawn of time there’s been this urban myth about how women make up rapes,’ she said.

“‘Every time a case like this comes out, it feeds that … and it really dissuades the real victims from disclosing.'”

As for false rape charges being “exceedingly rare,” that is not the case, as I explained in my column U. of Maryland right to deny protesters a forum to publicly name alleged rapists (Baltimore Sun, 10/15/07). And if they are rare, we certainly seem to get a lot of them–I’ve posted God knows how many on this blog.

The story is below–thanks to Jeremy Swanson.

Etobicoke Rape A Lie, Police Say Chill Effect; Woman claimed she was abducted at gunpoint
Chris Wattie, National Post
Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Police spent hours this weekend searching for two men who hijacked a woman’s car in her Etobicoke neighbourhood, sexually assaulted her and drove away, dumping her in front of her home.

The woman told police she was abducted at gunpoint, forced into a dark green van, driven to an unknown location and sexually assaulted.

Her car was found abandoned at Woodbine Raceway, but officers were unable to find any sign of the two suspects.

They soon concluded the unidentified woman made up the whole story.

Read the full article here.

Los Angeles, CA–We’re accustomed to listening to wives complain about their husbands who golf. Apparently this lazy, good-for-nothing hubby can’t even muster the energy to go to the golf course so his wife can be mad at him about it.

From Dana Summers’ comic Bound and Gagged.

Los Angeles, CA–I was recently contacted by a reporter who is looking for divorced fathers who feel their place in their families and their kids’ lives has been usurped by their ex-wives’ new husbands. According to the reporter:

“The piece will be on stepfathers and how they complicate the father/child relationship…guys who feel usurped in their role, not men who feel that the stepfather is abusive.”

If this is you, please send me a 100 word summary by clicking here.

Interestingly, we have discussed several Country & Western songs about divorced dads which center on this theme. A couple examples are:

1) Country and Western singer Toby Keith’s Who’s That Man?. (If you want to shed a tear, watch the last 20 seconds of this video.)

2) Doug Supernaw’s ‘I Don’t Call Him Daddy’.

Dallas, TX–“In 2004, CPS investigators found that the boys were unkempt and wore dirty clothes. Officials provided Ms. Busby with services including day care, food, clothing, help with utilities, and parenting skills training.

“The following year, investigators received a report of a domestic violence incident between Ms. Busby and her then-boyfriend. She was arrested, and the two boys were placed in foster care.

“They remained there for several months until a judge returned them to Ms. Busby…

“Her criminal history includes charges of assault, trespassing and burglary.

“In 2002, Ms. Busby was sentenced to a year in the county jail after finding another woman in her boyfriend’s home, attacking her with a knife, and stealing her purse.

“In 2005, she was accused of scratching a Dallas County detention officer. That case is pending.”

A knife attack, arrests for domestic violence, assault and burglary–nice lady. One can see why CPS would give her her kids.

I wonder where the kids’ dad(s) are? Did they abandon their kids? Or were they driven away by this violent, dangerous, vicious lunatic? If anybody hears anything, please let me know.

The article quoted above is the Dallas Morning News’ Family was on a rocky road before mother flung boys, self from I-30 overpass (3/13/08). Note the way the reporter describes the would-be murderer as “troubled”–a word generally not applied to men who murder children.

Los Angeles, CA–Background: In April, I called your attention to a new, damaging Parental Alienation bill in the California legislature in my co-authored column AB 612 Will Make It Harder to Protect Children from Parental Alienation (Riverside Press-Enterprise, 4/2/07).

Fathers & Families’ legislative representative Michael Robinson helped lead successful opposition to AB 612, and the bill died last summer.

In January, I was contacted by Dan Abendschein of the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group here in Los Angeles regarding parents who have been alienated from their children after a divorce or separation. In this blog post I asked readers who fit the description to email me so I could pass it on to Dan, and many of you responded with stories of your experiences.

Dan’s article on Parental Alienation came out a few days ago, and is linked and excerpted below.

To write a Letter to the Editor regarding the story, click here.

SGVN owns several papers in the greater Los Angeles area.

Bill addresses theory used in custody cases
By Dan Abendschein, Staff Writer
SGVN, 03/09/2008

A state bill that would set guidelines for child custody cases has highlighted a nearly 20-year-old dispute over a theory used by psychological evaluators.

The bill, AB 612, which failed to pass into law in 2007, targeted the controversial theory, called Parental Alienation Syndrome. The syndrome describes behavior where one parent turns a child against the other, convincing the child the parent has treated him or her badly, even when they have not.

Dr. Philip Stahl, a California evaluator and member of the state’s Association of Family & Conciliation Courts, says evaluators are split in their beliefs about whether children can be alienated.

“You have evaluators who really don’t understand alienation, and people who want to apply it in every case,” said Stahl.

Evaluators are not the only ones with differing views on the issue: there are stalwart advocates who believe that hundreds of people have suffered because of parental alienation, and those who believe just as many have suffered from false charges of the syndrome.

Women’s group advocates say the theory has been used by courts to place children with abusive fathers, and strip mothers of their custodial rights.

“It’s junk science used to target women and take their custody rights away,” said Karen Anderson, a spokesperson for the California Protective Parent’s Association. “It’s a problem in courts all over the country.”

Julia Cotton, a mother from Los Angeles County, said that a custody evaluation in her divorce case accused her of alienation and led to her young daughter being placed with her husband full time.

“Her recommendation led to me only getting my daughter for supervised visits,” said Cotton. “When I saw her she acted traumatized and seemed totally out of it.”
Cotton said she suspected that her ex-husband was abusing her daughter in some way, but didn’t know what to do about it.

“I knew that the more I tried to do something about it, the more I would be accused of alienation,” she said.

While woman’s groups tout Cotton’s story as a typical one throughout California, father’s rights groups have a polar-opposite view of custody courts and alienation.

“Ninety-eight percent of the time that you see abuse charges that have not been verified by police, those allegations are coached,” said J. Michael Kelly, a Los Angeles County lawyer, and member of the United Fathers of California law group.

One father from the San Gabriel Valley in the middle of a custody battle who asked to be called Norm said his two teenage daughters say they don’t want to have anything to do with him, and he can’t figure out why.

“They call me a violent man, they say I am aggravating,” said Norm. “I had a bad custody evaluator and now I barely see them.”

Norm said he believes his wife is genuinely convinced that he does not treat their kids well.

“I don’t think she is trying to be vindictive,” he said. “I just think in her mind, there is some deeper mental problem that is convincing her I’d be bad for the kids.”

The text of the 2007 version of AB 612 was drafted by the CPPA and explicitly banned the use of Parental Alienation Syndrome, or just the term alienation from use in evaluations. It also aimed to minimize the use of custody evaluations.

The family law section of the state bar and several psychologists groups banded together to oppose the bill.

The 2008 version of the bill is much vaguer than its predecessor, stating evaluators will be forced to conform to “standards generally accepted by the medical, psychiatric, legal, and psychological communities.” The bill does not specifically mention Parental Alienation Syndrome.

“The thinking was that if you mentioned specific syndromes or disorders, people who would use them in evaluations would just start calling them by a different name,” said Ira Ruskin, D-Redwood City, who introduced the bill.

But, Karen Anderson, who helped draft the original bill, said the new version, labeled AB 2587, is not strong enough.

Read the full article here.