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Does this Massachusetts Court Think Mothers Feel Pain of Loss of Children More than Fathers Do?

Boston, MA–Shared parenting activist Laura Chidester sent me this sad Boston Globe story about a grieving couple. Both mother and father suffered an equal loss, but the mother was awarded much more in damages. Laura writes:

“The article doesn’t explain why the mother was awarded so much more, but I bet we can guess.”

Perhaps there’s a logical reason why the mother was awarded over three times what the father was awarded–the article explains it a little, but not much. But one can’t help but suspect that the jury may believe that a mother feels the loss of her children more than a father does.

Jury faults mortuary for losing remains
Awards couple $325,000 in suit over son’s missing body
Boston Globe, March 5, 2008

A Suffolk Superior Court jury awarded a Boston couple a total of $325,000 yesterday, ruling that they suffered emotional distress when a city funeral home lost and possibly cremated the remains of their stillborn son.

“We will always wonder where our son is,” Robert Benedict said in an interview after the verdict. “It will never bring peace.”

The civil verdict by the jury of eight women and six men came after a day and a half of deliberations. Superior Court Judge Paul K. Troy, speaking from the bench after the verdict, called the case a “tragedy” and “heartbreaking.”

“There are no winners,” he said.

Robert and Therese Bellissimo Benedict said they suffered needlessly because of a mistake by the J.S. Waterman & Sons funeral home in the North End, which is owned by Service Corporation International, a national chain based in Houston.

In an interview yesterday, the Benedicts noted that Service Corporation International trains employees through what the company calls Dignity University, an online program.

“Whoever was on staff when my son was there missed that entire semester at Dignity University,” Therese Benedict said. “In some ways, it is a direct correlation to depersonalizing what was once a family-owned business.”

The jury found that the funeral home was negligent and caused Robert Benedict emotional distress and awarded him $75,000. The jury awarded Therese Benedict $250,000 after concluding she was subjected to both negligent actions and intentional infliction of emotional harm.

Lisa Marshall, spokeswoman for Service Corporation International, said in a telephone interview that the company regrets the trouble that befell the Benedicts.

“This is not typical of the way our funeral homes operate,” she said. “It was a mistake, and we are very sorry about that.”

Read the full article here.

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DV Conference Report #17: Troubled Relationships

Sacramento, CA–Background: The historic, one-of-a-kind conference “From Ideology to Inclusion: Evidence-Based Policy and Intervention in Domestic Violence” was held in Sacramento, California February 15-16 and was a major success. The conference was sponsored by the California Alliance for Families and Children and featured leading domestic violence authorities from around the world.

Many of these researchers are part of the National Family Violence Legislative Resource Center, which is challenging the domestic violence establishment’s stranglehold on the issue. The NFVLRC promotes gender-natural, research-based DV policies.

I have been and will continue to detail the conference and some of the research that was presented there in this blog–to learn more, click here.

One of the presenters at the conference was Claudia Ann Dias, MSC, JD, who provides education and training in the fields of substance abuse, family violence, cultural awareness, sexual harassment and communications skills to both public and private sectors. She has been featured on 20/20 and Oprah for her work with male and female family violence perpetrators.

Dias spoke about what she described as the triangle of some troubled relationships. There are three parts to the triangle — the victim, the rescuer, and the persecutor.

Dias (pictured, photo by Kevin Graft)explained that everything people do, they do for a benefit. When a person in a relationship is a “victim,” she says, the person gets benefits from it. Among the benefits for the victim include attention, sympathy, freedom from accountability, lowered expectations, being cared for, and, Dias emphasized, great, great stories.

For the rescuer, Dias listed benefits such as self-esteem, purpose, recognition, and distraction from one’s own problems. She says that the rescuer “collects chips”– for everything they do, they put a chip in their pocket, so one day they can say, “For all I’ve done for you, you can do this for me.”

When the rescuer no longer wants to be the rescuer, or slips up, he becomes the persecutor. The persecutor is the rescuer who has failed the victim. The failed rescuer-turned-persecutor is the worst person in the world, and is treated accordingly. The failed rescuer begs to come back, to be given his job back, and the victim generously allows it. As a therapist, she says, things begin to change as soon as you hold the victim accountable for his or her behavior.

I thought what she said had a lot of truth to it. One light moment in the conference occurred when Dias had written a bunch of stuff on her white board, and had no more room and no way to erase it. I took a couple napkins out of my briefcase and went up and erased the white board. As I was doing it, someone in the audience said, “He is the rescuer,” and everybody laughed.

As soon as I finished erasing the board, I announced, “Now I’m going to cash in my chips,” and I walked over to Claudia and gave her a big hug. Everyone laughed. I suppose what I should have done was bend her back over my knee and give her a big, dramatic, movie-style kiss. The picture at the top was taken just before I made my move…

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California Lawyer Magazine: NOW Leader Calls Fathers’ Movement ‘Dishonest and Dangerous’

California–Background: California Lawyer magazine covered the Fathers’ Rights Movement in the #2 story in its March issue–The Dad-Vocates by Bill Blum. The article quotes family law attorney David C. Stone, men’s advocate Warren Farrell, Craig Candelore of the Men’s Legal Center, myself, and others. In the article, Helen Grieco, executive director of the California chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) says, “The fathers’ rights movement is both dishonest and dangerous.”
According to Blum: “She views the rise of fathers’ rights organizations in the 1980s-and the accompanying increase in custody disputes as bargaining tools-as a direct response to ‘the demand of the women’s movement for greater child support, which ended up costing fathers more money.’ Under California law (Cal. Fam. Code 4055), Grieco points out, child-support payments are determined by a formula tying support both to the income of the parents and, most important, to the percentage of time children spend in the physical custody of each parent. Generally, the more time a child spends with a mother having primary physical custody, the more support a father must pay. “‘There are definitely financial reasons why some men seek child custody,’ says USC Law School professor Scott Altman, who studied divorce-negotiation tactics by polling the members of the family law section of the California Bar. Altman found that over a one-year period more than 60 percent of divorce attorneys reported receiving threats of custody litigation from their opponents to extract more favorable child-support arrangements. Altman further found that attorneys who represented women exclusively or predominantly received such threats three times as often as their counterparts. (Lurking in the Shadow, 68 USC L. Rev. 493 (1995).)” This is a common and misleading feminist argument. I discussed it in my co-authored column Louisiana’s HB 315 Says One Parent is Better Than Two (Shreveport Times, 5/20/06): “In Louisiana, like most states, how much time each parent spends with his or her children helps determine how much child support is ordered. Rep. Shirley Bowler (R-River Ridge), who authored the bill, asserts that dads seek shared custody as a way to decrease their child support obligations. She promotes HB 315 as a way to ‘remove this angle’ in the current law, which she claims divorced dads are exploiting. “While it is true that there are fathers who put their pocketbooks above their children”s best interests, Bowler and the bill”s supporters ignore the obvious converse. If a dad may seek 50% physical time with his children simply to lower his child support obligation, doesn”t it also hold that a mother may seek 85% physical time in order to increase it? “Similarly, critics charge that the child support provisions of current law amount to paying men to spend time with their children. In reality, the provisions simply acknowledge that both moms and dads have child-related expenses.”

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Officer: Lincoln Memorial Fathers 4 Justice Protester ‘Resisted Arrest from Smaller, Female Officer’

Washington DC–Background: Two Fathers 4 Justice activists breached security and climbed onto the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC on August 17, 2007. Fatherhood activist Bob Norton was present and said:

“Four security guards tackled protester Bob Dickerson to the floor and sat on him. They forced his head into the stone floor. The security people overreacted for sure. I think they tackled him just because he was trying to leave.

“It is F4J”s mission to do peaceful protests but the timing and location probably are not the best for this type of thing in DC with the hair trigger our government shows in using the Patriot Act, etc.”

A video of the protest can be seen here. To learn more, click here.

Steve, one of the security guards who arrested Dickerson, recently sent me his perspective of what occurred. Steve writes:

“I am one of the security guards who helped arrest Mr. Dickerson – I had on a burgundy shirt and a baseball cap (see picture). The problem with many of these comments/opinions are that they are done in hindsight.

“I was there with my children (I was off-duty at the time), and there was no indication that these were peaceful protestors. In this day, I don’t think it would be over-reacting to think that these people dressing in costume and scaling a national monument could have much more dire plans.

“As far as Mr. Dickerson, I witnessed him resisting arrest from a female officer who was much smaller than he, and I rushed to assist (while my children were safely with my girlfriend). I assure you we used minimal force to arrest him. While he did not lash out violently, the video does not show that he vehemently resisted physically. Again, it’s not like these people announced a “peaceful protest.” I believe the response was appropriate.

“P.S. I am also a divorced father.”

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‘Most marital problems revolve around why the wife is unhappy with her husband’

“Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye.” — Luke 6:42 Chicago, IL–Men certainly create their share of problems in marriages, but I believe that a significant percentage of divorces are caused by some women’s hypercritical nature.
In my co-authored Chicago Tribune column Men Blamed for Marriage Decline but Women’s Relationship Wounds Often Self-Inflicted (1/21/07) I wrote: “To what, then, do we attribute women’s discontent with marriage and relationships, and the fact that they initiate the vast majority of divorces? A new Woman’s Day magazine poll found that 56% of married women would not or might not marry their husbands if they could choose again–why? “Nobody would dispute that, in selecting a mate, women are more discerning than men. This is an evolutionary necessity–a woman must carefully evaluate who is likely to remain loyal to her and protect and provide for her and her children. If a man and a woman go on a blind date and don’t hit it off, the man will shrug and say ‘it went OK.’ The woman will give five reasons why he’s not right for her. “A woman’s discerning, critical nature doesn’t disappear on her wedding day. Most marital problems and marriage counseling sessions revolve around why the wife is unhappy with her husband, even though they could just as easily be about why the husband is unhappy with the wife. In this common pre-divorce scenario there are only two possibilities-either she’s a great wife and he’s a lousy husband, or she’s far more critical of him than he is of her. Usually it’s the latter… “Yes, there are some men who make poor mates, but not nearly enough to account for the divorce epidemic and the decline of marriage. While it’s easy and popular to blame men, many of the wounds women bear from failed relationships and loneliness are self-inflicted.” Thanks to Peter, a reader, for sending me the cartoon.

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‘The administration identified 1,362 victims of human trafficking since 2000, nowhere near the 50,000 a year estimated’

Washington DC–“Outrage was mounting at the 1999 hearing in the Rayburn House Office Building, where congressmen were learning about human trafficking. “A woman from Nepal testified that September that she had been drugged, abducted and forced to work at a brothel in Bombay. A Christian activist recounted tales of women overseas being beaten with electrical cords and raped. A State Department official said Congress must act — 50,000 slaves were pouring into the United States every year, she said. Furious about the ‘tidal wave’ of victims, Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) vowed to crack down on so-called modern-day slavery.
“The next year, Congress passed a law, triggering a little-noticed worldwide war on human trafficking that began at the end of the Clinton administration and is now a top Bush administration priority. As part of the fight, President Bush has blanketed the nation with 42 Justice Department task forces and spent more than $150 million — all to find and help the estimated hundreds of thousands of victims of forced prostitution or labor in the United States. “But the government couldn’t find them. Not in this country…The administration has identified 1,362 victims of human trafficking brought into the United States since 2000, nowhere near the 50,000 a year the government had estimated.” The International Marriage Broker Regulation Act of 2005 (IMBRA) unfairly targets men and men’s civil rights. To read my blog posts on the subject, click here, here, and here. As so often happens, feminist groups and the government greatly exaggerated a problem women face, one which reflects poorly on men, and then passed an anti-male law because of it. According to Tristan Laurent of www.OnlineDatingRights.com: “The Washington Post uncovered widespread fraud in human trafficking reporting. Beginning in 2000, the US government has found sex trafficking a convenient target to attack and they have given millions and millions to stop it. NGOs and feminist groups have sprung up to lap up the gobs of money the feds and the states have spent on this essentially non-existent problem. The National Organization of Women, the Tahirih Justice Center, US Senator Maria Cantwell and others…have used these phony reports of massive human trafficking to justify [the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act of 2005], a law against men who want to meet foreign women, IMBRA.” According to Laurent, in 2004 Cantwell told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “Human trafficking is the politic way of describing modern-day slavery…18,000 and 20,000 people are trafficked into the United States each year….When we talk about human trafficking and abuse, we need to also be aware of the advent of for-profit international marriage brokers – companies that operate solely to connect men and women of different nations with the intent of getting married.” The Washington Post article is below. Human Trafficking Evokes Outrage, Little Evidence U.S. Estimates Thousands of Victims, But Efforts to Find Them Fall Short By Jerry Markon Washington Post, 9/23/07

Continue reading “‘The administration identified 1,362 victims of human trafficking since 2000, nowhere near the 50,000 a year estimated’”
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Fathers & Families News Digest, 3-10-08

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

State launching campaign to establish paternity (Associated Press, 3-4-08)

Women in NY prisons seek better child custody protections (Press & Sun Bulletin, 3-4-08)

Richards attacks Sheen over reality show (San Francisco Chronicle, 3-6-08)

With a little care, parents can share (Sydney Morning Herald, 3-6-08)

Divorce settlement spurs Paul McCartney’s iTunes marriage (New York Daily News, 3-7-08)

Judge recuses self in child-support payment (Associated Press, 3-7-08)

Bill wades into custody battles (San Bernardino Sun, 3-8-08)

More couples hiding wealth from each other (Telegraph.co.uk, 3-8-08)

Child-support lapses lead to 20 arrests (Statesman Journal, 3-8-08)

Bill would criminalize false abuse charges (Martinsburg Journal, 3-10-08)

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‘California Lawyer’ Magazine Covers Fathers’ Rights Movement

California–“Being a divorced dad doesn’t necessarily make David C. Stone an effective advocate for fathers. But it certainly doesn’t hurt. ‘I understand what they’re going through,’ says the 57-year-old sole practitioner, whose family law practice caters almost exclusively to men. ‘I’ve been married three times; I’ve given away houses. I also had visitation rights with a son who had moved to Arizona. I realize how difficult and painful divorce can be.
The only reason I pursue this line of work is that children need two actively engaged parents.’ “Such work puts Stone on the front lines of what both supporters and critics call the fathers’ rights movement (FRM)-a movement with roots that go all the way back to the 1970s. However, it would be something of a stretch to think of it as a highly organized crusade. As Glenn Sacks, a proponent and frequent radio commentator, observes, for fathers’ rights there’s ‘no dominant unifying organization like the NAACP in the civil rights context. It’s more a loose confederation.’ “It’s also a cause that has drawn an eclectic group of activists to its ranks. Take Sacks: A nonlawyer, he is perhaps the closest thing that the FRM has to a public tribune. Yet he’s never been divorced, and is in fact happily married with two children. Other prominent figures include Anne Mitchell, a Stanford Law School graduate who was abandoned by her mother at age three, raised by her father until age eleven, then moved in with another family; Krystal R. Clemens, who 16 years ago started DadsLaw, Inc., a family law practice in Orange County that runs a nationwide network of affiliate lawyers; and Craig Candelore, an Army Reserve colonel and the founding attorney of the Men’s Legal Center of San Diego. “Despite their varied backgrounds, all share a strong belief that on such emotionally charged issues as child custody and visitation, the family-court system is stacked against men.” California Lawyer magazine covers the Fathers’ Rights Movement in the #2 story in its March issue–The Dad-Vocates by Bill Blum. The article covers a variety of issues and mentions a couple of family law attorney David C. Stone’s cases. In one case, “a dying man, now living in Virginia, wants to have his kids with him this summer, but the children’s mother agreed to send them for only a week, preferring after that to ship them off to Hawaii for a vacation with her parents.” Nice lady. Blum writes about Nathaniel S., who in 1997 had a son with his live-in girlfriend in Tustin: “They never married but seemed to enjoy a conventional relationship-until it unraveled in 2003. The next year, says Stone, the boy’s mother, without consulting Nathaniel, took the child to live in Jacksonville, Florida. “Stone says Nathaniel didn’t go straight to court because he believed he’d get to see his son the following summer under an informal agreement with the child’s mother. Nathaniel also didn’t believe he’d get much help from the legal system. But when, according to Stone, it became clear that the child’s mother had no intention of sending the child to visit, Nathaniel called DadsLaw. “Stone acted quickly, securing a presumptive finding of paternity and an order requiring that Nathaniel’s son be sent back to Orange County to spend the summer with his father. Nathaniel also was ordered to pay child support (currently $930 per month). Although Nathaniel has continued to make the payments, Stone says, the visitation order was ignored and Nathaniel lost contact with his son, now ten. “Increasingly desperate, Nathaniel tracked down Stone last spring at his solo practice. The pair then returned to court for what promised to be a battle royal. “It took two months and over $2,000 in costs,” Stone says, “but we finally managed to serve the mother in Florida with a new order to show cause.” “The order sought monetary sanctions against the child’s mother and, ultimately, an order awarding Nathaniel primary physical custody of his son. Stone says he was also prepared to put on a reverse “move-away” case, referring to a long line of appellate decisions delineating the rights of custodial parents to relocate with their children. (For example, In re Marriage of Burgess, 13 Cal. 4th 25 (1996); In re Marriage of LaMusga, 32 Cal. 4th 1072 (2004).) And he was ready to invoke a claim of parental alienation syndrome (PAS), a doctrine asserting that children may become alienated from one parent as a result of the hostile actions or words of the other parent. (The notion that PAS can be considered a full-blown psychological disorder, on par with, say, post-traumatic stress disorder, however, remains highly controversial.) “‘Nathaniel grew up without his father,’ Stone says, ‘and he wanted to break that cycle’ with his own son. On January 7 the judge in the case ordered the boy to stay with his father this summer and go back to his mother in the fall, after which there would then be another review.” Read the full article here.

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Nine States, Bermuda Proclaim April 25 ‘Parental Alienation Awareness Day’

Bermuda–“Parental Alienation involves taking advantage of the suggestibility and dependency of children for the sole purpose of destroying a loving relationship they once shared with a parent.”

The Parental Alienation Awareness Organization/ www.Parental-Alienation-Awareness.com is making progress in gaining recognition of Parental Alienation, as nine U.S. states and the British territory of Bermuda have declared April 25 “Parental Alienation Awareness Day.”

The Parental Alienation Awareness Organization is looking for volunteers to ask their local Governor, MP or government officials to proclaim or officially recognize April 25th as Parental Alienation Awareness Day. If you’re interested, click here.

Bermuda’s Proclamation declaring April 25th as Parental Alienation Awareness Day states that, “Parental Alienation involves taking advantage of the suggestibility and dependency of children for the sole purpose of destroying a loving relationship they once shared with a parent.”

The nine U.S. states are:

Florida – Governor Crist
Indiana – Governor Daniels
Connecticut – Governor Rell
Montana – Governor Schweitzer
Kentucky – Governor Fletcher
Nebraska – Governor Heineman
Iowa – Governor Vilsack
Maine – Governor Baldacci
Nevada – Governor Gibbons

The Parental Alienation Awareness Organization has a package and a well-organized program to help volunteers approach their states about declaring April 25th as Parental Alienation Awareness Day. To learn more about how to get involved, click here.

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Anti-Father Bias at the Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles, CA–The Los Angeles Times article Next speaker enjoys broad support (3/2/08) details the rise of Karen Bass, the incoming leader of the California assembly and the first African American woman to be elected to lead a legislative house in the U.S. The piece was a nice example of the subtle and not-so-subtle societal bias against fathers and fatherhood. The article begins: “Anyone who knew Wilhelmina Bass might understand why her daughter Karen Bass, the Los Angeles Democrat elected Thursday as the next leader of the California Assembly, has devoted her Capitol career to making the state a better parent to its 80,000 foster children. “A former beauty salon owner who raised Karen and three boys in a well-appointed house in the Venice-Fairfax area, Wilhelmina Bass was a kind, poised, contemplative mother, and ‘the notion that people would come into this world and not have loving parents has always caused Karen pain,’
said Sylvia Castillo, Bass’ district director and a friend for three decades.” We all know the script: heroic, overwhelmed black mother raises her kids herself, and now one of them has done mama proud by making good in the world. Yet, believe it or not, Bass actually had a father, too. It is only much further down in the story, after we are already assuming that Bass was raised by a single mom, that we are told, “She credits her father, DeWitt, a mail carrier, for making her a ‘news junkie’ — Bass said she used to wake at 4:30 a.m. to listen to the radio with him before he began his route.” In fact, in the autobiographical information that Bass herself provided the Democratic Party, she wrote, “Karen has dedicated her life to improving our neighborhoods. Her father, DeWitt Bass–a letter carrier for 40 years–and mother, Wilhelmina, raised Karen and her three brothers in the Venice/Fairfax neighborhood.” In other words, Bass saw herself as being raised by both parents, and it even seems like she was at least a bit of a daddy’s girl. Why did the Los Angeles Times choose to place far more importance on her mother than on her father? To write a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times, click on letters@latimes.com. Nancy Vogel, the Los Angeles Times Staff Writer who wrote the story, can be reached at nancy.vogel@latimes.com.