Category: Blog

Wise County, VA–Background: Conscientious Virginia judge James Michael Shull, who smoked out a woman who sought to extend a restraining order based on false charges of domestic violence, was removed from the bench last fall by this Virginia Supreme Court ruling. Not only was Shull railroaded, but he has been the target of widely-disseminated misleading reporting. To learn more about the case, see my blog posts In Defense of Judge James Michael Shull (Part I), Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, and Part VII, read my co-authored newspaper column defending Shull here, or click here.

The lying mother who cost Judge Shull his career has abducted her child from the custody of her ex-husband, and is now on America’s Most Wanted.

As I’ve mentioned before, Tammy Huffman-Giza has a rap sheet as long as your arm. On February 22 Huffman-Giza was found guilty of welfare fraud and sentenced to prison. However, instead of going to prison, she was given two years supervised probation–perhaps due to the female sentencing discount. If she had gone to jail where she belongs–for the welfare fraud and a variety of other crimes–she would never have been able to abduct her son.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s page is here. A Fox News story on it is here.

From America’s Most Wanted:

Child Abduction In Virginia

On Feb. 25, 2008, State Police and investigators in Wise County, Va. issued an Endangered Missing Child Alert for 8-year-old Brayden Reid Carty.

According to police, Brayden was taken by his biological but non-custodial mother, 32-year-old Tammy Huffman-Giza the weekend prior, when Brayden’s father brought the child over to her apartment in Coeburn, Va. for a visit.

Cops say when the father went to pick up Brayden, the apartment was empty — except for a letter Huffman-Giza allegedly penned before taking off with the child. In the letter, police say Huffman-Giza wrote she had met someone named “Richard” online, and that she’d made plans to go to London, England to meet him. Police have issued a felony warrant for Tammy, charging her with child abduction.

According to police, Huffman-Giza suffers from mental health issues and has attempted to harm herself in the past. Cops fear Brayden is endangered.

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.

Dr. Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling (pictured, photo by Kevin Graft) of the University of South Alabama specializes in Juvenile, Family, and Intimate Partner Violence. Her email address is jlr@usouthal.edu.

At the conference, she co-presented the Plenary “Family Roots of Adolescent Violence in Relationships and Effective Interventions: A Developmental and Relational Perspective” with Marlene Moretti, PhD. Some of the points Jennifer made include:

1) When grappling with the emerging reality that women commit Intimate Partner Violence as often as men, she said, “Every time we tried to say that women’s intimate partner abuse is different than men’s, the evidence did not support it.”

2) Jennifer interviewed women in shelters about whether they had stalked their intimate partners. She wanted to ask them if they had committed violence against their intimate partners, but was not allowed to. She says that 25% of the women who were being stalked by their intimate partners said they had stalked their partners too.

3) Jennifer wondered why some of the women were leaving the battered women’s shelter in less than a week. The answer, she said, is that they too were engaging in violence against their partners, and in some cases had left to pick up the battle again. Jennifer explained, “We weren’t helping these women because we were ignoring their paradigm.”

4) Jennifer also said that many women who stay with their batterers or abusers are not staying out of fear or because of their kids. “Love has a lot to do with it,” she explained.

5) She said that some of her work has been “suppressed,” and that people in positions of authority have refused to publish it.

6) She believes that in some ways Intimate Partner Violence researchers have not done enough to bring their findings to the media and to present it in ways that are commonly understandable and digestible. She says that among researchers in many fields, there is a perverse desire to make the academic journals as difficult for the layperson to understand as possible. She criticized this.

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

Some child-support recipients to pay annual service charge (Examiner, 2-29-08)

Military Divorce Rate Holding Steady (Associated Press, 3-1-08)

Evangelical stance on divorce is changing (Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 3-1-08)

Man to get child support back (Augusta Chronicle, 3-2-08)

Who’s your daddy? (Lancaster Online, 3-2-08)

Court to offer faster cases (Greenville Daily Reflector, 3-2-08)

Texas attorney general, family-court judges battle over child support collection (Dallas Morning News, 3-2-08)

Obesity new factor in grading parents (National Post, 3-3-08)

Custody statue is bad math (Denver Post, 3-3-08)

Child support: pay up or lose welfare (Sydney Morning Herald, 3-4-08)

Sacramento, CA–Background: At the conference “From Ideology to Inclusion: Evidence-Based Policy and Intervention in Domestic Violence” (held in Sacramento, California February 15-16), Erin Pizzey told me about domestic violence shelters’ policies of excluding all males ages 12 or older from going to the shelters with their mothers. I wrote about it here.

Evan Stark, a prominent feminist advocate for domestic violence victims and the author of Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life (Interpersonal Violence), took issue with Pizzey’s criticisms of battered women’s shelters’ policy of excluding boys. To read his views, click here.

Pizzey saw Stark’s comments and was not pleased. She wrote:

“I am outraged at the inference that boys have never been able to go into shelters in America or refuges in England because the shelter/refuge can’t monitor the boys’ sexual or violent behaviour. Why does this man think that the boys will be violent or sexual towards the girls/young women in the shelter? This shows an appallingly biased mindset.

“Of course some of the girls and some of the boys will be violent and sexual, but it is the job of the shelter/refuge to work with those children just like they should work with the some of the women in the shelter/refuges to help them learn appropriate behaviour.

“It is untrue to say that my refuge did not take boys into the central refuge. I made it quite clear that the boys, could if they wished, live in the boy’s project. Many boys chose to stay with their mothers.

“Chiswick was a therapeutic community and everyone within the community worked to see that we treated each other with respect and love. The problem with the shelters/refuges is that most of them are hostels and their purpose is to fund the feminist movements so they exclude young boys because they are the potential enemy.”

Stark counters Pizzey’s views below.

Feminist DV Expert Criticizes Pizzey, Defends Excluding Teen Boys from Shelters

Pizzey is “outraged” that I support excluding older male children from all shelters. But I never said anything of the kind. What I did was explain that some shelters exclude older boys because they lack the staffing to regulate violence and sexual acting out by these adolescents, females as well as males. In fact, this is no longer as much of a problem as it was 25 years ago, when Pizzey worked in a shelter.

Today, most refuges in England use free standing apartments, so families stay in tact. Here, the picture is mixed. Many of our shelters lack the funding or staff to regulate violence or sexual acting out in the facility and are not equipped for older males. Pizzey admits “some boys and girls” may be violent or sexual, but she thinks we should monitor these behaviors rather than try to prevent them by separating older boys from girls.

Shelters in this country and most in England are not social service agencies. They are spaces where women can be temporarily safe and consider their options. Critical to this experience is the idea that we do not tell women how to lead their lives or set any but the most basic rules to maintain the house.

Pizzey’s approach was more like a mother superior who treated the residents at Chiswick as if they were immature and needed her personal guidance. We treat women who use the shelter not as problem women but as women who have had problems with abusive partners. In many of these relationships, they were punished, often brutally, for any behavior their partner considered inappropriate or disloyal. Restoring confidence in their own decision-making is a critical phase in recovery. This means letting women make their own mistakes. But many shelters feel they can’t extend this philosophy to violence or sexual acting out.

Painting all shelters as feminist is also wrong. While many shelters in the U.S. were started by women’s groups and some remain feminist in their orientation, the majority of U.S. facilities were started by the Y, the Salvation Army and other religious, community-based or free standing organizations. Unless these facilities have the staff and space, they too exclude older boys. So this policy has nothing to do with feminism or man- hating. And it is designed to protect boys as well as girls.

Many shelters also exclude women with addictions or serious psychiatric problems. Since many battered women suffer from these problems, this policy also sets limits on what we can do. Again, however, it reflects widely held beliefs about what is safe, not a bias against addiction or mental illness.

I pointed out that Pizzey herself segregated older males in a house behind the main refuge. She admits this, but claims boys had the choice to stay in the refuge with their moms. This may be true. But when we visited Chiswick several years after it opened, there were no male adolescents in the refuge.

The most absurd part of Pizzey’s response is her description of Chiswick as a “therapeutic community.” When we visited, there were 90 women and children staying in the 5 bedroom house, more than l5 in a room. Pizzey claimed, “If they can manage this, they can manage anything.” Since even this chaos was preferable to the violent situations women and children had left behind, it may ultimately have helped women gain confidence in their ability to survive on their own. But there was nothing even remotely resembling therapy taking place.

As several letter writers and Glenn Sacks, I am a feminist as well as a man. This means I believe in full equality, liberty and justice for women as well as men. Women in the U.S. earn a third of what men do for the same work; still do 90% of child care, 90% of housework, 85% of all cooking; represent a tiny proportion of those in political power (though they register and vote in larger numbers than men), etc.

It is only in my lifetime that women in many advanced countries got the right to vote, to sit on juries, to go to the top universities and professional schools, to charge husbands with rape or to enter corporate boardrooms.

I have no question that women can be as violent and abusive as men. But these inequalities and numerous others I could list with more space, mean that women enter personal relationships on an unequal footing with men, though ostensibly both have the same formal rights. It is this unequal footing, exploited by too many men with coercion and control, that drives the millions of women to seek shelter or legal or police protection each year.

Los Angeles, CA–“There’s a mini-controversy brewing in the advertising world over the sometimes-stereotypical portrayal of fathers in TV ads. Most notably, fathers’ rights advocate Glenn Sacks almost succeeded in derailing a bid by Arnold, Boston, to win the Volvo account. Sacks complained that a previous Arnold ad for Fidelity Investments showed a father in a negative light. Arnold has since won the account and Sacks said he has no issues with the agency’s ads for Volvo.
“ We’ve done several protests against ads which portray men and fathers as clowns–see Campaign Against Anti-Father Verizon Commercial, Campaign Against Anti-Male Advertising, Campaign Against Detroit News ‘Get Her a Gift or She”ll Give You a Black Eye” Ad and Portable On Demand Storage Decides to Remove Anti-Male Ad in Face of Protests. The Volvo/Arnold campaign referenced above was the brainchild of advertising guru Richard Smaglick of www.fathersandhusbands.org, and he worked with me on the campaign. Brandweek Magazine is a weekly marketing trade publication, one of the largest in the advertising world. In November, Brandweek editor Todd Wasserman discussed the problem of ‘Dad as Idiot’ advertising in his column The Surviving Dads Of Ads (11/12/07), writing, “It”s hard to argue that guys like Sacks don”t have a point”. He discussed several of the anti-male ads we cover on this blog, as well as some of our campaigns against anti-male advertising. After the article came out, our readers flooded the magazine with letters, 12 of which were printed–to read some of them and learn more, see my blog post Brandweek Prints Dozen Letters Criticizing Anti-Male Advertising. Later the Washington Times interviewed Wasserman and published an article on the subject of father-bashing in TV advertising. The Times wrote: “Todd Wasserman knew he had touched a nerve when he saw the enormous number of responses from readers…The dad-as-buffoon and the anti-father imagery seemingly permeated advertising and marketing campaigns, which continually use stereotypes about men to get cheap laughs, he observed…The letters poured in. ‘I don’t think we ever got so much reaction,’ said Mr. Wasserman…the more people I talked to, the more it seemed a lot of people felt that way.'” Today Brandweek came out with a new article on the Spike network’s True Dads series and the issue of how men and fathers are portrayed on television. They write: “The Spike network, home to Ultimate Fighting Championship and Steven Segal movies, is channeling that testosterone-fueled lineage to cater to that frequently mocked demo: dads. “The idea is proving to be an advertiser magnet, with Red Lobster recently inking a first-time deal for True Dads, an on-air series of spots that show dads spending time with their kids. Call it the slightly softer side of Spike.” We’ll be talking more about Spike’s “True Dads” campaign soon. If readers would like to write a Letter to the Editor of Brandweek and express their views about the way men and fathers are portrayed within the advertising industry, go to feedback@brandweek.com. One quibble–when Richard and I did the Volvo campaign, we weren’t unhappy over one previous Arnold Worldwide ad, as Brandweek indicates, but several ads. Some of them can be seen on our campaign page here. Also, as I’ve explained many times, the problem is usually not this particular ad or that one, but instead a consistent pattern of portraying men negatively. To learn more about the problems with the way men are portrayed in advertising, click here. The Biz: Spike Takes Break From Bond Marathons To Laud Fathers Brandweek Magazine February 25, 2008 The Spike network, home to Ultimate Fighting Championship and Steven Segal movies, is channeling that testosterone-fueled lineage to cater to that frequently mocked demo: dads. The idea is proving to be an advertiser magnet, with Red Lobster recently inking a first-time deal for True Dads, an on-air series of spots that show dads spending time with their kids. Call it the slightly softer side of Spike. A number of sponsors, including Jeep, T-Mobile and Pizza Hut, already have linked with True Dads, which the network now sells as part of its upfront presentations to advertisers. The Darden Restaurants-owned Red Lobster chain’s brand will be featured in the new co-branded spots starting next month. The program is an example of the ways in which cable channels are getting increasingly creative in order to snag ad dollars and give marketers face time outside of traditional ad pods. Broadcast networks are inching further into that territory, but the looser cable environment seems to favor the risk-taking necessary for the campaigns to work. Spike has embedded advertisers into unscripted series, such as Toyota’s inclusion in Pros vs. Joes. Those deals often wind up spilling over to single-marketer commercial breaks, on-air contests and other attention-grabbing gimmicks. Spike has a history of packaging its shows, from its wrestling and movie nights to late night sports and reality. The network created a micro-miniseries for Mountain Dew, 45-second segments, to run in Thursday night’s TNA Impact, a series that’s a little mixed martial arts and a lot of theatricality. On the horizon for ad partners: live commercials. “The market demands it right now,” said Chris Rapp, Spike’s vp-integrated marketing, “and putting short-form content on the air gets viewers more engaged in the brand and in our network.” True Dads works like this: when an advertiser wants to participate, Spike’s internal creative team comes up with a concept for linking the theme of dads and kids with the brand’s message. With input from the marketer, the team puts together a custom-made co-branded spot, usually 30 seconds, that airs throughout Spike’s schedule. Advertisers have bought into the program for weeks or months at a stretch. The Red Lobster spot features a father and his son on a fishing trip that turns out to be not too successful. They have to eat something, so their seafood craving is satisfied at Red Lobster. The family-friendly campaign, emphasizing the “fresh” theme of the restaurant chain’s current mantra, happens to coincide nicely with Lent, a time when fish consumption is up. Spike has done similar work for Dunkin’ Donuts, T-Mobile and Dominos. Those brands have been woven into vignettes called The CSI Guys, a parody of the popular CSI series. The stars of that short-form programming might use a victim’s cell phone to call for pizza, for instance. The marketers always have approval of the spots, but rarely want to tone down the irreverence. “We position ourselves as the voice for guys,” Rapp said, “and advertisers look to us to figure out ways to connect with that audience in the language they speak.” True Dads comes as there’s a mini-controversy brewing in the advertising world over the sometimes-stereotypical portrayal of fathers in TV ads. Most notably, fathers’ rights advocate Glenn Sacks almost succeeded in derailing a bid by Arnold, Boston, to win the Volvo account. Sacks complained that a previous Arnold ad for Fidelity Investments showed a father in a negative light. Arnold has since won the account and Sacks said he has no issues with the agency’s ads for Volvo.

New York–“She wanted to kill them. I let the court know that. But they took only one side…I loved them. I’ve been fighting for them.”

Note that the woman, apparently a violent lunatic who allegedly had sent her ex threatening letters and set fire to his car, was granted an order of protection. Now, despite the fathers’ repeated warnings to social workers, the kids are dead.

But at least they didn’t give dad custody…

See the story below are also click here to learn more.

‘Nassau County killed’ them, boys’ father cries
BY OREN YANIV and JANE H. FURSE
NY DAILY NEWS
February 25th 2008

The grieving father of two boys allegedly killed by their disturbed mother said social workers failed to heed his warnings they were in danger.

“Nassau County killed these kids,” said Innocent Demesyeux, 28, who claimed county authorities ignored his pleas to protect Michael, 5, and Innocent Jr., 18 months, from their “violent” mother, Leatrice Brewer, 27.

Demesyeux, an ambulette driver who has been estranged from Brewer since 2004 and was locked in a custody battle with her, said he warned authorities she had threatened to kill the children as recently as last week.

“She wanted to kill them,” Demesyeux told the Daily News. “I let the court know that. But they took only one side.”

He said Brewer called him on Wednesday or Thursday sounding “crazier than normal,” claiming people on MTV were talking to her and saying “they were making fun of her on TV and that this Spanish woman put voodoo on her.”

A custody hearing was scheduled for today in Mineola Family Court, and fear of losing custody also may have caused Brewer to “snap,” said Desmesyeux.

He said Brewer’s violent behavior – including threatening letters and a 2004 incident in which she burned his car – has been going on for years.

Although she petitioned the court for an order of protection against him, he said she continued to be obsessed with spending time with him – resulting in the birth of Innocent Jr. 18 months ago.

“She basically was playing mind games,” he said, saying that during her call last week, “she told me she wanted me to come over” even though she had an order of protection.

“I loved them,” Desmesyeux said numbly. “I’ve been fighting for them.”

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.

For many years the feminist “Duluth’ model has been the dominant paradigm within the domestic violence establishment and in domestic violence treatment. According to John Hamel, LCSW, a court-certified batterer treatment provider and author of the book Gender-Inclusive Treatment of Intimate Partner Abuse, “In the Duluth theoretical framework, domestic violence is caused by a patriarchal society that sanctions violence by men against their female partners. Women are assumed to be either victims or, when they are found to aggress against their male partners, to be doing so in self-defense.”

Claudia Dias (pictured, photo by Kevin Graft) explained that it is mandated, apparently by the state of California, that she have the Duluth Domestic Violence Power & Control Wheel (pictured above) prominently displayed in the office or center where she provides batterers’ treatment classes. Dias is a critic of the Duluth model. She says that she gets around this problem in the following manner: she prominently displays the Duluth Domestic Violence Power & Control Wheel with one minor modification — she has a circle and a line going through it.

Sacramento, CA–Background: I’ve been detailing the historic, one-of-a-kind conference “From Ideology to Inclusion: Evidence-Based Policy and Intervention in Domestic Violence” (held in Sacramento, California February 15-16)–to learn more, click here.

In my recent blog post DV Conference Report #3: 12-Year-Old Boys in Abusive Families Aren’t Allowed to Go to Shelters with Their Mothers, but Instead Go to Foster Care, I discussed domestic violence shelters’ policies of excluding all males ages 12 or older from going to the shelters with their mothers. I wrote:

“One morning during the conference, I had breakfast with two remarkable ladies, Erin Pizzey (pictured) and Patricia Overberg. Pizzey founded the first battered women’s shelter in the world in 1971, and Overberg was the first battered women’s shelter director in California to admit male victims of domestic violence to a shelter. As bad as things are, both of them told me things which were amazing and horrifying. Pizzey told the following story:

“A woman was being abused by her violent husband and sought shelter. She had three children, two young ones and a 12-year-old boy. She wanted to go to a battered women’s shelter and, of course, take her children with her. However, the feminists who run the battered women’s shelters in England have a policy that no boys aged 12 or older are allowed into the shelters.

“The woman was presented with the equivalent of Sophie’s Choice. Either she could return to her violent husband, and risk both herself and her children, or she could submit to the feminist policy. She chose the latter. Rather than allow the boy to stay with his mother and his siblings in the battered women’s shelter, the boy instead had to wait in the police station, while his mother and siblings went off to the shelter. The English equivalent of child protective services was called, and the boy was picked up and placed in foster care!

“Overberg told me the same thing happens in California and in much of the United States.”

Evan Stark is a prominent feminist advocate for domestic violence victims and the author of Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life (Interpersonal Violence) and numerous other DV books. Stark took issue with Pizzey’s criticisms of battered women’s shelters’ policy of excluding boys ages 12 or older from being with their mothers at the shelters. Stark wrote:

“The issue Pizzey raises, of young men not being able to come to a shelter with their moms, has been a serious problem since the beginning of the shelter movement. The reason for this policy, which you don’t mention, is that many shelters take younger women, including girls in their teens, and the boys in families are often older than some of the females in the facility and there are no provisions to monitor their behavior– violent or sexual.

“At Chiswick, Pizzey didn’t admit boys to the shelter, either, but housed them in a separate building. She could do this because she had a large grant from a private company to buy the houses. But most shelters in England, as here, run on a shoestring budget and, in England, were located in Housing Estates (equivalent to our housing projects) and had no separate space for male children.

“Today, many shelters in England use free-standing apartments rather than houses and have no restrictions on male youth coming with their mothers. You are shocked that some of these boys have to go to foster care. But, as you rightly point out, this is often preferable (and is temporary) to staying in a home where all families members are exposed to the man’s violence.”

Pizzey saw Stark’s comments and was not pleased. She has asked me to post her response:

“I am outraged at the inference that boys have never been able to go into shelters in America or refuges in England because the shelter/refuge can’t monitor the boys’ sexual or violent behaviour. Why does this man think that the boys will be violent or sexual towards the girls/young women in the shelter? This shows an appallingly biased mindset.

“Of course some of the girls and some of the boys will be violent and sexual, but it is the job of the shelter/refuge to work with those children just like they should work with some of the women in the shelter/refuges to help them learn appropriate behaviour.

“It is untrue to say that my refuge did not take boys into the central refuge. I made it quite clear that the boys could, if they wished, live in the boy’s project. Many boys chose to stay with their mothers.

“Chiswick was a therapeutic community and everyone within the community worked to see that we treated each other with respect and love. The problem with the shelters/refuges is that most of them are hostels and their purpose is to fund the feminist movements so they exclude young boys because they are the potential enemy.”

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.

Dr. Donald Dutton is one of the premier domestic violence authorities in the world. He co-founded the Assaultive Husbands Project in 1979 and has published more than 100 papers and books, including the Domestic Assault of Women, The Batterer: A Psychological Profile, The Abusive Personality, and his latest work, Rethinking Domestic Violence. Dr. Dutton can be reached at dondutton@shaw.ca.

One of the issues Dr. Dutton discussed at the conference is domestic violence between lesbians. This is an important and relevant issue, of course, in part because it provides a look at Intimate Partner Violence without the pervasive assumption that the violence in families is almost always caused by men. It also allows us to examine Intimate Partner Violence outside of the feminist Duluth model, which says that it is men who commit IPV, and they do so as part of their role in the patriarchy.

Dutton cited one study of 1,100 lesbian or bisexual women who are in abusive lesbian relationships. The study, which was conducted in Phoenix, found that the women were more likely to have experienced violence in their previous relationships with women than in their previous relationships with men.

Dutton explained that in general research shows that domestic violence is more common in lesbian relationships than in heterosexual relationships.