Category: Blog

September 3, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Today’s the day we celebrate the contributions of the men and women who work every day to make everyone’s life easier, better, fuller and safer. We probably should do it more often.

A few weeks ago I watched a short Jordan Peterson video in which he pointed out to his interlocutor how fantastically complicated our economic system is. For us consumers to get, say, a fresh head of lettuce in a super market involves so many different moving parts of the economy as to boggle the mind. The fields have to produce, the produce needs to be harvested at the right time, it must be inspected, cleaned and packaged, put on a truck that functions and whose refrigeration system does as well. The driver has to drive the truck to market, there must be fuel for the truck at a place where it’s needed, the produce needs to be unloaded and displayed in a refrigerated area of the store. And of course every single aspect of the system I just mentioned has its own massively complex support system. For example the crude oil that’s the basis of the diesel fuel has to be extracted, refined, etc. Electrical systems have to be maintained and function properly. Etc., etc.

Of course, working people do all of that. They do it every minute of every hour of every day. And all of us benefit.

So we should always remember the people who go about their lives doing the work that makes all our lives better.

And, this being a blog about families, family laws and family courts, I’d be remiss if I failed to point out what working parents provide for their children. After all, without someone earning the money that supports the family, the members thereof would be in a world of hurt. Without that income, there’d be nowhere to live, nothing to eat, no clothes to wear, no ability to buy medicine, etc. In short, the parents who work and earn perform a service for their kids that is more basic, more important, more necessary than any other.

Now, we know to a significant degree, it’s fathers who do that. Yes, mothers are doing more paid work now than before, but dataset after dataset, in the U.S. and all the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, show men and fathers on average do more paid work and earn more than do women and mothers.

Vital as that is to their kids and families, it’s almost uniformly ignored by family court judges who seem to consider the only form of parenting worth the name consists of feeding, bathing, reading to, etc. the children. Important as those activities are and deserving of recognition, earning the money to pay for it all is as well.

So, on this Labor Day, let’s remember the workers of the country and the world. And let’s especially remember the contributions they make to their kids. And let’s resolve to remind family court judges of that obvious fact that’s sadly too often overlooked.

September 2, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Continuing from Friday with the latest Bolch fiasco.

Bolch pretends that, since money is fungible, there’s no way we can ascertain what a custodial parent is spending her child support money on. Of course if we were to take seriously the problem many fathers have with feeling their money doesn’t go to the child but to the mother who wants nothing to do with them except the bi-weekly check, we could establish as system much like our food stamp one. That is, we could denominate certain child-specific items (e.g. diapers) that could be bought with a child support debit card and other items (e.g. alcohol) that couldn’t be.

That would solve the problem at least for the most part. But Bolch is convinced the only way we can conclude that child support isn’t going to the child is if this happens:

And if the parent with care is not properly providing for the child despite being given the means to do so, then that may be grounds for a change of residence (to use the old terminology).

Yes, it may be, and I may be able to fly to the moon. How many times, when he was practicing law, did Bolch see a change of residence ordered based on how child support was being spent by the custodial parent? Once? My guess is he didn’t see it even that often. The reasons are many. First, such a thing is almost impossible to prove. Second, bringing such an action that’s so unlikely to succeed is simply beyond the means of most fathers. Third, even if Dad proves that Mom is misspending the money, how likely is it that a change of residence would be ordered? Answer: not very.

Bolch might refer to the study done by Trinder, et al that the Stowe blog wrote up several years ago. It analyzed almost three hundred post-divorce applications made almost invariably by fathers. In none of them was a change of residence ordered. In short, Bolch’s “solution” to the problem is no solution at all.

Having failed, moves on.

Then there is the ‘shared care should happen in every case, therefore, there is no need for child maintenance’ argument. The problem, of course, with this is that it conflates two entirely separate issues: the issue of which parent, if any, should pay child maintenance, and the issue of how much time the child should spend with each parent. The two issues are actually entirely separate.

Except of course they’re not. Suppose Mom has the child 29 days out of the month and Dad just one. Who does Bolch suppose spends more money on the child? Surely even he can see that Mom fed the child three times a day for 29 days and Dad did so just once. Ergo, Mom spent more and so Dad should pay Mom something to make up the difference.

Now, if Mom has the child for 15 days and Dad does the same, those everyday expenses tend to even out, right? So there should be no need for Dad to pay Mom. Of course not all expenses for children occur regularly; some are one-time or once-a-year things. So health insurance, school clothes and the like aren’t automatically evened out simply by an equal parenting time schedule. For those expenses, the higher earner should bear a bit more of the burden.

But only in a world truly apart from reality are the matters of child support and parenting time “entirely separate.” As usual, Bolch, in the face of the status quo he worships, has abandoned critical thought.

What if, as is likely to often be the case, one parent has a substantially higher income than the other? Would it be fair in such a case that each party pays half of the cost of bringing up the child? Or should the better off parent pay more? 

No, what’s fair is that each parent bear the consequences of his/her own actions. If Dad spent long hours in school, educating himself for a well-paying career and in fact earns a good salary and Mom doesn’t, what’s fair is that, when Mom walks away from the marriage, Dad lives a better lifestyle than does Mom.

Second, if Mom’s so incapable of earning that she can’t even bear the cost of supporting the child she decided to have (not a huge amount of money), then maybe she shouldn’t be the custodial parent.

Third, Bolch fails to notice that the above quotation directly contradicts his earlier claim that child support isn’t spousal support, as so many non-resident fathers allege. After all, if we’ve gone from simply supporting the child to telling Dad to pay more because he earns more, we’re perilously close to telling him to contribute to Mom’s lifestyle.

Let’s say it takes $800 per month to pay the expenses of raising the child. Dad earns $60,000 per year and Mom earns $40,000 and they each have the child half the time. Why not just call it even? Each can afford the $400 per month it takes to raise the child, so if we tell Dad to send Mom, say $500 per month in child support, how is that anything but contributing to her lifestyle?

And as I said, if Mom earns so little that she can’t afford to pay her half of the cost of the child’s upkeep, shouldn’t we seriously consider removing the child from her custody and placing it with Dad? After all, we don’t want the child to live in poverty, do we?

The reason that these perfectly obvious concepts play no part in either custody or child support law is that those laws are aimed at a transfer of income from men to women. That was explicitly made clear in the U.S. in the late 80s and early 90s when state legislatures adopted obviously flawed science to support child support guidelines that sent many a father to the poorhouse. They continue to this day and are doggedly defended by gender feminists for the same reason – the transfer of wealth from men to women.

I suppose I could suggest that Bolch do a bit of reading, but I very much doubt that doing so would have much effect.

August 31, 2018 by Robert Frabklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

No sooner do I deal with the ignorance of Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell on the subject of child support than our old friend and punching bag John Bolch chimes in on the same subject (Marilyn Stowe Blog, 8/28/18). Unsurprisingly, the results are much the same. In his invariable zeal to support the status quo and oppose fathers legitimate interests, Bolch gets much wrong about his chosen topic. That said though, I must admit that his piece is better than Mitchell’s. He actually gets a fact or two correct and raises a coherent argument. I’ve never before said that Bolch’s work is superior to anyone’s, but in this case the fact is the fact. Yes, it’s setting the bar at ground level, but there it is.

It seems Bolch has heard various non-custodial fathers complaining that they have to pay to support their kids.

The first issue for the non-resident parent is that they see the money they are paying to support their child actually going to the parent with care.

Well done, John. Non-custodial parents do often raise that issue and with good reason. I’ve read many a complaint that runs something like this: “I pay my child support every time, but when I finally get to see my kid, he’s dressed in rags and hasn’t eaten all day. Meanwhile Mom seems to have plenty of money for gin/heroin/cocaine/methamphetamine/whatever.”

That’s spurred me to recommend an arrangement under which Mom gets a debit card for an account Dad funds with his child support payment. The card could only be used for certain child-related things plus other items like rent. That way Mom would receive her money and Dad would know it wasn’t being used for non-legitimate expenditures.

Needless to say, Bolch has nothing to say about such a simple and obvious solution to non-custodial fathers’ completely understandable complaints.

In their eyes, the maintenance is akin to spousal maintenance, rather than child maintenance. Why should they pay spousal maintenance? 

Right again! (That’s two in a row. Bolch is on a roll!)

But then he blows it.

First, the argument that the money is being used by the parent with care for their own benefit, rather than for the benefit of the child. Well, so what?

Uh, John the “so what?” of it is that child support is supposed to be child support. If it’s used for the child, fine, but if it’s used to support Mom’s heroin habit, that’s not so fine. Surely you agree, right?

Now Bolch’s actual point, poorly made as it is, is that money is fungible and so it’s impossible to separate what the child support is being used for and what it’s not. Fair enough, but to that end, see my recommendation described above. A debit card that can only be used for child-related items all of a sudden renders money non-fungible. Child support funds would go into the child support account and could only be used for, you know, child support.

Now, what about the fathers’ point that in fact what their money does is support Mom, not the child, that it’s spousal maintenance? Bolch ignores that altogether, but I don’t.

As I said in my last piece on the Sun-Times fiasco, we’ve known for decades that the child support system aims at ensuring that the child undergoes no decline in living standards when Mommy and Daddy split up. Well, if little Andy or Jenny’s lifestyle remains the same due to Daddy’s support, then Mommy’s lifestyle does too. It can’t be any other way. So in fact, child maintenance is spousal maintenance. But again, Bolch’s sole aim is to defend the status quo, so he’s not about to think critically about the issue or come up with sensible conclusions.

Does he know that, back in the late 80s, our child support system took as gospel the work of Lenore Weitzman who claimed that mothers underwent a 76% decline in living standards when they divorced? Does he know that that was wrong and known to be wrong at the time? Does he know that, 10 years after the fact, Weitzman herself admitted as much? And yet child support remains aimed at making up that supposed deficit.

What about the fact that, in the early 80s radical feminists in the U.S. and Europe (at least) changed the direction of their movement from urging fathers to spend more time at home so their wives could work more to maintaining the status quo so as to increase the transfer of funds from men to women? Former German feminist Hildegard Sunderhof said exactly that at NPO’s shared parenting conference in Boston last year and of course Weitzman’s fraudulent work was part of that movement.

Does Bolch know that gender feminists now oppose even the most modest reform of spousal maintenance and child support laws for that very reason?

Needless to say, Bolch knows none of the above. And it’s that very ignorance that allows him to assert the patent nonsense he does.

I’ll have more to say about this next time.

National Parents Organization has completed a study—the first of its kind—of the parenting time guidelines of each of Ohio’s 88 county courts of domestic relations. These guidelines are intended to guide divorcing parents in setting a parenting time schedule for their children and, often, are explicitly presented as default schedules, “for parents who cannot agree otherwise.” Because these guideline schedules have a significant effect on the schedules parents agree on and those imposed when parents do not agree, they are important factors in shaping the actual parenting of children of divorced parents.

A large and compelling body of recent scientific research shows that children of separated parents benefit from substantially equal parenting time with each parent. (See “NPO Shared Parenting Research Resources” for citations and links.) This means that the defaults that courts set in place are important in promoting the best interest of children. And, importantly, the research established that this is true even for infants and toddlers and even when parents are in (non-violent) high-conflict relationships.

NPO’s study focused on “ordinary parenting time”, meaning non-holiday/non-vacation time. This is time that’s vital to establishing a true parent/child relationship. Furthermore, it was restricted to the guidelines that courts apply to parents living in close proximity, based on the individual court’s definition of that term.

The results of NPO’s study, reported in the “NPO Ohio Parenting Time Report” are shocking! Ohio Counties vary widely—indeed, wildly—in their parenting time guidelines.

• Sixty-four of Ohio’s 88 counties have a parenting schedule that allows the children only two overnights and 60 hours or less with one of their parents in a two-week period. This means that the children are with their non-residential parent less than 20% of the ordinary parenting time. None of these counties’ schedules provide for the children to be with the non-residential parent on a school night. (One other Ohio county provides a schedule only slightly enhanced from this outdated model, by adding one additional overnight with the non-residential parent in a two-week period. This still accords the children just 20% of ordinary parenting time with one of their parents.)

• Thirteen Ohio counties provide default schedules that allow the children 4-5 overnights with the non-residential parent and substantially more time with the non-residential parent, between 25% and 30%.

• Only three Ohio counties provide default schedules that allow the children equal, or nearly equal, time with each parent.

The wide variation, alone, undermines any claim to Ohio counties’ parenting time schedules being based on research about what parenting arrangements promote child wellbeing. It is just not believable that, for children in Sandyville, Ohio (Tuscarawas County), it is presumptively in their best interest to be with their separated parents equal amounts of time but for children in Magnolia, Ohio (Carroll County)—just four miles away—it is presumptively in their best interest to see one of their parents only every 12 days, and then only for two days.

Ohio counties are also divided over whether children’s interests are served by parenting time guidelines that are age-sensitive or not. Forty-one counties have age-sensitive schedules, though some are minimally sensitive to children’s ages; forty-seven counties impose the same schedules on children of all ages, from birth to 18 years.

Surprisingly, 39 Ohio counties still use the outdated language of ‘visitation’ to talk about all of the time that the children are in the care and physical custody of one of their parents.

Using county population data from the U.S. Census Bureau, NPO estimated that 60% of Ohio families are subjected to parenting time guidelines that allow children just two overnights in a two week period with one of their parents. Only 2% of Ohio families reside in counties whose guidelines allow children equal, or nearly equal, time with both of their fit and loving parents.

Ohio courts are directed to make decisions about parenting time in the best interest of the children. NPO’s study demonstrates that most Ohio domestic relations courts do not have parenting time guidelines that research shows are in children’s best interest.

Ashland, Kentucky newspaper The Daily Independent published this staff editorial calling Kentucky’s first in the nation shared parenting law “long overdue.” We agree and thank the staff at The Daily Independent for joining the shared parenting movement and recognizing what is best for children. Read the entire editorial here.

August 29, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

This article begins with this sentence (Chicago Sun-Times, 8/27/18):

It boggles my mind that last year in Illinois, parents owed almost $900 million in child support.

Here’s what boggles my mind: experienced writers who choose to write about subjects about which they know little.  Such a writer is Mary Mitchell, author of the linked-to piece.  Not only does she know almost nothing about child support, she’s not interested in learning.  If she were, she’d probably have done certain obvious things to educate herself. 

My crazy guess is that she has a computer and access to the Internet.  With those two handy things, she could have checked out authoritative sources regarding child support and learned some very interesting facts.  But she didn’t, and, having read her article, I think I know why.  I think she’s more interested in denigrating fathers and in recruiting her readers to the anti-father cause than in educating them about the facts of child support.

I say this because she lets us know about several non-custodial parents who are way behind on child support.  Indeed, they’re so far behind and so clearly have the money to pay that they almost certainly deserve the moniker “deadbeat.”  And of course, they’re all fathers.  So Step One on Mitchell’s ignorance agenda was to stay carefully away from acknowledging that non-custodial mothers are in fact less likely to pay what they owe than are their male counterparts.  That information is about a minute and a few mouse clicks away on the website for the U.S. Census Bureau, but Mitchell never got around to going there.

And while Illinois officials boast that to date it has collected more than $2 million from deadbeat dads, that’s just a drop in the bucket when compared to what children are owed.

Right, and does Mitchell let on about why that is?  Does she even know?  Did she take five minutes out of her busy day to find out?  No, no and no.  For her, outrage is sufficient unto the evils of the day.  Information?  No.  Indignation?  She’s got that in spades.

Of course had she done a bit of study on the site for the Office of Child Support Enforcement, she’d have learned that there are many reasons why huge amounts of child support haven’t been paid and never will be.  For example, child support is routinely set at levels non-custodial parents can’t pay.  Also, the system makes it all but impossible to obtain a downward modification. Interest on child support debts has been charged in the past at usurious rates of as high as 12% per annum.  Those rates are of course reflected in the figures on unpaid support, and rates today are still at junk-bond levels.

Then of course there’s the fact that 63% of those who are behind earn less than $10,000 per year.  So Mitchell’s righteous wrath is directed at the poorest of the poor, whether she knows it or not.  Nice.

Additionally, child support obligations automatically become judgments, and a deadbeat’s driving privileges can be suspended when child support is more than 90 days past due.

But enforcing these laws takes legal representation and a lot of persistence.

In Illinois, the minimum amount of child support for two children is 28 percent.

But for many custodial parents, when they factor in the time they have to take off work to go to court, legal fees, and child care costs, pursuing a deadbeat hardly seems worth it.

Right again, but in all my reading on child support, I’ve never seen anyone have the audacity to suggest that the state insufficiently suspends driver’s licenses for failure to pay.  Everyone else on the planet, including the OCSE, now understands that doing so makes the situation worse not better, that a dad without a license to drive becomes hamstrung in the task of getting a keeping a paying job.  Not Mitchell.  She’s so incurious the obvious simply never occurs to her.

And what’s this about the hardship on custodial mothers in using the legal system to help get the money they’re owed?  Did Mitchell contact the Illinois Office of the Attorney General?  Silly me, of course she didn’t.  Had she done so, or indeed had she read any of the reams of information on child support enforcement, she’d know that custodial parents have the long, strong arm of the state on their side while non-custodial ones have to fend for themselves.  The U.S. government spends a whopping $5 billion per year on child support enforcement nationwide and zero to help payers.  Mitchell hasn’t a clue.

But the ignorance just keeps on coming:

Court-ordered child support isn’t about providing for an ex-partner’s lifestyle.

It is about providing children with the same level of financial support they would have had, had their parents stayed together.

I’ll try to keep this simple for Mitchell.  If the goal of child support is to maintain the child’s lifestyle the same as if there’d never been a divorce, it’s to maintain the custodial parent’s lifestyle as well.  It can’t be otherwise, so in fact, child support is very much about providing for an ex-partner’s lifestyle.

Needless to say, Mitchell never stops to ask herself or anyone else why that should be the goal of child support.  After all, it costs less to make ends meet when two parents live together with their children than when they live apart.  This is not a difficult concept.

So why should the system pretend that nothing financial should change when parents split up?  By engaging in that pretense, we’re lying to children.  We’re telling them that divorce changes nothing monetarily when we know that’s not true.  Are children really so fragile and so incapable that they can’t understand that Mommy and Daddy have split up and they’re going to have to tighten their belts a little?  Of course not, but the child support system isn’t having it.

Sun-Times readers deserve better than this.  Our child support system is deeply flawed and in desperate need of radical reform.  But Mitchell’s article is the exact opposite of what we need to help bring about that change.

There is an article in The Daily Independent on Kentucky’s first in the nation shared parenting law. A recent poll by Public Policy Polling shows that Kentuckians favor the new law, with 84% of respondents agreeing that a child would benefit from equal time with both parents. The author spoke with Matt Hale, Chairman of the Kentucky chapter of National Parents Organization, and Senator Robin Webb of Kentucky on how this bill has been one of the most popular passed this year.

August 27, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Another day, another boatload of tax money spent for no good reason (Reason, 8/22/18).  It’s the inimitable Lenore Skenazy again with another tale of bureaucratic overreaching, this time on the part of a Wilmette, IL child protective agency.

What were they investigating this time?  An eight-year-old girl walking the family dog.  In her own neighborhood.  Within sight of her mother.  That most normal of situations was anonymously reported to the police who paid a surprise visit to the girl’s mother, Corey Widen.  They left without further ado, but soon the Department of Children and Family Services showed up.  And they didn’t leave the matter at just a quick interview of Widen.  No, they interviewed Widen’s other children, various relatives and the girl’s pediatrician.

Eventually of course the whole thing was dropped.  But it should never have reached the investigative stage.

“This case should have been screened out immediately and not sent for an investigation,” Diane Redleaf, a long-time family defense attorney and author of the forthcoming book They Took the Kids Last Night: How the Child Protection System Puts Families At Risk, told me.

Right.  Widen’s case should have been put where 80% of reports to CPS agencies end up – in the round file on the floor.  As of 2016, the Administration for Children and Families reported about 3.4 million allegations of child abuse or neglect, of which 676,000 were found to have merit.  Widen’s should have been dealt with on the telephone.  It was a huge waste of DCFS (and police) resources, to say nothing of the consternation it undoubtedly caused Widen, her kids and everyone who came into contact with investigators.

And, as I’ve said before, that overreaching isn’t just a waste.  It’s far worse than that.  After all, every CPS agency in the country is strapped for funds, and has too few caseworkers to handle the real cases, the cases in which a child is truly at risk or already being harmed.  Utterly useless complaints take up time that should be used helping children who need it.

But of course the system we’ve set up absolutely guarantees exactly that.  We’ve created a huge network of “mandated reporters,” e.g. the police, school administrators, teachers, fire fighters, doctors, nurses, etc. – who are required by law, and at the risk of their jobs should they fail, to report the slightest suggestion of abuse or neglect.  Unsurprisingly, the system over-reports.

Add to that the fact that we’ve also created a culture of fear for children’s safety that everywhere encourages our friends, neighbors and complete strangers to report what they believe to be child abuse or neglect.  That many of those reports can be made anonymously, as was the one against Widen, tends to embolden those seeking revenge for some perceived or actual slight.

In short, the system we have ensures over-reporting and that’s what we get.  We get that at the expense of increasing the danger to children who need the attention CPS exists to provide.  They often don’t get it because understaffed agencies are too often running down non-existent cases.

But it’s actually worse even yet.  It’s one thing to say that our child protective system is woefully inefficient, which it is.  It’s another to realize that that’s the good news.  Far worse is the fact that the culture of fear we’ve produced actually ends up harming kids.

It does that by strongly encouraging overprotection of them.  We often hear overprotection defended as “erring on the side of caution,” but it’s anything but.  The simple fact is that human beings and human society are extremely complex.  Children are born very immature and therefore need long years of socialization in order to become responsible, productive members of society. 

Protecting them from every harm would, therefore, be bad for them even if we could do it, which we can’t.  Overprotection produces children who are perennially dependent, unable to “launch” as adults, because they’ve never had the opportunity to experiment and fail, experiment again and learn.  With Mom, Dad or Big Brother forever shielding them from harm, kids never learn either their possibilities or limitations.

And that, my friends, is child abuse.  It’s not just healthier for children to allow them age-appropriate freedoms, it’s unhealthy for them not to.

Those are well-known truisms, but alas, we’re far from establishing the sort of sensible policies that would reflect them.

August 26, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The National Parents Organization is looking to catch a wave. For some years now, NPO has been the largest, strongest and most effective organization in the country and possibly the world for family court reform. As the arguments in favor of shared parenting grow ever more numerous and stronger, and those against it become weaker and less coherent, NPO believes the wave will continue to grow. Every year, up to half of state legislatures consider bills to make parenting time more equal between mothers and fathers. This past year we saw Kentucky pass the first ever presumption of equal parenting time. Other states, like Arizona, Utah and Missouri have passed less explicit laws that still move us toward equal parenting.

In short, it looks like the momentum for shared parenting will only continue to increase. And of course NPO will be leading the charge toward more just and equitable family courts across the country.

To that end, NPO is proud to announce the purchase of the domain name sharedparenting.com. Board of Directors member Matt Hale explains:

“NPO’s acquisition of sharedparenting.com adds further legitimacy to the equal parenting time movement and our place in it,” said board member Matt Hale.

“I made the initial recommendation to obtain the website so that it wouldn’t be acquired by an anti-shared parenting group or a business looking to get new customers”, Hale continued. “NPO’s board unanimously approved the motion and Executive Director Petra Maxwell moved quickly to purchase the domain.”

“The address currently simply redirects to nationalparentsorganization.org. NPO is considering all options, one of which is to expand the address into its own website. We just want to use it in the best want to help shared parenting become the national standard,” Hale concluded.

Given the growing enthusiasm for shared parenting and NPO’s strong belief that more and more states will pass shared parenting legislation in the coming years, making this purchase was the obvious thing to do.

I’m also glad to report that our new Executive Director, Petra Maxwell, has taken the bit in her teeth and is leading NPO with vigor, intelligence and strength.

I’ll continue to report on NPO’s progress as the weeks go by. For now, though, we’re bigger, stronger, more active and better positioned to push reform than ever before.

Hey, what’s not to like?

August 24, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

In this case, it’s taken one mother and two courts in separate countries to deny a child a relationship with her father (Marilyn Stowe Blog, 8/22/18). It looks to have been hard work, but they managed the feat. And of course, the ever bland and gob-smackingly dense John Bolch agrees. Where would we be without Bolch to pillory in the internet town square to the delight of the crowd that actually knows something about family courts and children’s well-being? John, it’s good for a man to have a purpose in life and that appears to be yours.

An American man and a Latvian woman seem to have been married in England and had a daughter in October of 2015. They separated about three months later.

After they separated the father suspected that the mother intended to remove the child from the jurisdiction, because she wished to return to Latvia with the child. Accordingly, on the 9th of February 2016 the father issued an application for an order prohibiting the mother from removing the child from the jurisdiction. An order in those terms was made by the court on that day.

Mom ignored the order that obviously was made without the stipulation that she turn over her passport to someone designated by the court. She took the child to Russia where her parents live and the two have been there ever since. Understandably, the father filed a petition, pursuant to the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, in a Russian court. Apparently that petition is still pending.

He also filed an action in a British court asking that it issue an order enforcing its own order prohibiting the mother from fleeing with the child. Amazingly, the British court refused to do so.

Mr Justice Keehan accepted that the child was well cared for in Russia, where she had been living for two years and four months at the time of the hearing. On the other hand, he was concerned that the father, who was not represented, was “focused, indeed obsessed, on the rights – his rights of parental responsibility, on [the child’s] rights to live in Russia or her rights to live in this jurisdiction.”

Yes, because the father was “focused, indeed obsessed” with his parental rights and the child’s rights to both parents, he was considered by the British judge to be undeserving of having any relationship with his child and indeed, no parental rights at all, at least none he can exercise.

First, if a father can’t be focused on his rights in a court of law, where should he be? Neither the judge nor Bolch appears to understand that courts are where rights are adjudicated and, not assisted by counsel as he was, the man probably felt the need to assert those rights as strongly as he could. Somehow that redounded to his detriment.

And of course the hook on which the court hung its hat was – you guessed it – the best interests of the child. Equally predictable, Bolch, who’s never met a court’s decision of which he disapproved, fails to even question the court’s thinking.

Most obviously, parental child abduction is child abuse as many mental health professionals have said and common sense agrees. So, as we so often see in abduction cases, the court that tells us it’s acting in the child’s interests ignores not only the indisputable fact of child abuse, in this case by the mother, but as well the fact that the child continues to live with her abuser. The same judge who failed to take the passport from a mother who was known to be a flight risk now rubberstamps her doing exactly that and all under the magic formula of the “best interests of the child.” Amazing.

And, also as we so often see, the Russian court has taken something like two years to do what the Convention requires to be done far sooner. In the meantime, it’s created a fait accompli – the child living peacefully with her abductor and grandparents. Who would interrupt such an arrangement just to comply with and international convention to which one’s country is a signatory?

As I’ve said before, it is precisely the reason that the Convention exists that (a) these cases be handled expeditiously and (b) whatever the temporary upset to the child at being returned to her father, the law is the law and should be enforced.

This of course is where Bolch is apparently willfully blind. When a court allows a parent to violate its order without consequence and cloaks its doing so in the mantle of the best interests of the child (or any other for that matter) it signals loudly and clearly to other parents that it doesn’t mean what it says, that court orders are just meaningless words. The British court’s refusal to enforce its order, and on the slimmest of pretexts, is an open invitation to future parents to violate future orders. The message is this: “Keep the child long enough and we’ll give you precisely what you wanted all along – the removal of the other parent from the child’s life.”

When the BIC is used in such a way, it accomplishes the opposite, not just in the case at bar, but in future cases. Bolch claims to have been a lawyer, but his invariable failure to grasp that simplest of legal concepts calls the matter into question.