This is not only a pretty good article, it reports on some promising developments in how domestic violence is starting to be addressed in Utah (Salt Lake Tribune, 3/13/10).  Briefly, folks in the mental sciences community in Utah have noticed that the approach taken by the Duluth Model doesn't work, so they're trying to push what can work.

The approach to domestic violence has to date stemmed from a political ideology that holds that DV is committed almost exclusively by men against women and that it is done to perpetuate power and control in the home that's reflected in patriarchal dominance of women by men in society generally.  That ideology has always considered marriage and the family to be one of the main sources of oppression of women.

The main problems with the above formulation of DV is that it's factually wrong.  Thirty-five years of research show beyond question that men and women commit DV equally with women tending to initiate violence a bit more than men.  Women are about twice as likely to be injured in a DV incident than are men, although some studies show the ratio to be lower.  As to the family oppressing women, the fact is that a married woman and her child are far safer inside the marital relationship than anywhere else.  That's established by essentially all the reliable social science on the topic.

In addition, the practice of the current DV industry is to treat all DV equally.  That means putting female victims and their children (except adolescent male children) in shelters where the preferred message is "divorce him."  That too is driven by the political ideology that holds that women are better off without marriage and families.

But women who enter DV shelters have a long history of rejecting the advice they're given there.  Most of them don't want to leave their husbands and a good percentage of them notice that they themselves had a hand in the violence that occurred.  And, as much data show, most DV is either entirely non-injurious or results in only a minor cut or bruise.  Few women see those incidents as warranting abandonment of their marriage and separation of their children from their fathers.

Mental health professionals have long known that DV is learned behavior and has little to do with the "woman, good; man, bad" paradigm of the DV industry.  In fact, as with much couples behavior, DV results from relational behavior, not the unilateral conduct of one individual.

And there's impressively little evidence that the current approach works.  (Indeed, I'd argue that its purpose is not the diminution of domestic violence, but the separation of women and children from men and fathers.  That's the precise finding of at least one study of the matter.)  Actually, no one pretends that it does.  In fact, we often hear calls for increased funding for the current non-functional system and we hear about ever-increasing levels of DV.  But how can we need ever-more money for an ever-increasing problem, if what we're doing is working?

So in Utah, they're starting to try something else, and it's high time.  There are two initiatives; one is couples counselling and the other is called Circles of Peace which derives from native American cultures.

The first approach treats offender and victim, while the second brings an offender, family members and other supporters together to resolve behaviors that lead to domestic violence.

As to couples counselling,

The premise is couples who have experienced low-level domestic violence and for whom violence is a learned behavior "can learn other ways," said Annette Macfarlane, executive director of New Hope Crisis Center.

"We know that there is a really good chance that they are going to stay together, so if they can learn how to function in a healthy way, not only is their marriage going to be better, but the children aren't going to be contaminated by the idea that violence is an acceptable way to live your life," she said.

The four-year study is a collaboration between researchers at the University of Utah and New York University, where lead investigator Linda Mills is based.

The Circles of Peace concept takes a different approach.

Circles of Peace, which began in Nogales, Ariz., in 2004, brings an offender together with key individuals in his or her life -- typically a therapist, spiritual leader, community member, family members and friends -- for 26 weeks or more of group talks. Victims choose to participate about half the time, Mills said.

The circles philosophy, she said, holds that "the most important group to anyone in a process of change are the people he or she is most accountable to, and that is family and community."

I don't want to judge Circles of Peace before it's been tried, but I'm dubious about any program that identifies one "offender" and calls the other person in the relationship "victim."  My guess is that that's rarely the case.  Again, DV is relational and any treatment of it that's not based on that is probably flawed.

There is one situation in which the shelter program is valuable and necessary.  That's when serious, injurious violence occurs.  When someone's life or physical wellbeing are in actual danger, shelters are necessary.  The good news is that those situations are pretty rare.  The vast majority of DV is not injurious in any way and when it is, the vast majority is so minor as to not require medical care.  In the United States, the National Violence Against Women Survey found that 61% of women and 75% of men suffered no injury whatsoever from a DV incident.  In Scotland, a mere 1% of people reporting a DV incident said they'd suffered anything more than a "minor cut or bruise."  So shelters are necessary, but they should exist for the small minority of people who need immediate help to avoid actual serious injury.

Beyond that, until we start treating the reality of DV instead of its funhouse mirror image we've been shown by the radicals in the DV industry, we'll continue to get it wrong.  The two programs underway in Utah make minor inroads into a system that yearly wastes billions of dollars.

Let's all give a hearty cheer for the Irish Labor Party.  They've just published the text of the Guardianship of Children Bill that's just been introduced in Parliament.  Read about it here (Irish Times, 3/15/10).  Read the bill itself here.

The highlights of the bill are these:

• Fathers will now automatically be deemed to be guardians of their children irrespective of their marital situation at the time the child is born;
• Single fathers who are not guardians of their children presently due to existing law, may, after the passage of the Guardianship of Children Bill apply to the court to become guardians.  Men who became fathers before the passage of the Bill must be treated by courts exactly as if their child had been born after its passage;
• The bill establishes the presumptions that,

(a) a child’s welfare is best served by vindicating the child’s right
to maintain personal relations, direct contact and society with and protection of both of his or her parents on a regular basis,
(b) a child’s welfare is best served by vindicating the child’s right
to maintain personal relations, direct contact and society with
and protection of all of his or her grandparents on a regular
basis,
(c) it is in the best interests of a child –

   (i) that both parents should have joint custody of the child,
   save in circumstances where the welfare of the child so
   requires, and
   (ii) that both parents who are guardians of a child should –
       (I) take all reasonable steps to consult and cooperate
       with each other in relation to all
       decisions, events and other matters of
       importance directly concerning the child, and
      (II) continue to have contact and be involved in a
       constructive relationship with the child and
       contribute to the child’s upbringing,
       development and education, and
(d) where the circumstances of the case are such that the giving of
the custody of the child to one parent would give rise to a
significant risk that the relationship between the child and the
other parent will be irretrievably damaged, it is in the best
interests of the child to be placed in the custody of that other
parent.

That's not a presumption of equally shared parenting, but it's close to it.   A child's right to parental contact on a "regular basis" obviously allows judges to make the standard 80/20 split.  Likewise joint custody is not necessarily joint physical custody.  Still, (c)(i) and (ii) strongly suggest that parental decision-making is to be cooperative and real.  Those two are aimed directly at the "Disneyland Parent" phenomenon in which the non-custodial parent effectively becomes a non-parent.

And (d) is a direct statutory assault on parental alienation.  It mandates giving the child to the non-alienating parent. 

Section 4 contains a provision for removing as guardian a single parent who either doesn't want to be guardian, who is unknown, whose whereabouts are unknown or whose guardianship would be seriously detrimental to the child.  In that case, the other parent can ask the court to remove the other parent as guardian. 

As we've seen countless times, mothers not infrequently hide knowledge of children from fathers.  For example, a man and woman have a relationship for a while, the woman becomes pregnant and, without telling the father about it, breaks off the relationship.  She may move to a different city or a different part of the city.  If he ever finds out about the child, his rights are so impaired as to be almost non-existent.

Well, under the Guardianship of Children Bill, she could still do that, but there's a catch.  To get an order issued depriving a man of his guardianship, she has to make a sworn affidavit to the court.  Affidavits that are false and known to be false, can result in her being fined between 5,000 and 30,000 euros and can send her to prison for up to five years.  As far as I know, that's the only provision in the laws of English-speaking countries that requires a mother to tell the truth about the identity and whereabouts of the father.  It's far from airtight, but it's better than what we've got anywhere else.

Section 22 requires parents, whether married or not to give accurate information to the registrar of births about the other parent.  I don't know about Ireland, but in this country, about 14.2% of birth certificates have no father's name on them.  That too goes a long way toward depriving him of his parental rights.  I have never seen, read or heard about any mother ever paying a price for not providing the father's name for the birth certificate.

As things stand now in Ireland, an unmarried mother has automatic parental (guardianship) rights to her child.  An unmarried father does not.  This bill, if passed, would end the misandry of the current law.

What will be the fate of the Guardianship of Children Bill?  I couldn't guess, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Utah House Majority Leader, Kevin Garn made a mistake 25 years ago.  Then, at age 28, he sat naked in a hot tub with a 15-year-old girl named Cheryl Maher.  According to Garn, nothing more happened.  But that all changed in 2002 when he was running for the Utah Legislature and Maher contacted him.  She wanted money to keep silent about the incident - a lot of money.  That's when Garn made his second and much larger mistake; he paid up.  He paid Maher $150,000 to keep quiet.  He even got her to sign a document saying she'd never divulge the hot tub incident.

Now this article informs us that Maher has decided that $150,000 wasn't enough (Salt Lake Tribune, 3/13/10).  Specifically, she's said in a 2008 email that she wants "compensation."  How much she wants this time, is anyone's guess.  You see, now she claims that sitting in the hot tub proved so traumatic to her that it ruined her subsequent life.  So I suppose the current demand is not for hush money but to pay her for the agonies she's suffered over the years.  Right.

Garn, meanwhile has come clean about the matter.  He made a speech on the floor of the Utah House admitting both the incident and the payment to Maher.  But that too wasn't enough; Garn resigned his House seat a week after Maher decided to go public.  Read about it here (Salt Lake Tribune, 3/13/10).

I know what you're thinking.  You're thinking "that's extortion.  It's a felony in Utah."  Well, you're right.  The original payment looks clearly to have been extortion and that's how Garn said he perceived it.  So it's odd that none of the articles on the incident say what's obviously true - that Maher committed a felony.  

In fact, this astonishing piece of work by one Peg McEntee tells us that it was Maher who was "exploited" and that Garn's behavior 25 years ago was "much more" than a mistake (Salt Lake Tribune, 3/13/10).  The author doesn't let on as to what it was if not that.  Nor does she explain how Maher was exploited.  Nor does she explain why she gives Maher a pass on her blatant violation of criminal law.  Nor does she explain why she gives Maher a pass on violating the terms of the agreement she signed with Garn.  No, as is so often the case, it matters little how badly a woman acts, for some people it's always the guy who's at fault.

Garn certainly erred.  He should have bitten the bullet in 2002, called the cops, had Maher arrested and leave his political future in the hands of the voters.  Sitting in a hot tub with an underage girl 25 years ago shows bad judgment, but nothing else that I can see.  Maher claims he touched her; Garn adamantly denies that.

Like countless previous cases, this is but another example in which the democratic process is sacrificed to the perceived needs of the moment.  The simple fact is that, if the Kevin Garns of the world are to be hounded out of office in situations like this, the will of the people is placed in the hands of the Cheryl Mahers of the world.  If she goes public, an elected official falls; if she doesn't he remains in office.  I look forward to the day when someone like Kevin Garn says "I used poor judgment in the past and if the people of my district think that disqualifies me from holding office, then so be it.  But Cheryl Maher doesn't decide that; the voters of my district do."  Then and only then will we learn what people will accept in a public official and what they won't.

In her book of essays "Political Fictions," Joan Didion pointed out something similar in the Monica Lewinsky case.  There, the talking heads on the news and talk shows spoke as one.  To them, Bill Clinton had disgraced the office of the presidency and should have resigned forthwith.  They were vocally outraged that poll after poll revealed that the American people disagreed.  In fact, the American people had a far more nuanced understanding of the matter than the media elites did.  They understood that Clinton's behavior was wrong, but they overwhelmingly believed that it didn't disqualify him from continuing as president.

I don't know what Kevin Garn's politics are.  My guess, though, is that they're something like 180 degrees away from mine.  But I wish he'd stood up and said "let the voters decide."

"I couldn't think of what to say!"

"What about 'No'?"

                                    - Dangerous Liaisons 

"They need to do something about protecting women from predators like him, I know he's a predator," said the corrections officer who was charged with failing to report the activities. "I know he's done it to several people before and, I didn't know until after the fact, after all this stuff happened, but I found out all about Michael Murphy."

Predator.  Where have we seen that word before?  Ah, yes; Clyde Haberman of the New York Times called comedian David Letterman a 'predator' because he had consensual sex with a woman he employed.  So how does that make him a predator?  Well, according to Haberman and others who have difficulty with the concept of consent, he's a predator because "it isn't about sex, it's about power and control."  In their way of thinking, anyone who holds a position of power greater than that of another person, cannot have consensual sex with that person because consent is impossible.  The fact that the woman in the Letterman case doesn't see it that way never factored into Haberman's account of things.

And as I pointed out, the mantra intoned by Haberman that "it's about power and control" is nonsense anyway.  If he actually meant that, he'd criticize Madonna, Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez and other female stars who've dallied with male staff.  But he doesn't and that means his complaint is not about power and control, it's about men.  Women get a pass when they do what Haberman called Letterman a predator for doing.

So who is Michael Murphy and what did he do to warrant the 'predator' label?  Read about it here (Associated Press, 3/15/10).  He's an inmate in a Montana correctional facility.  He's inside for 25 years for burglary and forgery, and he apparently has a way with the ladies.  Over the years, he's charmed sexual and other favors out of at least five female guards and his female psychotherapist.  None of the women claims Murphy used force or the threat of force, so how does that make him a "predator?"  After all, isn't predation "about power and control?"  And what kind of power can a prisoner exercise over a guard?  

That's a mystery to me, but all the women who said 'yes' to Michael Murphy and who've subsequently lost their jobs and in at least one case her marriage agree - they were victims of Michael Murphy.  Here's his psychotherapist whom Murphy kissed one day in her office.

 "From that point on I just, I felt like I couldn't do anything, I couldn't say no to him, I couldn't get myself out of it. It's like he had that over me, and he continued to push." 

The guard quoted at the first of this piece also blames Murphy.  Another demanded that Murphy be "held accountable," although for what, she didn't say.  Even the article linked to claims that the women were "under the thumb of Murphy."  Again, what power Murphy held over them is a mystery.  Of course once a guard had some sort of inappropriate contact with him, he could always threaten to tell her superiors, but that doesn't explain the original infraction.

The concept of the sexual male as 'predator' is far from new, so it's perhaps doubly surprising to see it used in this supposedly gender-equal era.  Three-hundred years ago or so, authorities feared unmarried males because of their ability to create children with only a mother to support them.  Those children often became wards of the parish which meant that their support came from taxpayers.  That was why Oliver Twist was so unpopular for asking for more soup.  His upkeep was at taxpayer expense.

Therefore, in order to warn supposedly innocent women and stigmatize unmarried men, young males were depicted as 'wolves,' i.e. sexual predators whose insatiable appetites threatened all and sundry.  For a taste, read Sir Samuel Richardson's Clarissa.

And it's precisely that outworn concept of the sexually ravening male and the innocent female that we were supposed to have left behind.  By now we were supposed to have come to understand that women are no more innocent than men and that both are sexual beings.  Gender equality means, among other things, taking appropriate responsibility for your own actions and not relying on sexist stereotypes to bail you out when you err.

But when an employee of David Letterman has sex with the boss, the Clyde Habermans of the world are johnny-on-the-spot to slap the tag of 'predator' on him even though she seems to have been perfectly happy with the arrangement.  And in a Montana prison, where "power and control" are 100% in the hands of guards, not prisoners, we hear the same thing.  "Some way, somehow, he made me do it.  I couldn't say no to him."

I suppose there are lots of others as well.  Studies of both adult and juvenile detention facilities show that (a) most sexual abuse of prisoners is done, not by other inmates but by guards and (b) most of the abuse by guards is done by female guards.  So, if we believe the guards who had sex with Michael Murphy, what about all those others?  Are they all victims too?

It turns out there's a good answer to that question. 

The man who once ran New York City's corrections department has little sympathy for female prison workers who see themselves as victimized in these cases.

Martin Horn, now a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the female workers who have sex with inmates are often treated less harshly by officials than male workers who do the same.

"As long as we have a double standard we are going to see these kind of behaviors," Horn said. "It is a very slippery slope we go down if we say we are not going to hold female officers to the same standard."

In other words, don't buy into the excuses offered by the guards or Murphy's psychotherapist.  Don't treat them as innocent victims of the "power" exercised over them by an inmate.  Treat male and female guards equally.  Hold them to a single standard and discipline them accordingly.  In other words, gender equality.  What a concept.

As one final note, at least three studies of sexual abuse in both adult and juvenile detention facilities show that many prisons have virtually no problem with sexual abuse while at others, it's rampant.  Why?  Because those that do have the problem don't take certain obvious steps to prevent it.  That's the conclusion of the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission that spent six years studying the problem of sexual abuse behind bars.  In 2009, it issued recommendations for prison administators to follow.  The very first one states that correctional facilities must adopt "a written policy mandating zero tolerance toward all forms of sexual abuse."  Notice that they don't say zero tolerance for abuse by male guards.  They say zero tolerance.  Period.

To do that, though, we'll have to drop the pretense that female guards are helpless victims in the matter of sex with inmates.  Clyde Haberman won't like that one bit.

I've written recently about the district attorney's office in Santa Clara, California.  Last year, it had neglected to inform defense attorneys of some 3,000 videotapes that had been made of examinations done in connection with allegations of sexual abuse of children.  Then, one of its most prominent deputies, Ben Field lost his license to practice law for four years due to his many egregious violations of ethics rules and rules of criminal procedure.  Chief among those was his refusal to turn over evidence in a sexual assault case that the complainant had admitted fabricating.  Two innocent men went to prison in that last case. 

More recently still, it's come to light that the same hospital that made the videotapes also created "intake forms" in sexual assault cases.  Those too weren't turned over to defendants or their attorneys, although that looks now to be more the fault of hospital personnel than of the DA's office.

So what's the DA's latest prank (San Jose Mercury News, 1/30/10)?  It seems that there's a rule of procedure in California that allows a party to remove a case from a judge once, no questions asked, as long as it's done before the judge has made any rulings in the case.  So Santa Clara District Attorney Dolores Carr has instructed her deputies to remove all their cases from Judge Andrea Bryan.  Why?

On Jan. 22, Carr instructed her staff to stop bringing all criminal cases before Bryan, who recently angered prosecutors by finding that a trial prosecutor committed numerous acts of misconduct, including giving false testimony.

Carr claims she perceives a "pattern" of ruling by Bryan that is problematical, but she refuses to say what it is.  But what this is beginning to look like is a DA's office that over the years has developed a habit of withholding evidence and lying to judges, all in the service of putting people behind bars.  Now they're getting push-back from the California State Bar that suspended Field, defense attorneys and Judge Bryan who apparently takes exception to the "numerous acts of misconduct, including giving false testimony" by at least one DDA in her courtroom. 

We've got too many people sitting in prison at taxpayer expense in this country without violating the rules of legal and ethical conduct in order to add more.  If that's not enough, both the videotape scandal and the intake form scandal are solely involved in sexual assault matters.  That means that those particular violations of procedural rules and due process of law are aimed overwhelmingly at men.  The vast majority of criminal defendants in sexual assault cases are male, and the guilty ones should be appropriately punished.  But the illegal behavior of the Santa Clara District Attorney's office and that of the county hospital tend to put innocent defendants in prison, and the vast majority of them too are men. 

Fathers & Families and our allies recently introduced a wide-ranging package of California bills which include child custody reform, child support reform, protection from family court financial abuses, and others. Our lobbying team has spent many months laying the groundwork for these bills, and we are confident of their passage.

California legislation is widely recognized to have an enormous impact on other states and the federal government. California ushered in the era of no fault divorce in 1969, and many of the draconian domestic violence laws common throughout the US were first passed in California in the mid-1990s. The military parent/child custody legislation we passed in California in 2005 has led to the passage of similar legislation in over two dozen states. California losses are national losses--our California victories on this legislation will be national victories.

Effective legislative advocacy goes far beyond passing bills--it also is important to defeat or amend bad legislation. For example, last year Fathers & Families' legislative representative Michael Robinson helped build a professional coalition to scuttle AB 612, a bill that would have banned target parents of Parental Alienation from raising PA as an issue in their cases. In 2004 and 2006, we helped defeat bills that would have allowed custodial parents free rein to move children far away from their noncustodial parents.

F & F is the only family court reform organization in the country with a fulltime lobbyist (as well as an associate) working within the capitol of a major state. Fathers & Families is currently tracking 77 different pieces of family law-related legislation in the California legislature. So far, in part because of our strong Sacramento presence, none of the new bills introduced are particularly harmful. However, this can change at any time--one of the reasons family law has become so unfair is that our movement wasn't able to effectively monitor and defeat/amend hostile legislation. We have that capability now.

Our new legislation and related efforts are detailed below. This large-scale legislative effort costs and will continue to cost money--give to fund this important work by clicking here. One very affordable way to help is to make a monthly gift—to do so, click here and enter an amount under "monthly contribution."

Together with you in the love of our children,

Glenn Sacks, MA
Executive Director, Fathers & Families

Ned Holstein, M.D., M.S.
Founder, Chairman of the Board, Fathers & Families

Child Custody Reform

AB 2416 (Cook): There are two elements of this bill:

1) At Fathers & Families we receive many letters from military parents grappling with serious and painful family law problems. One of the most common complaints is that when deployed soldiers call their children at the court-specified time, nobody ever picks up.Letters are written, but they never reach the children.

Needless to say, it is extremely difficult for a soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan to effectively overcome this visitation interference. Given the length and frequency of current deployments, many soldiers lose all contact and sometimes even their relationships with their children, particularly if the children are young.

Fathers & Families has worked with the American Retirees Association, Assemblyman Paul Cook, and others on AB 2416 to remedy this problem. AB 2416 authorizes courts to issue orders granting grandparents, stepparents and extended families the ability to exercise a deployed soldier's normal parenting time. By encouraging courts to issue such orders, we allow children to preserve their loving bonds with their deployed parents, and also protect the important relationships children share with their grandparents, stepparents, and other extended family. The bill will substantially reduce the current problem of deployed servicemembers being unable to enforce visitation/contact orders.

In addition, AB 2416 creates a rebuttable presumption that when a military parent is deployed, upon his or her return, child custody and visitation orders will revert to the original order. This protects the crucial role these parents play in their children's lives, and helps prevent a military parent from having to re-litigate their case.

Take a moment to watch deployed sailor Bill Hawes' tearful reunion with his little son here and little Siri Jordan's reunion with her divorced father Dan Jordan here--AB 2416 will help protect precious relationships like these.

Child Support Reform

SB 578 (Wright): At Fathers & Families we're inundated with calls and letters from dads struggling with child support problems, and this has been particularly true during the recession. Currently the interest rate on child support in California is a whopping 10%, and at least a third of California's staggering $14.4 billion child support debt is interest. Particularly in the recession, this interest saddles hard-luck child support obligors with huge paper arrearages they can't possibly pay. This sets them up for abusive enforcement action or drives them underground, making it difficult for them to function as parents for their children.

Fathers & Families is working publicly and behind the scenes to resolve this problem. Democratic State Senator Rod Wright's SB 578 is one component of that work. Currently child support obligors who do manage to make their monthly child support obligations still fall behind because interest keeps accruing on their arrearages. Under SB 578, the Department of Child Support Services cannot charge a child support obligor any interest in any month where they have made their normal monthly payment--an important bread and butter reform for many child support obligors.

SB 580 (Wright):  SB 580 will ensure that noncustodial parents aren’t saddled with an unreasonably high percentage of their children’s medical care costs.

Participation in the Department of Child Support Services' Programs Workgroup

Fathers & Families' Robinson is a member of the Department of Child Support Services Programs Workgroup--the only member of an advocacy group to hold such a position. Fathers & Families has also been invited to participate in the California Administrative Office of the Courts' Child Support Guideline Focus Group, which is reviewing the "fairness, appropriateness, and comprehensibility of the California Statewide Uniform Child Support Guideline."

The Groundbreaking COAP Program

Fathers & Families' Robinson has been at the forefront of child support reform, including working with Wright and California DCSS on the groundbreaking COAP program, which allows parents who are unfairly saddled with inflated, unpayable child support arrearages to settle them for modest cash payments. We are currently involved in efforts to expand the COAP program and simplify the application and approval process.

Protection from Family Court Financial Abuses

SB 1355 (Wright): A recent Department of Justice study on reducing prisoner recidivism focuses on an important but little-mentioned problem child support obligors face—the crushing child support debts which accrue while they were behind bars. Since interest accrues rapidly, many former prisoners struggle under a staggering debt they will never pay off. Some return to jail because of nonpayment of child support. Others are re-incarcerated after turning to illegal activity to support themselves, because at low wage lawful jobs, 50% or more of their paychecks are garnished to pay the debt.

These debts often make it impossible for ex-offenders—many of whom are young fathers who were incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses—to play a meaningful role in their children’s lives. And prisoners pay for their crimes with their time behind bars—these debts often amount to a punishment artificially extended beyond their sentences.

SB 1355 will address this problem by mandating that "the obligation of a person ordered to pay child support is suspended for the period of time in which the person ordered to pay support is incarcerated or institutionalized." It's a common-sense solution in an area where common sense is often lacking.

HB 2348 (Arizona): Although federal law is clear, judges are often ignoring it and calculating veterans’ disability compensation into divorce settlements as a divisible asset. Very often these payments are the only assets a veteran has. When judges include it as income, it creates great hardship for those veterans, who rarely have the resources to hire legal help to contest the taking of their benefits.

Last year Robinson successfully worked to pass California SB 285 (Wright) which protected disabled veterans' VA disability compensation, and has worked with advocates and legislators from several other states on similar legislation. One of the first of these is Arizona HB 2348. F & F did an Action Alert in support of the bill in January. The bill has now passed both the Arizona House Military Affairs and Public Safety Committee and the Rules Committee and is being fast-tracked to the Arizona House floor for a full vote.

HB 1165 (Indiana): A military parent bill also modeled on SB 285, Indiana's HB 1165 is moving rapidly through the Indiana legislature and is expected to be signed by Governor Mitch Daniels within the next few weeks.

Other Fathers & Families' Family Court Reform Legislative Projects

The Elkins Family Law Task Force

The Elkins Family Law Task Force is conducting a comprehensive review of family law proceedings and will recommend to the Judicial Council of California proposals that increase access to justice for all family law litigants. The Task Force recently issued its draft recommendations and Fathers & Families submitted our official comments in response here. Robinson appeared at the Task Force’s February meeting at the Administrative Office of the Courts in San Francisco--his statement to the Task Force is here.

Federal Legislation to Protect Military Parents

Fathers & Families' legislative representative Michael Robinson worked with Mark Sullivan of the American Bar Association on federal military parent legislation. Partly due to their work, the National Defense Reauthorization Act (HR 2647), which was signed by President Obama in October, 2009, mandates that the Secretary of Defense produce a report on child custody litigation involving members of the Armed Forces, as well as international intrafamilial abductions of servicemembers' children. The Secretary of Defense will submit its report to the Armed Services Committees of the Senate and the House of Representatives, and Fathers & Families is submitting military parents' cases to the Secretary of Defense for inclusion in the Report.

In Fathers & Families Board Member Robert Franklin's recent piece Maine Newspaper's Statement 'Most Often Children Die at the Hands of Young Men' Is False, Franklin, Esq. dissected false claims made regarding fathers, father figures and child abuse. He also contacted both the Bangor Daily News and Dr. Lawrence Ricci of Portland, who had asserted in the article  that across the U.S. fathers and father figures are more likely to kill children.

A week later the paper has added an Editor's Note to the top of the article correcting this mistake. The Editor's Note reads:

Editor's Note: The following correction was appended to this story, and the online version reflects those changes:

A story that ran on Page A1 on March 6-7 about child abuse fatalities requires clarification. A statement by Dr. Lawrence Ricci of Portland asserted that across the U.S. fathers and father figures are more likely to kill children. Ricci said Thursday his statement referred specifically to abused children who died of head trauma. According to a report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, mothers and female partners of a parent were identified as perpetrators in 27.4 percent of fatalities involving child maltreatment in 2007, the most recent year for which statistics are available, while 19 percent of perpetrators were identified as fathers or male partners of a parent.

Franklin's original post is below:

This article weighed in with some disinformation about child abuse, neglect and death.  Its headline - "Most Often Children Die at the Hands of Young Men" - gives a taste of what's to come (Bangor Daily News, 3/6/10).  That is, the article itself contains some important misstatements of fact.

The piece is all about homicides that have children as their victims.  It quotes a spokesperson for the Maine Department of Public Safety, Stephen McCausland, as saying that about two children per year are victims of homicide in Maine and that usually they're under the age of three when they die and that most of the perpetrators are parents.

Without knowing the Maine statistics in detail, none of that is surprising, because the same is true nationwide.  According to the Administration for Children and Families of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, about 80% of homicides with children as the victim are perpetrated by parents.  There are about 1,300 of those nationwide.

McCausland goes on to say that,

The vast majority are children who died at the hands of a young man, usually the father or the mother’s boyfriend.

That's a defensible statement.  The facts are these:

• From 2005-2009, 11 children under the age of 18 were the victims of a homicide in Maine;
• Three were killed by fathers, three were killed by mother's boyfriend; two were killed by mothers; two were killed by other children and one was killed by a step-father;
• One of the boyfriends was mentally incapable of criminal wrongdoing and was committed to a psychiatric institution.

So in Maine, over the years McCausland referred to, seven of the 11 children were killed by a father or boyfriend.  This is a very small sample size, easily subject to fluctuation, but it is 63%, and if that constitutes a "vast majority," so be it.

But where the article really goes wrong is with its next expert, Dr. Lawrence Ricci who tries to bootstrap the Maine statistics to the national level by saying,

That’s certainly the case in Maine, and it’s certainly the case nationally.

Actually, that's certainly not the case nationally.  The ACF tracks child maltreatment including homicide yearly.  And every year since at least 1997, women have killed significantly more children than have men, regardless of their relationship.

For example, in the ACF's report of state data for 2007, some 56.5% of child homicide was committed by women while 42% was committed by men, with the sex of the remainder of perpetrators being unknown.  Ten years before, the figures were about 63%/37%.

But Ricci doesn't stop there.  He goes on to claim that nationally,

the perpetrators of serious physical child abuse or homicide are most likely fathers, next are nonbiological father figures such as stepfathers or mothers’ boyfriends, and then sitters, Ricci said.

Mothers are the fourth-most-likely perpetrators and “well down on the list,” he said.

Again, that's just flat-out false.  The most likely perpetrator of child injury or death is the child's mother.  Referring to all injury to children, the 2007 ACF states,

Victim data were analyzed by relationship to their perpetrators. Nearly 39 percent (38.7%) of victims were maltreated by their mother acting alone (figure 3–6). Nearly 18 percent (17.9%) of victims were maltreated by their father acting alone. Nearly 17 percent (16.8%) were maltreated by both parents.

The same report found that 27.1% of child homicides nationwide were committed by a mother acting alone while 16.3% were committed by a father acting alone.

The figures for all child maltreatment over the years are these:

• 2006: Mother acting alone - 39.9%; Father acting alone - 17.6%
• 2005: MAA - 40.4%; FAA - 18.3%
• 2004: MAA - 38.8%; FAA - 18.3%
• 2003: MAA - 40.8%; FAA - 18.8%
• 2002: MAA - 40.3%; FAA - 19.1%
• 2001: MAA - 40.5%; FAA - 19.3%
• 2000; MAA - 40.0%; FAA - 16.6%

In other words, for none of those years was child abuse by a mother less than twice that of a father.

Prior to 2000, the AFC didn't break down abuse into categories like "mother only" or "father only," so here are the figures for male and female child abuse for the three years before 2000:

• 1999: Female - 61.8%; Male - 38.2%
• 1998: Female - 60.4%; Male - 39.6%
• 1997: Female - 62.3%; Male - 37.7%

I've emailed Ricci to find out his response to these data, but he hasn't responded.  How he figures that fathers commit more child abuse than do mothers is anyone's guess.

If you want to email the Bangor Daily News, the editor-in-chief is Michael J. Dowd and his email address is mdowd@bangordailynews.net.  If you want to email the article's author, Dawn Gagnon, go to the article and click on her name.

Thanks to Tatyana and Jeremy for the heads-up.

According to this article, there's been a "spike" in parental child abduction lately in Australia (Sunday Herald Sun, 3/14/10).  It's just happened in the past month.  That brings up the question "why would Australians suddenly start absconding with their children at a greater rate than before?"  I wonder if the recent publicity about rolling back family law reform might have something to do with it.  That's just speculation, of course.

Whatever the cause, the Australian courts are taking the almost unprecedented step of allowing publication of the names and photos of the abducted children.  Australia, like many countries, keeps the names of children in divorce and custody cases out of the news.  The stated reason is the protection of the children's privacy, which has always concerned me.

Here in the United States, we don't shield children in divorce or custody cases, or indeed any other cases except those involving sexual assault.  As far as I know, there's no indication of trauma to children from their lack of privacy in family court matters.  In the first place, only a tiny fraction of divorce and custody cases ever makes the news in any way, and the few that do might warrant a single article, but rarely more.  And up to a certain age, children have no concept of publicity, privacy, the news, family courts or what is going on in them.  So the notion of preserving the privacy of a two-year-old has always seemed more of an excuse than a reason.

The downside to the "children's privacy" argument is exactly what the article linked to is describing.  In Australia, in order to publicize a child's abduction, several legal hoops must be jumped through.  Those include the issuance of a "recovery order" which authorizes police to search for the child, followed by a "publication order" which allows publication of the child's name, photograph and other information that might assist ordinary Australians in identifying the child.  By the time hearings are held and orders issued, the abducting parent can be long gone.

As a counterpoint, there's the case of Baby Gabriel, the 10 month old who was kidnapped by his mother, Elizabeth Johnson, in Arizona and taken to Texas where he was apparently "adopted" unofficially and by persons unknown.  Baby Gabriel's photo was splashed all over the national and local television and print news within hours of Johnson's arrest in Florida.  Gabriel was nine months old when Johnson abducted him.  I doubt that the publicity concerns him much, but his widely publicized photograph is one of the most effective tools police have in locating him.

Australia's concern for children's privacy has another dimension; it extends to parents as well.  So any case that has to do with a child not only keeps the child's name out of the papers, it keeps the adult's out as well.  The theory is that if the adult's name is published then people will know who the child is and the child's privacy will be impaired.  The problem with that is that it provides an almost impenetrable wall of secrecy around any wrongful act a parent wishes to do vis-à-vis the child.  Therefore, allegations of abuse, abduction or violation of visitation orders become "private," which is another way of saying that the public can't know what's going on.  If the public knew more, maybe some of the bad parental behavior would stop.

The article informs its readers that,

there are 700,000 children in Australia who have no meaningful contact with one of their non-custodial parents, mostly their fathers.

That's well worth knowing, but the lack of contact scarcely comes about due to abduction which is rare.  It comes about to a great degree because custodial parents (almost invariably mothers) know to a virtual certainty that visitation orders won't be enforced.  So Deputy Chief Justice of the Family Court John Faulks can say

"Parents should adhere to court orders or they are at risk of serious consequences,"

but mothers and fathers alike know it's not true.  Anyone who wants to know the sordid truth about that should read "Kangaroo Court - Family Law in Australia" by esteemed academic John Hirst.

The secrecy in which child custody matters are conducted is one significant reason why visitation orders are so routinely violated. 

Predation.  That's that thing that African lions do to zebras.  They kill them when they can and eat them.  They do that in order to survive. 

But in the strange world of the New York Times it's what David Letterman did to the woman who worked for his production company.  He killed her?  No, he had sexual intercourse with her.  Maybe someone should explain the difference to Clyde Haberman, the author of this piece (New York Times, 3/12/10).

The New York District Attorney's office has just gotten a guilty plea from the man who tried to extort money from Letterman in connection with the late-night star's extra-marital affair.  And that's the stimulus for Haberman's all but incoherent rant.  The piece should be deconstructed fully, less for its supreme silliness than for what it reveals about the current zeitgeist.  Anyone who wants to understand why there's such widespread disdain for elite opinion-making in this country need look no further than Haberman's article.

He begins by criticizing the DA's office for not investigating the circumstances of the extortion plot "completely."  By that he means "delving into the Letterman affairs, plural."  But of course for a prosecutor to do that, he/she would have to have probable cause to believe a crime had been committed.  Given that Letterman has committed no crime, such probable cause was notably absent.  So Haberman's main point - that the DA should have conducted a criminal investigation into David Letterman's sexual dalliances - vanishes altogether, a fact that, oddly enough, he admits in his very next sentence.

But no matter; when it comes to men, women and sex, according to certain elite media, men have pretty much always done something wrong.  So Haberman, having disproven his first point in record time, moves on in his search of something to say.

Haberman just can't stand the fact that Letterman hasn't suffered sufficiently for having consensual sex with an adult woman in his employment.  So he consults the National Organization for Women, and - surprise - finds an opinion there.  According to NOW, because Letterman owns the company and his paramour is employed by it, any sexual relationship between the two is a product, not of mutual esteem or attraction, but of their business relationship.  Or, as Haberman says,

The real issue in these situations is not about sex. It is about power and inequality.

According to that theory, a woman who's not the boss can never freely consent to sex with the boss.  But there was never a claim by anyone in Letterman's company that any woman paid a price for refusing the star's advances.  No one ever claimed there was a quid pro quo.  And of course if Haberman, or any of the minions of NOW, had ever paused in their opinionating long enough to consult Letterman's lover, they'd have learned that she's an adult who entered into the affair of her own free will.  Sex with the boss as a condition of employment is obviously wrong and offensive to human decency, but that's not what happened here.

Actually, if "the real issue" were truly about "power and inequality," people like Haberman would notice when female stars do what Letterman did - have sex with an underling.  They'd inveigh against Britney Spears, Madonna and Jennifer Lopez the same as they do about Letterman, but they don't.  That's because "the real issue" for them is not about power and inequality; it's about men and women.  For them, when a man and a woman do the same thing, the man is wrong.  The woman?  Not so much.  In fact, the man is not just wrong, he's a beast, a predator.

But to think of things like facts, to consider who the woman actually is, to ask her what she thinks about the matter would erect quite an obstacle on the glory road to the conclusion that in sex, men are predators and women prey.  In fact, the woman who, according to Haberman, was Letterman's helpless victim never makes an appearance in his article.  She's irrelevant to his thesis.  Far better for him to consult representatives of NOW, who weren't there and whose disdain for the actual woman involved is such that they at once deny her a voice and pigeonhole her as the helpless victim she's never been.

NOW and the Amen Corner at the Times have been peddling this snake oil for a long time - long enough in fact that if it were ever to gain popular acceptance, it would have done so by now.  But it hasn't.  The vast majority of people know the difference between appropriate and inappropriate sex.  They know that men aren't predators and women prey.  They understand that, except in cases of forcible rape, women who engage in sex do so because they want to.  They understand that the woman David Letterman wronged was not his lover but his wife.

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