"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.

...dad being an idiot with his kid while mom shows contempt for him and corrects him. Watch Hanes' groundbreaking ad "Paste" here.

From Tennessee we go now to Canada on the continuing topic of equally shared parenting.  In both the state and the nation, there are bills pending before the legislatures that would establish the presumption of equally shared parenting.  And in both, the presumption could be rebutted by a showing that one parent was violent or otherwise unfit.  And both bills have substantial backing and momentum, although their ultimate fate remains unknown.

But what a difference a thousand miles or so can make!  This article on shared parenting actually deals honestly with some of the issues involved, particularly the issue of domestic violence (The London Free Press, 3/10/10).

(As a brief aside, let me point out that the entire debate about equally shared parenting sometimes seems like nothing more than a debate about domestic violence.  In that way, the anti-dad crowd has successfully highjacked the terms of the discussion.  And that's a shame since actual incidents of physically harmful DV are fairly rare.  As but one example, about three months ago, the government of Scotland published its most recent findings on DV in that country.  It found that about 5% of men and 5% of women in intimate relationships had experienced some form of DV in the previous year.  Seventy-nine percent of those had suffered no injury whatsoever or simply a "minor cut or bruise.")

If the article is any indication, people in Canada and specifically in Ontario, are starting to take seriously the many ways in which allegations of domestic violence can be used as a weapon in child custody matters.  In fact, the London Equal Parenting Committee is sponsoring a talk by former MP Roger Gallaway about that very topic.  The article quotes Gallaway as follows:

"What I find distressing is the lack of objectivity around this whole subject," says Gallaway, who represented his riding for the Liberal party from 1993 to 2006. "There has to be some type of balance put into the discussion. And it's sadly lacking."

Gallaway regrets that none of the 1998 report's recommendations -- including a call for stricter rules regarding the reporting of abuse -- were ever adopted.

"An allegation of violence is a weapon," he says. "And in Ontario we have a zero-tolerance policy, which generally speaking says that when allegations are made, it's the male who's removed (from the residence). And that then casts the die for what will occur in terms of child custody or access."

Gallaway adds that more and more people are starting to realize that more and more deserving fathers are being shortchanged when it comes to contentious custody battles.

"There's a growing constituency . . . that sees what's occurring and knows these men aren't bad people," he says. "So the doubt about what is being said about (so-called) violent men is growing."

The article illustrates Gallaway's point with this story:

One man I spoke to, for instance, says his ex-wife falsely accused him of slamming a van door on her leg. And even though that assault charge was later withdrawn by the Crown attorney, the man says the allegations damaged his reputation during proceedings with a family court judge who restricted his access to his kids.

It's a familiar story.  Family courts have always shown an overwhelming tendency to grant child custody to mothers.  Now that men are starting to understand the value to themselves and their children of hands-on fathering, they're trying to assert what parental rights they have.  The law places an enormously powerful weapon - allegations of DV - in the hands of mothers and they use it.  Sometimes they use it unscrupulously.

As a counterpoint, the article quotes DV advocate Peter Jaffe as saying that false accusations of DV are "rare."  Actually, in the U.S. studies have shown that as much as 71% of DV restraining orders were either unnecessary or received under false pretenses.  Other studies show that over half involve not even the allegation of physical violence.  In Canada, reports of child maltreatment are deemed to be unsubstantiated or without evidence in 55% of cases according to the Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect.  So what Jaffe said looks to be far from the truth.

And Jaffe himself long ago proved his bias in matters of domestic violence by confining his research cohorts to women in DV shelters and then pretending that his findings can be extrapolated to the population at large. 

Little by little, state by state, country by country, the value to everyone of equally shared parenting is gaining understanding and acceptance.
 

Sometimes it seems that we just can't get away from outrageously bad "journalism."  In just the past two days I've been astonished at the frankly false data reported by the Bangor Daily News about child maltreatment.  The article completely ignored easy-to-find accurate data published yearly by the Administration for Children and Families of the Department of Health and Human Services.  That data directly contradicted the article's main point which was that fathers commit more child abuse than anyone else.  In the history of the statisitics gathered by the ACF, that has never been true in any year.

Now we have this piece about the bill before the Tennessee Legislature currently being vetted in committee (Jackson Sun, 3/10/10).  It would establish a presumption in law that equally shared parenting would be in the best interests of the child.  Of course the bill includes many exceptions to equally shared parenting, such as a history of violence on the part of one parent, unfitness by one parent or an agreement between parents to have something other than equal parenting responsibilities.  In short, it's similar to other equally shared parenting legislation around the country and the world.

So what's the Jackson Sun's take on the bill?  According to that paper, it would create "mandatory joint custody" after divorce.  That's right, a bill that would do no more than establish a presumption that could be rebutted in numerous ways and that parents could simply agree to ignore is in some way "mandatory."  The piece uses the term several times throughout.

But, not content to frankly misrepresent the effect of the proposed legislation, the piece then turns its blurred vision on supporters of the bill, describing them as

those who have been to court in child custody disputes and have been disappointed in the outcome. Perhaps they received weekend visitation, which they believe to be insufficient.

Fathers who have testified for the bill believe that the courts have an inherent bias for mothers, and these fathers who have been denied joint custody are angry.

So naturally, those who support a father's right to time with his child and a child's right to time with its father are portrayed as nothing more than petulent men who are angry that they didn't get their way.

Both the article and the WPLN audio piece it links to at the bottom make much of the fact that in 95% of cases, the parents agree on custody.  Now, assuming that figure is correct, (and I have grave doubts that it is based on data from studies outside of Tennessee), did it occur to anyone that fathers agree to accept "visitation rights" because they know that's all they'll get under the current regime?  Countless family lawyers have told their male clients some version of "You can pay me a lot to try to get custody and end up with visitation every other weekend, or you can pay me a little and end up with visitation every other weekend.  It's your choice."  Faced with that prospect, of course fathers agree.  But to the fine folks at the Jackson Sun and WPLN, that's proof that the system is working fine.

That brings me to the fact that, as bad as the piece is for what it says, it's actually worse for what it doesn't say.  And that goes for the WPLN audio piece too.  In both pieces,

• there's not a word about the radical discrepancy in child custody under the current system in which 84% of custodial parents are mothers;
• there's not a word about the actual need, established by five decades of social science, that children have for their fathers;
• there's not a word about how the current system of primary custody/visitation strongly tends to separate children from their non-custodial parent regardless of who the parent is;
• there's not a word about the widespread refusal by family courts to enforce even the meager visitation rights they give to fathers;
• there's not a word about the benefits to children of having as much contact as possible with both parents;
• there's not a word about how mothers can benefit from greater father involvement with children by being freed to achieve and advance more in their careers;
• there's not a word about the fact that supporters of equally shared parenting include not just disgruntled dads, but countless psychologists, sociologists, social workers, mothers, fathers, judges, attorneys, politicians and many others who understand the value of fathers to children;

In short, in an article that's supposedly about equal parenting, there's not a single word about the many virtues of having both parents involved in a child's life after divorce.  Those are, after all, why there's such a wave of support for equal parenting worldwide.  The audio piece briefly acknowledges the broad and deep support equal parenting has, but treats it as some sort of bizarre phenomenon, incomprehensible by reason.

When you think about it, it's funny how many things opponents of equally shared parenting have to ignore in order to maintain their opposition.  That's understandable since their brief for clinging to the status quo is thin-to-non-existent.

It's understandable alright, but it's sure not journalism.

No sooner have we finished with Santa Clara Deputy District Attorney Ben Field's suspension from the practice of law due to prosecutorial misconduct, but this comes across our desk (San Jose Mercury News, 3/11/10).

Last year I reported on a Santa Clara Hospital that the county's prosecutors used to analyze evidence in cases of alleged sexual abuse.  Back then some 3,000 videotapes of examinations of alleged sexual assault victims came to light.  It seems that the woman who conducted the examinations recorded them as well.  She didn't tell prosecutors about the tapes, and when they found out about them, they, er, neglected to inform defense attorneys.  One man's conviction was overturned and apparently "dozens" of others may be.

Now,

Attorneys have uncovered a second, critical trove of evidence that has been withheld for years by medical investigators in hundreds of Santa Clara County sex-assault cases, prompting a wholesale review of procedures at the county's public hospital.

The emergence Tuesday of previously unknown forms documenting interactions between medical personnel and suspected victims comes after prosecutors discovered more than 3,000 videotaped medical exams of children last year that were also improperly withheld from the accused.

So once again possibly exculpatory evidence has been withheld from defendants in alleged sex crime cases.  And just like in the Ben Field case, we hear echoes of the Duke Lacrosse case.  Here's how it works:

Prosecutors are required by law to turn over exculpatory evidence in their possession to defendants and their attorneys.  But the key words there are "in their possession."  In the Duke case, tissue samples had been collected and DA Mike Nifong sent that material, not to a state-run laboratory, but to a private one.  That way, the tests could be conducted and if they indicated guilt, the lab reports could be given to the DA who would then turn them over to the defense.  But if they indicated innocence, the results stayed in private hands.  Therefore, the DA's office would not have exculpatory evidence "in its possession," and therefore it wouldn't be required to turn it over to the defense.  It maintained "plausible deniability."

The same thing looks to have been happening in Santa Clara County, which is why,

Two years ago, an appellate court ruled that the hospital examiners were part of the "prosecution team," making the District Attorney's Office responsible for ensuring that evidence is turned over to defendants.

By adjudicating the hospital officials to be, in effect, an arm of the DA's office, the court was trying to prevent prosecutors from doing what Mike Nifong had done - hiding evidence from the defense in a purportedly neutral place. 

What's now come to light are intake forms in which people alleging sexual victimization tell hospital personnel what happened.  Obviously, in some cases, their statements then could tend to prove the innocence of a person subsequently charged.

Interestingly, hospital personnel who are part of the Sexual Assault Response Team continue to stonewall not only defense lawyers but prosecutors as well.  Last year, when the scandal about the withheld videotapes came to light, prosecutors swore that there was no other missing evidence beyond the tapes.  That was because hospital personnel had told them that.  Now that turns out once again to have been false.  One defense attorney, Michael Kresser,

praised prosecutors for acting quickly, but expressed concern about their lack of knowledge about Sexual Assault Response Team procedures, including the existence of the forms.

In other words, this time it's not prosecutors who are subverting justice and putting innocent defendants behind bars, it's nurses and other hospital personnel.  And it seems only to be a problem in allegations of sex crimes.

Here's my guess: someone at the hospital (and it may be several "someones") is a "believe the woman" adherent.  That is, there's someone who's swallowed whole the notion that women or children who complain of sexual abuse can't lie.  Therefore, since all allegations must be true, withholding exulpatory evidence is acceptable because it jails a man who's guilty even if there's evidence tending to show he's not.  I'd put money on it; there's one of those (or more) at Valley Medical Center in Santa Clara County, California.