British Conservatives and Joint Custody

Robert Franklin published in the online men’s journal Men’s News Daily (http://mensnewsdaily.com) an article titled “British Tories Favor Shared Parenting After Breakup” (http://mensnewsdaily.com/glennsacks/2009/10/13/british-tories-favor-shared-parenting-after-breakup/), on the support of British conservatives of public policies that favor joint custody.

Tim Loughton, UK Shadow Children's Minister, said at a meeting hosted by the charity consortium Kids in the Middle, that his party (the Conservative and Unionist Party, “Tories”) preferred a system that presumed shared parenting following divorce, even if the couples could not reach an agreement and needed mediation to do so. Loughton said:

"At the moment we have got an incredibly adversarial system when parents split up. It is crazy we have so many acrimonious cases. (…) From the start of the process there should be a default mechanism for shared responsibility unless there is a welfare reason not to."

His comments come as a reaction to the growing concerns in British society over the adverse impact of conflict between parents on children. Several issues compound these concerns:

-The generalized rejection to the current adversarial nature of divorce processes.

- The growing acceptance of a presumption of equally shared parenting for custody awards.

- The understanding of the importance of mediation in divorce processes.

-The generalized idea that both parents should be involved in their children’s education.

Even though there is no concrete law project in favor of joint custody in the United Kingdom, the fact that the powerful Tory Party favors joint custody should be considered a milestone in the attainment of one. This should be read as a sign of the profound transformations that family relations and gender roles are undergoing in many countries around the world, transformations that in the end will bring healthier families, happier children, and stronger communities.

I would like to finish this post quoting the last paragraph of the article, on which, after mentioning all the possible barriers against the concretion of a pro-joint custody law in the United Kingdom, says:

“But those are all things to be dealt with, to be fought over when the time comes. Final victory never comes; movement toward greater father-child bonds is always a work in progress. It is now and always will be a process of becoming.”

Colombia: A Law in Favor of Joint Custody and Against False Accusations

The webpage of the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, published last October 15th of 2009 an article by Andrea Linares Gómez titled “Pérdida de custodia por falsa denuncia o si un padre daña imagen del otro, plantea proyecto de ley” (“Law Project Proposes Loss of Custody for False Accusations or If a Parent Damages Image of the Other). (http://www.eltiempo.com/colombia/justicia/perdida-de-custodia-por-falsa-denuncia-o-si-un-padre-dana-la-imagen-de-otro-plantea-proyecto-de-ley_6335647-1). The article discusses the law project that wants to establish joint custody in Colombia. This project responds to a tendency in Colombian society. According to family judge Ana Lucía Suárez, although in the majority of cases is the mother who wants the children’s custody, more fathers ask for it with more frequency.

It is always good news knowing that another country joins the world trend in favor of joint custody, especially if that country is as important and has such an influence as Colombia. However, what catches my attention is that the project establishes that if one of the parents damages his/her children’s image of the other parent or makes malicious sexual abuse accusations against the noncustodial parent, that parent will lose custody of the children. The project also provides for taking custody rights from any parent who physically abuse his/her children.

Federico Cardona, president of the Colombian organization Fundación Primero la Infancia (Infants First Foundation), that gathers noncustodial fathers and mothers, states that false accusations are the most common problem among separated couples. These false accusations are used as an instrument to alienate the other parent from his/her children and to create in them a negative image of the noncustodial parent. This dynamic, as we all already know, is typical in Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) cases.

The problem of false accusations during custody disputes is a very serious one. In countries like Puerto Rico and Chile, the phenomenon reaches epidemical proportions. The main reason of this proliferation of false accusations is precisely its impunity: in family courts, anyone can accuse another of any atrocity, knowing that courts, with the excuse of protecting minors, will ban any contact between the accused and his/her children, knowing also that when accusations are proved false, the bond between children and the absent parent would have been weakened, and the accuser will not be liable for his/her malicious accusations. The achievement of this piece of legislation is that, as many pro joint custody groups have been asking for a long time, at last would exist a juridical figure through which the malicious accuser could be brought to court and be judged.

I hope that this pro joint custody law will be approved in Colombia, and that other Latin-American countries follow this example.

Signe Wilkinson, Fatherlessness, and Schools

Signe Wilkinson (born in 1959 in Texas) is an editorial cartoonist best known for her work at The Washington Post and the Philadelphia Daily News. She was the first female cartoonist to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. She was served as president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists from 1994-1995.

In one of her cartoons, published last September 29th (http://glennsacks.com/blog/?p=4273), on which she depicts a classroom where every student chair has been labeled with one of the causes of American school system failure, and the most prominent has been labeled with the word “Dadless”. The fact that such a mainstream voice points out fatherlessness as one of the factors of the current school system debacle (right now, the US schools’ performance compares to those of third world countries) is an achievement in itself, but that that voice points in as the most relevant, is a true accomplishment.

We teachers know (I was an elementary school teacher for nineteen years) that schools are microcosms of the communities and societies where they stand. It is true that fatherlessness is one of the main social sources of student failure at schools, it is also true that fatherlessness is one of the sources of failure in life for so many children who have been risen without their fathers.

Very recently, the Sundance Channel aired a five episodes series titled “Brick City,” on the current struggle to revitalize the once extremely vital, now extremely violent city of Newark. In one of the most telling scenes, a teacher, in a classroom full of high school boys, asked them to raise their hand if they had little or no contact with their fathers; the vast majority raised their hands.

There is an admonition in this: If we want our societies to fail, the only thing that we have to do is to remove fathers from the lives of their children. But if what we want is give our world a chance to succeed and survive, let us allow that fathers to be an integral part of the lives of their children.

We, the believers in joint custody, have already chosen what we want.

What Would Happen If The Fathers Sue?

I recently read the article “Dad Gets Custody; Sues Oklahoma Dept. of Human Services and DV Shelter” (http://glennsacks.com/blog/?p=4209) by Robert Franklin, Esq. This article is worth reading, due to its particular approach to the problem of domestic violence and to what Franklin calls the “domestic violence industry.”

Domestic violence is an extremely delicate matter. On one hand, domestic violence is a real problem that is suffered by both genders and that causes numerous deaths every year. On the other hand, during child custody disputes, domestic violence accusations (along with sexual misconduct) are often used as means to exclude one of the parents from their children’s lives and to eradicate from the process any chance of fair treatment. Because many divorcing parents know that courts follow the official policy of “shoot now, ask later,” they accuse the other parent of domestic violence to isolate them from their children. And since making false accusations is a crime everywhere except in family courts, the accuser knows that even when the accusations are proven false and malicious, even when in many times the other parent has done time in jail, nothing will happen to them and they would have achieved their goal of planting a physical and temporal barrier between the other parent and his/her children.

It is from the acknowledgement of this complexity that Franklin’s article should be read. The article starts stating Franklin’s concerns regarding the way battered women shelters deal with the problem of domestic violence. Quoting a study done in Germany, he sustains that many shelters work as centers of radical feminism indoctrination, where they teach women that only men are perpetrators and only women are victims. That view assumes that domestic violence is a political act of power and oppression, not the result of a psychological disorder. These shelters, more than making an effort to actually help victims, their goal is often the separation, whether by divorce or otherwise, of the woman and her husband/partner.

Is in this context that the case of Crystal Hall should be understood. Mrs. Hall, who suffers from a form of mental/emotional/psychological impairment, contacted Safenet Services, a shelter for victims of domestic violence in Oklahoma, claiming that she and her five children had been abused by her husband, James Hall. Safenet, through its executive director, Donna Grabow, suggested her divorce as the only solution to her situation, telling her that the court would be sympathetic to a woman claiming abuse.

Over the course of 28 months, Mr. Hall underwent seven evaluations by various state agencies, all of which found him to be a fit and loving father with no evidence of abuse of either his wife or his children. The court ordered the children placed in his custody and further ordered his wife to pay child support, given that she is mentally capable of, and is in fact, working.

Since this ordeal started, there has been no discernible improvement in Mrs. Hall's psychological health, and she has become seriously co-dependent on Grabow and Safenet, who come to her house three times each day, seven days each week to make sure she takes her medication. Furthermore, although the court granted her visitation rights, Mrs. Hall has made no effort to visit her children for over a year. Even more worrying is the fact that the Oklahoma family court judge has forbidden Safenet staff from contacting the Hall children, who feel harassed by the organization.

Franklin assess Hall case as the case of “a mentally unstable woman who fell into the hands of a more or less typical DV shelter.” Because the shelter religiously followed the ideology of men are abusers and women are victims, they accepted unquestioningly Mrs. Hall’s claims, and urged her to divorce with the promise of the custody of her children. And from then, the mess that followed.

Now Mr. Hall has filed a civil suit for damages against the Oklahoma Department of Human Services, Safenet Services, Inc. and Donna Grabow. I have always wondered what would happen to the family courts system if the fathers who suffered their abuse counterattack with legal actions, not against their spouses as they usually do, but against the court system itself. Mr. Hall is probably one of the firsts, if not the first, of a new breed of fathers that should propagate fast.