Fatherhood & Martyrdom

Through history, taking away someone’s children has been always an extremely humiliating act of war. Through history, empires have taken the children of the invaded countries, killed them, sold them as slaves or just removed them from their parents (one of the latest versions of the last one, occurred in Argentina during the Dirty War, during which the Military Junta used to “disappear” members of the opposition and give their children in adoption to pro-government families).

The struggle for the cause of joint custody resembles a war. Like a war, it is the sum of many battles, small and big, that will add up in the end to the final victory. Like a war, it requires a grand strategy viewpoint to focus and organize every action in such a way that those actions could achieve victory. Like a war, it constantly creates traumas in the people involved, traumas that should be addressed and healed, if such thing is possible.

And like a war has its share of dead people. This is not a bloodless struggle. The violence that the current state of family laws generates is immense, and many ways, uncontrollable (and I am not talking now about the suicides that result from these endless and unfair legal processes).

Separating parents from their children is an unspeakable act of violence. And as many have said before, violence engenders violence.

The extremely long, painful and humiliating process to which our family courts submit parents who fight for the custody of their children, many times explodes in the worst form possible. Allow me to give two examples of the terrible violence that the present state of things generates.

Caroline M. Kotoski has been accused in Cape Cod of soliciting an undercover police officer to murder her estranged husband. On September 9 of 2004, she met with an undercover state trooper posing as a hit man and paid the trooper $7,500 to kill William Kotoski and agreed to hand over another $7,500 once her estranged husband was dead. The accused was motivated by her desire to gain custody of her two children and possibly inherit a “huge amount of money” (http://www.capecodtoday.com/blogs/index.php/2006/08/29/cape_teacher_of_the_year_on_tial_for_kil?blog=53).

Mazoltuv Borukhova, estranged wife of orthodontist Daniel Malakov, was charged with murder and conspiracy three and a half months after Malakov was gunned down at a Queens’s playground in front of his young daughter. Malakov and Borukhova had been embroiled in a bitter custody dispute over their daughter Michelle after Malakov had been granted temporary custody. The man arrested in the shooting is a Borukhova's relative by marriage. (http://gothamist.com/2008/02/08/slain_dentists.php)

Let us stop this. Let us have clear family laws that set things straight from the start, that set joint custody by default, stopping this way these endless arguments that create only frustration, anger, and violence.

Let us stop this now. Our children are waiting.

A bibliography of orphanhood

Has ever happened to you that during a discussion on joint custody, suddenly appears a wise guy accusing that your ideas are your personal opinion, or even worst, asking you for the specific study from which you took your ideas? (Yes, it is true, there are people that, lacking common sense, other people’s common sense seems to them as an anomaly.)

So that next time you meet with someone who needs evidence that the sky is blue and that the Mediterranean exists (and that is not good for children to be orphans, be it physically or legally), next I will give a list of references required in any discussion on the subject, an annotated bibliography of solitude:

Benett, Bill. The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators: American Society at the End of the Twentieth Century, New York, Broadway Books, 1994. State that 63% of all teenagers committing suicide, 70% of all pregnant teenagers, and 71% of all teenagers abusing chemical substances, come from single- parent households, as well as 80% of all prison inmates and 90% of all homeless and runaway children.

Colson, Chuck. How Shall We Live, Tyndale House Publishers, 2004, p. 323. State that 72% of juvenile murderers and 60% of rapist come from single-mother homes.

DeParle, Jason. “Raising Kevion,” New York Times, August 22, 2004. Calls single-parent families a “double dose of disadvantage” for the children.

Eddy, Chuck. “The Daddy Shady Show,” Village Voice, December 31, 2002. Indicates that children that were raised by single-mothers are 5 times more likely to commit suicide, 9 times more likely to drop out of high school, 10 times more likely to abuse chemical substances, 14 times more likely to commit rape, 20 times more likely to end up in prison, and 32 times more likely to run away from home.

Harper, C. C. & S. S. McLanahan. “Father Absence and Your Incarceration,” paper presented at the annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, August 1998. States that “the strongest predictor of whether a person will end up in prison is that he was raised by a single parent.”

Horn, Wade. “Why there is no substitute for Parents,” Imprimis 26, no. 6 (June 1997) p. 2. States that by 1996, 70% of minors that dropout from school, commit suicides, and were inmates in state juvenile detention centers serving long term sentences were raised by single mothers. States also that girls raised without fathers are more sexually promiscuous and are more likely to end up in divorce.

Lyken, David T. “Parental Licensure,” American Psychologist, 56: 885, 887 (2001) Another study that states that the strongest predictor of whether a person will end up in prison is that he was raised by a single parent.

Lyken, David T. “Reconstructing Fathers”, American Psychologist, 55: 681,681 (2000) States that 70% de teenage pregnancies happen to girls who were raised by single-mothers.

McLanahan, Sara & Gary Sandefur. Growing Up With a Single Parent. What Hurts, What Helps. The definitive text on the subject of father’s absence. Includes statements as strong as this one: “In our opinion, the evidence is quite clear: Children who grow up in a household with only one biological parent are worse off, on average, than children who grow up in a household with both of their biological parents, regardless of the parent’s race or educational background.”

Newland, Martin. “Why England is Rotting,” Maclean’s, June 11, 2007. States that Britain leads Europe in the proportion single-mothers household, and also leads Europe in crime, alcohol and drug abuse, obesity and sexually transmitted diseases.

Redding, Richard E. “It’s Really About Sex: Same Sex Marriage, Lesbigay Parenting, and the Psychology of Disgust”, Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy, January 1, 2008. States that 70% de runaways, juvenile delinquents, and child murderers were raised by single-mothers.

Some of these references will take you to others, so this bibliography will only be the tip of the golden thread that will bring you to other research papers and other studies.

Jesus said “You will know truth and truth will set you free”. Let us study and spread the truth so that truth and justice be spread too. Let us do it now. Our children are waiting.

Visitation and custody

In my many conversations with fathers that are fighting now or have fought for the joint custody of their children, I have discovered, to my surprise and worry, that the distinction between custody and visitation is not clear for most people, and therefore, why the former is much more important than the latter is not clear neither.

When courts award sole physical custody of a child to one of the parents, they are disregarding the proven benefits of joint custody. In 1981, Beck v. Beck, the seminal case on joint custody in New Jersey, the custody of two adopted girls was decided in favor of joint legal and physical custody. Mr. Beck used as professional support of his claims for joint custody the testimonies of Dr. Warren Clark, a school psychologist, and Dr. Judith Greif, a psychiatric social worker who has conducted independent research on the topic of joint custody. The court found “…rational the viewpoints of Drs. Greif and Clark and hence adopted their conclusions”. Dr. Greif testified that:

…as long as both parents are fit, “the most important thing is to maintain the child’s open and meaningful access to both parents.” (…) Visitation, for Dr. Greif was not “meaningful contact.” She stressed that the continuity of relationship allowed by alternating physical custody is more important that the discontinuity of physical environment caused by it. 86 New Jersey Superior Court 492 (1981)

And by “meaningful” contact, we should read physical custody. As this case helped to clarify, visitation is not, it cannot be, meaningful contact (86 New Jersey Superior Court 492). Dr. Greif:

…distinguished between custodial time and visitation, describing the former as “meaningful contact” and the latter as “entertainment time.” It saw the contact and involvement of the girls with two fit, concerned parents as “going to be what’s good for the girls.” (86 New Jersey Superior Court 493)

Beck v. Beck repeatedly states that only physical custody can develop a healthy bond between divorced parents and their children:

Alternating physical custody enables the children to share with both parents the intimate day-to-day contact necessary to strengthen a true parent-child relationship. 86 New Jersey Superior Court 485 (1981)

The award of joint physical custody to both parents is the only way to preserve the relationship between them and their children. And those of us who love our children must keep on fighting until joint custody arrangements be the rule and not the exception, as they are now. We have to. Our children are waiting.

Family Courts and the RICO Act

Many states have joint custody laws. In many cases, the absence of laws is not the problem, but the lack of commitment of the family courts with the enforcement of the laws. Laws exist, but judges and their courts do not follow them.

The crack through which judges are capable to betray the laws they pledged to defend, and to exert almost unlimited powers, is the so called “court discretion.” By using this resource, many family laws open the door so that the judge could decide when and/or how apply the law, as long as the could justify to do so, what in the real world translates to judges using any excuse to do whatever they want. (Remember that scene of the film V for Vendetta, on which government officers are about to rape the main character of the film using their “court discretion? Definitely, I am not the first one to notice that the concept of court discretion judicial has grim consequences for the administration of justice.)

This would not be that damaging if the court system would provide means to correct its mistakes, what the appellation process is supposed to be used for. The truth is that the court structure protects itself, the same corrupt way (did I say that I am writing from New Jersey?) that criminal organizations do, following the old rule: “one hand washes the other.” The legal figure that this form of cover-up assumes is the principle according to which an upper court owes deference to the decisions of lower courts. According to this erroneous principle, upper courts should assume that the lower courts were better informed than they are, and therefore, its decisions should be respected although the might look evidently incorrect. And since the principle or court discretion is applied by appellation courts…

The cycle of legal manipulation would be as follows: using its discretion the family court makes a decision that betrays family laws, the father appeals the decision, upper courts sustain the family court decision based on the notion that the family court knows more than they know: I repeat, one hand washes the other.

This ill intentioned manipulation of the law by the courts with the purpose of betraying them is not unusual. In the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), the decision that in principle declared illegal racial segregation in schools in the United States, the text that instructed to stop segregation stated with deliberate ambiguity that the order should be executed 'with all deliberate speed'. Because there was no specific deadline, the courts used this ambiguity to delay the application of the decision for more than a decade.

We all have heard of the RICO Act. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (commonly known as RICO Act or RICO) the federal law that penalizes criminal organizations. In one of its definitions, includes as “racketeering activity (…) (B section 1503 (relating to obstruction of justice), (…) section 1511 (relating to the obstruction of State or local law enforcement)…

My question is the following: Could a state institution, by performing an illegal activity, be considered a criminal organization? If that is so, could it be processed under the RICO Act? If that is so, could family judges be considered part of a criminal organization if in an organized way they participate in obstructing laws and obstructing state public policies o? I believe so, and I believe also that because nothing nor nobody, note even judges, is above the law, we should not tolerate that judges to continue betraying the laws that they are supposed to defend.

We, those who fight for our children, should question and defy the system that supports inequality and injustice. We cannot afford to be cowards. Our children are waiting.