America Again Bows Out of UN Rights of the Child Convention

In 1989, the United Nation's Rights of the Child Convention was drafted, and it was put into effect in 1990.  Although the United States, then under the Reagan Administration, was instrumental in drafting the articles in the treaty, America never signed it, along with only one other country to date--Somalia.

The intention of the treaty was to establish guidelines for basic children's rights.  The document acknowledges that children are often the victims of the most violent crimes, including rape, forced conscription, forced labor, and other forms physical and psychological abuse.  Essentially, the U.N. Rights of the Child Convention was created in order to give those under eighteen a voice and to offer protection for the one group of the world's citizens who are most vulnerable to suffering on a global scale.

Other U.N. member nations are perplexed at the United States' refusal over the past twenty years to sign the treaty.  A recent Voice of America article (“US Remains Hold-Out in UN Child Rights Convention”) reports on the nation's most recent hold out.  While President Barack Obama has called America's absence in the treaty "embarrassing," the Senate is the final decision maker.  As of yet, the convention has not been presented for ratification.

What, then, is holding us back?  For one, the United States has been historically reticent in signing any sort of international treaty.  Although the Rights of the Child treaty is seemingly benign, conservative elements across the country have decried the U.N. Convention as indicative of international power impinging on national sovereignty and parental rights.

Those supporting the ratification assert that the supposed power-grabbing of the treaty is a misconception clouded by ultra-conservative politicking.  The treaty, if anything, affirms parental rights and stresses the importance of children being raised and supported by their parents, even if they are separated.

While the United States did sign two additional protocols in which forced child conscription and prostitution were banned, the country has yet to move forward with any decision regarding the treaty.  Some in the global community have pointed out the good it would do for suffering children around the world--especially in third world countries--if the world's most powerful nation joined the convention.

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This guest post is contributed by Jessica Cortez, who writes on the topics of Online Degree Programs.  She welcomes your comments at her email Id: cortez.jessi23@gmail.com.  

On “Divorced from Reality” by Baskerville (2 of 2)

This is the second and final article on Stephen Baskerville, “Divorced from Reality”.

Baskerville believes that the child abuse “epidemic” is almost entirely the creation of radical feminism and the welfare bureaucracies. He quotes evidence that proves that an intact family is the safest place for women and children, and that very little abuse takes place in married families. Child abuse and domestic violence overwhelmingly occurs in homes from which the father has been removed. According to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), children of single parents have a 77% greater risk of being harmed by physical abuse, an 87% greater risk of being harmed by physical neglect, and an 80% greater risk of suffering serious injury or harm from abuse or neglect than children living with both parents. And according to Britain ’s Family Education Trust, children are up to 33 times more likely to be abused in a single-parent home than in an intact family. Baskerville writes:

“The principal impediment to child abuse is thus precisely the figure whom the welfare and divorce bureaucracies are intent on removing: the father.”

It is not married fathers, but single mothers who are most likely to injure or kill their children. Research shows that the most likely physical abuser of a young child will be that child’s mother, not a male in the household. Mothers accounted for 55 percent of all child murders. Women ages 20 to 49 are almost twice as likely as men to be perpetrators of child maltreatment: and since male perpetrators are not usually fathers but boyfriends or stepfathers, fathers emerge as by far the least likely child abusers.

In family courts, false allegations of child abuse and domestic violence are routine, and used almost always for purposes of breaking up families, securing child custody, and eliminating fathers. These false accusations are virtually never punished, and as a result of them, protective orders separating parents from their children are issued without any evidence during divorce proceedings.

There is a cruel political rationale behind all this government family-destruction machinery. Bureaucracies expand by creating the very problem they exist to address. By eliminating the father, government officials can present themselves as the solution to the problem they have created. The more child abuse there is, the more justification the government has to expand the child abuse bureaucracy.

Judges create the most dangerous environment for children when they remove fathers in custody proceedings, and they do it because they know they will never be held accountable for any harm that may come to the children. As Baskerville writes:

“On the contrary, if they do not remove the fathers, they may be punished by the bar associations and social work bureaucracies whose funding depends on a constant supply of abused children.”

The figure of the “deadbeat dad” is another result of hysteria manufactured by the divorce machinery. Fathers are less likely to abandon offspring than to be involuntarily divorced fathers who have been “forced to finance the filching of his own children.” Originally a method of recovering welfare costs, child support is now a “massive federal subsidy on middle-class divorce.” If no-fault divorce allowed a mother to divorce her husband for no reason and to take the children with her, child support allows the divorcing mother to use the now-fatherless children to claim her ex-husband’s money, money that she may spend however she wishes with no accounting requirement, and if he refuses to pay, he could be incarcerated without trial.

Child support finances family dissolution by paying mothers to divorce: it’s “an incentive for divorce by the custodial mother.” Evidence shows that only one-fifth to one-third of child-support payments is actually used for the children, the rest is profit for the custodial parent. Furthermore, mothers are not the only ones who profit from child support. State governments receive federal funds for every child-support dollar collected, what gives states a financial incentive to create as many single-parent households as possible by encouraging divorce. Baskerville writes:

“This is why state governments set child support at onerous levels. Not only does it immediately maximize their own revenues; by encouraging middle-class women to divorce, governments increase the number of fathers sending dollars through their systems, thus generating more revenue.”

The logical conclusion of this draws a terrible picture of how the power structure works:

“All this marks a new stage in the evolution of the welfare state: from distributing largesse to raising revenue and, from there, to law enforcement. The result is a self-financing machine, generating profits and expanding the size and scope of government—all by generating single-parent homes and fatherless children. Government has created a perpetual growth machine for destroying families, seizing children from legally blameless parents, and incarcerating parents without trial.”

Finally, Baskerville, an Anglican, accuses the church of refusing to protect the marriages it has consecrated, leaving a vacuum that has been filled by the state. He believes that family structure will be restored when the church takes families out of the hands of the state, does what is supposed to do by helping them to survive, and protects them from government intervention.

Again, I insist the the readers should read the full article. Every father who has been a victim of the family court system should.

On Baskerville’s “Divorced from Reality” (1 of 2)

In the January/February of 2009 issue of the Christian magazine Touchstone, Stephen Baskerville published the article “Divorced from Reality” (http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=22-01-019-f), on the family crisis in the US. I would like to summarize its content, but strongly recommend my readers to read the full text, due to to the extension and depth of Baskersville’s analysis on the issues discussed.

According to the author, the decline of the family structure has reached dangerous proportions, and it is the major source of social instability in the Western world, and a major threat to civic freedom and constitutional government. Quoting G. K. Chesterton, he sustains that the family structure serves as the principal check on government power, and that today family and state confront one another as the primary social organizing factor. He believes that today’s divorce laws are used by the state to erode family primacy, and to enhance its own power as social control. He writes:

“Indeed, many are devastated to discover that they can be forced into divorce by procedures entirely beyond their control. Divorce authorizes unprecedented government intrusion into family life, including the power to sunder families, seize children, loot family wealth, and incarcerate parents without trial. Comprised of family courts and vast, federally funded social services bureaucracies that wield what amount to police powers, the divorce machinery has become the most predatory and repressive sector of government ever created in the United States and is today’s greatest threat to constitutional freedom.”

Baskerville’s main concern are the laws regulating “no fault divorce”. When four decades ago laws were passed to legalize “no fault” divorces, these laws enabled the government, at the request of one spouse, to dissolve a marriage over the objection of the other. Divorce today, he states, seldom involves two people mutually deciding to part ways, but are unilateral in nature, prevailing over the objection of one spouse. He writes:

“Under “no-fault,” or what some call “unilateral,” divorce—a legal regime that expunged all considerations of justice from the procedure—divorce becomes a sudden power grab by one spouse, assisted by an army of judicial hangers-on who reward belligerence and profit from the ensuing litigation: judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, counselors, mediators, custody evaluators, social workers, and more.”

Unilateral divorce generates political and costitutional problems because by its nature, it requires constant government supervision over family life. Divorce expands government power because it involves state functionaries to enforce the divorce and the post-divorce order.

The implications of unilateral divorce are terrible: it allows the government to remove innocent people (usually fathers) from their homes, to seize their property, and to separate them from their children, even if they are innocent of any legal wrongdoing. The state seizes control of his children with no burden of proof to justify why; the burden of proof (and the financial burden demanded by it) falls on him. Baskerville writes:

“By far the most serious consequences involve children, who have become the principal weapons of the divorce machinery. Invariably the first action of a divorce court, once a divorce is filed, is to separate the children from one of their parents, usually the father. Until this happens, no one in the machinery acquires any power or earnings. The first principle and first action of divorce court therefore: Remove the father.”

The divorce machinery can take an respectable parent, block him for seeing his own children without government authorization, arrest him for failure to conform to a variety of additional judicial directives that apply to no one but him; arrest him for domestic violence or child abuse, even if no evidence is presented that he has committed any; arrest him for not paying child support, even if the amount exceeds his means; he can even be arrested for not paying an attorney or a psychotherapist he has not hired.

The growth of the divorce machinery has generated a series of hysterias against fathers so hideous that no one dares to defend those accused: child abuse and molestation, wife-beating, and nonpayment of child support. The accused of these offenses, even in the absence of any formal charge, evidence, or conviction, loses his children and is isolated from everyone, since no one wants to be associated with a “pedophile,” “batterer,” or “deadbeat dad.”

An while all these happens, there is no evidence that the family crisis is caused significantly by fathers abandoning their families, beating their wives, and molesting their children, but there is irrefutable evidence indicating that this crisis “is driven almost entirely by divorce courts forcibly separating parents from their children and using these false accusations as a rationalization.”

Child support as a dissuasive for fathers

In this very moment, in Massachusetts there is a legal battle on the laws regulating child support payments.

On January 1, 2009, Massachusetts instituted new guidelines which incremented child support payments, even though this state already had among the highest guidelines in the United States.

The new guidelines raise substantially child support payments in almost all cases, in many cases increasing them by 20%, but in some cases tripling them. Under these new guidelines, if a recipient and payer earn the same amount of money, the recipient will enjoy a standard of living almost double that of the payer.

In 2001, Fathers & Families, the national organization that advocates for a family court reform that would establish equal rights and responsibilities for fathers and mothers (www.fathersandfamilies.org), won changes in Massachusetts child support laws that lowered payments by 15%. The new guidelines are, in fact, the anti-father forces counter attack to this victory. In response, Fathers & Families filed a lawsuit in federal and state courts. They presented their case in federal court in January and in state court April 13, and are currently awaiting a decision.

This case should be followed closely by all non-custodial parents. While we all joyfully recognize our financial obligations towards our children, we also know very well that child support is widely used by custodial parents (and by the courts that represent them) as a weapon against non-custodial parents. Many times, when fathers think about claiming their rights, they think twice before going to court, because they fear that if they do so they will be punished by incrementing their child support payments. In these cases, the state instates itself as the guardian of gender inequality by implementing child support laws as a fear tactic for preserving the status quo. It can do so because child support laws tend to be imprecise, and in many occasions, unfair. And since the punishment for not paying child support is prison, you can all imagine how many people use this weapon just for the fun of seeing their ex-spouse in jail.

I strongly believe that the current state of child support laws is the fuel that powers the current state of child custody laws. In places like Puerto Rico, where I am from, it has triggered a whole industry based on child support money. The legal battle in Massachusetts is an extremely important battle in the struggle for our children.

Two articles on Newsweek

I want to call your attention on two articles that appeared in the prestigious magazine Newsweek, on its December 15th issue. One is a panorama of the most recent developments in the relationships between divorced parents and their children. The other one is a personal testimony of a 14 years old girl, raised on a joint custody arrangement.

In “Not Your Dad's Divorce. How changes in child support laws, and a push by fathers for equal time, are transforming the way this generation of ex-spouses raise their children” (http://www.newsweek.com/id/174790), Susanna Schrobsdorff starts narrating how she and her ex-husband agreed a joint custody arrangement of the two daughters at the moment of their divorce (in their case, the arrangement included that the girls would spend several nights a week with their Dad), and how this arrangement, albeit sometimes complicated and demanding, has proven to be the best for their daughters.

From that point Schrobsdorff summarizes the advancements, slow but sustained, in custody laws, towards joint custody arrangements, as opposed to the “every other weekend wit Dad” of the traditional formula. The author quotes Dr. Leslie Drozd, editor of the journal Child Custody; skating joint custody arrangements are far more frequent now than 20 years ago.
Although nationwide, the proportion of divorced spouses who have joint physical custody is a low 5 percent, in California and Arizona , where statutes permitting joint physical custody were adopted in the 1980s, a decade earlier than in other states with similar statutes, the joint physical custody rates reach up to 27 percent.

A very interesting point in this article is that it links the increase of joint custody arrangements to state readjustment regarding child support. I have already establish the link between them, and I firmly believe that the current child support laws are the financial support to the current state of gender discrimination at the family courts The laws governing child support have also evolved and affected child-custody arrangements. In the last 15 years, most states have passed legislation that ties child support payments to how much time a child spends with the non-custodial parent.

Another crucial point of this article is that it points out that many fathers don’t fight in court their children’s custody because the legal system and their lawyers discourage them from doing so (I have been in that situation, and it seems to me a serious ethical problem for the lawyers that take that position), because the process is too long, too expensive and results are uncertain. All this, even though that the numbers show that those men eager to fight for the sole custody of their children are wining in the same proportion than women.

The article finishes saying that the only way to end the horrors that litigation imposses to fathers seeking the custody of their children, is that courts Stara with the presumption that joint physical custody will be the first option, mainly because evidence shows that a majority of kids who have grown up in joint physical custody arrangements prove to be healthy and satisfied with the relationship with their parents, as oposed to those raised under sole custody regimes.
The second article, less academic but far more moving, is titled “How I divide my life between my divorced parents' homes” (http://www.newsweek.com/id/174698) written by Charlotte Juergens, a 14 years old girl raised on a joint custody arrangement. In this article, she tells how her parents divorced when she was only 2 years old, and how from that moment until today spends her nights at each parent house every other day, spending equal time with each one.
She believes that this arrangement has made possible that she is a healthy person, because in a certain way she has lived as she would have if her parents had lived together, seen them every day.

I advise everyone to read both articles in their entirety, so you can feel like I felt, encouraged to keep up the fight.

We cannot stop. Our children are waiting for us.

The single mother industry

Last Sunday I discussed the subject of the elections in Puerto Rico and how these elections could signify a change in the state policies regarding family laws, a change towards laws that simultaneously protect children and treat fathers fairly.

I ask to my non-Puerto Rican readers a little bit of patience while I go back to my country to discuss a problem that I believe is not exclusive of Puerto Rico, since it has multiple more subtle incarnations in many other places.

In many contemporary societies single mothers have become a sacred object, something untouchable that cannot be questioned, because the universal consensus, sponsored by the political correctness tyranny, sustains that single mothers are a kind of social martyrs that we all have to pity and feel compelled to help and sustain economically. This notion is being spread by mass media, even though is evident that the proliferation of single mother is more than anything a symptom of a social disease, the dissolution of the family nucleus, which in turn creates a long sequence of other social evils: children raised without a father figure, children that due to this condition have more propensity to criminal behavior, depression, promiscuity, etc. (Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, authors of Freakonomics, propose that the drastic reduction of criminality in the United States after Roe versus Wade was due precisely to Roe versus Wade, because this decision reduced dramatically the amount of children raised by single mothers, children that, as many studies have shown, have twice the probabilities of becoming criminals than children raised by both parents.)

Puerto Rico is an extreme case of this canonization of the single mother and of the conversion of this canonization into an industry. Many women have discovered an easy way to earn a living: have children and live of child support. And I am not talking about that women who has had to divorce and who now struggles to rebuild her life and who receives child support to help her raise her children. I talk about those women that in Puerto Rico live of their motherhood, because the child support that they get is being used to support them and not their children, or even worst, because, because they are serial mothers who have children of different men in order to live solely of the child support checks that they get from those men.

The present laws of child support pervert the whole process of supporting economically our children, polluting it from its base. The present situation is supported by three equally pernicious legs:

First, the absolute disproportion between the obligations of both parties, demanding from one (the father) much larger money amounts than the ones required to the other (the mother). The disproportion is such and the load is so onerous for fathers that most times it is far beyond their real possibilities and ends up taking many of them to bankruptcy, many of them to jail, some of them to suicide, and blocks the possibilities of rebuilding their lives after divorce. To add insult, the other party can even stay without a job, because the State does not believe that it has to help with the financial burden of raising their own children.

Second, the absolute lack of controls that ensure that the child support money will be used for child support. I know of a case on which a father calls ASUME, the government agency that is in charge of managing child support, to denounce that one of his child support checks had been cashed in a San Juan casino, just to be told that his responsibility was to pay child support, and once it was in his ex-wife hands, she could use it as she wanted to. Now, give me a reason to pay child support. While the government does not enforce mechanisms that ensure that the money paid for the children is being used in the children, child support Hill remain being used by unscrupulous mothers as a means to earn a living.

And third and most important and revealing, the outbreak of single mothers in Puerto Rico is the direct result of the discriminatory policy of family courts, which award women child custody in the almost entirety of cases. Like in the urban legends on which a villain amputates the legs of a child to force him to beg for money in the streets, in Puerto Rico the State denies joint child custody to the fathers and then and ask the people to feel pity for the women who have to raise their children by themselves. There is no better example of an ill-intentioned social consciousness.

The single mother, as it is conceived in the Puerto Rican social discourse, is a political creation that has the purpose of creating a group of voters loyal to the political part that protects its privileges, no matter that in order to do so the rights of a great part of the population, children and fathers, have to be sacrificed.

I say something that because everyone knows, nobody says, but it is worth to be brought to this discussion: politicians do not look for the good of their countries, but for their own perpetuation in power. Because women are the majority of the Puerto Rican electorate, politicians have not taken the risk of losing the votes of this sector, and have turned it into a privileged sector, exempting it from the duties that are demanded from the others, in this case, of financially supporting their own children. Ask yourself: When was the last time that you heard of mother going to jail for not paying child support? Never? I thought so.

The insufferable passivity and cowardice of men have been the fundamental vehicles for this situation to reach this point. Without them, the present state of family laws would be unsustainable. It is time for this to change.

Our children are waiting.

On the Elections in Puerto Rico

I should start clarifying that I am not a follower of the New Progressive Party (Partido Nuevo Progresista or PNP), the political party that last Tuesday won the elections in Puerto Rico. Until the year 2002, the year on which I moved from Puerto Rico to New Jersey, I was a member of the Puerto Rican Independence Party (Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño or PIP), and I still relieve that the best choice for the future of my country is its political independence. I should say also that I don’t feel towards the Popular Democratic Party (Partido Popular Democrático or PPD), the still governing party that lost this elections, the visceral rejection that of the PIP traditionally have felt towards the PPD. If the PPD embraces the soberanist autonomical ideal that proposes its left wing, its proposal would be as valid as independence.

Having said this, I should say that if the PNP fulfill its promises and works on following its proposed platform, its victory could be the best that has happened to the family institution in Puerto Rico.

For reasons that combine the most vulgar electoral logic (women are more than men and vote in biggest proportion than them, therefore, political parties should never do anything that could scare their votes away) and a perverse interpretation of feminism (the majority of Puerto Rican feminism does not promotes equality between genders, but a kind of feminine supremacism), the PPD and the PIP have opposed vehemently to every attempt of approving laws that promote joint custody and establish fair parameters for child support payments. When during this administration, an excellent law pro-joint custody was submitted for the legislature approval, the government aimed at it all its cannons, from the Department of Justice, the Courts Administration to, shamefully, the Department of Family.

The PNP includes in its platform (Juntos hacia el cambio, http://www.fortunogobernador.com/images/PLANDEGOBIERNOPNP2009-2012.pdf) a section dedicated to its proposals on family issues (p. 147-50), and in it includes promises of promoting joint custody whenever possible and the revision of laws on child support to make them more fair. Now that the PNP has won, we Puerto Ricans should dedicate the next four years to remind it to fulfill what its platform promises. If the PNP does it, it would become the first Puerto Rican party that really does something to remedy the accelerated deterioration of the Puerto Rican society.

For the sake of Puerto Rico, let us believe that the PNP is going to keep its promises. All of us should continue reminding them to do so.

Our children are waiting for us.

Against giving up

The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.
Jesus Christ

Resignation is cowardice. Accepting life as it comes to us, accepting injustice and inequality as if they were unavoidable of life, is cowardice.

Because of that, because no human being should be forced to settle up for less than he/she deserves, because no human being has to suffer in silence the blows of life, the only choice that is left is to fight bravely, to fight relentlessly, to fight until the victorious end.

That is why every time I hear someone telling me that I should be happy because at least I can see my daughter, while other fathers cannot see their children, their words, instead of being a comfort, are nothing more than a well-intentioned insult.

I ask myself what would Martin Luther King and Malcolm X had replied, if during the effervescence of the civil rights movement, someone would have told them that should feel satisfied because, at least, they were not slaves. I am convinced that both of them would have felt as offended as I feel every time someone ask me to settle for the present state of custody laws, state that perpetuates inequality between genders by priming the role of the mother over the role of the father.

Human life without dignity is not human life. And there is no dignity in living a second-class life, being demoted from parent to vice-parent. Anything less than equality is unacceptable. No human being should accept being treated in way less than he/she should be treated. We are fathers, not babysitters of our own children, not the guys who visit them occasionally and who are important only because they supply the money. We are fathers and it is time to demand being treated as such.

We cannot accept that the immense majority of times child custodies are awarded indiscriminately to a gender, disposing of the rights of the other. We cannot accept that financial responsibilities of rising children to fall falls upon a gender, allowing the other to use the money assigned to the children without any control that ensures that the money is being used in what was assigned to. We cannot accept that children who are not orphans to be forced to live as such by court decree.

It is time for the fight to start.

Our children are waiting for us

Small Tragedies

No one cares about children. There are many reasons for that: Children don’t vote. Children don’t give money to the political parties. Children don’t dine with judges, don’t play golf with politicians, and don’t belong to the clubs that big entrepreneurs belong to. And if this wasn’t enough, children can’t even decide on what happen with their own lives. Then, why should we be interested in a group that has no power at all? Why defend those who cannot defend us? How does it help us to protect those who cannot do anything in return for us, nothing?

Because children don’t count in the circles of power, the state, that which is supposed to protect them by means of the so called family courts and agencies, those courts and agencies that are supposed to look for their rights, the state ignores them in everything that is most vital, most necessary for them: the laws of custody, the laws of child support, the laws of adoption...

In order to make us decide to protect children, maybe is not enough to use moral reasons (we should protect the defenseless), social reasons (children who are raised today without a father figure will become a social problem tomorrow), and psychological reasons (children raised today under the single parent custody regime will be more inclined to depression and suicide when they become adults). Maybe we need a reason closer to us, closer to our hearts. I propose one: we should protect children because they are our children, because they are the children of our brothers and sisters, of our friends, of our neighbors, in summary, because they are the children of another human being who feel for them the same unconditional and absolute love that we feel for our children. If no other reason is enough, I believe that this must be.

With this reason on mind, starting today I will publish a new edition of this blog every Sunday. My intention was to start doing it in September, but situations beyond my control didn’t allow that to happen.

I publish this blog with several purposes in mind: first, to expose the tragedy that the present state of laws regarding children welfare represent, by publishing those news on the subject that come to my knowledge. Second, to promote laws that affirm the rights of children, and the rights of their parents to raise them and to relate with them in a fair and healthy manner. The name Children of Mom and Dad summarizes my proposal; children must have mothers and fathers to raise them, no mothers or fathers: our children should not be orphans by decree of the courts, as they presently are. And third, but maybe even more important that all of the above, my purpose is to organize groups that implement actions that promote the goals already mentioned.

There are too many people that don’t have a voice. There are too many tragedies that, because happen in the small kingdom of children, are despised and ignored. Hopefully, from now on, the voice of this blog will be voice of those who have none.