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.