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.

New Data on Fathers and their Children

Two recent articles on the relationship between fathers and their children give new data on this important issue. The articles are Our Fatherhood Crisis , by Glenn Sacks and Robert Franklin, published on June 21, 2009 in The Washington Times (http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/21/our-fatherhood-crisis/?feat=home_commentary), and Obama’s Father’s Day Criticism of Dads Misses Mark by Glenn Sacks and Robert Franklin (http://lifestyle.msn.com/your-life/family-parenting/article.aspx?cp-documentid=20440872&page=print). I want to quote some of the most relevant facts that appeared on these articles:

1 - Professor Rebekah Levine Coley lead a recent Boston College study of low-income minority families, and found that when nonresident fathers are involved in their adolescent children's lives, they worked as an important protective factor, decreasing markedly the incidence of substance abuse, violence, and delinquency.
Writing about this study, MSNBC health and science writer Linda Carroll explains that:

"When it comes to preventing risky teen sex, there may be no better deterrent than a doting dad. Teenagers whose fathers are more involved in their lives are less likely to engage in risky sexual activities such as unprotected intercourse, according to a new study...While an involved mother can also help stave off a teen's sexual activity, dads have twice the influence."

2 - Professors Kathryn Edin of Harvard and Timothy Nelson of the University of Pennsylvania conducted a study of low-income, unmarried fathers and found that most strive to be good parents but often are thwarted by the children's mothers' interference. They found that these dads provide what monetary support they could, but focused on the non-financial aspects of fatherhood. These aspects include educating their daughters about relationships with males and teaching their sons how to defend themselves.

Ms. Edin's soon-to-be-published subsequent studies (Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing) found that when mothers move on to have new partners their actions are "strongly associated with increases in the probability that the biological father will have no contact with his child.” When fathers move on to have subsequent partners and children, they largely retain their desire to be in their original children's lives. According to Ms. Edin: "The evidence points more strongly to the role of mothers 'swapping daddies' than it does to the role of fathers 'swapping kids.'" A single mother's new partnership "may provide strong motivation [for her] to put the new partner in the 'daddy' role." The biological father is then less likely to be involved because the mother is more likely to exclude him and/or because he may feel he's now redundant.

When a mother wants to exclude her children's father from their lives, she can push him out easily. Family courts usually award custody to mothers, and are extremely lazy enforcing fathers' visitation rights. In most states, mothers are allowed to move their children thousands of miles away from the children's fathers, destroying the fathers' bonds with their children.

3 - Dr. Perry Crouch is a gang intervention specialist in Los Angeles. He states that only about half of one percent of the gang members he deals with have fathers in their lives.

4 - Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox, after examining hundreds of pre-sentencing reports detailing the family histories of convicted criminals, found that the common denominator of those cases was that one parent, usually the father, was missing from the home.

5 - In Growing Up With a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps, sociologists Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur analyzed data from five different studies and concluded that children of single parent families are more than twice as likely to drop out of high school as their peers with two parents, they're also less likely to go to college if they do finish high school, and more likely to be both out of school and out of work, proving that fathers and educational performance are also strongly linked.

6 - The Urban Institute report titled What About the Dads? tells that even when fathers inform child welfare officials that they would like their children to live with them, the agencies seek to place the children in the foster care system instead, pushing fathers away from their children.

Readers should also check out the statistics on these issues gathered by the people of Fathers and Families: http://fathersandfamiliesorg.siteprotect.net/site/infores.php

A Message for Inés Quiles

Last May 14th, the political analyst Inés Quiles, in her radio show “Si no lo digo, reviento” which is aired Monday to Friday from 10:00 to 12:00 in the morning by the Puerto Rican radio station Radio Isla 1320 (www.radioisla1320.com), Inés interviewed senator Carmelo Ríos, proponent of avant-garde joint custody law before the legislature of Puerto Rico. After the interview, the microphones were opened to the public and one listeners, a father who has the custody of his children, called to criticize the law and to oppose joint custody, on the grounds that a child can not healthily adapt to life between two houses. To answer this unfounded argument, that same day I wrote Inés the following e-mail:

Inés:

I hope that you and your loved ones are well. I am Vidal Guzmán, a Puerto Rican architect resident in New Jersey, pro joint -custody activist, and knowing your commitment to our children and to joint custody, I have contacted you previously to comment on issues related to our cause.

Listening to your show today, I heard one of your listeners saying several dangerous mistakes about joint custody. I tried to call your program to correct the listener, but it was impossible to me to get in, and for that reason, I am sending you this message.

The listener, from the comfortable position of a father who has the custody of his children, said that all the studies on the subject affirmed that moving regularly a child from the house of a parent to the house of the other was harmful for the child. That, as we would in my “barrio” Mamey of Guaynabo, was invented from air. Those studies do not exist. We should not confuse the opinion of a professional with the scientific studies done by a professional. And every study has proven once and again that if there is something really harmful for a child is the absence of the father. In fact, every statistic study done to date point out that the most certain predictor of depression, criminal conduct and social inadequacy in the adult life of a child, is having being raised by a single mother. The following link connects to a brief bibliography on the subject:

http://hijosdemamaypapa.blogspot.com/2009/02/una-bibliografia-de-la-orfandad.html

The listener should read the book by Ann Coulter, Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America (Crown Forum, January 6, 2009), on which the second chapter is dedicated to demystify single motherhood and to show how this supposed victims are in fact victimizing society and causing irreparable harm to their children. That chapter is rich in bibliographical references.

For a child, dividing his/her week between two homes, far from being a trauma, is an adventure that brings them fun and consolation from the real trauma that is the divorce of their parents. The listener should read the article 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 under a joint custody arrangement. In that article, she narrates how her parents divorced when she was only two years old, and how from that age until today, she sleeps at each parent’s house every other day, spending equal time with each one.

The listener complained also that joint custody would force the child to get used to two very different styles. I should remind the listener that that is was is supposed to happen in any traditional family, where father were men and mothers were women and therefore, those of us who had the privilege of having being raised by both of our parents, we developed under the guidance of two human beings distinct but equally important for our formation. Because the only way of having being raised by two parents of similar styles is having being raised by two parents of the same sex, what I see as totally acceptable, and even then there would have been differences between them. The idea of having a father and a mother is precisely to have the opportunity of receiving education from two human beings that are radically distinct, and that distinction is one that allows the development of human being that are complete, educated and used to the glorious complexity of the human race.

Feel free to share this e-mail with your listeners, and to air my phone 862-596-0118 and my e-mail vidalg@yahoo.com, in case that someone wants to contact me to discuss more about this issue.

Always at your orders,
Vidal Guzmán

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.

Four Trends for the Next Decade

Four trends has been taking place during the last years, four trends that will radically change the way in which we conceive couple and family relationships. They are the following:

1. The gradual, albeit delayed, loss of prestige of the until now untouchable figure of the single mother – Several weeks ago, I publish in this page the article titled “The Single Mother Industry”, in which I accuse the social canonization of the single mother as responsible of great part of the social disaster to which the family has been submitted during the last decades. I was pleasantly surprised to find that in the recently published book by Ann Coulter, Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America (Crown Forum, January 6, 2009), the second chapter is dedicated to demystify the single mother and to show how these supposed victims are really victimizing society and causing irreparable harm to their own children. It is good that it has been precisely a woman the one who has taken bull by its horns.

2. The standardization of the prenuptial agreement as normal part of the processes to get married - Books as popular as “Think Big: Make It Happen in Business and Life” by Donald Trump and Bill Zanker, (Collins Business, September 30, 2008) and “How Come That Idiot's Rich and I'm Not?” by Robert Shemin (Crown, March 4, 2008) identify divorce as one of the biggest economical disasters that a person could suffer, specially if that person is a man, automatically taking at least half of their income and assets. As preventive measure, prenuptial agreements allow to avoid the most disastrous economical results of divorce.

3. The normalization of single fatherhood as a family model – CNN published recently on its webpage the article “One and only dads: Numbers, challenges grow for single fathers” by Andrea Harry (http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/06/18/single.dads/index.html), on which the author documents that families headed by single fathers are the fastest growing household form in America. Currently, one in six families is headed by a father, compared with one in 10 in 1970. Of that number, only 5% are widowed, 42% are divorced and a surprising 38% have never been married. Is this last group the most socially significant, because speaks about the growing movement of men who opt to be single fathers, among many reasons, because in this way they avoid the risk of losing their children in case of a divorce. This movement is the answer to the slow pace in which laws are changing to agree with the times and the changes that have happened in the structure of nuclear family, and to correct the discrimination by reason of gender that exist in family courts.

4. The gradual but consistent standardization of joint custody as the predominant arrangement among custody arrangements – As we discussed in this page a few weeks ago in the article “Two articles on Newsweek,” joint custody arrangements have been slowly gaining territory in the American society, what should encourage us to continue the fight.

We should keep our eyes open to these phenomena and watch how they will be changing or daily lives on the next years. And we should keep fighting. Our children are waiting.

For women’s rights

I say that men’s rights are not only their rights: they are also the rights of women.

I say that our struggle for men’s rights is also the struggle for women’s rights, because if it is true that at family courts the weighing scale is still leaning towards women, in a very near future, when laws Project both parents rights no matter gender, we should make sure that laws are formulated in such a way the weighing scale does not leans in the opposite direction, like it has happened infinite times before in history when it comes the time of adjustments and corrections (Remember the French Revolution? And the urban violence unleashed in the post-apartheid South Africa?). Only through clear laws and fair court we would be able to achieve this task.

I say that our struggle for men’s rights is also the struggle for women’s rights, because the present state of family laws is ideological fossil that states that men belong to streets and women belong to their house wit the children, limiting this way the spectrum of divorced women with children. And this goes from the extraordinary to the ordinary, from the woman who since divorced has been forced to relegate his professional career to a second plane because she does not have time for it, to the one who, as one woman confessed to a pro-joint custody militant in Puerto Rico, she had not been able to go to the movies in years because the situation after her divorce had killed her social life. We fight for fair laws that assign equal responsibilities to men an women, laws that insert men in the family life that they are entitled to by right, and liberate women from having the full load of raising children.

I say that our struggle for men’s rights is also the struggle for women’s rights, because in the present state of things, those women who live with divorced men with children live with the continuous stress of sharing the emotional, social, and economical pressure to which present laws submit them. There is no worst enemy for a new family than a former wife devoted to sabotage it.

I say that our struggle for men’s rights is also the struggle for women’s rights, because many aunts, grandmother, godmothers and other women relatives of children of divorced men find themselves without contact with the children they love, because when courts block contact between fathers and their children, they’re not only blocking them, but their whole families.

It is for all of the above that leaders of pro-joint custody groups, like Ana Isabel Gorduño of Amor de Papá in Mexico, and Anneliese Garrison of Parents Without Custody of Southern New Jersey are women. They have understood what is at stake in this struggle.

It is time that men and women to be equal for the law. Let us fight to achieve this equality. Our children are waiting.

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.