http://www.bendweekly.com/Opinion/8387.html
Bend Weekly (USA)
20 July 2007
Children's rights should include life with both parents
By Phyllis Schlafly
Debates about same-sex marriage and gay adoptions always include the argument that a child has the right to both a father and a mother. If that is true, why is a child usually deprived of that right when heterosexual couples divorce?
It would seem that maintaining the father's love and authority would be crucial when a child's life is turned upside down by divorce. Yet, family courts routinely deprive children of one parent, usually the father, restricting his time with his child to about six days a month.
The courts pompously assert they are invoking "the best interest of the child," but how can it be in the best interest of children to make them forfeit one parent?
We hear many pious comments about the need for fathers to be involved in the upbringing of their children. This need should be even more important in times of emotional stress, such as divorce, than the need for fathers to play ball with their kids in an intact family.
Some states are considering legislation that establishes a presumption of shared parenting whereby divorced parents divide equally both time and authority over the children. This enables children to maintain strong ties to both parents.
When primary or sole custody is given to the mother, the father becomes merely a visitor in the child's life (that's why it's called "visitation"), whose only value is to mail a paycheck and be an occasional baby sitter. The father loses his parental authority and fades out of his own child's life.
An argument is sometimes made that shuttling back and forth between two homes might be upsetting or a nuisance, but there is no more shuttling with equal custody (where parents, for example, get alternating weeks) than with the typical mother-custody/father-visitation schedule (where the father gets two weekends a month plus some Wednesday evenings). Do the math; both plans have about the same number of shuttles between homes.
An argument is also made that giving custody primarily to the mother promotes stability, but the need for stability is really a reason for shared custody. The stability of parental relationships is a great deal more important than contact with material things.
Americans have always assumed that parents share decision-making authority because only parents can determine what is in the best interest of their own children. As recently as 2000, the Supreme Court in Troxel v. Granville reaffirmed this principle and rejected the argument that a judge could supersede a fit parent's judgment about his child's "best interest."
Nevertheless, in what Stephen Baskerville calls a "silent revolution," millions of divorced parents have had their fundamental right to decide what is in the best interest of their own children taken away and given instead to a vast array of government officials and so-called "experts" such as judges, lawyers, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, child protective services, child support enforcement agents, mediators, counselors, parenting classes, and feminist groups.
This shift began in the 1970s after the spread of unilateral divorce was followed by the creation of a giant federal child support-enforcement bureaucracy. The notion that this mix of government officials and government-appointed advisers can dictate what is the best interest of the child rather than a child's own parents is how liberals and feminists are fulfilling their goal that "it takes a village (i.e., the government) to raise a child."
An example of the bias against fathers can be seen in the Responsible Fatherhood Act of 2007 recently introduced by Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Evan Bayh, D-Ind. The bill mentions "child support" 65 times, but not once does it mention parenting time, custody, visitation, or access denial.
Baskerville's new book, "Taken into Custody: The War Against Fatherhood, Marriage, and the Family" (Cumberland House, $24.95), provides a copiously documented description of society's injustices to children who have been deprived of their fathers and of fathers who have been deprived of their children. This book is a tremendous and much-needed report on how family courts and government policies are harming children.
It is a breakthrough for shared parenting that a noncustodial father, Robert Pedersen, was recently named runner-up in the nationwide Best Life Magazine's "Hero Dad" Contest. Pedersen is only allowed 6 to 8 days a month with his two children from a previous marriage.
Pedersen has devised a novel way to demonstrate the importance of fathers to children of divorced parents. He is leading an "Equal Parenting Bike Ride" starting in Lansing, Mich., on Aug. 11 and culminating with an Aug. 18 rally in Washington, D.C.
---Phyllis Schlafly is a lawyer, conservative political analyst and the author of the newly revised and expanded "Supremacists." She can be contacted by e-mail at phyllis@eagleforum.org
Friday, July 27, 2007
Thursday, July 19, 2007
The distortion of feminism
These are old references (1999) but they are a valuable critique of some of the excesses and dangers of radical feminism.
Quote: "The goal of these authors remained the redistribution of labour and wealth within the family, from men to women. Yet they conceded they had to do so without alienating the majority of people by attitudes that appeared to be hostile to men. The way they would do this would be to emphasise the interests of the children." - Melanie Phillips, "The Sex-Change Society", Melanie Phillips, 1999, Page123
http://www.melaniephillips.com/http://www.melaniephillips.com/books/
The Sex-Change Society- Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male
Melanie Phillips Paperback, 370 pages (1999)
Social Market Foundation. ISBN: 1-874097-64-X
The Sex-Change Society issues a devastating attack on androgynous public policy, arguing that feminism has distorted its own agenda of equality by replacing it with sameness. The results are startling. Men have been demonised through a distorted view that they are intrinsically violent and feckless while all women are essentially 'saint-like'. At the same time, women are being encouraged to work at all times, whether they want to or not. In this timely critique Melanie Phillips tells the disturbing story of the attempt to feminise the state, to reverse the roles of men and women and to run masculinity out of town altogether. The result has been an anti-family policy in which everyone has become a potential loser.-----------------------------------
-----------------------Unrelated article by Melanie Phillips re DV
http://www.travel-net.com/~retap/DV-1.htm
The Sunday Times (Britain)
24 October 1999
Women are at least as violent as men but the evidence is being dismissed or ignored
By Melanie Phillips
Mention feminism to most people and the reaction will probably be one of faintly amused indifference. Some men may be irritated by feminist rhetoric; some women might feel their agenda is a little extreme. But the extent to which feminism in its most extreme form has embedded itself within the institutions and thinking of Britain has simply not been grasped.
Feminism has become the unchallengeable orthodoxy in even the most apparently conservative institutions, and drives forward the whole programme of domestic social policy. Yet this orthodoxy is not based on concepts of fairness or justice or social solidarity. It is based on hostility towards men.
The idea that men oppress women, who therefore have every interest in avoiding the marriage trap and must achieve independence from men at all costs, may strike many as having little to do with everyday life. Yet it is now the galvanic principle behind social, economic and legal policy-making.
Buried within this doctrine, though, is an even deeper assumption. Male oppression of women is only made possible by the fact that men are intrinsically predatory and violent, threatening both women and children with rape or assault. Men are therefore the enemy - not just of women but of humanity, the proper objects of fear and scorn.
This assumption runs through feminist thinking as a given. "Most violence, most crime ... is not committed by human beings in general. It is committed by men," wrote Jill Tweedie.
According to Marilyn French, men used violence both to threaten and control, as well as actually harm: "As long as some men use physical force to subjugate females, all men need not. The knowledge that some men do suffices to threaten all women."
Moreover, it is marriage and family life that expose women most to male violence. According to Gloria Steinem, "patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself... The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown man in the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or lover in the isolation of their own home".
All this has been enough to turn the stomachs of some feminists, particularly those who love husbands or sons. Novelist Maggie Gee said she once thought the sex war was exciting, but had now concluded it went too far. "Women are giving up on their relationships too quickly. Living with a man I love very much, I keep thinking that all the generalisations about men just aren't true."
These generalisations, however, are now the stuff of public policy. Male violence against women, said the government in June 1999, was no longer going to be "swept under the carpet". Virtually nobody questioned the premise that men were invariably victimisers and women always their victims.
There is no doubt that some men are violent towards women; the evidence of women's injuries is real enough. However, this is one side of the story only. There is another side: the extent of women's violence against men and children. That, though, is a story that almost every official body in Britain and America has successfully suppressed.
There are now dozens of studies which show that women are as violent towards their partners, if not more so, than men. Unlike most feminist research, these studies ask men as well as women whether they have ever been on the receiving end of violence from their partners. They are therefore not only more balanced than studies which only ask about violence against women, but are more reliable indicators than official statistics which can be distorted by factors affecting the reporting rate - women using claims of violence as a weapon in custody cases, for example, or men who are too ashamed or embarrassed to reveal they have been abused.
Many people are likely to be astonished and sceptical about the conclusion drawn by these reports. The idea that women are as violent as men is counter-intuitive and simply disbelieved. So it is important to provide a flavour of the scope and significance of their findings.
A 1994 British study by Michelle Carrado and others, for example, interviewed 1,800 men and women with heterosexual partners. Some 11% of the men but only 5% of the women said their current partner had committed acts of violence towards them, ranging from pushing, through hitting, to stabbing. Five per cent of married or cohabiting men reported two or more acts of violence against them in a current relationship, compared with only 1% of women. A further 10% of men but 11% of women said they had committed one of these violent acts.
Study after study shows women are not merely violent in self-defence but strike the first blow in about half of all disputes. The American social scientists Murray Straus and Richard Gelles reported from two large national surveys that husbands and wives had assaulted each other at approximately equal rates, with women engaging in minor acts of violence more frequently. Elsewhere, they found more wives than husbands were severely violent towards their spouses.
Moreover, there is now considerable evidence that women initiate severe violence more frequently than men. A survey of 1,037 young adults born between 1972 and 1973 in Dunedin, New Zealand, found that 18.6% of young women said they had perpetrated severe physical violence against their partners, compared with 5.7% of young men. Three times more women than men said they had kicked or bitten their partners, or hit them with their fists or with an object.
In any event, the idea that women are never the instigators of violence is demolished by the evidence about lesbians.
According to Claire Renzetti, violence in lesbian relationships occurs with about the same frequency as in heterosexual relationships. Lesbian batterers "display a terrifying ingenuity in their selection of abusive tactics, frequently tailoring the abuse to the specific vulnerabilities of their partners". Such abuse can be extremely violent, with women bitten, kicked, punched, thrown down stairs, and assaulted with weapons including guns, knives, whips and broken bottles.
It is true that most women who are the victims of violence suffer domestic assaults. Yet the 1996 British Crime Survey reported that nearly one third of the victims of domestic violence were men, and that nearly half of these male victims were attacked by women. Moreover, if a woman starts a physical fight with a man, even a mild slap might provoke him into retaliating, with far worse consequences. Women who murder violent husbands may be treated leniently because they were provoked; yet men who are violent against women are never granted the same understanding. Provocation, it appears, is a feminist issue.
Moreover, given the greater strength of men, it is particularly noteworthy that so many women initiate violence against them. The fact is that men hold back. The psychologist John Archer has noted that, among female college students, 29% admitted initiating an assault on a male partner. Of those women, half said they had no fear of retaliation or, since men could easily defend themselves, they did not see their own physical aggression as a problem. In other words, far from assuming that men are violent, women take men's non-aggression for granted.
Archer went on to remark on the apparent restraint shown by many men in western cultures. "We might speculate that to some extent a strong norm of men not hitting women enables women to engage in physical aggression which might otherwise not have occurred," he wrote. Male aggression, he suggested, was a kind of default value associated with patriarchal structures.
When these are overridden, as they have been by modern secular liberal values and by the emancipation of women, female aggression increases. "These values will have greatest impact in a relationship that can be ended by the woman at little cost, and where the rate of male aggression is low. "We can speculate that these represent specific instances of a more general set of circumstances entailing a relative change in the balance of power between men and women."
In other words, as women have become independent of men, they have also become more violent towards them - because men have become dispensable. This unpalatable conclusion, however, has been completely overlooked in a culture that believes infamy is the prerogative of the male.
Much to everyone's astonishment, the Home Office recently produced its own evidence that domestic violence was not a male disease. In January 1999, it reported that 4.2% of women and 4.2% of men aged 16 to 59 said they had been physically assaulted by a current or former partner in the past year. Women separated from their partners were most likely to be victims, with 22% assaulted at least once in 1995.
The public reaction to the Home Office research was almost complete silence. The government, too, appeared impervious to its implications. Shortly after it was published, the Home Secretary opened a domestic violence court in Leeds that was founded on the explicit assumption that only men were violent.
In June this year, the Cabinet Office women's unit launched a campaign to "change the culture" that presented domestic violence as almost exclusively a problem of male crime. It managed to omit another under-reported fact: that most violence against children is committed by their mothers, not their fathers. A study by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children revealed a few years ago that natural mothers, not fathers, are most frequently the perpetrators of physical injury, emotional abuse and neglect. This is not particularly surprising, since mothers generally have much more daily contact than fathers with their children. There was yet another notable omission: the women's unit material did not differentiate between couples who were married and people who were living together or had irregular lovers.
It therefore omitted a key fact: that the risk of violence increases significantly for unmarried couples. The Home Office study itself observed that marital separation was a "key risk factor". Only 12.6 in every 1,000 married women are victims of violence, compared with 43.9 in every 1,000 never-married women and 66.5 in every 1,000 divorced or separated women. As husbands are replaced by partners and lovers, therefore, violence against women increases. Marriage is a strong safety factor for women.
Yet this is not said. Instead, the opposite idea is fostered, that violence against women typically takes place within marriage. In November 1998, the women's unit announced a new initiative. Children were urged to report violence against mothers and sisters. There was no mention of abuse against fathers. Instead, a television advertisement showed a husband berating his wife when she told him dinner would be late. That was the violence. It was followed by a helpline number for children to call if a woman in their house had been abused.
This fictional scenario illuminated some remarkable thinking by civil servants and ministers. It had become acceptable, it thus appeared, for children to inform on their fathers to teachers or "helplines" simply for shouting at their mothers. Shouting was now to be classified as domestic violence. If that is the case, then violence happens with enormous frequency in families. Don't women sometimes shout at men?
There was another telling aspect of this advertisement. It featured an "Oxo" middle-class nuclear family. The thinking behind this, according to the then Scottish Office minister Helen Liddell, was that "domestic abuse knows no boundaries of social class or social group". However, not only was this scenario not violence, but the nuclear family is the least likely setting for abuse of women or children. It was no accident, however, that it was chosen. The married nuclear family has to be demonised because it is said to be the vehicle for the oppression of women.
The outcome of all this is that it is now generally accepted that violence is intrinsically male. This is a gravely distorted picture. It is true that most recorded crime is committed by men. It does not follow, however, that most men commit crime. Yet this is the false conclusion that has been drawn, as the result of the suppression or distortion of the facts about violence as well as the message that is constantly promulgated that violence is a problem of masculinity. The evidence suggests that a quite different conclusion should be drawn. This is surely that both women and men are capable of aggression and violence, but that violent men, like violent women, are not typical of their sex.
---Extracted from The Sex Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male, by Melanie Phillips.
Quote: "The goal of these authors remained the redistribution of labour and wealth within the family, from men to women. Yet they conceded they had to do so without alienating the majority of people by attitudes that appeared to be hostile to men. The way they would do this would be to emphasise the interests of the children." - Melanie Phillips, "The Sex-Change Society", Melanie Phillips, 1999, Page123
http://www.melaniephillips.com/http://www.melaniephillips.com/books/
The Sex-Change Society- Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male
Melanie Phillips Paperback, 370 pages (1999)
Social Market Foundation. ISBN: 1-874097-64-X
The Sex-Change Society issues a devastating attack on androgynous public policy, arguing that feminism has distorted its own agenda of equality by replacing it with sameness. The results are startling. Men have been demonised through a distorted view that they are intrinsically violent and feckless while all women are essentially 'saint-like'. At the same time, women are being encouraged to work at all times, whether they want to or not. In this timely critique Melanie Phillips tells the disturbing story of the attempt to feminise the state, to reverse the roles of men and women and to run masculinity out of town altogether. The result has been an anti-family policy in which everyone has become a potential loser.-----------------------------------
-----------------------Unrelated article by Melanie Phillips re DV
http://www.travel-net.com/~retap/DV-1.htm
The Sunday Times (Britain)
24 October 1999
Women are at least as violent as men but the evidence is being dismissed or ignored
By Melanie Phillips
Mention feminism to most people and the reaction will probably be one of faintly amused indifference. Some men may be irritated by feminist rhetoric; some women might feel their agenda is a little extreme. But the extent to which feminism in its most extreme form has embedded itself within the institutions and thinking of Britain has simply not been grasped.
Feminism has become the unchallengeable orthodoxy in even the most apparently conservative institutions, and drives forward the whole programme of domestic social policy. Yet this orthodoxy is not based on concepts of fairness or justice or social solidarity. It is based on hostility towards men.
The idea that men oppress women, who therefore have every interest in avoiding the marriage trap and must achieve independence from men at all costs, may strike many as having little to do with everyday life. Yet it is now the galvanic principle behind social, economic and legal policy-making.
Buried within this doctrine, though, is an even deeper assumption. Male oppression of women is only made possible by the fact that men are intrinsically predatory and violent, threatening both women and children with rape or assault. Men are therefore the enemy - not just of women but of humanity, the proper objects of fear and scorn.
This assumption runs through feminist thinking as a given. "Most violence, most crime ... is not committed by human beings in general. It is committed by men," wrote Jill Tweedie.
According to Marilyn French, men used violence both to threaten and control, as well as actually harm: "As long as some men use physical force to subjugate females, all men need not. The knowledge that some men do suffices to threaten all women."
Moreover, it is marriage and family life that expose women most to male violence. According to Gloria Steinem, "patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself... The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown man in the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or lover in the isolation of their own home".
All this has been enough to turn the stomachs of some feminists, particularly those who love husbands or sons. Novelist Maggie Gee said she once thought the sex war was exciting, but had now concluded it went too far. "Women are giving up on their relationships too quickly. Living with a man I love very much, I keep thinking that all the generalisations about men just aren't true."
These generalisations, however, are now the stuff of public policy. Male violence against women, said the government in June 1999, was no longer going to be "swept under the carpet". Virtually nobody questioned the premise that men were invariably victimisers and women always their victims.
There is no doubt that some men are violent towards women; the evidence of women's injuries is real enough. However, this is one side of the story only. There is another side: the extent of women's violence against men and children. That, though, is a story that almost every official body in Britain and America has successfully suppressed.
There are now dozens of studies which show that women are as violent towards their partners, if not more so, than men. Unlike most feminist research, these studies ask men as well as women whether they have ever been on the receiving end of violence from their partners. They are therefore not only more balanced than studies which only ask about violence against women, but are more reliable indicators than official statistics which can be distorted by factors affecting the reporting rate - women using claims of violence as a weapon in custody cases, for example, or men who are too ashamed or embarrassed to reveal they have been abused.
Many people are likely to be astonished and sceptical about the conclusion drawn by these reports. The idea that women are as violent as men is counter-intuitive and simply disbelieved. So it is important to provide a flavour of the scope and significance of their findings.
A 1994 British study by Michelle Carrado and others, for example, interviewed 1,800 men and women with heterosexual partners. Some 11% of the men but only 5% of the women said their current partner had committed acts of violence towards them, ranging from pushing, through hitting, to stabbing. Five per cent of married or cohabiting men reported two or more acts of violence against them in a current relationship, compared with only 1% of women. A further 10% of men but 11% of women said they had committed one of these violent acts.
Study after study shows women are not merely violent in self-defence but strike the first blow in about half of all disputes. The American social scientists Murray Straus and Richard Gelles reported from two large national surveys that husbands and wives had assaulted each other at approximately equal rates, with women engaging in minor acts of violence more frequently. Elsewhere, they found more wives than husbands were severely violent towards their spouses.
Moreover, there is now considerable evidence that women initiate severe violence more frequently than men. A survey of 1,037 young adults born between 1972 and 1973 in Dunedin, New Zealand, found that 18.6% of young women said they had perpetrated severe physical violence against their partners, compared with 5.7% of young men. Three times more women than men said they had kicked or bitten their partners, or hit them with their fists or with an object.
In any event, the idea that women are never the instigators of violence is demolished by the evidence about lesbians.
According to Claire Renzetti, violence in lesbian relationships occurs with about the same frequency as in heterosexual relationships. Lesbian batterers "display a terrifying ingenuity in their selection of abusive tactics, frequently tailoring the abuse to the specific vulnerabilities of their partners". Such abuse can be extremely violent, with women bitten, kicked, punched, thrown down stairs, and assaulted with weapons including guns, knives, whips and broken bottles.
It is true that most women who are the victims of violence suffer domestic assaults. Yet the 1996 British Crime Survey reported that nearly one third of the victims of domestic violence were men, and that nearly half of these male victims were attacked by women. Moreover, if a woman starts a physical fight with a man, even a mild slap might provoke him into retaliating, with far worse consequences. Women who murder violent husbands may be treated leniently because they were provoked; yet men who are violent against women are never granted the same understanding. Provocation, it appears, is a feminist issue.
Moreover, given the greater strength of men, it is particularly noteworthy that so many women initiate violence against them. The fact is that men hold back. The psychologist John Archer has noted that, among female college students, 29% admitted initiating an assault on a male partner. Of those women, half said they had no fear of retaliation or, since men could easily defend themselves, they did not see their own physical aggression as a problem. In other words, far from assuming that men are violent, women take men's non-aggression for granted.
Archer went on to remark on the apparent restraint shown by many men in western cultures. "We might speculate that to some extent a strong norm of men not hitting women enables women to engage in physical aggression which might otherwise not have occurred," he wrote. Male aggression, he suggested, was a kind of default value associated with patriarchal structures.
When these are overridden, as they have been by modern secular liberal values and by the emancipation of women, female aggression increases. "These values will have greatest impact in a relationship that can be ended by the woman at little cost, and where the rate of male aggression is low. "We can speculate that these represent specific instances of a more general set of circumstances entailing a relative change in the balance of power between men and women."
In other words, as women have become independent of men, they have also become more violent towards them - because men have become dispensable. This unpalatable conclusion, however, has been completely overlooked in a culture that believes infamy is the prerogative of the male.
Much to everyone's astonishment, the Home Office recently produced its own evidence that domestic violence was not a male disease. In January 1999, it reported that 4.2% of women and 4.2% of men aged 16 to 59 said they had been physically assaulted by a current or former partner in the past year. Women separated from their partners were most likely to be victims, with 22% assaulted at least once in 1995.
The public reaction to the Home Office research was almost complete silence. The government, too, appeared impervious to its implications. Shortly after it was published, the Home Secretary opened a domestic violence court in Leeds that was founded on the explicit assumption that only men were violent.
In June this year, the Cabinet Office women's unit launched a campaign to "change the culture" that presented domestic violence as almost exclusively a problem of male crime. It managed to omit another under-reported fact: that most violence against children is committed by their mothers, not their fathers. A study by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children revealed a few years ago that natural mothers, not fathers, are most frequently the perpetrators of physical injury, emotional abuse and neglect. This is not particularly surprising, since mothers generally have much more daily contact than fathers with their children. There was yet another notable omission: the women's unit material did not differentiate between couples who were married and people who were living together or had irregular lovers.
It therefore omitted a key fact: that the risk of violence increases significantly for unmarried couples. The Home Office study itself observed that marital separation was a "key risk factor". Only 12.6 in every 1,000 married women are victims of violence, compared with 43.9 in every 1,000 never-married women and 66.5 in every 1,000 divorced or separated women. As husbands are replaced by partners and lovers, therefore, violence against women increases. Marriage is a strong safety factor for women.
Yet this is not said. Instead, the opposite idea is fostered, that violence against women typically takes place within marriage. In November 1998, the women's unit announced a new initiative. Children were urged to report violence against mothers and sisters. There was no mention of abuse against fathers. Instead, a television advertisement showed a husband berating his wife when she told him dinner would be late. That was the violence. It was followed by a helpline number for children to call if a woman in their house had been abused.
This fictional scenario illuminated some remarkable thinking by civil servants and ministers. It had become acceptable, it thus appeared, for children to inform on their fathers to teachers or "helplines" simply for shouting at their mothers. Shouting was now to be classified as domestic violence. If that is the case, then violence happens with enormous frequency in families. Don't women sometimes shout at men?
There was another telling aspect of this advertisement. It featured an "Oxo" middle-class nuclear family. The thinking behind this, according to the then Scottish Office minister Helen Liddell, was that "domestic abuse knows no boundaries of social class or social group". However, not only was this scenario not violence, but the nuclear family is the least likely setting for abuse of women or children. It was no accident, however, that it was chosen. The married nuclear family has to be demonised because it is said to be the vehicle for the oppression of women.
The outcome of all this is that it is now generally accepted that violence is intrinsically male. This is a gravely distorted picture. It is true that most recorded crime is committed by men. It does not follow, however, that most men commit crime. Yet this is the false conclusion that has been drawn, as the result of the suppression or distortion of the facts about violence as well as the message that is constantly promulgated that violence is a problem of masculinity. The evidence suggests that a quite different conclusion should be drawn. This is surely that both women and men are capable of aggression and violence, but that violent men, like violent women, are not typical of their sex.
---Extracted from The Sex Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male, by Melanie Phillips.
Mediator says no contact, ever, because mum doesn't want it
An acquaintance separated from his partner before the baby was born.
He arrived at the hospital to see his new born child, accompanied by his sister. He was not aggressive. He is polite, soft-spoken and well-mannered.
The mum punched him in the face. The nurse was a witness. He has suffered mild whiplash since. He hasn't asked the nurse to be a witness, but feels it very unlikely she would testify anyway. The courts give mums plenty of lee-way regarding their behaviour around the time of birth.
This acquaintance went to a mediation session at the Family Court. His ex-partner was not present in the room (possibly not present at the mediation). The (female) mediator told him quite categorically that he could expect absolutely no contact with his new born daughter "because the mother doesn't want it."
This was not - say - over the next few weeks while the mother and baby bonded. This was EVER !
He found the mediator very patronising - let's say - 'matronising'.
This acquaintance was reasonably confident going in to the Family Court process and wasn't really looking for advice. He had confidence in a system which he believed was fair and based on common sense. He came out of that mediation session shell-shocked, and immediately began visiting solicitors and groups to get advice and help make sense of what appeared to him outrageous behaviour by the mediator.
It amazes me how many people say to me "but the Family Court has all changed hasn't it ? It is all fair and equal now, no ?"
The government has done a good job of sowing deceptive information in the media to make people think things have changed. As I have said previously, one senior Family Court official said to me that the changes were merely a "repackaged brief".
It because of the lack of a Presumption of Equal Parenting Time, and an unwillngness to enforce orders and impose appropriate penalties (but NOT by reducing access to the children except in extreme and chronic cases where they constitute child abuse) when the mother (or father) contravenes them, that people must continually return to the court system, with all the amplification of conflict and stress this entails.
The Family Court system in Australia is ethically and philosophically bankrupt. The government should be held accountable for the damage they have done and their failure to rectify the situation. But as we know, governments are rarely held accountable except in clear cases of breaking the law (even in cases of genocide, government officials can often get away with murder).
In a true democracy, a class action suit would be brought against the government, and fathers who had had their rights abused would be compensated, and the law would be changed to a Presumption of Equal Parenting Time. But the Dads Movement is not sufficiently organised, and even if they were, the government would continue to control the agenda of the courts in such a way that it would not be able to even consider such a case.
Moreover, no one talks about the rights of parents. It is politically incorrect to do so. Such rhetoric is seen as neglecting the best interests of the child, as if they were somehow mutually exclusive.
Meanwhile, radical feminists like Elspeth McInnes continue to fearmonger. For example Elspeth was quoted in a newspaper article a few days ago as saying that 66% of cases before the Family Court system involve safety issues with the children. Does this include the plethora of cases involving false or grossly exaggerated claims of domestic violence for which a DVO has been handed down whether or not the matter has even been investigated ?
In the case mentioned above, I suggest it reflects a strategy by Family Court staff to fulfill their brief of minimising the number of cases that go to trial by intimidating one of the litigants - nearly always the father, with the objective that they become demoralised and compliant with the demands of the other party - ie the mother. The Dad is more likely to be a self-represented litigant and an easier target.
I suggest the mediator is taking advantage of the fact that the medition session is not recorded and that she cannot be quoted in court proceedings.
I suggest that all mediation sessions be recorded, and that the recordings can be quoted whenever any of the participants deem appropriate. The lack of transparency aids the ongoing injustice.
The mediator mentioned above should be taken to task. I suggest that if she display this type of behaviour again, she should be sacked. But it is almost certain that she continues to behave in this way.
He arrived at the hospital to see his new born child, accompanied by his sister. He was not aggressive. He is polite, soft-spoken and well-mannered.
The mum punched him in the face. The nurse was a witness. He has suffered mild whiplash since. He hasn't asked the nurse to be a witness, but feels it very unlikely she would testify anyway. The courts give mums plenty of lee-way regarding their behaviour around the time of birth.
This acquaintance went to a mediation session at the Family Court. His ex-partner was not present in the room (possibly not present at the mediation). The (female) mediator told him quite categorically that he could expect absolutely no contact with his new born daughter "because the mother doesn't want it."
This was not - say - over the next few weeks while the mother and baby bonded. This was EVER !
He found the mediator very patronising - let's say - 'matronising'.
This acquaintance was reasonably confident going in to the Family Court process and wasn't really looking for advice. He had confidence in a system which he believed was fair and based on common sense. He came out of that mediation session shell-shocked, and immediately began visiting solicitors and groups to get advice and help make sense of what appeared to him outrageous behaviour by the mediator.
It amazes me how many people say to me "but the Family Court has all changed hasn't it ? It is all fair and equal now, no ?"
The government has done a good job of sowing deceptive information in the media to make people think things have changed. As I have said previously, one senior Family Court official said to me that the changes were merely a "repackaged brief".
It because of the lack of a Presumption of Equal Parenting Time, and an unwillngness to enforce orders and impose appropriate penalties (but NOT by reducing access to the children except in extreme and chronic cases where they constitute child abuse) when the mother (or father) contravenes them, that people must continually return to the court system, with all the amplification of conflict and stress this entails.
The Family Court system in Australia is ethically and philosophically bankrupt. The government should be held accountable for the damage they have done and their failure to rectify the situation. But as we know, governments are rarely held accountable except in clear cases of breaking the law (even in cases of genocide, government officials can often get away with murder).
In a true democracy, a class action suit would be brought against the government, and fathers who had had their rights abused would be compensated, and the law would be changed to a Presumption of Equal Parenting Time. But the Dads Movement is not sufficiently organised, and even if they were, the government would continue to control the agenda of the courts in such a way that it would not be able to even consider such a case.
Moreover, no one talks about the rights of parents. It is politically incorrect to do so. Such rhetoric is seen as neglecting the best interests of the child, as if they were somehow mutually exclusive.
Meanwhile, radical feminists like Elspeth McInnes continue to fearmonger. For example Elspeth was quoted in a newspaper article a few days ago as saying that 66% of cases before the Family Court system involve safety issues with the children. Does this include the plethora of cases involving false or grossly exaggerated claims of domestic violence for which a DVO has been handed down whether or not the matter has even been investigated ?
In the case mentioned above, I suggest it reflects a strategy by Family Court staff to fulfill their brief of minimising the number of cases that go to trial by intimidating one of the litigants - nearly always the father, with the objective that they become demoralised and compliant with the demands of the other party - ie the mother. The Dad is more likely to be a self-represented litigant and an easier target.
I suggest the mediator is taking advantage of the fact that the medition session is not recorded and that she cannot be quoted in court proceedings.
I suggest that all mediation sessions be recorded, and that the recordings can be quoted whenever any of the participants deem appropriate. The lack of transparency aids the ongoing injustice.
The mediator mentioned above should be taken to task. I suggest that if she display this type of behaviour again, she should be sacked. But it is almost certain that she continues to behave in this way.
An example of using DVOs for parental alienation
I am posting an account of one Dad about a DVO charge against him, which had no justification in the first place, and which he is struggling to have removed.
If anybody thinks that women do not regularly use false accusations of domestic violence to have DVO charges laid against the Dad to minimise the child's contact with the father, then they are either naive or in denial.
"I do not know this for a fact, but I have been told by some people here in Western Australia not to make a report to the police about being abused by your wife. If you do the police will remove me (the victim) and I will be prevented from going back home. This is because they believe the children are still far safer with the abusive woman/mother than they would be with the father.
"This was a question I had asked some people before my ex went and got the restraining order out on me. Apparently Western Australia has a more draconian set of Domestic Violence laws than the rest of the country. This is a problem we all have to suffer when we have politicians in positions of great power with gender-biased agendas.
"So, I followed the advice and did nothing, but my ex-partner went and made a report against me ! and I ended up DVO.
"On the 30th of this month (July), I am in court for the very first time since the order was taken out against me 18 months ago, with an application to cancel the DVO.
"I do not feel confident, but I just cannot see how they can keep this order against me when the ex has not one shred of evidence against me that I have committed any acts of domestic violence against her or our children.
"Obviously I will be on my own in court and I am facing a female magistrate who apparently has a reputation for giving women what they want and caning men.
"I will try to not believe that until she has behaved that way toward me, because I normally do not judge a person until I have met them myself, and I see no reason to change now.
"So, I am going to be pointing out the fact that my ex-partner has no proof, and that the children are suffering terribly, because of her use of the DVO to control and silence me".PG
If anybody thinks that women do not regularly use false accusations of domestic violence to have DVO charges laid against the Dad to minimise the child's contact with the father, then they are either naive or in denial.
"I do not know this for a fact, but I have been told by some people here in Western Australia not to make a report to the police about being abused by your wife. If you do the police will remove me (the victim) and I will be prevented from going back home. This is because they believe the children are still far safer with the abusive woman/mother than they would be with the father.
"This was a question I had asked some people before my ex went and got the restraining order out on me. Apparently Western Australia has a more draconian set of Domestic Violence laws than the rest of the country. This is a problem we all have to suffer when we have politicians in positions of great power with gender-biased agendas.
"So, I followed the advice and did nothing, but my ex-partner went and made a report against me ! and I ended up DVO.
"On the 30th of this month (July), I am in court for the very first time since the order was taken out against me 18 months ago, with an application to cancel the DVO.
"I do not feel confident, but I just cannot see how they can keep this order against me when the ex has not one shred of evidence against me that I have committed any acts of domestic violence against her or our children.
"Obviously I will be on my own in court and I am facing a female magistrate who apparently has a reputation for giving women what they want and caning men.
"I will try to not believe that until she has behaved that way toward me, because I normally do not judge a person until I have met them myself, and I see no reason to change now.
"So, I am going to be pointing out the fact that my ex-partner has no proof, and that the children are suffering terribly, because of her use of the DVO to control and silence me".PG
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Jail term for mum halved
Family Court policy seems to fluctuate wildly - one minute giving the children contact with the dad, the next taking it away again for no apparent reason.
How can the Family Court justify giving the children only six hours a months contact with their dad ?
Why did the Court do this ? Because the mum cannot handle allowing the children contact with their dad ?
The Family Court system believes they are acting in the child's best interests by pandering to mums. But they send the wrong signal (it's ok to behave inappropriately) and create more conflict in the longterm.
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,22052211-5001021,00.html
The Daily Telegraph
11 July 2007
Jailed mum would do it all again
By Janet Fife-Yeomans
A mother who went to jail in a tug-of-love row with her ex-partner was quickly reunited with her son and daughter after her release from prison.
As she hugged her young children yesterday, the mother - who made legal history - told The Daily Telegraph that she would do it all again.
"It would but it's not easy," the woman, who cannot be identified, said.
"I'm just giving them as much love as I can."
She was jailed in March by the Federal Magistrates' Court after refusing to allow her ex-partner access to their children, a boy, 8, and girl, 6.
She was already on a good behaviour bond for defying court orders when Magistrate Michael Jarrett, sitting in Lismore, took the rare step of jailing her for four months.
In May, the Full Bench of the Family Court, made up of three judges, halved her four-month sentence and released her immediately from jail.Lawyers expect the judgment, yet to be published, to set fresh guidelines, raising the bar for the jailing of parents who contravene court orders.
In jail for two months, the mother received support from fellow inmates, who praised her for being "gutsy" in standing up for her children and baked her a 31st birthday cake.
Yesterday she revealed how she got through with prayer and believing she had done the right thing."
It was very rough," she said of the first night in a cell, with her children ordered by the court to live with their father."
Our families are the most important assets our country has and we need to keep them together. They had never lived with their father since we separated."
Refused Legal Aid, the woman organised an appeal from her cell with financial help from family.
She said her children were "extremely confused" after the court ordered the father to return the children to their mother the day after she got out of jail."
"What can I say? They've had a really hard time of it ...," she said.
"Our children are precious but they are treated like slabs of meat by the courts in many cases and it's very sad."
Steven Tester, the solicitor for the woman's ex-partner, said the children had "a ball" living with their father.
Court orders have now restricted the father's access to six hours a month.
How can the Family Court justify giving the children only six hours a months contact with their dad ?
Why did the Court do this ? Because the mum cannot handle allowing the children contact with their dad ?
The Family Court system believes they are acting in the child's best interests by pandering to mums. But they send the wrong signal (it's ok to behave inappropriately) and create more conflict in the longterm.
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,22052211-5001021,00.html
The Daily Telegraph
11 July 2007
Jailed mum would do it all again
By Janet Fife-Yeomans
A mother who went to jail in a tug-of-love row with her ex-partner was quickly reunited with her son and daughter after her release from prison.
As she hugged her young children yesterday, the mother - who made legal history - told The Daily Telegraph that she would do it all again.
"It would but it's not easy," the woman, who cannot be identified, said.
"I'm just giving them as much love as I can."
She was jailed in March by the Federal Magistrates' Court after refusing to allow her ex-partner access to their children, a boy, 8, and girl, 6.
She was already on a good behaviour bond for defying court orders when Magistrate Michael Jarrett, sitting in Lismore, took the rare step of jailing her for four months.
In May, the Full Bench of the Family Court, made up of three judges, halved her four-month sentence and released her immediately from jail.Lawyers expect the judgment, yet to be published, to set fresh guidelines, raising the bar for the jailing of parents who contravene court orders.
In jail for two months, the mother received support from fellow inmates, who praised her for being "gutsy" in standing up for her children and baked her a 31st birthday cake.
Yesterday she revealed how she got through with prayer and believing she had done the right thing."
It was very rough," she said of the first night in a cell, with her children ordered by the court to live with their father."
Our families are the most important assets our country has and we need to keep them together. They had never lived with their father since we separated."
Refused Legal Aid, the woman organised an appeal from her cell with financial help from family.
She said her children were "extremely confused" after the court ordered the father to return the children to their mother the day after she got out of jail."
"What can I say? They've had a really hard time of it ...," she said.
"Our children are precious but they are treated like slabs of meat by the courts in many cases and it's very sad."
Steven Tester, the solicitor for the woman's ex-partner, said the children had "a ball" living with their father.
Court orders have now restricted the father's access to six hours a month.
Sunday, July 8, 2007
Pedophile hysteria
Printed on www.theageonline.com.au
The Bogeyman Myth
Simon Castles
July 8, 2007
In seeking to protect our children from pedophiles, we are also, sadly, undermining the healthy bonds between men and children.
At my local cafe, which is plain and daggy enough to be family-friendly, children often sidle up to where I'm reading the paper to say hello. They don't actually say hello, of course. They stare at me, seemingly fascinated, or say something random like, "I've got white shoes on", or they show me something they're holding in their sticky little hands.
Occasionally, if I'm on one of the couches, they'll climb on up, placing a steadying hand on my thigh as their feet sink into the cushions.
When I'm with my girlfriend, these moments are amiable and warm. The child's parents are at ease (as much as parents can be). When I'm on my own, though, it's different. Something darker enters the picture when it's just me, a man in his mid-30s alone, and there's a child who has wandered away from his or her parents in search of distraction. I sense the parents' apprehension, even as they try to fight it. Discomfort acts like a contagion: they feel it, I feel it, the child feels it. It's as if the moment can't quite bear the weight of all the things thought and not said.I suspect most men know this dispiriting feeling.
In an age haunted by the spectre of pedophilia, average men do pay a price for the sins of a few. It's in the wariness and suspicion that now attends their interactions with children. A clearly positive imperative — to protect children from a most repugnant crime — has a downside, in the way it has corrupted the informal, healthy bonds between men and children.
Many men today worry (and if you don't believe me, ask a few) about appearing to enjoy children too much, about innocently touching children, about picking children up from school, about photographing children. The natural has come to feel aberrant.
Men have every right to feel saddened by this, and even a little angry. It is not in any way to play down the crime of child sex abuse to point out that, in our response to it, the sensitivities of the majority of men are somewhat trampled because of the actions of a minority.
Nowhere is this sad fact better illustrated than in a policy now common in the aviation industry. On many major airlines, including Qantas, United Airlines and British Airways, men are banned from sitting next to a child travelling alone. News of this discriminatory policy came to light when average blokes began coming forward with stories of their humiliation at being shifted — with suspicious passengers looking on — away from children. (Qantas says it moves the children, not the men.)
British MP and journalist Boris Johnson recently revealed how he was asked to move on a British Airways flight. "We have very strict rules," the stewardess told a confused Johnson. "A man cannot sit with children." Johnson remained seated to allow the children next to him to say something. "But he's our father," they chimed.
Airlines have defended the policy by saying they're simply erring on the side of caution and reflecting the concerns and wishes of parents. But in their efforts to cover (presumably for legal reasons) what is surely a minuscule risk, they stamp all men potentially dodgy, and send a message to children that men aren't to be trusted.
A policy like this does more harm than good. It takes risk aversion to a phobic extreme. It insults men, and cottonwool-balls children. It views all interactions between men and children as somehow poisonous, which actually blurs the distinction between good and bad.
Some will say that if such a policy saves just one child from abuse, it will have been worthwhile. This sounds like common sense, but really isn't. What of the damage — impossible to measure — done to the fabric of society by practices that essentially presume guilt in all men, foster suspicion, collapse trust, and discourage casual bonding between men and children?
Given the social trend towards seeing male interaction with children as potentially suspect, it is hardly surprising that the number of men lining up to work with kids continues to fall. In the past decade, the proportion of male primary teachers in Australia dropped from 23.8 per cent to 20.6 per cent. The younger the children, the less likely a man will be within cooee: in Victoria, about 1 per cent of preschool teachers are male.
A culture of suspicion must also impact on the number of men willing to put their hand up to coach a sports team or help with a school camp. A recent study by a British children's charity found that 13 per cent of men wouldn't volunteer to work with children because they feared being judged a pedophile.
There is a terrible paradox here. Good men are staying away from supervising children for fear of how they will be perceived, and yet at the same time many parents — and particularly single mothers — desperately want their children, especially their sons, to be exposed to good male role models. No parent wants a child's schooling and play to be a male-free zone, and yet society looks with some wariness at men who are keen to mentor and coach children. Messages are mixed, instincts are in conflict.
The sadness of all this is trumped by the difficulty of knowing exactly what to do about it. There are pedophiles in the world, after all, and parents want to protect their children with every ounce of their beings.But we mustn't allow a fear of pedophiles to turn into a phobia that undermines much more than it achieves. All phobias begin with a "what if" scenario that builds on its own logic, escalates in intensity, and turns an unlikely occurrence into something so terrifyingly real that it seems perfectly sensible and rational to shut out the world and bolt the door. It isn't. About 95 per cent of child sex abuse happens within families. The abuser is likely to be someone the parents and the child knows — not the creepy stranger at the park (or on the plane) who looms large in the collective imagination. We may like to think we can lock child abuse out, but the sad truth is we are more likely to lock it in.
Today, most people over 30 can't help but notice, usually with some wistfulness, that children don't play on suburban streets any more. We have become very protective of children, and fearful of neighbourhood threats that, on the evidence, are no greater than they ever were. Perhaps as our own lives feel busier and less certain in areas like work and housing, overprotecting children becomes a means of securing some sense of order and control.
Whatever the case, treating all men as potential predators will do nothing to stamp out child abuse. But it will give rise to horrors — not of bad men touching children in ways that revolt us, but of good men too scared to touch children at all.
Simon Castles is a Melbourne writer.
The Bogeyman Myth
Simon Castles
July 8, 2007
In seeking to protect our children from pedophiles, we are also, sadly, undermining the healthy bonds between men and children.
At my local cafe, which is plain and daggy enough to be family-friendly, children often sidle up to where I'm reading the paper to say hello. They don't actually say hello, of course. They stare at me, seemingly fascinated, or say something random like, "I've got white shoes on", or they show me something they're holding in their sticky little hands.
Occasionally, if I'm on one of the couches, they'll climb on up, placing a steadying hand on my thigh as their feet sink into the cushions.
When I'm with my girlfriend, these moments are amiable and warm. The child's parents are at ease (as much as parents can be). When I'm on my own, though, it's different. Something darker enters the picture when it's just me, a man in his mid-30s alone, and there's a child who has wandered away from his or her parents in search of distraction. I sense the parents' apprehension, even as they try to fight it. Discomfort acts like a contagion: they feel it, I feel it, the child feels it. It's as if the moment can't quite bear the weight of all the things thought and not said.I suspect most men know this dispiriting feeling.
In an age haunted by the spectre of pedophilia, average men do pay a price for the sins of a few. It's in the wariness and suspicion that now attends their interactions with children. A clearly positive imperative — to protect children from a most repugnant crime — has a downside, in the way it has corrupted the informal, healthy bonds between men and children.
Many men today worry (and if you don't believe me, ask a few) about appearing to enjoy children too much, about innocently touching children, about picking children up from school, about photographing children. The natural has come to feel aberrant.
Men have every right to feel saddened by this, and even a little angry. It is not in any way to play down the crime of child sex abuse to point out that, in our response to it, the sensitivities of the majority of men are somewhat trampled because of the actions of a minority.
Nowhere is this sad fact better illustrated than in a policy now common in the aviation industry. On many major airlines, including Qantas, United Airlines and British Airways, men are banned from sitting next to a child travelling alone. News of this discriminatory policy came to light when average blokes began coming forward with stories of their humiliation at being shifted — with suspicious passengers looking on — away from children. (Qantas says it moves the children, not the men.)
British MP and journalist Boris Johnson recently revealed how he was asked to move on a British Airways flight. "We have very strict rules," the stewardess told a confused Johnson. "A man cannot sit with children." Johnson remained seated to allow the children next to him to say something. "But he's our father," they chimed.
Airlines have defended the policy by saying they're simply erring on the side of caution and reflecting the concerns and wishes of parents. But in their efforts to cover (presumably for legal reasons) what is surely a minuscule risk, they stamp all men potentially dodgy, and send a message to children that men aren't to be trusted.
A policy like this does more harm than good. It takes risk aversion to a phobic extreme. It insults men, and cottonwool-balls children. It views all interactions between men and children as somehow poisonous, which actually blurs the distinction between good and bad.
Some will say that if such a policy saves just one child from abuse, it will have been worthwhile. This sounds like common sense, but really isn't. What of the damage — impossible to measure — done to the fabric of society by practices that essentially presume guilt in all men, foster suspicion, collapse trust, and discourage casual bonding between men and children?
Given the social trend towards seeing male interaction with children as potentially suspect, it is hardly surprising that the number of men lining up to work with kids continues to fall. In the past decade, the proportion of male primary teachers in Australia dropped from 23.8 per cent to 20.6 per cent. The younger the children, the less likely a man will be within cooee: in Victoria, about 1 per cent of preschool teachers are male.
A culture of suspicion must also impact on the number of men willing to put their hand up to coach a sports team or help with a school camp. A recent study by a British children's charity found that 13 per cent of men wouldn't volunteer to work with children because they feared being judged a pedophile.
There is a terrible paradox here. Good men are staying away from supervising children for fear of how they will be perceived, and yet at the same time many parents — and particularly single mothers — desperately want their children, especially their sons, to be exposed to good male role models. No parent wants a child's schooling and play to be a male-free zone, and yet society looks with some wariness at men who are keen to mentor and coach children. Messages are mixed, instincts are in conflict.
The sadness of all this is trumped by the difficulty of knowing exactly what to do about it. There are pedophiles in the world, after all, and parents want to protect their children with every ounce of their beings.But we mustn't allow a fear of pedophiles to turn into a phobia that undermines much more than it achieves. All phobias begin with a "what if" scenario that builds on its own logic, escalates in intensity, and turns an unlikely occurrence into something so terrifyingly real that it seems perfectly sensible and rational to shut out the world and bolt the door. It isn't. About 95 per cent of child sex abuse happens within families. The abuser is likely to be someone the parents and the child knows — not the creepy stranger at the park (or on the plane) who looms large in the collective imagination. We may like to think we can lock child abuse out, but the sad truth is we are more likely to lock it in.
Today, most people over 30 can't help but notice, usually with some wistfulness, that children don't play on suburban streets any more. We have become very protective of children, and fearful of neighbourhood threats that, on the evidence, are no greater than they ever were. Perhaps as our own lives feel busier and less certain in areas like work and housing, overprotecting children becomes a means of securing some sense of order and control.
Whatever the case, treating all men as potential predators will do nothing to stamp out child abuse. But it will give rise to horrors — not of bad men touching children in ways that revolt us, but of good men too scared to touch children at all.
Simon Castles is a Melbourne writer.
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