Where have all the dads gone? Ask America's judicial system

[Feckless]

Dianna Thompson: Where have all the dads gone? Ask America's judicial system
Date published: 6/15/2001

By DIANNA THOMPSON

LAKE FOREST, Calif.--Father's Day, our national celebration of fatherhood, traditionally evokes warm memories of the times we spent with our fathers; taking that first bike ride, catching our first fish, or the look on Dad's face when he solemnly handed over the car keys for
the first time.
These recollections last a lifetime; indeed, they are integral threads in the fabric of our lives. Unfortunately, too many American children will never experience these fond memories.
In 1966, President Johnson declared the third Sunday of June Father's Day. But now, startling research shows that 35 years later, half of America's children are living apart from their fathers. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1960 20 percent of all marriages ended in divorce; in 1990, that number was up to nearly half of all marriages.
And 1999 marked the first time that a full one-third of all U.S. births were to unwed mothers, according to the National Center for Health and Statistics.
Moreover, it isn't always a happy Father's Day for the 14 million noncustodial parents in this country. Many fathers won't even get to see their children Sunday unless the day falls on their every-other-weekend visitation schedule.
These days, traditional parental roles become somewhat blurred. Fathers nurture and make dinner, mothers work and pay the bills. Unfortunately, many of society's institutions haven't caught up in this evolving social landscape.
The courts must recognize that we are no longer living in the 1950s. With more women than ever in the work force, fathers are actively involved in the day-in, day-out caring for their children. Yet in custody battles, women receive custody 84.1 percent of the time, according to the Census Bureau.
Nothing stuns a divorcing father as deeply as hearing a judge relegate him from caring role model to mere "visitor" in his children's lives. More important, no child should ever lose a parent as a result of a divorce in which he or she had no choice.


Furthermore, noncustodial fathers routinely have to contend with access denial and visitation interference. This has reached epidemic proportions, yet the courts do little to stop it. According to Joan Berlin Kelley and Judith Wallerstein in their book "Surviving the Breakup," more than half of mothers report they see no reason for their children continuing to have contact with their father following a divorce. In the book "Fathers' Rights," one of us, Jeffery Leving, notes, "Only one in six divorced fathers sees his children once a week or more. Almost 40 percent of children who live with their mothers haven't seen their father in at least a year."
The effects of fatherlessness are alarming. Statistically, fatherless children are twice as likely to drop out of school; three of four teen suicides occur in single-parent families; 70 percent of children in juvenile detention grew up in fatherless homes; girls are 164 percent more likely to become pregnant before marriage and 900 percent more likely to suffer rape/sexual abuse. The
list goes on.
Father absence affects everyone in society, a fact increasingly recognized by the public. According to a 1996 Gallup Poll, 79.1 percent of Americans feel "the most significant family or social problem facing America is the physical absence of the father from the home."
Grandmothers, sisters, friends, and second wives are also affected. Many custodial mothers live with noncustodial fathers, and some women are noncustodial parents. Thus, women have become vocal supporters of fatherhood issues. In fact, women make up half of the membership of the largest national organization representing noncustodial parents and promoting shared parenting--the American Coalition for Fathers and Children.
Another court-made debacle involves the increasing number of men now being made to financially support children that DNA testing has proven aren't theirs. Why? Because state agencies need to comply with federal welfare laws directing them to identify 90 percent of the fathers of children born out of wedlock or lose federal funding.
Governmental institutions have a long way to go toward offering parity between the genders. Last year, a U.S. Senate resolution was passed unanimously to designate Father's Day as "Responsible Father's Day." The measure, as reported in the Washington Times, "lists the consequences
of fatherlessness and calls for fathers to 'use the day to reconnect and rededicate themselves to their children's lives.'" (Feck: *shakes head in disbelief*)

Unfortunately, the resolution didn't offer any suggestions to fathers who have limited visitation schedules, compounded
by access and visitation interference, on just how they can "reconnect and rededicate themselves."
Where have all the fathers gone? Are they becoming an endangered species? No. Fathers are right where the courts put them--locked out of their children's lives.
Rather than demoting fathers to mere visitor status, we need to let policy-makers know that we as a society value fathers, and that Father's Day is really every day for millions of children who need their dad.
DIANNA THOMPSON is executive director of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children. JEFFERY LEVING, an attorney, is the author of "Fathers Rights."

Fredericksburg.com - Dianna Thompson: Where have all the dads gone? Ask America's judicial system


Yeah my sources getting older...but look at the numbers...SCARY!

[Feckless]

Ah fits well, too:

Plundering fatherhood
Posted: June 16, 2001
1:00 am Eastern

By Stephen Baskerville
© 2008 Stephen Baskerville



Fatherhood is all the rage. President Bush unveils a $315 million plan "to promote responsible fatherhood." Sen. Evan Bayh, head of the Democratic Leadership Council, hosts a televised conference on "Connecting Fathers and Families" and promises to make fatherhood a top issue. Both houses of Congress, plus the governors and mayors, create bipartisan taskforces on "fatherhood promotion" and issue resolutions affirming the importance of fathers. The National Fatherhood Initiative holds a Fatherhood Summit in Washington on June 7-8.
How, precisely, the state can promote something as personal and private as a parent's relationship with his own children (let alone whether it should) is seldom explained. But if government fatherhood programs sound somewhat nebulous, there is a more concrete side to our leaders' discovery of fatherhood. In 1998, President Clinton signed the ominously-named "Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act" and announced a "new child support crackdown ... to identify, analyze, and investigate [parents] for criminal prosecution." On the campaign trail Al Gore called for jailing more fathers.
In Virginia, a commission dominated by [COLOR=blue ! important][COLOR=blue ! important]lawyers[/COLOR][/COLOR], judges and feminists moves to increase child-support obligations. In Alabama the government calls fathers "dogs" and announces increased measures to hunt them down.
That a crisis of fatherhood exists can hardly be denied. Forty percent of American children and 60 percent of African-American children now live without their fathers. Moreover, the social and personal pathologies directly attributable to father absence – crime, unwed motherhood, truancy, drugs and alcohol – are now too well known to belabor.
But what may be at work here is government, once again, creating a problem for itself to solve. Certainly policymakers are so intent on registering their concern that they never stop to tell us where the problem comes from in the first place. The often unspoken assumption is that these fathers have, in Clinton's words, "chosen to abandon their children." Yet there is no evidence this is true.
No academic or government study has ever demonstrated that large numbers of fathers are voluntarily abandoning their children. On the other hand, no knowledgeable policymaker or scholar denies that millions of fathers are involuntarily separated from their children by government officials.
Of the almost 1 million [COLOR=blue ! important][COLOR=blue ! important]divorces[/COLOR] each year involving children, at least two-thirds to three-fourths are initiated by mothers,[/COLOR] according to Sanford Braver of Arizona State University and other scholars. In the largest federally-funded study ever undertaken on the subject, Braver confirmed previous studies showing that overwhelmingly it is mothers, not fathers, who are walking away from marriages without legal grounds. These divorcing mothers have virtual certainty of getting the children and a large portion of the father's income, regardless of any fault on their part.
What is happening in divorce courts is much more serious than gender bias against fathers. A massive divorce industry is finding it increasingly easy – and lucrative – to simply eliminate fathers from their families with no show of wrongdoing and seize control of their children. The industry consists of judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, social workers, bureaucratic police and women's groups – all of whom have one interest in common: separating as many children from their fathers as possible. A father can then be plundered for almost any amount in coerced [COLOR=blue ! important][COLOR=blue ! important]attorneys[/COLOR]' fees, involuntary psychotherapy, and "child support" which his children may never see. [/COLOR]Failure to pay frequently results in incarceration without trial.
"The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals," wrote Ayn Rand. "When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."
What we are seeing today is nothing less than the criminalization of fatherhood itself: criminal penalties imposed on parents who have committed no act but are made outlaws through the actions of others in ways they are powerless to avoid. Once the father is stripped of custody, his contact with his own children outside government-approved times and locations becomes a criminal act. His criminalization is further consolidated through forced legal fees and impossible child-support burdens.
Child support obligations are determined by the same enforcement personnel who collect them. Such legislating by courts and enforcement agencies raises serious questions about the separation of powers and the constitutionality of the process. Where government officials develop an interest in hunting "delinquents," it is predictable that they will create delinquents to hunt. The more onerous the child-support levels, and the more defaults and arrearages, the more demand for coercive enforcement and for the personnel and powers required.
Private collection firms, such as Policy Studies, Inc., of Denver, are also involved in setting the levels of what they collect. Not only does an obvious conflict-of-interest arise in terms of the amount to be collected, but the firms can create precisely the "delinquents" and "deadbeats" they are hired to pursue and on which their business depends.
A presumption of guilt pervades the courts themselves, where "the burden of proof may be shifted to the defendant" according to a legal analysis by the National Council of State Legislatures. In clear violation of the Constitution, courts have held that "not all child support contempt proceedings classified as criminal are entitled to a jury trial," and "even indigent obligors are not necessarily entitled to a lawyer." Thus impoverished parents who lose their children through literally "no fault" of their own are the only citizens who – when they are fortunate enough to be formally charged and tried at all, before being incarcerated – must prove their innocence without counsel and without a jury of their peers.
Rather than confronting this appalling violation of both family integrity and constitutional rights, our elected leaders are cooking up fatherhood programs that may do more harm than good. In Massachusetts, state officials have used federal money to draw up a list of "Five Principles of Fatherhood," including: "give affection to my children" and "demonstrate respect at all times to the mother of my children." One cannot help but wonder what penalties the state will bring to bear on fathers who fail to show sufficient "affection" and "respect."
In an attempt to soften its image, the National [COLOR=blue ! important][COLOR=blue ! important]Child [COLOR=blue ! important]Support [/COLOR][COLOR=blue ! important]Enforcement[/COLOR][/COLOR][/COLOR] Association declares, "Child support is more than money. Child support also is [COLOR=blue ! important][COLOR=blue ! important]love[/COLOR][/COLOR], emotional support and responsibility." Yet there is something troubling about bureaucratic police taking it upon themselves to define and enforce a parent's love and emotional support of his own children. Is the state, with its armed agents and penal apparatus, mandated to punish fathers deemed to be delinquent on this as well?
There is nothing mutually exclusive about protecting the rights of parents and their children not to be separated without cause and enforcing [COLOR=blue ! important][COLOR=blue ! important]child [COLOR=blue ! important]support [/COLOR][COLOR=blue ! important]collection[/COLOR][/COLOR][/COLOR] on those men who truly abandon the offspring they have sired. Requiring men to accept financial responsibility for their progeny has been a matter of public policy for centuries. Forcing fathers to "finance the filching of their own children," as attorney and author Jed Abraham puts it, is a prescription for social and political destruction. Yet this is the experiment on which we are now embarked.
It might not be necessary for government to promote fatherhood if only government would stop destroying it.

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=23271

[Percy]

The Family Court MUST be destroyed.

I am sick to the stomach with such nbarbed insults as 'Responsible Father's Day'.

These frigging' politicians with their heads up their arses can all go to Hell.

The Family Courts are Responsible for family carnage. The Judges should be destroyed.

NO one is ANGRY enough.

[Marx]

NO one is ANGRY enough.

Oh, I'm angry.. I'm just so tired of being angry. I'd love to live a peaceful life again, like it used to be when I was ignorant of such issues.

[Feckless]

Even females are aware of this....I wonder when they want to marry a man (lets asume there is still love out there) and are forced to pay for his kids as well, won´t this put them on our side (this was an example taken from my sister in law)...

[Kim]

more than half of mothers report they see no reason for their children continuing to have contact with their father following a divorce. In the book "Fathers' Rights," one of us, Jeffery Leving, notes, "Only one in six divorced fathers sees his children once a week or more. Almost 40 percent of children who live with their mothers haven't seen their father in at least a year."

Those are just horrible, disgusting and heartbreaking statistics. No wonder our children are in trouble, no wonder society is in such a decline.

I am sick to the stomach with such nbarbed insults as 'Responsible Father's Day'.

Well, if they didn't turn it around into "fathers need to step up to the plate", they might actually have to take responsibility for the problem; they might have to admit just how wrong they were.

[julie]

Amazing how these are from 2001.

The cry has been big over and over again.

But no-one does the proper ground work. It is always so one else's problem and always someone else is to blame.

Y'all need to catch up with the Maori people of NZ.

"If it's to be, it's up to me", is one of their mottos.

So they started contacting the policy makers who by the way wish they could give you an answer and helped them find an answer. It was give and take but then that is life.

They hurt too you know every time they hear, "The men hate you, all they do is pull you down and call you names".

Men have no friends because men want no friends. This does not have to be a war if you don't want it to be.

[julie]

BTW, not wanting to be hard nor aggressive.

Please don't take my word for it. Just pick up the phone and start making phone calls and see for yourselves.

[shaazam]

a lot have hit the road running and headed West never looking back !!

others have been incarcerated on phoney child molestation charges and domestic violence invented by his ex

and their companions are in side for alimony and child mainteance default

[Stan]

The Family Courts are Responsible for family carnage. The Judges should be destroyed. NO one is ANGRY enough.

I think it's because men get so steam rollered in court and are alone with no support, noone getting the word out.

Just listen to some of the recent political speeches talking further strengthening women's rights, options, programs, funding and so forth.

Biden the VP Candidate is one of the heavies that brought us VAWA and says he is proud of it and pleased with it's effects.

I'd rather that people are all treated equally.