Revenge: The Courts Are Punishing Men For Being Men

I discovered a fascinating article online about federal initiatives to "strengthen the
family." According to this article, these initiatives are achieving an opposite effect,
as the government focuses on punitively flogging divorced males, branding them all "deadbeat dads" and blaming them for society's ills.

This article also spells out some nightmarish, Big-Brother-like activities that I would not have associated with Family Courts:

http://www.independent.org/tii/content/pubs/review/tir84_baskerville.html

Found on
http://www.aldaily.com/

It's a long paper, so here's some choice sound bites:

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A punitive quality seems to pervade the treatment of fathers in general throughout divorce court, but the presumption of guilt becomes explicit with accusations of spousal or child abuse. Fathers accused of abuse during divorce are seldom formally charged, tried, or convicted because there is usually no evidence against them; hence, they never receive due process of law or the opportunity to clear their names, let alone recover their children. Yet the accusation alone prohibits a father’s contact with his children and causes his name to be entered into a national database of sex offenders (Parke and Brott 1999, 49–50).

The most serious effect of forcibly removing fathers after quasi-criminal accusations is the abuse of children it induces. Contrary to popular belief, it is not fathers, but mothers—especially single mothers—who are most likely to abuse children.

In family court, it is not unusual for a father earning $35,000 a year to amass $150,000 in attorney’s fees, according to Washington attorney William Dawes. Unlike any other debt, these fees may be collected by incarceration. In fact, unlike the inmates in a medieval debtors’ prison, he is punished even though he did not incur the debt voluntarily. One of the most astonishing practices of family courts is ordering fathers to pay the fees of attorneys, psychotherapists, and other officials they have not hired and summarily jailing them for not complying.

In some jurisdictions, it is a crime to criticize family-court judges or otherwise to discuss family-law cases publicly, and fathers have been arrested for doing so.

A father charged with “civil contempt” connected with child support may be exempted from due process of law and legally presumed guilty until proven innocent.

In the largest federally funded study ever undertaken on the subject, Arizona State University psychologist Sanford Braver demonstrated that few married fathers voluntarily leave their children. Braver found that overwhelmingly it is mothers, not fathers, who are walking away from marriages. Moreover, most of these women do so not with legal grounds such as abuse or adultery but for reasons such as “not feeling loved or appreciated.” The forcibly divorced fathers were also found to pay virtually all child support when they are employed and when they are permitted to see the children they have allegedly abandoned.

Requiring an unimpeachable parent “to finance the filching of his own children,” as attorney Jed Abraham puts it (1999, 151), encourages government officials to seize control of the children, property, and persons of as many citizens as they can, thereby increasing their jurisdiction and the demand for their services.

"The family court is the most powerful branch of the judiciary,” according to Judge Robert Page of the New Jersey Family Court. “The power of family court judges,” by their own assessment, “is almost unlimited” (1993, 9, 11).

Very little information is available on these courts. They usually operate behind closed doors and leave no records.
Most strikingly, they claim exemption from due process of law and even from the Constitution itself.

A father brought before these courts is likely to have only a few hours’ notice of a hearing that may last thirty minutes or less, during which he will lose all decisionmaking authority over his children...his name will be entered on a federal registry, his wages will immediately be garnished, and the government will have access to all his financial information.

No allegations of wrongdoing, either civil or criminal, are required. And no agreement to a divorce or separation is necessary. Yet from this point, if he tries to see his children outside the authorized times or fails to pay the child support (or courtordered attorneys’ fees), he will be subject to arrest.

Orders separating fathers from their children for months, years, and even life are issued without the presentation of any evidence of wrongdoing. A father receiving an order must vacate his residence immediately and make no further contact with his children.
Forcing a father to stay away from his children even though he has done no wrong may provoke precisely the kind of violent response it ostensibly intends to prevent.

Advocates of unilateral divorce portray it as a “citizen’s right” and a “civil liberty,” yet in practice the regime of involuntary divorce has led to authoritarian measures against forcibly divorced parents and others. Some sixty thousand government agents, some of them armed, now enforce child support, approximately thirteen times the worldwide number of Drug Enforcement Administration agents.
These plainclothes police now command sweeping powers to seize property and persons involved involuntarily in divorce proceedings, including the power to issue arrest warrants.