Totally insane!
Note: Cross posted from [wp angelfury] A Human Rights Issue-Custodial Justice.
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Father’s Rights and Violence Against Women
by Dr. Michael Flood
In this talk, I’m going to focus on the ‘fathers’ rights’ movement, and their impact on violence against women.
Introduction: The fathers’ rights movement
The fathers’ rights movement is defined by the claim that fathers are deprived of their ‘rights’ and subjected to systematic discrimination as men and fathers, in a system biased towards women and dominated by feminists. Fathers’ rights groups overlap with men’s rights groups and both represent an organised backlash to feminism. Fathers’ rights and men’s rights groups can be seen as the anti-feminist wing of the men’s movement, the network of men’s groups and organisations mobilised on gender issues (Flood, 1998).
Two experiences bring most men (and women) to the fathers’ rights movement. The first is deeply painful marriage breakups and custody battles. Fathers’ rights groups are characterised by anger and blame directed at ex-partners and the ‘system’ that has deprived men or fathers of their ‘rights’, and such themes are relatively common among men who have undergone separation and divorce. The second experience is non-resident fathers’ dissatisfaction with loss of contact with their children or with regimes of child support.
The fathers’ rights movement focuses on trying to re-establish fathers’ authority and control over their children’s and ex-partners’ lives, on gaining an equality concerned with fathers’ ‘rights’ and status rather than the actual care of children, and on winding back legal and cultural changes which have lessened gender inequalities.
Fathers’ rights groups are well-organised advocates for changes in family law, and vocal opponents of feminist perspectives and achievements on interpersonal violence.
Impact of the fathers’ rights movement on violence against women
The fathers’ rights movement has had four forms of impact on violence against women.
Priviledging contact over safety
Most importantly, the fathers’ rights movement has influenced family law, with damaging consequences for women, children, and indeed men. Above all, fathers’ contact with children has been privileged, over children’s safety from violence. [See The Custody Scam, the story of Dawn Axsom, Child Abuse: When Family Courts Get it Wrong, Letter to Judge from Jury foreman regarding prosecution of mother trying to protect her children from abusive father, or watch the PBS documentary Breaking The Silence; Children’s Stories at the bottom of this post.—Deborrah]
An uncritical assumption that children’s contact with both parents is necessary now pervades the courts and the media. The Family Court’s new principle of the ‘right to contact’ is overriding its principle of the right to ‘safety from violence’. The Court now is more likely to make interim orders for children’s unsupervised contact in cases involving domestic violence or child abuse, to use hand-over arrangements rather than suspend contact until trial, and to make orders for joint residence where there is a high level of conflict between the separated parents and one parent strongly objects to shared residence.
The fathers’ rights movement has been unsuccessful in achieving its key goal of a rebuttable presumption of children’s joint residence after separation. However, other changes in family law and government policy over the last two years have reflected its influence. Recent reforms mean that greater numbers of parents who are the victims of violence will be subject to further violence and harassment by abusive ex-partners, while children will face a greater requirement to have contact with abusive or violent parents.
Current government policy echoes many of the key themes of the fathers’ rights movement. Both government policy and many fathers’ rights groups are guided by two central, and mistaken, assumptions: that all children see contact with both parents as in their best interests in every case, and that a violent father is better than no father at all (DVIRC, 2005, pp. 5-6). Both bodies talk of ‘conflict’ rather than violence, neglect violence as a legitimate issue for the courts and family services to address, emphasise mediation and counseling as solutions, and focus on punishing women for making false allegations or breaching contact orders.
Discrediting victims
The second impact the fathers’ rights movement has had on violence against women is in discrediting victims. Fathers’ rights groups tell two key lies.
First, fathers’ rights groups tell the lie that women routinely make false accusations of child abuse to gain advantage in family law proceedings and to arbitrarily deny their ex-partners’ access to the children.
Second, fathers’ rights groups tell the lie that women routinely make up allegations of domestic violence to gain advantage in family law cases and use protection orders to remove men from their homes or deny contact with children rather than out of any real experience or fear of violence.
I have written detailed critiques of these first two lies, and they are available both online and in the latest issue of the Australian journal Women Against Violence. I can send copies to anyone who wishes.
Men’s versus women’s violence (Impact on perceptions of intimate violence)
Related to this, the fathers’ rights movement also has had some impact on public perceptions of intimate violence. In particular, it tells the lie that domestic violence is gender-equal or gender-neutral – that men and women assault each other at equal rates and with equal effects.
While I’ve called this a lie, this is one claim for which there is some academic support.
To support the claim that domestic violence is gender-symmetrical, advocates draw almost exclusively on studies using a measurement tool called the Conflict Tactics Scale. The CTS situates domestic violence within the context of “family conflict”. It asks one partner in a relationship whether, in the last year, they or their spouse have ever committed any of a range of violent acts. CTS studies generally find gender symmetries in the use of violence in relationships. There are three problems with the use made of such studies by fathers’ rights activists.
First, men’s rights and fathers’ rights groups make only selective use of this data, as CTS authors themselves reject efforts to argue that women’s violence against men is as common or as harmful as men’s violence against women (Kimmel 2001, p. 22).
Second, there are methodological problems with the Conflict Tactics Scale. The CTS is widely criticized for not gathering information about the intensity, context, consequences or meaning of the action. The CTS ignores who initiates the violence (when women are more likely to use violence in self-defense), assumes that violence is used expressively (e.g. in anger) and not instrumentally (to ‘do’ power or control), omits violent acts such as sexual abuse, stalking and intimate homicide, ignores the history of violence in the relationship, neglects the question of who is injured, relies on only one partner’s reports despite poor interspousal reliability, and omits incidents after separation and divorce, which is a time of increased danger for women.
Third, a wide range of other data find marked gender asymmetries in domestic violence. For example, crime victimization studies based on large-scale aggregate data, household and crime surveys, police statistics, and hospital data all show that men assault their partners and ex-partners at rates several times the rate at which women assault theirs and that female victims greatly outnumber male victims (Tjaden & Thoennes 2000, pp. 25-26).
Feminist and other scholars have worked to reconcile the conflicting findings of these bodies of data. One important insight is the recognition of different patterns of violent behaviour in couples and relationships. Some heterosexual relationships suffer from occasional outbursts of violence by either husbands or wives during conflicts, what some (Johnson 1995, 284-285) call “common couple violence”.
Here, the violence is relatively minor, both partners practise it, it is expressive in meaning, it tends not to escalate over time, and injuries are rare. In situations of “patriarchal terrorism” on the other hand, one partner (usually the man) uses violence and other controlling tactics to assert or restore power and authority. The violence is more severe, it is asymmetrical, it is instrumental in meaning, it tends to escalate, and injuries are more likely.
CTS studies are only a weak measure of levels of minor ‘expressive’ violence in conflicts among heterosexual couples. They are poorer again as a measure of ‘instrumental’ violence, in which one partner uses violence and other tactics to assert power and authority (Johnson 1995, 284–285).
There is no doubt that men are the victims of domestic violence. Men experience domestic violence at the hands of female and male sexual partners, ex-partners, and other family members.
A growing body of research tells us that there are important contrasts in women’s and men’s experiences of domestic violence. Women are far more likely than men to be subjected to frequent, prolonged, and extreme violence, to sustain injuries, to fear for their lives, and to be sexually assaulted (Kimmel 2001, 19; Bagshaw et al. 2000). Men subjected to domestic violence by women rarely experience post-separation violence and have more financial and social independence. Female perpetrators of domestic violence are less likely and less able than male perpetrators to use nonphysical tactics to maintain control over their partners (Swan & Snow 2002, 291-292).
Women’s physical violence towards intimate male partners is often in self-defense (DeKeseredy et al. 1997; Hamberger et al. 1994; Swan & Snow 2002, 301; Muelleman & Burgess 1998, 866). On the other hand, women’s intimate violence can also be motivated by efforts to show anger, a desire for attention, retaliation for emotional hurt, and so on (Hamberger et al. 1994). It is inadequate to explain women’s violence simply in terms of their own oppression and powerlessness, and naïve to assume that women are immune from using violence to gain or maintain power in relationships (Russo 2001, 16-19).
Men are likely to under-estimate and under-report their subjection to domestic violence by women (George 1994, 149; Stockdale 1998, 63). There is no evidence however that male victims are more likely to under-report than female victims. In fact, men tend to over-estimate their partner’s violence and under-estimate their own, while women do the reverse (Kimmel 2001, 10-11).
The fathers’ rights movement’s attention to domestic violence against men is not motivated by a genuine concern for male victimisation, but by political agendas concerning family law, child custody and divorce (Kaye & Tolmie 1998, pp. 53-57). This is evident in two ways.
First, the fathers’ rights movement focuses on this violence when the great majority of the violence inflicted on men is not by female partners or ex-partners but by other men. Australian crime victimisation surveys find that less than one percent of violent incidents among men is by partners or ex-partners, compared to one-third of incidents among women (Ferrante et al. 1996, 104). Boys and men are most at risk of physical harm from other boys and men.
Second, the fathers rights’ movement seeks to erode the protections available to victims of domestic violence and to bolster the rights and freedoms of alleged perpetrators, and this harms female and male victims of domestic violence alike. I turn to this now.
Protecting perpetrators and undermining supports for victims
The fourth way in which the fathers’ rights movement has had an impact on violence against women is in its efforts to modify responses to the victims and perpetrators of violence.
The fathers’ rights movement has sought to wind back the protections afforded to the fictitious ‘victims’ of violence and to introduce legal penalties for their dishonest and malicious behavior. The Lone Fathers’ Association and other groups argue that claims of violence or abuse should be made on oath, they should require police or hospital records, and people making allegations which are not then substantiated, and those who’ve helped them, should be subject to criminal prosecution. They call for similar limitations to do with protection orders.
Fathers’ rights groups also attempt to undermine the ways in which domestic violence is treated as criminal behavior. They emphasise the need to keep the family together, call for the greater use of mediation and counseling, and reject pro-arrest policies.
Such changes would represent a profound erosion of the protections and legal redress available to the victims of violence and the ease with which they and their advocates can seek justice. This agenda betrays the fact that the concern for male victims of domestic violence often professed by fathers’ rights groups is rhetorical rather than real. While such groups purport to advocate on behalf of male victims of domestic violence, they seek to undermine the policies and services that would protect and gain justice for these same men.
Fathers’ rights groups often respond to issues of domestic and sexual violence from the point of view of the perpetrator. And they respond in the same way as actual male perpetrators: they minimise and deny the extent of this violence, blame the victim, and explain the violence as a mutual or reciprocal process (Hearn, 1996, p. 105).
This sympathy for perpetrators is evident in other ways too. Fathers’ rights advocates have expressed sympathy or justification for men who use violence against women and children in the context of family law proceedings. And, ironically, they use men’s violence to demonstrate how victimised men are by the family law system (Kaye & Tolmie, 1998a, pp. 57-58).
Members of fathers’ rights groups also act as direct advocates for alleged perpetrators of violence against women. For example, one group distributes pamphlets for ‘victims of a false AVO’, giving no attention to how to respond to ‘true’ perpetrators of violence nor to the safety of family members.
Fathers’ rights groups also attack media and community campaigns focused on men’s violence against women, call for the de-funding and abolition of what they call the “domestic violence industry”, and engage in the harassment of community sector and women’s organisations which respond to the victims of violence.
Other, positive responses by men: The White Ribbon Campaign
This is all pretty depressing news. In this context, I’ve been especially heartened to see a growing positive response by men, in alliance with women, to help stop violence against women. I will focus on one such response.
White Ribbon Day is the largest effort by men across the world, working in partnership with women, to end men’s violence against women. White ribbons are worn on the day by men to show their concern about violence against women, and by women who are supporting men. It takes place on November 25th, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.
In Australia, White Ribbon Day is organised in part by UNIFEM, a women’s organisation, but it is conducted in partnership with men and men’s organisations. The White Ribbon Campaign focuses on the positive roles that men can play in helping to stop violence against women.
To find out more, visit the website: http://www.whiteribbonday.org.au/
Conclusion
To continue our efforts to prevent violence, several strategies are necessary.
We must continue to respond effectively to those who’ve experienced this violence, the coalface work that some of you already do.
We must continue to keep the issue of violence against women on the public agenda.
We must step up efforts to engage men in positive ways, building partnerships with supportive men and men’s groups. We must confront, or sidestep, the dangerous ambitions and dishonest claims of the men’s and fathers’ rights backlash.
The achievements of the fathers’ rights movement are already putting women, children and indeed men at greater risk of violence and abuse. The fathers’ rights movement has exacerbated our culture’s systematic silencing and blaming of victims of violence and hampered efforts to respond effectively to the victims and perpetrators of violence.
However, the new politics of fatherhood has not been entirely captured by the fathers’ rights movement. There is potential to foster men’s positive and non-violent involvement in parenting and families. Key resources for realising the progressive potential of contemporary fatherhood politics include the widespread imagery of the nurturing father, community intolerance for violence against women, growing policy interest in addressing divisions of labour in child care and domestic work, and men’s own investments in positive parenting.
However, thwarting the fathers’ rights movement’s backlash requires that we directly confront the movement’s agenda, disseminate critiques of its false accusations, and respond in constructive and accountable ways to the fathers (and mothers) undergoing separation and divorce (Flood, 2004, pp 274-278).
Beating the backlash
The following are some of the political strategies we can use to help beat the fathers’ rights backlash.
Discredit fathers’ rights groups. Emphasise that they;
- Are interested only in reducing their financial obligations to their children;
- Are interested only in extending or regaining power and authority over ex-partners and children.
- Do nothing to increase men’s actual share of childcare / parenting or men’s positive involvement in parenting both before and after separation.
- Collude with perpetrators of violence against women and children, protect and advocate for perpetrators, or are perpetrators.
- Produce critiques of their lies and their strategies which are credible and accessible.
- Co-opt the new politics of fatherhood;
- Support positive efforts to respond to separated fathers. (And emphasise that FR groups fix men in anger and blame, rather than helping them to heal.)
- Build on men’s desires to be involved (and nonviolent) parents.
- Find alternative male voices: supportive men and men’s / fathers’ networks and groups.
‘Speaking as a father…’
Tell women’s stories
Atrocity tales: Stories of abuse and inequality.
In letters, submissions, on talkback, etc.
(But beware of the ways in which these can (a) portray women only as victims, (b) homogenise and essentialise women’s (diverse) experiences of violence, and (c) undermine credibility and support. )
Find and nurture male allies: in government, the community sector, academic, etc.
More widely, we must continue do the work of violence prevention: to undermine the beliefs and values which support violence, challenge the power relations which sustain and are sustained by violence, and promote alternative constructions of gender and sexuality which foster non-violence and gender justice.
Contact the Author:
Dr Michael Flood
Postdoctoral Fellow
Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society (ARCSHS)
La Trobe University
E-mail: michael.floodanu.edu.au
PO Box 4026, Ainslie ACT, 2602
Presentation in Panel, “Myths, Misconceptions, and the Men’s Movement”, at Conference, Refocusing Women’s Experiences of Violence, Sydney, 14-16 September.
Sign this petition to stop court ordered child abuse in your Congressional district!
Ever since 1884, when Professor William Pencoast of Philadelphia’s Jefferson Medical College requested a semen sample of his “best looking” medical student in order to impregnate the child-seeking wife of a sterile Quaker merchant, sperm donation has held out the promise of parenting to infertile spouses, choice mothers and lesbian couples. Unfortunately, a misguided offshoot of the men’s rights movement has recently started to assert paternal rights for sperm donors. This effort, which threatens both to undermine the stability of families conceived with donor sperm and to deter other would-be parents from availing themselves of such opportunities, has slowly chipped away at the established legal and ethical principle that sperm donors, while they may provide the biological material for conception, are not fathers. Now the Irish Supreme Court — in a ruling that defies both reason and modernity — has set family law back a generation by granting de facto parental rights to one such sperm donor. Vigilance is needed to make sure that this noxious jurisprudential seed does not spread.
The Irish case pitted a forty-two-year-old unidentified man against a lesbian couple whom he had earlier provided with sperm. At the time of his contribution, he apparently did not express any desire to retain parental rights. Instead, he was to be a favored “uncle” — without any formal privileges or responsibilities. Later, after his friendship with the child’s mothers deteriorated, he changed his mind. When the women attempted to move to Australia with their now three-year-old son, the sperm donor sued and obtained an injunction to keep the child in the country while he fought for his alleged rights as a biological parent. High Court Justice John Hedigan initially rejected his claims. However, on December 10, the Supreme Court’s Susan Denham overturned Hedigan’s verdict. Mustering a specious argument that could be used to reject virtually every case of lesbian parenting, Denham wrote: “There is benefit to a child, in general, to have the society of his father….I am satisfied that the learned High Court judge gave insufficient weight to this factor.” Her decision, which awarded the sperm donor visitation rights while the larger issues of guardianship are resolved, is a slap in the face to lesbian parents everywhere. But its implications extend well beyond same-sex families. Any single female parent who has accepted donor sperm — even one widowed or divorced — is now vulnerable to the fatherhood claim of a stranger whose only prior parental contribution has been masturbating into a plastic cup.
American courts have so far generally resisted similar assertions. As early as 1993, a Manhattan Family Court ruled that a sperm donor, Thomas Steel, had no legal right to visit the daughter of lesbian parents Sandra Russo and Robin Young — even though he had supplied half of her DNA. At that time, Judge Edward Kaufman seminally declared that Steel’s efforts had “already caused [the child] anxiety, nightmares and psychological harm” and that, for the girl, “a declaration of paternity would be a statement that her family is other than what she knows it to be and needs it to be.” In short, interpersonal and emotional bonds — not genetic connections — are what define families. Although that approach is now widely accepted, disgruntled donors have continued to press their cases.
The most widely publicized effort of a sperm donor to assert parental rights in the United States was a suit brought by Kansan Daryl Hendrix against his former friend, Samantha Harrington, who had given birth to twins using his excess sperm. A divided state supreme court ruled 4-2 that, in the absence of a written agreement, sperm donors were not legal parents. Yet Hendrix pursued his case all the way to the United States Supreme Court — which refused to hear it — and, in the process, became a darling of a faction of the American men’s rights movement. Similar cases are working their way through the court system in other states. These efforts pose a genuine challenge to reproductive freedom and familial integrity.
The sperm donors’ rights movement is the bastard stepchild of two strange ideological bedfellows. One group that has furthered such efforts are Christian conservatives who either oppose all forms of artificial reproduction or the single- and same-sex parental arrangements that can arise from them. These opponents of artificial insemination conflate the so-called “natural” with the desirable. (In child-rearing matters, however, they are often “naturalists” of convenience: Infant mortality, after all, is natural; vaccination and medicine are direct challenges to nature.) The other advocates for sperm donors’ rights are men who, for various reasons, have missed the fatherhood train. Some have already played a limited role in the lives of the offspring they later attempt to claim — but they often seek the benefits of fatherhood when they have earlier eschewed the responsibilities. Do not shed to many tears for them. If they had wanted the responsibilities of parenthood, as well as the pleasures, they could have had children of their own. Most still can. Instead, they have cast their lot with the most reactionary elements in the reproductive policy arena. Advancing the antiquated argument that every child should have a father, these forces have succeeded in preventing anonymous donation in Great Britain, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia and New Zealand. Great Britain and Canada no longer allow donors to be compensated. As a result, semen sources are drying up. The unfortunate consequence is that, without sperm, would-be mothers will not be able to conceive.
The irony of the sperm donors’ rights movement is that it has undermined the rights of those donors — the vast majority — who do not want any contact with their biological spawn: Children are now pressuring sperm banks to identify their genetic “fathers” and several women have even succeeded in holding their sperm donors liable for child support. These trends also threaten to undermine the “no-strings-attached” policies that make altruistic sperm donation possible. Who in their right mind is going to donate sperm to a stranger when they risk being saddled with college tuition 18 years later — as was one Long Island “father”? The result of these child-support efforts will not be men taking responsibility for such children. The result will be men refusing to sire such children at all. Unlike sexual intercourse, masturbating into a plastic cup has few concomitant benefits.
A handful of rare cases may exist where the identities of sperm donors need to be unmasked for medical reasons — such as when a donor discovers that he has a fatal genetic disease that could not be tested for at the time of his donation. In all other cases, the identities of donors should be perpetually concealed. Moreover, these donors should not be granted any more rights or privileges than they arranged for at the outset. Our society would do best to view them no differently than the altruistic donors of other tissues and organs. If I donate my blood or even my kidney to a stranger, that affords me no right to socialize with him in the future and creates no legally recognizable relationship. As a recent divorce case in New York State clarified, I cannot even demand compensation for my donated organ if the marriage that it was based upon were to be sabotaged by the recipient’s concealed infidelity. Why should society treat my donation any differently simply because it contains a germ-line cell rather than somatic tissue?
A generation of progressives — women’s rights advocates, gay rights advocates, supporters of artificial reproductive technologies — have fought to transform the definition of “family” from one based solely upon molecular biology to one based upon love and mutual respect. In order to protect this progress, legislation is needed — either at the state or national level — to guarantee the rights of established families over the efforts of interloping sperm donors. The battle over sperm is just that latest fight in the ongoing struggle over reproductive freedom, yet we risk losing it even before we know that it is being fought. We should all get our Irish up.
Volcanoes erupt coal – Fox News « The Volcanism Blog
(To be fair to Fox News they do say near the end of the article that ‘massive volcanic eruptions worked to deposit silica in the peat that formed Xuan Wei’s coal’, which is a bit closer to the mark than claiming that the coal ‘was …
Casio new ultra Slim High Luminance portable Projector is also …
The rest of the news. 1/8 > Toshiba to enhance line-up of 32nm multi-level cell SSDs. 1/8 > New Sony Vaio W Series Netbook cares both for the environment and for the kids. 1/8 > New Sony Blu-ray 3D Capable Devices …
9 reasons why the Dec. jobs report is bad news for Dems | Analysis …
When did a news organization such as Reuters and others become a talking arm of the GOP. Really?!? Health care reform is supposed to take billions off of our deficit and help create new jobs, etc. I think in lieu of having tax breaks …
Married parents don’t have any legal obligation to pay for their adult children’s college education or living expenses. But a bill just introduced in Virginia’s legislature would require divorced parents to pay for such expenses.
HB 146 would extend child support beyond age 18 to age 23 when the “child” is attending college. Right now, child support in Virginia usually ends soon after the child reaches the age of majority.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a similar provision providing for post-majority support as a violation of the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. It reasoned that since married parents do not have to support their adult children, it was discriminatory to force divorced parents to do so. See Curtis v. Kline, 666 A.2d 265 (Pa. 1995). (Courts have apparently split over the constitutionality of such requirements).
I agree with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s reasoning, on principle. Married parents in Virginia generally have no duty to support their college-age children. Thus, neither should divorced parents.
But I also oppose this requirement based on my experience as a lawyer. (I should note, by the way, that I am not divorced, and have no child support obligations).
As an intake lawyer for a non-profit law firm for over 6 years, I saw cases of aging divorced parents forced to pay the college bills of ungrateful offspring with whom they had an acrimonious relationship, even though they could ill-afford to do so – like a father dying of incurable liver disease forced to pay his estranged daughter’s graduate school expenses, under a state law permitting child support to be awarded for adult children. (We did not handle family-law cases in state court and I thus had no choice but to reject these people’s pleas for legal assistance).
Divorced parents, like married parents, should have the right not to pay for their adult children’s living expenses or college costs — for example, if the child engages in conduct or a field of study that is objectionable to the parent.
It is an unfortunate reality that courts are likely to apply this bill, if it is enacted and not struck down, in a way that results in support obligations that are inequitable to some aging parents. Virginia courts have sometimes awarded support even in situations where statutory language would appear to bar any support. For example, in Calvin v. Calvin, 31 Va. App. 181 (1999), the Virginia Court of Appeals awarded spousal support, even though the recipient had engaged in adultery and been “vindictive and cruel” in the court’s own words, and even though Virginia’s statutes expressly bar support to adulterous spouses absent a finding of “manifest injustice” under both economic and fault-based factors. Additional examples are given here.
