NOW seems stuck in yesterday

NOW seems stuck in yesterday

This is the latest article by Cathy Young.

Excerpts:

The feminists of 1966 were interested in justice for all. They were highly critical of the notion that breadwinning should be the man's sole or primary burden and that a married woman automatically should be entitled to financial support from her husband during marriage or after divorce.

In more recent times, however, NOW and its state chapters have tended in almost knee-jerk fashion to side with women in the debates over divorce, often advocating higher and more long-term spousal support.

While paying lip service to the idea of equal parenting, NOW steadfastly has opposed efforts to broaden the rights of divorced fathers.

With the exception of a few chapters, it has staunchly opposed such proposals as joint custody and mediation instead of litigation.

Ten years ago, NOW issued an "Action Alert against fathers' rights," which accused divorced men who seek a role in their children's lives of abusing power "in the same fashion as do batterers."

The top resolution adopted at its 1999 national conference was another call to arms against the fathers' rights movement, asserting that "women lose custody of their children, despite being good mothers, despite a lack of involvement of the father with the children, and regardless of a history of being the primary caregiver." (That undoubtedly has happened in some cases, but to this day it is still far more frequently fathers who experience such injustice.)

NOW's 1966 statement declared that women must seek equality "not in pleas for special privilege, nor in enmity toward men, who are also victims of the current half-equality between the sexes -- but in an active, self-respecting partnership with men."

Sadly, many of the organization's policies and practices have betrayed this principle.

Feminism is still needed in 2006, at a time when social conservatism is on the rise and when many conservative women's groups that claim to offer an alternative to the women's movement promote retrograde and limiting notions of gender roles.

But what's needed is a call for equality, not special privilege or enmity toward men. NOW's feminism is not its foremothers' feminism, and that's too bad.

Equal rights for unwed fathers

Equal rights for unwed fathers

This is the latest article from Cathy Young. You can also visit her on her blog - The Y Files. On her blog she has another excellent post about Male Reproductive Rights.

Excerpts:

Today, partly as a result of several legal controversies in which unmarried fathers successfully contested adoptions, the majority of states have ''putative father registries" by means of which a man can assert his paternity. But the purpose of these registries often seems to be less to protect the rights of the father than to protect the rights of everyone else: the mother who wants to give up the baby, the adoption agency, and the adoptive parents. Some would say that they also protect the rights of the child. But that depends on whether you believe that a child is better off being adopted than being raised by the biological father.

In most states, the unwed father has to file with the registry either within a certain period of the child's birth -- from five to 30 days -- or, as in Massachusetts, at any time before the adoption petition is filed. But neither the mother nor the adoption agency has any obligation to notify the man of the adoption, or of the fact that he is a father or father-to-be. Even when the father is notified, he may not be told about the putative father registry -- which is what happened to Jones, whose attorney, Allison Perry, refers to the Florida registry as a ''well-kept secret." That is the situation in most states. Not only are most men unaware of the registries' existence, even some lawyers don't know about them.

Amazingly, many specialists believe that it's too much of a burden on the woman or the adoption agency to require that a man be notified of his paternity. Instead, they argue that it should be his responsibility to file with the putative father registry every time he enters a sexual relationship with a woman, on the off-chance that a pregnancy may result -- a requirement that, if nothing else, smacks of a humiliating invasion of privacy. Surely, it is far more efficient and less invasive to limit the notification requirement to cases in which a pregnancy actually happens, and to place the burden on those who are aware of the pregnancy.

You would think that, unlike men who seek to avoid their paternal responsibilities, fathers who want to be responsible for raising their own children would at least encounter societal sympathy and support. Sadly, that has not generally been the case. Unwed fathers who contest adoptions are often faulted for not taking affirmative steps to find out about the child's existence, and in some cases are blamed even if they were actively deceived by the mother. Often, they're suspected of being abusers whose real hidden motive is to control the mother.

The issues of men burdened with responsibility for unwanted pregnancies, and of men who are not allowed to be fathers to wanted children, are linked by a common thread. Biology has made men and women unequal with regard to reproduction. In recent decades, thanks to both technology and social change, we have made strides to alleviate the inequality for women, helping them avoid unwanted childbearing. But we have lagged far behind in equalizing the situation for men. We cannot ask men to be equal parents while giving virtually all the power in reproductive decisions to women.

To Be A Man or To Be A Sperm Donor?

I should have known Cathy Young would be talking about Roe v. Wade for men. As always, she remains a reasonable voice in some of the most difficult of issues. And the comments on her posts are always a good read.

Maligning fathers

This is the latest Boston Globe article by Cathy Young. You can always visit Cathy at her blog - The Y Files.

Click on the article title to read it in full.

Maligning fathers

Excerpts:

LAST NOVEMBER, I wrote about the controversy about the Public Broadcasting Service documentary, ''Breaking the Silence: Children's Stories," which claimed that male batterers and child abusers frequently gain custody of their children in divorce cases after the mothers' claims of abuse are disbelieved by the courts. The film caused an outcry from fathers' rights groups. In response to these protests, PBS announced a 30-day review to determine whether the film met the editorial guidelines for fairness and accuracy.

Unfortunately, it seems that the review amounted to little more than a whitewash.

On Dec. 21, PBS issued a statement acknowledging that the film ''would have benefited from more in-depth treatment of the complex issues," but also concluded that ''the producers approached the topic with the open-mindedness and commitment to fairness that we require of our journalists" and that the program's claims were supported by ''extensive" research.

Connecticut Public Television, which co-produced ''Breaking the Silence," has supplied me with two detailed reports -- one from producer Dominique Lasseur, the other from Lasseur and George Washington University law professor Joan Meier, the film's lead expert -- on which PBS drew to support its conclusion. To call these reports shoddy and self-serving would be an understatement.

Defending the claim made in ''Breaking the Silence" that children are in greater danger of abuse from fathers than from mothers, Lasseur and Meier point to several limited studies that often lump together biological fathers with stepfathers and mothers' boyfriends (who, statistically, pose a far higher risk). Yet even these cherry-picked statistics show that a significant proportion of perpetrators of severe child abuse are mothers -- which makes the film's exclusive focus on abusive fathers difficult to defend.

Lasseur and Meier profess to be shocked that anyone could see the film as collectively maligning divorced fathers when it focuses only on abusive fathers in contested custody cases. Yet the film clearly suggests that if a divorcing father decides to fight for custody, chances are he's a batterer who's using the custody suit as an abuse tactic -- and that if he's accused of abuse, he's most probably guilty. And that's not prejudicial?

Notably, PBS ombudsman Michael Getler and especially Corporation for Public Broadcasting ombudsman Ken Bode have taken a far more negative view of the film than did the PBS review. On Jan. 4, Bode wrote, ''After close review including discussions and e-mail exchanges with those involved with the program or closely affected by it, I found the program to be so totally unbalanced as to fall outside the boundaries of PBS editorial standards on fairness and balance."

PBS's negative picture of fathers

Boston.com

Cathy Young has weighed in on the PBS "documentary" Breaking the Silence.

Cathy also has her own blog, The Y Files, and you can see her post directly related to PBS here.

PBS's negative picture of fathers
By Cathy Young

Excerpts:

The film's point is simple: Children in America are routinely ripped from their mothers and given to fathers who are batterers or molesters. The women's claims of abuse are not believed by the courts and are even held against them when mothers are suspected of manufacturing false charges as a divorce strategy.

To fathers' groups, ''Breaking the Silence" is blatant antidad propaganda. In a campaign led by the Boston-based Fathers and Families, PBS has been bombarded with thousands of calls and letters. It is now conducting a 30-day review of the research used in the film.

There is no question that our legal system fails children all too often. But the PBS documentary presents a skewed and sensationalist picture.

The website of the film's producers, Tatge/Lasseur productions, lists two sources for these claims: a study of 39 abused women involved in custody litigation in Massachusetts, and the 1990 report of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Gender Bias Study Committee which states that fathers who actively seek custody obtain primary or joint physical custody over 70 percent of the time.

But the 70 percent figure was not limited to domestic violence cases. It is also highly misleading, since it doesn't separate custody disputes from cases in which the father gets custody by mutual consent. In contested custody cases, mothers are two to four times more likely to prevail.

Lasseur told me that if he had encountered cases in which an abusive mother was awarded custody of the children, he would have reported on them. I asked about the claim on a battered men's advocacy site that a man named Tom Gallen had approached him with exactly such a case. Lasseur conceded that Gallen had a well-documented story but explained that, relying on his ''instinct as a producer," he felt that Gallen wouldn't be the right person to use.

The filmmakers contend that their only concern was the well-being of children. Yet, if the film contributes to a climate in which fathers who seek custody are tagged as suspected abusers, it could endanger children as well. PBS should rectify this bias by presenting programs with a different point of view.

Stigmatizing Fathers

Latest Cathy Young article available through Boston.com

Stigmatizing fathers
By Cathy Young January 24, 2005

EVERY SO often, yet another wrenching story of a contested adoption is in the news. Television cameras capture a heartbreaking scene: a frightened, sobbing child being taken away from the adoptive parents, to be handed over to biological parents whom the child has never met. The latest such drama unfolded recently in Jacksonville, Fla., where 3-year-old Evan Parker Scott has been returned to his birth mother after the adoption was annulled because it took place without the birth father's consent.

In these cases, public sympathy is typically on the side of the adoptive parents -- while the unwed father is often assigned the role of villain. He's seen as a feckless good-for-nothing who wants the rights of a father just because he took the trouble to impregnate a woman.

Sometimes, the popular perception may be justified. (Evan Scott's biological father apparently has a history of drug abuse and violence, including toward the mother when she was pregnant.) But then there are the other cases.

Take the story of a New York City police officer identified in legal papers only as Robert O. When his ex-girlfriend found out she was pregnant shortly after their breakup, she decided not to tell Robert and arranged an adoption. Eventually, the couple got back together and married -- and one day, Robert learned that he had a 17-month-old son. His quest for paternal rights ended in defeat in 1992; the courts held that Robert had only himself to blame for not keeping in touch with his former girlfriend and not knowing about her pregnancy.

In 2000, a 19-year-old Iowa man, David Heidbreder, got quite a shock when he found out that his former girlfriend Katie Carton, who had gone to stay with her grandparents in Minnesota after their breakup, had given birth to a girl and put her up for adoption. (Carton had refused to tell Heidbreder where she was but had stayed in touch by e-mail and assured him that she would not give up the baby.)

He filed papers with the Minnesota registry which allows men to claim parental rights and block an adoption. However, he missed the registration deadline -- 30 days from the child's birth -- by one day. He sued and lost.

In recent years, some unwed fathers have been more successful in court, though not in the court of public opinion. Ottakar Kirchner, the father of "Baby Richard," was vilified in the press after he managed to regain custody of his son. The boy was born when Kirchner was away on business in his native Czech Republic; the mother, Daniela Janikova, had decided to break up with Kirchner after hearing rumors of his infidelity. She lied to him that the child had died at birth and repeatedly frustrated his attempts to track down the boy.

Biological paternity isn't everything; but it isn't nothing, either. Where is the sympathy for fathers who lose their children through no fault of theirs? Would we be more sympathetic if a woman's baby were taken away at the hospital and placed for adoption without her knowledge because the birth father signed the adoption papers?

The father in such a case faces a strong presumption of guilt. It is readily assumed that if the mother doesn't want him involved, he's either abusive or terminally irresponsible. In society's eyes, when a man doesn't want to marry his child's mother, he must be a cad; when a woman doesn't want to marry the father, he must be a creep.

People can believe that a man would wage a lengthy legal battle out of spite at his ex-girlfriend; yet many won't allow that a woman could want to deny her ex-boyfriend his child for equally base reasons. We stigmatize and prosecute men who refuse to support their children, but not women who willfully conspire to keep a father away from his child.

It's particularly bizarre to place the burden on the man to find out if the woman is pregnant, considering that she's the one with direct knowledge of her condition. Indeed, if a man took such steps after the woman had told him she wanted no further contact, he could be considered a stalker.

In the end, our society sends men quite a mixed message. If your partner gets pregnant and decides to keep the baby, you're liable for 18 years of child support, whether or not you want to be a father. If she doesn't want to be a mother, she can give your child to strangers and there isn't much you can do. Then we complain that men don't take parenthood seriously enough.

Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine. Her column appears regularly in the Globe.

Do fathers have the edge in divorce?

Another article by Cathy Young: Do fathers have the edge in divorce?

It is a common perception that while women may face bias in some areas, men are on the receiving end of discrimination when it comes to child custody - which goes to fathers, recent data show, only 16 percent of the time. Some feminists, like former National Organization for Women President Karen DeCrow, embrace equal rights for divorced dads. Yet many others have been loath to acknowledge that there is bias favoring women in anything.

Mostly, these feminists argue, fathers don't want custody - and when they do, they have the edge: Judges frown on working women who spend less time with the kids than did traditional moms, while working men who spend more time with the kids than did traditional fathers are hailed as great dads; non-working women may be denied custody because they can't support the children.

In the 1986 book Mothers on Trial, radical feminist psychologist Phyllis Chesler claimed that 70 percent of mothers in custody battles lost. This was based on a very non-random sample of 60 women, mostly referred by feminist lawyers or women's centers. While even sympathetic reviewers commented on the sloppiness of Chesler's research, her "finding" that fathers are likely to win contested custody cases was often presented as fact.

Similar numbers have cropped up again, most recently in Karen Winner's Divorced From Justice: "Contrary to public belief, 70 percent of all litigated custody trials rule in favor of the fathers," shouts the jacket (italics in the original). A national alert on father's rights groups issued by the National Organization for Women - urging members to combat proposed laws encouraging joint custody and mediation - also states that "many judges and attorneys are still biased against women. ..."

Where do these figures come from? One respectable source is the 1989 Gender Bias Study of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which reported that when fathers seek custody, they win primary or joint physical custody 70 percent of the time. In The Divorce Revolution, Lenore Weitzman reported two-thirds of fathers asking for custody in California succeeded.

Maybe, some fathers' advocates say, men only seek custody when they have a chance because there's something wrong with mom. Explaining why few non-custodial mothers pay child support, the Gender Bias Study notes "women who lose custody often [have] mental, physical, or emotional handicaps" that impair their earning ability.

That aside, the high success rate of men in custody battles is yet another contender for the Phony Statistics Hall of Fame. The figures do not refer to contested cases. Weitzman acknowledged that when fathers got sole custody, it was typically by mutual agreement; of cases that went to trial, two-thirds were won by women. The work from which the Gender Bias Study gathered its numbers did not separate contested and uncontested custody bids, but showed that mothers filing for sole custody received it 75 percent of the time (the rest usually received joint legal/primary physical custody), while the "success rate" for fathers was 44 percent.

A Stanford study of more than 1,000 California couples divorced in the 1980s suggests conventional wisdom is right. If both parents requested sole custody when filing for divorce, it was awarded to mom in 45 percent and to dad in 11 percent of the cases, with joint physical custody for the rest. (When she asked for sole custody and he for joint custody, the odds were 2-1 in her favor.)

Most of the disputes were negotiated. Just five couples went to trial vying for sole custody - and one of these cases resulted in a victory for the father.

The answer is not to help fathers win more custody fights but to have fewer fights. In Michigan, the Legislature is considering a "shared parenting" or joint custody bill - the Senate substitution bill for House Bill 5636 - opposed by the state's NOW chapter. There's ample room for discussions of the best way to ensure children of divorce still have two parents. But disinformation shouldn't be part of the debate.

Cathy Young is vice-chair of the Women's Freedom Network.

Article by Cathy Young?

To see where I found this article click here. I was looking for info on Karen DeCrow, a former President of NOW, who is apparently for presumptive joint custody after divorce. The article is attributed to Cathy Young who currently writes for Reason Magazine. There was no title to the article and I will reprint it entirely below:

The often bitter debate over women, babies, and careers got a new twist last week when Michigan circuit court Judge Raymond Cashen gave custody of a 3-year-old named Maranda to her father, Steve Smith, in part because the mother, Jennifer Ireland, has placed the child in a day care center while she attends the University of Michigan. Smith also studies and works but his mother, who is not employed, is willing to help him care for the little girl at home. (Both mom and dad were 16 when Maranda was born.)

"Under the future plans of the mother, the minor child will be in essence raised and supervised a great deal of the time by strangers," Judge Cashen wrote. "Under the future plans of the father, the minor child will be raised and supervised by blood relatives."

Predictably, this has sparked an outcry from feminists who see a backlash against mothers who do not fit the 1950s mold. "A kind of Donna Reed cultural terrorism," columnist Anna Quindlen called the decision.

But others argue that 69-year-old Judge Cashen is no enemy of working women: his own wife taught at a community college most of her life and some of their children were in day care. Moreover, the decision was influenced by other factors: the judge felt that the child would generally have a more stable environment with her father. "Under the mother's plan, the child will not have a specific residence, being moved periodically between the University of Michigan and the maternal grandmother's home," he wrote. "Under the father's plan, the child will reside at the paternal grandparents' home for an indefinite period." (This reasoning should not endear him to fathers' rights groups that favor joint custody arrangements under which the child lives with each parent part of the time.)

Michigan attorney Kay Schwarzberg, who handles many divorce and custody cases, believes that concerns about the possible negative impact of day care on very young children can't be dismissed as mere backlash. But mainly, Schwarzberg is amused that there should be such outrage over Judge Cashen's reference to day care vs. home care in giving custody to the father, when for decades judges cited that issue in awarding custody to moms: "No one got excited about all the wonderful men who couldn't have custody because they were working and had to put their children in day care."

This theme is echoed by Al Lebow, founder of the Michigan- based Fathers for Equal Rights of America, one of nearly 300 fathers' rights groups across the country: "The real crux of this issue is that if the situation were reversed, there would be nobody from the media making inquiries." There are, he says, "thousands upon thousands of horror stories" of men denied not only custody but any meaningful access to their children. Though custody laws are now gender-neutral on the surface, fathers' advocates -- and most family law attorneys -- contend that a double standard lingers: a father has to show that he is a better parent (sometimes, a much better parent) to get the kids; a mother has only to show she's not a bad parent. Women are still presumed, particularly by older, traditional members of the bench such as Judge Cashen, to be naturally possessed of superior parenting skills.

Fathers' rights activists claim that just five percent of divorced dads get custody. The figure may be too low; since there is no system of tracking custody decisions, precise numbers are hard to come by. (According to the Census Bureau, 13 percent of children in single-parent families now live with their dads.) Some feminists claim that fathers win two-thirds of all contested custody cases, due to their greater resources and male bias in courts. But they apparently get that figure by counting joint- custody decisions as unilateral male victories. And some divorced fathers' advocates say that men rarely ask for custody unless they feel they have a very compelling case (and can afford huge legal fees), because they believe the deck is stack against them.

Indeed, the motives of fathers who seek sole or joint custody are often treated as suspect. Quindlen transparently insinuated, as did a New York Times editorial, that Smith had no interest in his child and started the custody fight to avoid paying Ireland $8 a week in child support -- as if anyone could think that $8 a week was worth the inconvenience of having an unwanted child in the house, not to mention the expense of raising her! (Some activists in the battered women's movement promote the even more sinister notion that most dads who fight for custody are abusers who want to use the children to continue controlling the mother.)

Those who are up in arms about Jennifer Ireland losing her child should ask themselves if they would have been as upset if Jennifer had been James. According to Lynne Hecht Schafran, an attorney with the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, "Women should not be penalized for working outside the home." True. But if taking a child away from a parent is a penalty, are good fathers who lose custody of their children penalized for being male?

"We don't understand why, in this day and age, the women's movement is not interested in equality," says Lebow. Supporters of broader custody rights for fathers include former NOW president Karen DeCrow. Yet pro-maternal custody feminists argue that the child should live with the mother because she is usually the "primary caretaker." Day care clearly seems to undermine this argument: as DeCrow once quipped, if this standard were consistently applied, the children of women lawyers would be living in the Caribbean with their nannies.

Perhaps the only way to avoid biased and arbitrary decisions, and the destructive win-lose mentality of custody battles, is to institute the presumption of joint custody as the norm. No fit parent should be penalized -- whether for his gender or for her career -- by being reduced to the status of a visitor in his or her child's life.

Joint Custody

Boston.com has an article from Cathy Young concerning joint custody. It is succinct, easy to read and is based on equal protections for both parents.
Equal access to children after a divorce