Parental "alienation" is just gaslighting bullsh**. Notice Mom was accused of it by a guy who beat her up. Meanwhile, it's DAD who has deprived her of contact for two years.
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/family-court-ruling-violent-father-given-sole-custody-of-child-20160405-gnz3pr.html
Family Court ruling: violent father given sole custody of child
April 17, 2016 - 12:29PM
Rachel Olding
A violent man was granted sole custody of his son because he was deemed to be more capable than the boy's mother, who was rebuked for allegedly trying to turn the child against his father.
Among the reasons the Family Court gave for choosing the father to be sole carer is because he was unemployed and, therefore, could "devote all his time to the care of the child", compared with the mother, who worked part-time.
In an extremely unusual case, Judge Stewart Austin found the parents were so toxic towards each other that it was in the child's best interests to eliminate one from his life entirely.
Judge Austin chose in favour of the father, despite the man having numerous domestic violence convictions, and said the mother's relationship with the boy, who was 10 at the time of the judgment, could be "revived" later in life.
Critics of the Family Court say the 2014 judgment, which is about to be challenged in court, is part of a disturbing trend whereby the court sees a parent who is supposedly alienating the other parent as worse than an abusive parent.
The parents, given the pseudonyms Mr and Ms Perri, have been in and out of the Family Court since their relationship ended in 2009.
Each blames the other for the boy's distress.
"[The child] feels he has to choose between his parents and this pressure is psychologically distressing," a family consultant said in a report relied upon in Judge Austin's judgment.
"The conflict of loyalty he feels is so strong he emotionally decompensates and his behaviour deteriorates."
In 2011, at a time Mr Perri was on an apprehended violence order and a good behaviour bond for domestic violence offences, the court ordered the boy live with his father and have supervised visits with his mother.
The boy's behaviour deteriorated to the point where he was severely disturbed and was self-harming, running away from school and hurting other children.
In the most recent judgment, Judge Austin decided to cut all the boy's contact with his mother, including letters and phone calls.
He found that the boy's deterioration was due to the looming court case, rather than the father's deficiency, and it would be exacerbated by disrupting his living situation.
He said Ms Perri's capacity to care for the child was inferior, partly because she worked part-time and did not have a detailed plan for improving the boy's life.
She was also reluctant to believe her son's claim that his older half-sibling had sexually assaulted him, despite the police believing it was probably true.
She removed the half-sibling from their home, but believed the assault could not have happened because the boy was away at the time of the alleged incident.
Judge Austin said violence at the hands of the father, which stopped when the parents separated, was "in the past" and, therefore, was not a "pre-eminent issue".
Speaking to Fairfax Media, the mother said she felt like she had been told to simply "get over it".
"It was like the violence just wasn't relevant," Ms Perri, who has not seen her son in two years, said. "I had to be cross-examined by my ex-husband [because he couldn't afford legal representation] and it terrified me. I couldn't look at him."
She plans to return to court, alleging Mr Perri has contravened one of the orders by not keeping her informed of his current phone number.
The chief executive of the Victims of Crime Assistance League, Robyn Cotterell-Jones, said the Family Court was so out of touch with the effects of domestic violence that a royal commission was needed.
"It makes a farce out of all things supportive if the Family Court sides with the perpetrator and awards the children one tried to protect to the perpetrator," she said.
"When a woman leaves a man because his behaviour ... is unacceptable or criminal, they think they are doing what's right and almost always have naive assumptions that society will support them to be safe."
Showing posts with label PAS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PAS. Show all posts
Sunday, April 17, 2016
Monday, April 4, 2016
Dad who assaulted mom, held knife to daughter's chest AWARDED CHILD ACCESS after getting out of prison (Australia)
Sickening, but all too common. Dad is identified only by his last name, a pseudonym.
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/family-court-judgement-father-who-bashed-partner-and-threatened-child-granted-access-20160401-gnw5ne.html
Family Court judgement: Father who bashed partner and threatened child granted access
Date April 3, 2016
Rachel Olding Reporter
A man who bashed his partner and held a samurai sword to his daughter's chest has been granted access to the nine-year-old following his release from jail.
The long-running dispute in the Family Court has incensed anti-violence advocates, who say the court still has a poor understanding of domestic violence and is too often granting access when there has been a history of violence.
It comes amid calls to nationalise the recommendations from Victoria's landmark Royal Commission into Family Violence report released during the week.
It recommended an overhaul of the entire court system, including the creation of specialist family violence courts.
A photograph showing the injuries inflicted upon a domestic abuse survivor who was later told that the man who bashed her should be allowed to visit their daughter.
Given the pseudonyms Ms Tindall and Mr Saldo, the couple from Sydney have been bitterly fighting over parenting orders since their relationship ended in 2008.
The court had ordered weekly paternal visits but, in August 2010, Ms Tindall suddenly stopped dropping the child at meetings because she had given evidence against Mr Saldo in his criminal trial for bashing her, tying her to a chair and holding a sword at the child in their Sydney home in 2007.
Graphic photographs tendered in the District Court showed bruising sustained by Ms Tindall, 34, when her then partner repeatedly punched her because he believed she had tried to cheat on him.
He pleaded guilty during the trial and was sentenced to at least two-and-a-half years prison.
Ms Tindall was convicted in 2013 of 20 breaches of the parenting orders because Justice Stewart Austin believed the criminal trial didn't constitute "a change in the family dynamic" that would warrant her halting weekly visits.
"The father's decision to publicly admit his past violent behaviour changed nothing about the history of the parties' relationship," he said, in a judgement that was later overturned by the Full Court.
After being released on parole in 2014, Mr Saldo, 38, applied to have his regular visits reinstated.
He expressed no remorse, saying he was pressured into pleading guilty and didn't commit the offences.
The child was interviewed by a family consultant and asked what she wanted to happen, to which she said she knew her father had hurt her mother but "I would be upset if I didn't get to see him".
Accordingly, Justice Margaret Cleary ordered in January that monthly visits at a supervised centre start, building up to fortnightly visits.
She praised the father for his "positive conduct... stability and lawfulness" in prison and noted that he intended to apply to have his conviction acquitted.
He has not filed an appeal more than two years later.
She admonished Ms Tindall for "avoiding time between the child and the father for her own reasons, which do not relate entirely to the child".
"The child is entitled to come to her own judgement about the father," she said.
Judgements issued throughout the eight-year dispute show the court's tendency to side with Mr Saldo.
Initially, child psychologist Dr R said he thought the mother was was making up the allegations, evidenced in her "disproportionate distress" and calculated manner.
An academic expert gave evidence that the mother, like many domestic violence victims, may have been acting in ways that seem irrational to reasonable people because of the abuse suffered.
When Mr Saldo pleaded guilty, Dr R issued a mea culpa, saying he had never been more wrong in his 20 years of report writing.
Former Australian of the Year and domestic violence survivor Rosie Batty, whose son was murdered by his father during a contact visit, told Fairfax Media she intends to turn her focus to the Family Court this year.
During a Senate inquiry last year, she singled it out as her "biggest area of concern", saying violent parents were too often being granted access to kids.
"There is a total disregard or a total ignorance of family violence being an issue," she told the inquiry. "You're viewed in court as likely to be lying to manipulate the system."
In a feature on the Family Court published in the Monthly in November, reporter Jess Hill found that judges were often deciding that access to an abusive parent was better than no access at all and that a parent supposedly 'alienating' a child from an abusive parent was possibly a greater threat.
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/family-court-judgement-father-who-bashed-partner-and-threatened-child-granted-access-20160401-gnw5ne.html
Family Court judgement: Father who bashed partner and threatened child granted access
Date April 3, 2016
Rachel Olding Reporter
A man who bashed his partner and held a samurai sword to his daughter's chest has been granted access to the nine-year-old following his release from jail.
The long-running dispute in the Family Court has incensed anti-violence advocates, who say the court still has a poor understanding of domestic violence and is too often granting access when there has been a history of violence.
It comes amid calls to nationalise the recommendations from Victoria's landmark Royal Commission into Family Violence report released during the week.
It recommended an overhaul of the entire court system, including the creation of specialist family violence courts.
A photograph showing the injuries inflicted upon a domestic abuse survivor who was later told that the man who bashed her should be allowed to visit their daughter.
Given the pseudonyms Ms Tindall and Mr Saldo, the couple from Sydney have been bitterly fighting over parenting orders since their relationship ended in 2008.
The court had ordered weekly paternal visits but, in August 2010, Ms Tindall suddenly stopped dropping the child at meetings because she had given evidence against Mr Saldo in his criminal trial for bashing her, tying her to a chair and holding a sword at the child in their Sydney home in 2007.
Graphic photographs tendered in the District Court showed bruising sustained by Ms Tindall, 34, when her then partner repeatedly punched her because he believed she had tried to cheat on him.
He pleaded guilty during the trial and was sentenced to at least two-and-a-half years prison.
Ms Tindall was convicted in 2013 of 20 breaches of the parenting orders because Justice Stewart Austin believed the criminal trial didn't constitute "a change in the family dynamic" that would warrant her halting weekly visits.
"The father's decision to publicly admit his past violent behaviour changed nothing about the history of the parties' relationship," he said, in a judgement that was later overturned by the Full Court.
After being released on parole in 2014, Mr Saldo, 38, applied to have his regular visits reinstated.
He expressed no remorse, saying he was pressured into pleading guilty and didn't commit the offences.
The child was interviewed by a family consultant and asked what she wanted to happen, to which she said she knew her father had hurt her mother but "I would be upset if I didn't get to see him".
Accordingly, Justice Margaret Cleary ordered in January that monthly visits at a supervised centre start, building up to fortnightly visits.
She praised the father for his "positive conduct... stability and lawfulness" in prison and noted that he intended to apply to have his conviction acquitted.
He has not filed an appeal more than two years later.
She admonished Ms Tindall for "avoiding time between the child and the father for her own reasons, which do not relate entirely to the child".
"The child is entitled to come to her own judgement about the father," she said.
Judgements issued throughout the eight-year dispute show the court's tendency to side with Mr Saldo.
Initially, child psychologist Dr R said he thought the mother was was making up the allegations, evidenced in her "disproportionate distress" and calculated manner.
An academic expert gave evidence that the mother, like many domestic violence victims, may have been acting in ways that seem irrational to reasonable people because of the abuse suffered.
When Mr Saldo pleaded guilty, Dr R issued a mea culpa, saying he had never been more wrong in his 20 years of report writing.
Former Australian of the Year and domestic violence survivor Rosie Batty, whose son was murdered by his father during a contact visit, told Fairfax Media she intends to turn her focus to the Family Court this year.
During a Senate inquiry last year, she singled it out as her "biggest area of concern", saying violent parents were too often being granted access to kids.
"There is a total disregard or a total ignorance of family violence being an issue," she told the inquiry. "You're viewed in court as likely to be lying to manipulate the system."
In a feature on the Family Court published in the Monthly in November, reporter Jess Hill found that judges were often deciding that access to an abusive parent was better than no access at all and that a parent supposedly 'alienating' a child from an abusive parent was possibly a greater threat.
Thursday, March 31, 2016
Violent custodial dad hands over "sole care" of 3-year old to violent wife, child beaten to death (Boston, Massachusetts)
Another violent father who never should have received custody. Like a lot of guys, he seems to have increasingly coupled with the women who deserved him.
If this had been a custodial mother, she would be accused of failure to protect and end up doing hard time. But since it's a dad, well, he'll probably just play the Clueless Dad card and pay no penalty whatsoever.
By the way, this is a familiar theme with abusive custodial fathers. Since their motivations are all about punishment/control of the mother, and not about what's best fot the child or any desire to actively parent, they frequently dump the child on the new (resentful) wife or girlfriend.
Dad is identified as DAVE WHYTE.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/03/30/kenai-whyte-was-child-left-danger/ApI0rd9rADTrExHytGR5eP/story.html?event=event25
Kenai Whyte was a child left in danger
SUZANNE KREITER/GLOBE STAFF
Ashley Young is the mother of 3-year-old Kenai Whyte.
By Yvonne Abraham globe columnist
March 30, 2016
Ashley Young knew her son was in danger of being hurt. She was wrong, it seems, about who would do the hurting.
Young thought little Kenai Whyte’s father, Dave Whyte, was a danger to him — and she had good reason to think so. But prosecutors say it was Whyte’s wife, Marie Buie, who beat the child horribly on Jan. 31. The 3-year-old died two days later.
The court documents and police reports are gut-wrenching reading. From the day he was born, the toddler who loved firetrucks and Lightning McQueen was surrounded by threats and fear, the adults in his life battling and abusing each other, sometimes over him.
“I feel as if my child is in danger with his father,” Young wrote in a 2013 filing. “If he can beat on me and abuse me, I feel he can do the same to my son.”
Kenai’s father left a trail of police reports and restraining orders testifying to his abusiveness. Young said Whyte’s violence drove her to a shelter for domestic abuse victims. And later, she took out restraining orders against Whyte for pushing her against a wall and for visiting Kenai’s day care center to try to get her new address. Marie Buie surrendered to police for allegedly causing harm to Kenai Whyte, who died Feb. 2.
And she wasn’t the only one afraid of him. Police called to Whyte’s home in August of 2013 reported that he had pulled Buie’s hair and cut her hand. A year later, he was charged with assault and battery after he grabbed Buie by the throat. His mother, too, took out a restraining order against Whyte around the same time, saying her son had threatened to kill her.
Buie was trouble, too, according to police reports. She was twice arrested for assault and battery: once for stabbing a neighbor and once for hitting Whyte with a bottle, biting him, and pushing him down some stairs because, she told police, she was frustrated that he had left her to care for Kenai alone.
As ever in these impossible cases, it fell to the state to find a path for Kenai through the morass. The Department of Children and Families had been watching him since he was a baby, and checkups showed he was doing fine. A spokeswoman would not say whether DCF ran criminal background checks on the parents’ partners, citing privacy concerns. New rules announced Monday will make those checks mandatory.
If the probate judges mediating custody disputes between Young and Whyte knew about the father’s propensity for violence, they were apparently unperturbed by it. Whyte was granted full legal custody and half-physical custody of Kenai. Young, representing herself before the court (Whyte had an attorney), tried to change that late last year, but she missed a court date after her baby was born prematurely. So Whyte prevailed.
It is possible that, presented with this cavalcade of dysfunction, the court came to the measured (but mistaken) conclusion that Kenai was safe in his father’s home. It is possible, too, that what happened here is what happens too often when family court judges are presented with allegations of domestic abuse: The victim of the abuse is disbelieved and penalized. Their fragile state in the courtroom can make them seem disruptive or irrational. Worse, abusers can convince judges that the victims are using abuse claims to gain greater custody rights.
Courts can focus too hard on the breach between the parents, losing track of who is hitting whom — and whether the violence also endangers the child.
“Judges seem to care more about parental alienation,” said David Adams, head of Emerge, a counseling program for abusers. “So much so, that some victims’ attorneys aren’t even raising domestic violence in custody disputes.”
Whatever the reason, Young lost her bid to have her son spend less time in his father’s home. So there Kenai was, alone with Buie on the January night prosecutors say she brutally beat him.
You would like to think his parents fought this hard over their child because they both treasured him and wanted to protect him. But then you have to confront the realization that even a little boy as loved as Kenai Whyte seems to have been left in harm’s way to die.
If this had been a custodial mother, she would be accused of failure to protect and end up doing hard time. But since it's a dad, well, he'll probably just play the Clueless Dad card and pay no penalty whatsoever.
By the way, this is a familiar theme with abusive custodial fathers. Since their motivations are all about punishment/control of the mother, and not about what's best fot the child or any desire to actively parent, they frequently dump the child on the new (resentful) wife or girlfriend.
Dad is identified as DAVE WHYTE.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/03/30/kenai-whyte-was-child-left-danger/ApI0rd9rADTrExHytGR5eP/story.html?event=event25
Kenai Whyte was a child left in danger
SUZANNE KREITER/GLOBE STAFF
Ashley Young is the mother of 3-year-old Kenai Whyte.
By Yvonne Abraham globe columnist
March 30, 2016
Ashley Young knew her son was in danger of being hurt. She was wrong, it seems, about who would do the hurting.
Young thought little Kenai Whyte’s father, Dave Whyte, was a danger to him — and she had good reason to think so. But prosecutors say it was Whyte’s wife, Marie Buie, who beat the child horribly on Jan. 31. The 3-year-old died two days later.
The court documents and police reports are gut-wrenching reading. From the day he was born, the toddler who loved firetrucks and Lightning McQueen was surrounded by threats and fear, the adults in his life battling and abusing each other, sometimes over him.
“I feel as if my child is in danger with his father,” Young wrote in a 2013 filing. “If he can beat on me and abuse me, I feel he can do the same to my son.”
Kenai’s father left a trail of police reports and restraining orders testifying to his abusiveness. Young said Whyte’s violence drove her to a shelter for domestic abuse victims. And later, she took out restraining orders against Whyte for pushing her against a wall and for visiting Kenai’s day care center to try to get her new address. Marie Buie surrendered to police for allegedly causing harm to Kenai Whyte, who died Feb. 2.
And she wasn’t the only one afraid of him. Police called to Whyte’s home in August of 2013 reported that he had pulled Buie’s hair and cut her hand. A year later, he was charged with assault and battery after he grabbed Buie by the throat. His mother, too, took out a restraining order against Whyte around the same time, saying her son had threatened to kill her.
Buie was trouble, too, according to police reports. She was twice arrested for assault and battery: once for stabbing a neighbor and once for hitting Whyte with a bottle, biting him, and pushing him down some stairs because, she told police, she was frustrated that he had left her to care for Kenai alone.
As ever in these impossible cases, it fell to the state to find a path for Kenai through the morass. The Department of Children and Families had been watching him since he was a baby, and checkups showed he was doing fine. A spokeswoman would not say whether DCF ran criminal background checks on the parents’ partners, citing privacy concerns. New rules announced Monday will make those checks mandatory.
If the probate judges mediating custody disputes between Young and Whyte knew about the father’s propensity for violence, they were apparently unperturbed by it. Whyte was granted full legal custody and half-physical custody of Kenai. Young, representing herself before the court (Whyte had an attorney), tried to change that late last year, but she missed a court date after her baby was born prematurely. So Whyte prevailed.
It is possible that, presented with this cavalcade of dysfunction, the court came to the measured (but mistaken) conclusion that Kenai was safe in his father’s home. It is possible, too, that what happened here is what happens too often when family court judges are presented with allegations of domestic abuse: The victim of the abuse is disbelieved and penalized. Their fragile state in the courtroom can make them seem disruptive or irrational. Worse, abusers can convince judges that the victims are using abuse claims to gain greater custody rights.
Courts can focus too hard on the breach between the parents, losing track of who is hitting whom — and whether the violence also endangers the child.
“Judges seem to care more about parental alienation,” said David Adams, head of Emerge, a counseling program for abusers. “So much so, that some victims’ attorneys aren’t even raising domestic violence in custody disputes.”
Whatever the reason, Young lost her bid to have her son spend less time in his father’s home. So there Kenai was, alone with Buie on the January night prosecutors say she brutally beat him.
You would like to think his parents fought this hard over their child because they both treasured him and wanted to protect him. But then you have to confront the realization that even a little boy as loved as Kenai Whyte seems to have been left in harm’s way to die.
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
Bureaucrats defend social workers after sexually abusive father gets unsupervised access (British Columbia, Canada)
Very typical of the way fathers rights ideology as taken over. Mothers are labeled vindictive crazy liars no matter what.
UNNAMED DAD.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/judge-bc-sexual-abuse-errors-b-j-province-1.3401088
B.C. defends social workers after abusive father gets unsupervised access
Ministry of Children and Families appeals ruling that blamed officials for allowing child to be abused
By Natalie Clancy, CBC News
Posted: Jan 13, 2016 9:07 AM PT| Last Updated: Jan 13, 2016 3:02 PM PT
The family members can't be identified to protect the children, three of whom a B.C. Supreme Court justice determined were sexually abused by their father.
Natalie Clancy Investigative Reporter | CBC News Vancouver
Natalie Clancy is an award-winning journalist with a 25 year track record for breaking stories. Her investigations have exposed how Canadian girls are recruited by ISIS, sexual harassment in the RCMP, and forced the B.C. government to improve safety for nurses.
B.C.'s Children's Ministry is defending its actions in a case that involved a father who a judge ruled in a civil case sexually abused a child while the toddler was in the care of the ministry.
A B.C. Supreme Court judge ruled earlier in 2015 that the province's child protection service was negligent when it gave the father unsupervised access to his children after the three eldest made disclosures of sexual abuse.
The Ministry of Children and Family Development filed its reasons for appealing the decision this week.
The factum, submitted to the B.C. Court of Appeal, says that social workers relied on several experts including a pediatrician, psychologist and an expert on parenting when granting the unsupervised visits.
Allegations about the father were investigated by Vancouver police in this case, who concluded there was "no evidence to support J.P's allegations that B.G. molested their children." As a result no criminal charges were laid in this case.
The document says the judge who ruled in the case made errors in law and ignored key evidence when he condemned the ministry's actions.
Stop 'keeping secrets for Daddy'
The factum paints an ugly picture of the mother referred to only as J.P., citing an incident when she pepper-sprayed her ex-husband, brother and sister-in-law in the home where the children were staying.
As a result the children were moved to a foster home.
Social workers were also concerned about her repeated attempts to interview the children about their father's abuse.
The document says during a supervised visit she "forcibly held (her daughter) in her lap while telling her that (she) needed to tell the truth and cannot keep secrets. J.P. stated that (her daughter) was 'keeping secrets for daddy,' and that her actions were 'ruining our lives.'"
The government says J.P. refused to meet with social workers to talk about the "traumatizing effect that J.P.'s behaviour would have on a five-year-old child."
Mother's lawyer responds
J.P.'s lawyer Jack Hittrich says he will file a full response to the province's appeal in April. In the meantime he highlighted his concerns to CBC News.
"What is astounding about this factum is that the central findings of fact are completely ignored," said Hittrich.
"They chose to align themselves fully with the (father)," says Hittrich, but the ministry denies that.
"In this case mom does everything she can to protect these children. The more she cries the more she's labelled as crazy!"
Concerns mother would harm children
The factum argues the judge was wrong to rule social workers acted in bad faith, suggesting the evidence shows they properly assessed the risks posed to the children, and made decisions based on the information available at the time.
They feared the children were endangered by their mother, and at one point concern was raised by a police investigator that the mother might even kill the children.
The ministry's appeal argues that at that time experts advised it was unlikely the children had been sexually abused, and that their mother needed mental health intervention before she could safely regain custody.
Social workers had no way of knowing a judge would later rule that the father had abused the children and the mother had no mental health issues.
The province says the actions of social workers were unfairly judged in hindsight.
By June of 2011 the director of child welfare was aware the three eldest children had made disclosures of sexual abuse, but their statements were inconsistent, and Vancouver police had found no physical evidence to support charges.
Ministry relied on expert findings
The judge ruled social workers did not properly assess the risk to the children, but the document says the ministry relied on several reports, including:
■Pediatrician found no physical evidence of sexual abuse.
■Child psychologist found low probability that sexual abuse occurred.
■Parental capacity expert concluded sexual abuse was unlikely.
■Child psychologist concluded sexual abuse was unlikely.
■Parental capacity expert recommended father get custody.
■Child psychologist recommended father get custody.
■Parental capacity expert said mother required mental health intervention.
■Child psychologist found mother required psychiatric assessment.
The document says the mother refused to go for a recommended psychiatric assessment while the father followed orders to work with a parenting coach, who wrote positive reviews.
The trial judge ruled the VPD investigation was flawed and the experts the ministry relied on were not reliable, and social workers ought to have known that.
The ruling found one ministry employee's pervasive distrust of J.P. influenced others, and his failure to include sexual abuse allegations in a key document amount to misfeasance.
But the province says the evidence does not support such a serious finding.
The document says the plaintiff's view that a "multi-institutional conspiracy" led social workers to make a decision that ultimately allowed a father to molest his toddler in the ministry's care is simply not supported by evidence.
Being wrong does not mean negligence
But the factum does not dispute that sexual abuse occurred after the father was granted unsupervised access.
"Whether the sexual abuse in fact occurred is a much different question from whether social workers reasonably and in good faith" says the document.
"The fact that the trial judge eventually concluded … that the director was 'wrong' in her assessment of risk does not render all actions of the director that preceded … negligent and malicious."
The province declined to comment on the appeal because it is still before the courts.
UNNAMED DAD.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/judge-bc-sexual-abuse-errors-b-j-province-1.3401088
B.C. defends social workers after abusive father gets unsupervised access
Ministry of Children and Families appeals ruling that blamed officials for allowing child to be abused
By Natalie Clancy, CBC News
Posted: Jan 13, 2016 9:07 AM PT| Last Updated: Jan 13, 2016 3:02 PM PT
The family members can't be identified to protect the children, three of whom a B.C. Supreme Court justice determined were sexually abused by their father.
Natalie Clancy Investigative Reporter | CBC News Vancouver
Natalie Clancy is an award-winning journalist with a 25 year track record for breaking stories. Her investigations have exposed how Canadian girls are recruited by ISIS, sexual harassment in the RCMP, and forced the B.C. government to improve safety for nurses.
B.C.'s Children's Ministry is defending its actions in a case that involved a father who a judge ruled in a civil case sexually abused a child while the toddler was in the care of the ministry.
A B.C. Supreme Court judge ruled earlier in 2015 that the province's child protection service was negligent when it gave the father unsupervised access to his children after the three eldest made disclosures of sexual abuse.
The Ministry of Children and Family Development filed its reasons for appealing the decision this week.
The factum, submitted to the B.C. Court of Appeal, says that social workers relied on several experts including a pediatrician, psychologist and an expert on parenting when granting the unsupervised visits.
Allegations about the father were investigated by Vancouver police in this case, who concluded there was "no evidence to support J.P's allegations that B.G. molested their children." As a result no criminal charges were laid in this case.
The document says the judge who ruled in the case made errors in law and ignored key evidence when he condemned the ministry's actions.
Stop 'keeping secrets for Daddy'
The factum paints an ugly picture of the mother referred to only as J.P., citing an incident when she pepper-sprayed her ex-husband, brother and sister-in-law in the home where the children were staying.
As a result the children were moved to a foster home.
Social workers were also concerned about her repeated attempts to interview the children about their father's abuse.
The document says during a supervised visit she "forcibly held (her daughter) in her lap while telling her that (she) needed to tell the truth and cannot keep secrets. J.P. stated that (her daughter) was 'keeping secrets for daddy,' and that her actions were 'ruining our lives.'"
The government says J.P. refused to meet with social workers to talk about the "traumatizing effect that J.P.'s behaviour would have on a five-year-old child."
Mother's lawyer responds
J.P.'s lawyer Jack Hittrich says he will file a full response to the province's appeal in April. In the meantime he highlighted his concerns to CBC News.
"What is astounding about this factum is that the central findings of fact are completely ignored," said Hittrich.
"They chose to align themselves fully with the (father)," says Hittrich, but the ministry denies that.
"In this case mom does everything she can to protect these children. The more she cries the more she's labelled as crazy!"
Concerns mother would harm children
The factum argues the judge was wrong to rule social workers acted in bad faith, suggesting the evidence shows they properly assessed the risks posed to the children, and made decisions based on the information available at the time.
They feared the children were endangered by their mother, and at one point concern was raised by a police investigator that the mother might even kill the children.
The ministry's appeal argues that at that time experts advised it was unlikely the children had been sexually abused, and that their mother needed mental health intervention before she could safely regain custody.
Social workers had no way of knowing a judge would later rule that the father had abused the children and the mother had no mental health issues.
The province says the actions of social workers were unfairly judged in hindsight.
By June of 2011 the director of child welfare was aware the three eldest children had made disclosures of sexual abuse, but their statements were inconsistent, and Vancouver police had found no physical evidence to support charges.
Ministry relied on expert findings
The judge ruled social workers did not properly assess the risk to the children, but the document says the ministry relied on several reports, including:
■Pediatrician found no physical evidence of sexual abuse.
■Child psychologist found low probability that sexual abuse occurred.
■Parental capacity expert concluded sexual abuse was unlikely.
■Child psychologist concluded sexual abuse was unlikely.
■Parental capacity expert recommended father get custody.
■Child psychologist recommended father get custody.
■Parental capacity expert said mother required mental health intervention.
■Child psychologist found mother required psychiatric assessment.
The document says the mother refused to go for a recommended psychiatric assessment while the father followed orders to work with a parenting coach, who wrote positive reviews.
The trial judge ruled the VPD investigation was flawed and the experts the ministry relied on were not reliable, and social workers ought to have known that.
The ruling found one ministry employee's pervasive distrust of J.P. influenced others, and his failure to include sexual abuse allegations in a key document amount to misfeasance.
But the province says the evidence does not support such a serious finding.
The document says the plaintiff's view that a "multi-institutional conspiracy" led social workers to make a decision that ultimately allowed a father to molest his toddler in the ministry's care is simply not supported by evidence.
Being wrong does not mean negligence
But the factum does not dispute that sexual abuse occurred after the father was granted unsupervised access.
"Whether the sexual abuse in fact occurred is a much different question from whether social workers reasonably and in good faith" says the document.
"The fact that the trial judge eventually concluded … that the director was 'wrong' in her assessment of risk does not render all actions of the director that preceded … negligent and malicious."
The province declined to comment on the appeal because it is still before the courts.
Sunday, September 13, 2015
Abusive father with history of DV gets child custody by accusing mom of parental alienation, then turns around and demands she have no contact with the kids (Pontiac, Michigan)
Straight out of the fathers rights playbook.
So you abused your wife, hit her in front of the kids. The kids are afraid of you, don't want to be around you. Should you take responsibility for your actions? Learn to be a decent human being?
Nah! That's for sissies! Accuse Mom of brainwashing the kids against you. Then strip her of custody, and deny HER all contact. (But that's not attempted alienation, see. Not when Daddy does it. "Parental alienation" was cooked up by an abuser shrink purely for the use of abusive fathers and their lawyers. So daddies can badmouth mom all they want, and keep the kids away from her and that's totally okay.)
This scam has been going on for 30 years now. This is just the latest version.
Dad is identified as OMER TSIMHONI.
http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/oakland-county/2015/09/09/dad-bitter-divorce-wants-ex-wife-blocked-contacting-kids/71975846/
Dad in bitter divorce wants mom blocked from contact
Mike Martindale, The Detroit News 7:51 p.m. EDT September 9, 2015
Pontiac — A bitter case of child custody and alleged parental alienation is headed back into Oakland Circuit Court with a request from the father that his ex-wife be ordered not to have contact with her children for 90 days.
The couple’s two sons, now aged 14 and 11, and a daughter, 9, have been ordered to stay with their father, Omer Tsimhoni, for 90 days while being treated by a mental health professional, according to court documents.
A 2011 divorce has grown increasingly bitter between Tsimhoni and his ex-wife, Maya Eibschitz-Tsimhoni, with all three children refusing to talk to or even look at their father earlier this year.
That led Circuit Judge Lisa Gorcyca in June to order the children to Children’s Village. They eventually were sent to a summer camp in July and then to live with their father for 90 days after taking part last month in an intense five-day High Road to Reunification Program.
The children have lived with their mother since the divorce and their father contends his ex-wife has turned them against him. The mother, who is a well-known ophthalmologist, has said she wants the children to have a positive relationship with their father but added she and they fear he may kidnap them and take them to Israel, where he has worked as an engineer for General Motors.
#A hearing that was scheduled for Wednesday on the father’s request — filed last week — to block the mother from seeing the children during the 90 days was adjourned without explanation and no new date has been set.
Case court records indicate the father is “apprehensive” his ex-wife will disregard the separation and try to contact the children or visit them at their school — which started up this week.
Such action, the father claims in legal filings, would “result in immediate and irreparable harm” to the father and children’s forward progress in the program.
During this three-month period the mother would not be able to contact the children in person or by phone, email, text, letters, computer, third parties, or by delivery of any objects to the children.
The father also wants the mother to engage in program guidelines that she “shall engage a mental health professional.”
Since the father has had custody of the children since early August he also seeks abatement of child support payments while they are in his sole physical custody.
Gorcyca earlier ordered psychological evaluations for both parents and also the children and set Oct. 5-9 for an evidentiary hearing for arguments on whether the father should not be granted sole custody.
So you abused your wife, hit her in front of the kids. The kids are afraid of you, don't want to be around you. Should you take responsibility for your actions? Learn to be a decent human being?
Nah! That's for sissies! Accuse Mom of brainwashing the kids against you. Then strip her of custody, and deny HER all contact. (But that's not attempted alienation, see. Not when Daddy does it. "Parental alienation" was cooked up by an abuser shrink purely for the use of abusive fathers and their lawyers. So daddies can badmouth mom all they want, and keep the kids away from her and that's totally okay.)
This scam has been going on for 30 years now. This is just the latest version.
Dad is identified as OMER TSIMHONI.
http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/oakland-county/2015/09/09/dad-bitter-divorce-wants-ex-wife-blocked-contacting-kids/71975846/
Dad in bitter divorce wants mom blocked from contact
Mike Martindale, The Detroit News 7:51 p.m. EDT September 9, 2015
Pontiac — A bitter case of child custody and alleged parental alienation is headed back into Oakland Circuit Court with a request from the father that his ex-wife be ordered not to have contact with her children for 90 days.
The couple’s two sons, now aged 14 and 11, and a daughter, 9, have been ordered to stay with their father, Omer Tsimhoni, for 90 days while being treated by a mental health professional, according to court documents.
A 2011 divorce has grown increasingly bitter between Tsimhoni and his ex-wife, Maya Eibschitz-Tsimhoni, with all three children refusing to talk to or even look at their father earlier this year.
That led Circuit Judge Lisa Gorcyca in June to order the children to Children’s Village. They eventually were sent to a summer camp in July and then to live with their father for 90 days after taking part last month in an intense five-day High Road to Reunification Program.
The children have lived with their mother since the divorce and their father contends his ex-wife has turned them against him. The mother, who is a well-known ophthalmologist, has said she wants the children to have a positive relationship with their father but added she and they fear he may kidnap them and take them to Israel, where he has worked as an engineer for General Motors.
#A hearing that was scheduled for Wednesday on the father’s request — filed last week — to block the mother from seeing the children during the 90 days was adjourned without explanation and no new date has been set.
Case court records indicate the father is “apprehensive” his ex-wife will disregard the separation and try to contact the children or visit them at their school — which started up this week.
Such action, the father claims in legal filings, would “result in immediate and irreparable harm” to the father and children’s forward progress in the program.
During this three-month period the mother would not be able to contact the children in person or by phone, email, text, letters, computer, third parties, or by delivery of any objects to the children.
The father also wants the mother to engage in program guidelines that she “shall engage a mental health professional.”
Since the father has had custody of the children since early August he also seeks abatement of child support payments while they are in his sole physical custody.
Gorcyca earlier ordered psychological evaluations for both parents and also the children and set Oct. 5-9 for an evidentiary hearing for arguments on whether the father should not be granted sole custody.
Monday, August 3, 2015
"We were sent to juvenile detention for refusing to live with our father" (USA)
Powerful piece from the Washington Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/08/03/we-were-sent-to-juvenile-detention-for-refusing-to-live-with-our-father/
We were sent to juvenile detention for refusing to live with our father
Stop locking kids up to enforce bad parental custody agreements.
By Hope Loudon and Elizabeth Loudon
August 3 at 6:00 AM
We were 14 years old when a police officer led us out of our school in handcuffs. We hadn’t committed a crime, and were dedicated students who maintained clean disciplinary records. But we could no longer abide by the shared-custody agreement our parents had signed in their divorce nine years earlier. It mandated we spend half our time with our father, a man we had no relationship with and who largely ignored us except when he wanted something from us. When living with him became unbearable, we made the terrifying decision to use civil disobedience and refuse to go with him.
A Michigan judge imposed the same injustice on three siblings last month. Judge Lisa Gorcyca sentenced the Tsimhoni children — ages 9, 10 and 14 — to juvenile detention for refusing to meet with their father, drawing international attention. Gorcyca dismissed the children’s claims of abuse and insisted that their father, Omer Tsimhoni, is “a good man.” She sent them to Children’s Village before relenting to public outrage and moving them to a summer camp after more than two weeks.
In too many parental custody and visitation disputes, adults belittle children’s attempts to escape homes where they feel mistreated. Our father seemed to derive pleasure from controlling us and crushing our spirits. But like Gorcyca, a school administrator told us our father was “loving” and insisted that cutting him off would amount to throwing our lives away. Our friends’ parents were sympathetic, but believed what happened in our home was family business. Instead of allowing us to live with our mother full time, police sent us to juvenile detention for being “incorrigible” children.
[Editor’s note: Contacted by The Post, the authors’ father sent an e-mailed response: “Did I do everything perfectly? No. But my goal and my motivation is and always was for my children to become strong, healthy, happy people. … From the eyes of the adolescent girl, a parent’s behavior isn’t always seen clearly.”]
Judge Gorcyca justified her action by saying the siblings’ mother brainwashed them to hate their father. She told the children, “one day you are going to realize what’s going on in this case and you’re going to apologize to your dad.” But as 22-year-olds who were once in the Tsimhoni children’s position, we’re still not apologizing.
We begged our father to release us to our mother full time on several occasions, but he dismissed our pleas. Our mom couldn’t afford a legal battle to change the custody agreement, and we believed the effort would be futile anyway. Since the pain our father caused us didn’t leave marks on our bodies, it was difficult to prove. #For years, we felt stressed and afraid, suffering from headaches, stomachaches, and even occasional panic attacks. We began wishing that our father would hit us so someone would finally believe we were in pain. Hope once dreamed that he punched her in the face, causing blood to stream down her jaw. In the dream, she cried tears of joy and said in a relieved whisper, “thank you.”
When we entered high school, we hoped the court would believe we were old enough to decide to live with our mother. When our father arrived to pick us up from school one day, we refused to go. We called for the school police officer, foolishly believing he and a school administrator would protect us. We were wrong. They scorned us for the way we were treating our “loving father” who “just wanted to make things better.” Instead of allowing us to leave with our mother, the police officer gave us a choice: Go with our father or be arrested. We chose the latter.
We were frisked, cuffed, and led through the halls of our high school to a police car.
[Why do we still put kids in shackles when they go to trial?]
As in the Tsimhoni children’s case, social workers acted as though our mother had brainwashed us. They accused us of causing a fight between our parents and treated us like criminals. At the detention facility, we were forced to remove our clothes and replace them with stained uniforms. Authorities separated and interrogated us. When we tried to explain that we felt mistreated and depressed in our father’s home, the man processing us said, “Stop giving me these evasive answers! Did he or did he not leave a mark?”
At the juvenile facility where we were taken, authorities bullied us just as Judge Gorcyca bullied the Tsimhoni children. We were held as voluntary walk-ins, but were free to walk out only into our father’s hands until we turned 18 or a judge ordered otherwise.
The detention facility staff did everything possible to break us down, adding to the trauma we had experienced from our father. We were not allowed to touch each other, even to hold hands in prayer. If we spoke too loudly, the staff yelled at us; if we spoke too softly, they forbade us from speaking at all.
It was a dehumanizing experience, but still less frightening than returning to our father. So we tried to make peace with our new reality.
It was dinner time on our third day in detention when our mom arrived with a court order for our release. The judge gave her temporary physical custody and required a psychological evaluation of us. The evaluator determined it was better for us to live with our mom than in a jail facility.
We have spoken to our father only once in the eight years since then. We are now faced with the misfortune of factoring the cost of trauma therapy into our budgets for graduate school, but we are lucky compared to many formerly incarcerated teens. Because of the inadequate education in juvenile detention facilities, many drop out of school and end up back in detention or jail. We still celebrate our Independence Day, marking our release from the juvenile detention facility and our father’s control.
We passionately resent that the court system forced us to live in a house where we didn’t feel loved and protected. Over time, the law has decided that people are not property, unless they are children. An adult cannot incarcerate his “defiant” employees, parents, or romantic partner, but the law will readily incarcerate his children for him. If the court protected us as it protects adults, we would have had much healthier and happier childhoods.
Like the judge in Omer Tsimhoni’s case, our father invoked the concept of “parental alienation syndrome” to discredit our charges of mistreatment. It’s a claim parents in custody battles often exploit to accuse their ex-spouses of brainwashing their children to turn against them, convincing mediators that the children have been coached to lie. As a result, bad parenting and abuse go uninvestigated and children are returned to violent and emotionally damaging homes. In extreme cases, the child or the protective parent is incarcerated for refusing to obey the court’s custody or visitation order.
Children should never be incarcerated without being found guilty of a crime. Spurious charges like “incorrigibility,” for which only children are prosecuted, are inherently discriminatory and should be abolished. Children should be represented by an attorney in custody cases at the expense of the state. Currently, they’re given a guardian ad litem, often a volunteer with only a few days’ training.
Further, courts should never overlook children’s complaints of abuse or mistreatment. Whether emotional or physical, such charges should be thoroughly investigated before custody or visitation orders are made. Courts exist to protect citizens’ rights, including children’s — and children should have the right to live in healthy homes.
In the Tsimhonis’ case, there is no ambiguity. From experience, we know that the decision to use civil disobedience to escape a parent is made not on a childish whim, but in genuine desperation. What we, and the Tsimhonis, were saying was: “Being with our father is so unbearable that we would rather risk imprisonment than associate with him. Let us live with our mom.” It’s a message that our justice system should not ignore.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/08/03/we-were-sent-to-juvenile-detention-for-refusing-to-live-with-our-father/
We were sent to juvenile detention for refusing to live with our father
Stop locking kids up to enforce bad parental custody agreements.
By Hope Loudon and Elizabeth Loudon
August 3 at 6:00 AM
We were 14 years old when a police officer led us out of our school in handcuffs. We hadn’t committed a crime, and were dedicated students who maintained clean disciplinary records. But we could no longer abide by the shared-custody agreement our parents had signed in their divorce nine years earlier. It mandated we spend half our time with our father, a man we had no relationship with and who largely ignored us except when he wanted something from us. When living with him became unbearable, we made the terrifying decision to use civil disobedience and refuse to go with him.
A Michigan judge imposed the same injustice on three siblings last month. Judge Lisa Gorcyca sentenced the Tsimhoni children — ages 9, 10 and 14 — to juvenile detention for refusing to meet with their father, drawing international attention. Gorcyca dismissed the children’s claims of abuse and insisted that their father, Omer Tsimhoni, is “a good man.” She sent them to Children’s Village before relenting to public outrage and moving them to a summer camp after more than two weeks.
In too many parental custody and visitation disputes, adults belittle children’s attempts to escape homes where they feel mistreated. Our father seemed to derive pleasure from controlling us and crushing our spirits. But like Gorcyca, a school administrator told us our father was “loving” and insisted that cutting him off would amount to throwing our lives away. Our friends’ parents were sympathetic, but believed what happened in our home was family business. Instead of allowing us to live with our mother full time, police sent us to juvenile detention for being “incorrigible” children.
[Editor’s note: Contacted by The Post, the authors’ father sent an e-mailed response: “Did I do everything perfectly? No. But my goal and my motivation is and always was for my children to become strong, healthy, happy people. … From the eyes of the adolescent girl, a parent’s behavior isn’t always seen clearly.”]
Judge Gorcyca justified her action by saying the siblings’ mother brainwashed them to hate their father. She told the children, “one day you are going to realize what’s going on in this case and you’re going to apologize to your dad.” But as 22-year-olds who were once in the Tsimhoni children’s position, we’re still not apologizing.
We begged our father to release us to our mother full time on several occasions, but he dismissed our pleas. Our mom couldn’t afford a legal battle to change the custody agreement, and we believed the effort would be futile anyway. Since the pain our father caused us didn’t leave marks on our bodies, it was difficult to prove. #For years, we felt stressed and afraid, suffering from headaches, stomachaches, and even occasional panic attacks. We began wishing that our father would hit us so someone would finally believe we were in pain. Hope once dreamed that he punched her in the face, causing blood to stream down her jaw. In the dream, she cried tears of joy and said in a relieved whisper, “thank you.”
When we entered high school, we hoped the court would believe we were old enough to decide to live with our mother. When our father arrived to pick us up from school one day, we refused to go. We called for the school police officer, foolishly believing he and a school administrator would protect us. We were wrong. They scorned us for the way we were treating our “loving father” who “just wanted to make things better.” Instead of allowing us to leave with our mother, the police officer gave us a choice: Go with our father or be arrested. We chose the latter.
We were frisked, cuffed, and led through the halls of our high school to a police car.
[Why do we still put kids in shackles when they go to trial?]
As in the Tsimhoni children’s case, social workers acted as though our mother had brainwashed us. They accused us of causing a fight between our parents and treated us like criminals. At the detention facility, we were forced to remove our clothes and replace them with stained uniforms. Authorities separated and interrogated us. When we tried to explain that we felt mistreated and depressed in our father’s home, the man processing us said, “Stop giving me these evasive answers! Did he or did he not leave a mark?”
At the juvenile facility where we were taken, authorities bullied us just as Judge Gorcyca bullied the Tsimhoni children. We were held as voluntary walk-ins, but were free to walk out only into our father’s hands until we turned 18 or a judge ordered otherwise.
The detention facility staff did everything possible to break us down, adding to the trauma we had experienced from our father. We were not allowed to touch each other, even to hold hands in prayer. If we spoke too loudly, the staff yelled at us; if we spoke too softly, they forbade us from speaking at all.
It was a dehumanizing experience, but still less frightening than returning to our father. So we tried to make peace with our new reality.
It was dinner time on our third day in detention when our mom arrived with a court order for our release. The judge gave her temporary physical custody and required a psychological evaluation of us. The evaluator determined it was better for us to live with our mom than in a jail facility.
We have spoken to our father only once in the eight years since then. We are now faced with the misfortune of factoring the cost of trauma therapy into our budgets for graduate school, but we are lucky compared to many formerly incarcerated teens. Because of the inadequate education in juvenile detention facilities, many drop out of school and end up back in detention or jail. We still celebrate our Independence Day, marking our release from the juvenile detention facility and our father’s control.
We passionately resent that the court system forced us to live in a house where we didn’t feel loved and protected. Over time, the law has decided that people are not property, unless they are children. An adult cannot incarcerate his “defiant” employees, parents, or romantic partner, but the law will readily incarcerate his children for him. If the court protected us as it protects adults, we would have had much healthier and happier childhoods.
Like the judge in Omer Tsimhoni’s case, our father invoked the concept of “parental alienation syndrome” to discredit our charges of mistreatment. It’s a claim parents in custody battles often exploit to accuse their ex-spouses of brainwashing their children to turn against them, convincing mediators that the children have been coached to lie. As a result, bad parenting and abuse go uninvestigated and children are returned to violent and emotionally damaging homes. In extreme cases, the child or the protective parent is incarcerated for refusing to obey the court’s custody or visitation order.
Children should never be incarcerated without being found guilty of a crime. Spurious charges like “incorrigibility,” for which only children are prosecuted, are inherently discriminatory and should be abolished. Children should be represented by an attorney in custody cases at the expense of the state. Currently, they’re given a guardian ad litem, often a volunteer with only a few days’ training.
Further, courts should never overlook children’s complaints of abuse or mistreatment. Whether emotional or physical, such charges should be thoroughly investigated before custody or visitation orders are made. Courts exist to protect citizens’ rights, including children’s — and children should have the right to live in healthy homes.
In the Tsimhonis’ case, there is no ambiguity. From experience, we know that the decision to use civil disobedience to escape a parent is made not on a childish whim, but in genuine desperation. What we, and the Tsimhonis, were saying was: “Being with our father is so unbearable that we would rather risk imprisonment than associate with him. Let us live with our mom.” It’s a message that our justice system should not ignore.
Thursday, May 7, 2015
Custodial dad with criminal history (including battery involving a police officer) insists he did not beat his kids; claims ex-wife "instructing" them (Chatanooga, Tennessee)
This a very fathers rights oriented article. Poor little custodial dad JOHNNY FIELDS---who incidentally has a criminal history with at least one reported case of battery against a police officer--is totally innocent!
It's that lying ex alienating the kids against me! I'm telling the truth but at least three other people are lying!!!
It's bullsh**.
It's starts with the deliberately confusing language that FRs are very fond of, that some varying chunk of child allegations are "false." That language is never used. CPS says "unfounded" or "unsubstantiated", which means that the allegations supposedly can't be proven. And CPS is infamous for supposedly finding no proof of child abuse allegations even in the most egregious cases, especially when fathers are involved. Partly because they are brainwashed into believing that fathers must be "involved" no matter what.
And no, women are actually less likely to lie about abuse than men, especially men with violent histories.
But despite that, FRs insist that vindictive mothers are doing all this "alienation" and lying while insisting on the dude's total innocence--even when the father has a documented history of violence.. This is what they teach their guys. It's totally out of their playbook on how to get custody.
How much you want to bet that this guy has a history of domestic violence too? But he won't own up to that, I'm sure.
And yes, violent fathers are more likely to get custody too. Partly because they tend to be pathological liars who are intent on smearing the mom, and partly because they intent on destroying and punishing her by taking her kids away from her.
See the relevant research here.
http://www.wdef.com/news/story/Father-says-abuse-claims-are-false-I-would-never/U0CNOwOfH0WoVnPhIpF9Sg.cspx
Father says abuse claims are false: ' I would never hurt my kids.'
Reported by: Erik Avanier
Published: 4/20 5:47 pm Updated: 4/20 7:20 pm
CHATTANOOGA, Tennessee(WDEF) - A father accused of child abuse vows to fight tooth and nail to clear his name.
Last week WDEF first reported on Johnny Fields, 51, of Chattanooga after he was booked into the Hamilton County jail on a charge of child abuse and neglect.
After posting bail, Fields contacted WDEF and requested that his side of the story be told.
"It's been a struggle to me. I've been standing like a man and doing the best I can do for my kids and they just wipe this in my face," Fields said while tears rolled down his eyes.
According to the arrest affidavit, Fields repeatedly punched his 12-year old daughters face. He is also accused of pulling her hair and beating her ribs.
Police found a small red scratch under the the girls eye and took Fields into custody.
Another child who said he witnessed the attack told officers he had to pull Fields off of the girl.
Both kids told police, "This happens a lot at home."
Child protective services was called to further investigate.
But Fields; a physically handicapped father with only one hand told WDEF a different version of what happened.
He said he came and found his children fighting over a lap top computer. He said his 12 year old was combative and even took swings at him. Fields told WDEF that he was trying to protect himself from being hit so he held her head down to keep her from using both hands to swing at him.
WDEF asked Fields about the scratch police found under her eye.
"If she had a red spot under her eye, I didn't do it. I'm her daddy and I would never hurt my kids or do anything to harm them," Fields said.
WDEF then asked Fields about a quote in the arrest report where the children say the abuse happens all the time.
"That's a darn lie. My kids know that's a lie. I've done everything I could do; selling scraps and fixing law mowers; trying to provide food for them and to take care of them like a father should. And this is the only thank I get; a slap in the face," Fields said.
Fields told WDEF he believes his ex-wife has been instructing the children to tell police they were abused so he could loose custody of his children. WDEF was never able to get in contact with his ex-wife to get her reaction to that allegation.
But according to legal experts who have defended clients with similar claims, there are cases where one parent has coerced children into making false accusation against another parent. WDEF spoke to defense attorney Jerry Summers who has experience defending clients who are believed to be falsely accused of child abuse. Summers said he always look for red flags that may determine motive for making a false claim of abuse.
"Is there a pending child custody battle? Is there a divorce pending. Are government benefits involved? Is one party trying to get child support by getting a custody change from one parent to another? Those are things you look for," Summers said.
Unfortunately, while there are many legitimate cases of child abuse by a parent, there is also illegitimate claims that end up in the court system.
"It's more prevalent than you realize. Usually the ones that the prosecution and the DA's have the ultimate decision where they think it's a valid case or not. Sometimes they objectively look at it and realize there's not a case, those cases go away," summer said.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in 2010, 40-percent of child abuse cases in this country were proven false.
"40-percent of false charges; that still leaves an awful lot of scars on a lot of people. You can get rid of the charge but you may not get rid of the stigma," Summers said.
Fields is trying to avoid the stigma of being labeled an abusive parent. During an interview with Fields, he tried hard not to cry but emotions eventually took over.
"I getting out of jail with tears coming out of my eyes because I know I did the best I could do," Fields said.
WDEF contacted Child Advocacy Center of Chattanooga but officials declined to comment about how they weed out false claims from legitimate ones. In full disclosure, Fields admitted to WDEF that he has a criminal past which includes battery on a police officer. But he maintains that was a long time ago and that he has turned his life around.
Fields is currently out of jail on a $3,000 bond awaiting a May 8th court date.
It's that lying ex alienating the kids against me! I'm telling the truth but at least three other people are lying!!!
It's bullsh**.
It's starts with the deliberately confusing language that FRs are very fond of, that some varying chunk of child allegations are "false." That language is never used. CPS says "unfounded" or "unsubstantiated", which means that the allegations supposedly can't be proven. And CPS is infamous for supposedly finding no proof of child abuse allegations even in the most egregious cases, especially when fathers are involved. Partly because they are brainwashed into believing that fathers must be "involved" no matter what.
And no, women are actually less likely to lie about abuse than men, especially men with violent histories.
But despite that, FRs insist that vindictive mothers are doing all this "alienation" and lying while insisting on the dude's total innocence--even when the father has a documented history of violence.. This is what they teach their guys. It's totally out of their playbook on how to get custody.
How much you want to bet that this guy has a history of domestic violence too? But he won't own up to that, I'm sure.
And yes, violent fathers are more likely to get custody too. Partly because they tend to be pathological liars who are intent on smearing the mom, and partly because they intent on destroying and punishing her by taking her kids away from her.
See the relevant research here.
http://www.wdef.com/news/story/Father-says-abuse-claims-are-false-I-would-never/U0CNOwOfH0WoVnPhIpF9Sg.cspx
Father says abuse claims are false: ' I would never hurt my kids.'
Reported by: Erik Avanier
Published: 4/20 5:47 pm Updated: 4/20 7:20 pm
CHATTANOOGA, Tennessee(WDEF) - A father accused of child abuse vows to fight tooth and nail to clear his name.
Last week WDEF first reported on Johnny Fields, 51, of Chattanooga after he was booked into the Hamilton County jail on a charge of child abuse and neglect.
After posting bail, Fields contacted WDEF and requested that his side of the story be told.
"It's been a struggle to me. I've been standing like a man and doing the best I can do for my kids and they just wipe this in my face," Fields said while tears rolled down his eyes.
According to the arrest affidavit, Fields repeatedly punched his 12-year old daughters face. He is also accused of pulling her hair and beating her ribs.
Police found a small red scratch under the the girls eye and took Fields into custody.
Another child who said he witnessed the attack told officers he had to pull Fields off of the girl.
Both kids told police, "This happens a lot at home."
Child protective services was called to further investigate.
But Fields; a physically handicapped father with only one hand told WDEF a different version of what happened.
He said he came and found his children fighting over a lap top computer. He said his 12 year old was combative and even took swings at him. Fields told WDEF that he was trying to protect himself from being hit so he held her head down to keep her from using both hands to swing at him.
WDEF asked Fields about the scratch police found under her eye.
"If she had a red spot under her eye, I didn't do it. I'm her daddy and I would never hurt my kids or do anything to harm them," Fields said.
WDEF then asked Fields about a quote in the arrest report where the children say the abuse happens all the time.
"That's a darn lie. My kids know that's a lie. I've done everything I could do; selling scraps and fixing law mowers; trying to provide food for them and to take care of them like a father should. And this is the only thank I get; a slap in the face," Fields said.
Fields told WDEF he believes his ex-wife has been instructing the children to tell police they were abused so he could loose custody of his children. WDEF was never able to get in contact with his ex-wife to get her reaction to that allegation.
But according to legal experts who have defended clients with similar claims, there are cases where one parent has coerced children into making false accusation against another parent. WDEF spoke to defense attorney Jerry Summers who has experience defending clients who are believed to be falsely accused of child abuse. Summers said he always look for red flags that may determine motive for making a false claim of abuse.
"Is there a pending child custody battle? Is there a divorce pending. Are government benefits involved? Is one party trying to get child support by getting a custody change from one parent to another? Those are things you look for," Summers said.
Unfortunately, while there are many legitimate cases of child abuse by a parent, there is also illegitimate claims that end up in the court system.
"It's more prevalent than you realize. Usually the ones that the prosecution and the DA's have the ultimate decision where they think it's a valid case or not. Sometimes they objectively look at it and realize there's not a case, those cases go away," summer said.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in 2010, 40-percent of child abuse cases in this country were proven false.
"40-percent of false charges; that still leaves an awful lot of scars on a lot of people. You can get rid of the charge but you may not get rid of the stigma," Summers said.
Fields is trying to avoid the stigma of being labeled an abusive parent. During an interview with Fields, he tried hard not to cry but emotions eventually took over.
"I getting out of jail with tears coming out of my eyes because I know I did the best I could do," Fields said.
WDEF contacted Child Advocacy Center of Chattanooga but officials declined to comment about how they weed out false claims from legitimate ones. In full disclosure, Fields admitted to WDEF that he has a criminal past which includes battery on a police officer. But he maintains that was a long time ago and that he has turned his life around.
Fields is currently out of jail on a $3,000 bond awaiting a May 8th court date.
Saturday, November 1, 2014
Court gives custody to dad who abused ex-wife and alienated the kids against her (Massachusetts)
Still think poor little daddies are discriminated against?
The ignorance here is breathtaking. This has NOTHING to do with what is "best for the children" and everything to do with rewarding and reinforcing the abusive control exercised by an UNNAMED DAD who has battered the mother in the past.
When the father's rights people accuse mothers of "alienation," it's treated as a capital crime and as child abuse. When fathers do it, it gets a nod and dismissed--just as we see here. Even though the alienation is part of a larger pattern of abuse and control.
As for this idiotic "guardian" who found the father "supportive" of the mother's relationship with the children? That never happens. Pure lip service if even that. Batterers undermine the mother's authority and well being by physical abuse alone, which by definition, is also mental abuse. Batterers are also expert manipulators, and it is sickening to see the authorities sell out to them as we see here.
The fact that the father is also a police officer is also very troubling, and suggests a lot of backscratching and collusion.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/10/31/appeals-court-rules-that-father-who-physically-abused-former-wife-should-get-custody-children/NlQtLdBvV4sThqKTTRCTmK/story.html#skip-target1
Court rules in favor of father who abused ex-wife in custody case
By John R. Ellement
Globe Staff
October 31, 2014
A police officer who abused his former wife during their marriage should be given custody of the couple’s two children because they have become so estranged from her that one might attack her, while the other is at risk of suicide, the Massachusetts Appeals court ruled Friday.
The court said the case was not about punishing past bad deeds, but about doing what was best for the children.
In a unanimous ruling, a three-judge panel of the court supported the decision by Probate and Family Court Judge John D. Casey, who rejected testimony from the mother’s expert that the father had “brainwashed’’ the children into saying he was the only parent they could live with.
Writing for the court, Appeals Judge Ariane D. Vuono said a searching examination of the troubled family by a guardian ad litem concluded that the father was the only safe haven for the children.
The conclusion by the guardian — who interviewed all four family members, as well as therapists and teachers — was properly given more weight by Casey than the mother’s expert, who only interviewed the mother and then listened to trial testimony, Vuono wrote.
“Cases concerning the custody of children are often difficult and emotionally charged, and may be rendered even more complex when domestic violence is involved,’’ Vuono wrote. “The judge properly recognized that the present case was not about punishing a party for past bad behavior, but was about deciding what was best for the children going forward.’’
The court identified the parties only by the fictitious initials K.A. and T.R.
The court said the couple’s turbulent marriage, which began in 1997, was marred by violence between the two, especially when they argued about what became a chronic issue for them, their struggling finances. The father filed for divorce in April 2010.
When the children were young, the mother was the primary caretaker because the husband worked the overnight shift at a police department while also working paid details. The mother worked at a school cafeteria, the court said.
When the couple argued, the father would leave the house for a few days or a week at a time, having no contact with the children, both of whom are now teenagers, according to the court.
But the relationship between the mother and the children changed dramatically, and the children became fearful of her to the point where they would wake up their father and seek his intervention, the court said.
During the divorce proceedings, the mother’s expert testified that the behaviorial change was a “red flag’’ signaling that the father had “brainwashed’’ the children into turning on their mother. But Casey, citing the guardian, found the father had repeatedly been supportive of the mother with the children.
After a trial, Casey ruled for the father, citing the guardian’s conclusion that the one of the children might assault her mother and the second was in such an emotionally vulnerable state that he might commit suicide if ordered to live with their mother.
The Appeals Court concluded that Casey’s rulings “reflect consideration of relevant circumstances ... and the potential risks to the children should the father not have primary physical custody.’’
The court said in its ruling that the mother will, all the same, have substantial parenting time.
The ignorance here is breathtaking. This has NOTHING to do with what is "best for the children" and everything to do with rewarding and reinforcing the abusive control exercised by an UNNAMED DAD who has battered the mother in the past.
When the father's rights people accuse mothers of "alienation," it's treated as a capital crime and as child abuse. When fathers do it, it gets a nod and dismissed--just as we see here. Even though the alienation is part of a larger pattern of abuse and control.
As for this idiotic "guardian" who found the father "supportive" of the mother's relationship with the children? That never happens. Pure lip service if even that. Batterers undermine the mother's authority and well being by physical abuse alone, which by definition, is also mental abuse. Batterers are also expert manipulators, and it is sickening to see the authorities sell out to them as we see here.
The fact that the father is also a police officer is also very troubling, and suggests a lot of backscratching and collusion.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/10/31/appeals-court-rules-that-father-who-physically-abused-former-wife-should-get-custody-children/NlQtLdBvV4sThqKTTRCTmK/story.html#skip-target1
Court rules in favor of father who abused ex-wife in custody case
By John R. Ellement
Globe Staff
October 31, 2014
A police officer who abused his former wife during their marriage should be given custody of the couple’s two children because they have become so estranged from her that one might attack her, while the other is at risk of suicide, the Massachusetts Appeals court ruled Friday.
The court said the case was not about punishing past bad deeds, but about doing what was best for the children.
In a unanimous ruling, a three-judge panel of the court supported the decision by Probate and Family Court Judge John D. Casey, who rejected testimony from the mother’s expert that the father had “brainwashed’’ the children into saying he was the only parent they could live with.
Writing for the court, Appeals Judge Ariane D. Vuono said a searching examination of the troubled family by a guardian ad litem concluded that the father was the only safe haven for the children.
The conclusion by the guardian — who interviewed all four family members, as well as therapists and teachers — was properly given more weight by Casey than the mother’s expert, who only interviewed the mother and then listened to trial testimony, Vuono wrote.
“Cases concerning the custody of children are often difficult and emotionally charged, and may be rendered even more complex when domestic violence is involved,’’ Vuono wrote. “The judge properly recognized that the present case was not about punishing a party for past bad behavior, but was about deciding what was best for the children going forward.’’
The court identified the parties only by the fictitious initials K.A. and T.R.
The court said the couple’s turbulent marriage, which began in 1997, was marred by violence between the two, especially when they argued about what became a chronic issue for them, their struggling finances. The father filed for divorce in April 2010.
When the children were young, the mother was the primary caretaker because the husband worked the overnight shift at a police department while also working paid details. The mother worked at a school cafeteria, the court said.
When the couple argued, the father would leave the house for a few days or a week at a time, having no contact with the children, both of whom are now teenagers, according to the court.
But the relationship between the mother and the children changed dramatically, and the children became fearful of her to the point where they would wake up their father and seek his intervention, the court said.
During the divorce proceedings, the mother’s expert testified that the behaviorial change was a “red flag’’ signaling that the father had “brainwashed’’ the children into turning on their mother. But Casey, citing the guardian, found the father had repeatedly been supportive of the mother with the children.
After a trial, Casey ruled for the father, citing the guardian’s conclusion that the one of the children might assault her mother and the second was in such an emotionally vulnerable state that he might commit suicide if ordered to live with their mother.
The Appeals Court concluded that Casey’s rulings “reflect consideration of relevant circumstances ... and the potential risks to the children should the father not have primary physical custody.’’
The court said in its ruling that the mother will, all the same, have substantial parenting time.
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Dad charged with putting 6-year-old son in head lock, draggling him across parking lot during visitation pick-up (Dolan Springs, Arizona)
For some ridiculous reason, family court judges have ruled that parking lots are safe places for protective mothers and abusive fathers to exchange the kids during custody visits. I have never understood this. Presumably, Daddy won't beat up somebody if they are in a public place and not in a private home? Doesn't necessarily work that way. In addition, if Daddy isn't safe in private, than why should he have visitation/custody rights at all? Why expose the already traumatized mother and children to further trauma and danger?
If there had been no unrelated witnesses to this father's abuse of this boy, the mother would probably have been labeled a liar, and the child the "alienated' victim of his mother's lies.
Now that fathers rights people are going to have to figure out a way to explain away the other witnesses who stopped the fathers abuse. Um, they were no doubt suffering from Stranger Alienation Syndrome (SAS)?
http://www.kpho.com/story/24945701/az-man-accused-of-holding-son-6-in-choke-hold
AZ man accused of holding son, 6, in choke hold
Posted: Mar 11, 2014 3:42 PM EDT
Updated: Mar 11, 2014 4:14 PM EDT
By Breann Bierman
DOLAN SPRINGS, AZ (CBS5) - An Arizona father has been arrested for allegedly putting his 6-year-old son in a choke hold and pulling him through the parking lot until a witness was able to rescue the boy.
Investigators said Perry Dorian Wickerd, 54, of Dolan Springs was at a business in the 16100 block of Pierce Ferry Road in Dolan Springs early Monday afternoon to pick up his son from his ex-wife's custody, according to the Mohave County Sheriff's Office.
Wickerd's ex-wife told police Wickerd had their son in a choke hold and she tried to stop him. She said two men in the area stopped to help and the good Samaritans were able to hold the man until deputies arrived.
Police called one of the witnesses who said he was driving by when he saw a man holding a child in a choke hold so he stopped his car, grabbed the man and forced him to release the child.
Wickerd was taken to Mohave County Jail on a felony aggravated assault charge.
If there had been no unrelated witnesses to this father's abuse of this boy, the mother would probably have been labeled a liar, and the child the "alienated' victim of his mother's lies.
Now that fathers rights people are going to have to figure out a way to explain away the other witnesses who stopped the fathers abuse. Um, they were no doubt suffering from Stranger Alienation Syndrome (SAS)?
http://www.kpho.com/story/24945701/az-man-accused-of-holding-son-6-in-choke-hold
AZ man accused of holding son, 6, in choke hold
Posted: Mar 11, 2014 3:42 PM EDT
Updated: Mar 11, 2014 4:14 PM EDT
By Breann Bierman
DOLAN SPRINGS, AZ (CBS5) - An Arizona father has been arrested for allegedly putting his 6-year-old son in a choke hold and pulling him through the parking lot until a witness was able to rescue the boy.
Investigators said Perry Dorian Wickerd, 54, of Dolan Springs was at a business in the 16100 block of Pierce Ferry Road in Dolan Springs early Monday afternoon to pick up his son from his ex-wife's custody, according to the Mohave County Sheriff's Office.
Wickerd's ex-wife told police Wickerd had their son in a choke hold and she tried to stop him. She said two men in the area stopped to help and the good Samaritans were able to hold the man until deputies arrived.
Police called one of the witnesses who said he was driving by when he saw a man holding a child in a choke hold so he stopped his car, grabbed the man and forced him to release the child.
Wickerd was taken to Mohave County Jail on a felony aggravated assault charge.
Police: Dad strangled 13-year-old son over potato chips (Espanola, New Mexico)
Dad's defense is straight out of the father's rights handbook. My ex-wife lied! She's turned my son against me through Parental Alienation Syndrome! WAA!
Of course, this ignores that the police would not have arrested him for strangling the boy if there were not evidence on the boy's neck of strangulation. Not a "scratch" the boy inflicted on himself, all in some paranoid plot to frame Daddy.
But that's what the FR people count on. Don't pay attention to the actual facts. Listen to my spin.
Dad is identified as PHILLIP CHACONE.
http://www.koat.com/news/new-mexico/police-espanola-city-councilor-abused-son-over-potato-chips/24911924
Police: Espanola city councilor abused son over potato chips
Phillip Chacon denies allegations, says son and ex-wife lied to police
UPDATED 8:01 AM MDT Mar 11, 2014
ESPANOLA, N.M. —On Friday, Phillip Chacon was sworn in as a new member on the Espanola City Council. Two days later, he was arrested after police say he strangled his 13-year-old son.
Chacon's son told investigators his father got angry because he took a bag of potato chips away from his dad. The boy told police Chacon then grabbed him by the collar and choked him, leaving red marks on his neck. The teen told detectives his father also punched him in the leg, leaving a bruise.
Espanola police arrested Chacon Sunday and charged him with abandonment or abuse of a child. Chacon spent the night at the Rio Arriba County Detention Center.
Chacon denies these allegations, saying he doesn't recall even eating a bag of chips. In fact, Chacon says his son scratched his own neck and his ex-wife made up the abuse allegations to get back at him.
"His mom has a history of trying to turn him against me," explained Chacon. "That's not by any means close to what happened. I mean, nothing happened. It was news to me when I got woken up by city police."
But, the Espanola police chief says the facts of his investigation prove differently.
"The preliminary information that we have right now does not support what his response is," said Chief Eric Garcia. "The facts of the case indicate clearly that there was some kind of abuse going on."
Chacon says he works at a high-security-clearance job at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Lab officials say a person by Chacon's name works there, but weren't able to confirm if it's the same person. Chacon has other young children.
Of course, this ignores that the police would not have arrested him for strangling the boy if there were not evidence on the boy's neck of strangulation. Not a "scratch" the boy inflicted on himself, all in some paranoid plot to frame Daddy.
But that's what the FR people count on. Don't pay attention to the actual facts. Listen to my spin.
Dad is identified as PHILLIP CHACONE.
http://www.koat.com/news/new-mexico/police-espanola-city-councilor-abused-son-over-potato-chips/24911924
Police: Espanola city councilor abused son over potato chips
Phillip Chacon denies allegations, says son and ex-wife lied to police
UPDATED 8:01 AM MDT Mar 11, 2014
ESPANOLA, N.M. —On Friday, Phillip Chacon was sworn in as a new member on the Espanola City Council. Two days later, he was arrested after police say he strangled his 13-year-old son.
Chacon's son told investigators his father got angry because he took a bag of potato chips away from his dad. The boy told police Chacon then grabbed him by the collar and choked him, leaving red marks on his neck. The teen told detectives his father also punched him in the leg, leaving a bruise.
Espanola police arrested Chacon Sunday and charged him with abandonment or abuse of a child. Chacon spent the night at the Rio Arriba County Detention Center.
Chacon denies these allegations, saying he doesn't recall even eating a bag of chips. In fact, Chacon says his son scratched his own neck and his ex-wife made up the abuse allegations to get back at him.
"His mom has a history of trying to turn him against me," explained Chacon. "That's not by any means close to what happened. I mean, nothing happened. It was news to me when I got woken up by city police."
But, the Espanola police chief says the facts of his investigation prove differently.
"The preliminary information that we have right now does not support what his response is," said Chief Eric Garcia. "The facts of the case indicate clearly that there was some kind of abuse going on."
Chacon says he works at a high-security-clearance job at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Lab officials say a person by Chacon's name works there, but weren't able to confirm if it's the same person. Chacon has other young children.
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
Dad with shared custody on trial for sexually abusing daughter; expert smears daughter as crazy liar (Canberra, Australia)
So-called experts like Donald Thomson are just hired hand whores of the court. This idiot should know very well that just because a previous child abuse allegation was (allegedly) "unsubstantiated" doesn't mean the child was lying or crazy. It just means that (allegedly) there was not enough evidence to charge the perpetrator.
All of this hocus pocus crap is straight out of the fathers rights/defense attorney playbook. Call the mom and/or the children vindictive, lying crazies. Meanwhile, neatly ignore suspicious evidence like the UNNAMED DAD ADMITTING that he slept in the same bed with his 7-year-old daughter during his visitation time.
What this article does not explore is that the psychological theories Thomson draws on are of dubious scientific value and highly controversial.
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/sex-abuse-claim-by-daughter-doubted-by-child-memory-expert-20140304-345je.html
Sex abuse claim by daughter doubted by child memory expert
Date March 5, 2014
Christopher Knaus
Reporter for The Canberra Times
A child memory expert has expressed doubts about the story of a young Canberra girl who says she was sexually abused by her father, saying he is concerned over unsubstantiated allegations she previously levelled at her grandfather.
A 52-year-old father, who cannot be named, is on trial in the ACT Supreme Court for allegedly committing sexual assault and acts of indecency on his daughter when she was aged six and seven.
He has pleaded not guilty to six charges, five relating to acts of indecency and one of an offence of sexual intercourse without consent, which were allegedly committed between May and late December 2012.
The jury has already heard pre-recorded evidence from the girl, and videos of her police interviews, in which she speaks of the alleged sexual abuse by her father.
But in the witness box on Tuesday, the father denied accusations he had committed the crimes against the girl.
The accused and the girl's mother had divorced and were informally sharing custody of their daughter.
He said the girl had slept with him in his bed because she was scared of the dark.
On their last weekend together in January last year, the father remembered taking his daughter to the movies and then for hamburgers and slushies, something he said she enjoyed a lot and was very animated about.
But a week later, he said police were on his doorstep, telling him she had made accusations of a sexual nature against him.
''I was very shocked, my mind was probably running in a hundred different directions at once,'' he said. ''I just said to myself 'you haven't done this … but what's going on, what's the motivation behind this?'''
But the Crown, represented by prosecutor John Lundy, said the man's story did not make sense, and asked why the girl could not have slept on a fold-out couch.
The man replied that she had asked to sleep with him because she was scared of the dark.
The court heard that the girl had previously made separate allegations against her grandfather, which were not substantiated.
The man's barrister, James Lawton, called evidence from Professor Donald Thomson, an expert on forensic psychology, specialising in child memory and recall.
The girl's first police interview took place in February last year, about six weeks after the last alleged offence.
Professor Thomson told the court that time gap could impact on a child's recollection.
He said the nine months that had passed since the first alleged offence in May 2012 could have made recall ''very, very poor'' and led to the omission and confusion of facts.
Professor Thomson expressed concern that the girl appeared to have discussed the issue with her mother.
It was also concerning that the girl appeared to have constructed the story about her grandfather with considerable detail and complexity.
He said if she could make up such a story about her grandfather, she could do it to any other person.
The trial continues before Justice Richard Refshauge on Wednesday, when both defence and prosecution are expected to give their closing submissions to the jury.
All of this hocus pocus crap is straight out of the fathers rights/defense attorney playbook. Call the mom and/or the children vindictive, lying crazies. Meanwhile, neatly ignore suspicious evidence like the UNNAMED DAD ADMITTING that he slept in the same bed with his 7-year-old daughter during his visitation time.
What this article does not explore is that the psychological theories Thomson draws on are of dubious scientific value and highly controversial.
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/sex-abuse-claim-by-daughter-doubted-by-child-memory-expert-20140304-345je.html
Sex abuse claim by daughter doubted by child memory expert
Date March 5, 2014
Christopher Knaus
Reporter for The Canberra Times
A child memory expert has expressed doubts about the story of a young Canberra girl who says she was sexually abused by her father, saying he is concerned over unsubstantiated allegations she previously levelled at her grandfather.
A 52-year-old father, who cannot be named, is on trial in the ACT Supreme Court for allegedly committing sexual assault and acts of indecency on his daughter when she was aged six and seven.
He has pleaded not guilty to six charges, five relating to acts of indecency and one of an offence of sexual intercourse without consent, which were allegedly committed between May and late December 2012.
The jury has already heard pre-recorded evidence from the girl, and videos of her police interviews, in which she speaks of the alleged sexual abuse by her father.
But in the witness box on Tuesday, the father denied accusations he had committed the crimes against the girl.
The accused and the girl's mother had divorced and were informally sharing custody of their daughter.
He said the girl had slept with him in his bed because she was scared of the dark.
On their last weekend together in January last year, the father remembered taking his daughter to the movies and then for hamburgers and slushies, something he said she enjoyed a lot and was very animated about.
But a week later, he said police were on his doorstep, telling him she had made accusations of a sexual nature against him.
''I was very shocked, my mind was probably running in a hundred different directions at once,'' he said. ''I just said to myself 'you haven't done this … but what's going on, what's the motivation behind this?'''
But the Crown, represented by prosecutor John Lundy, said the man's story did not make sense, and asked why the girl could not have slept on a fold-out couch.
The man replied that she had asked to sleep with him because she was scared of the dark.
The court heard that the girl had previously made separate allegations against her grandfather, which were not substantiated.
The man's barrister, James Lawton, called evidence from Professor Donald Thomson, an expert on forensic psychology, specialising in child memory and recall.
The girl's first police interview took place in February last year, about six weeks after the last alleged offence.
Professor Thomson told the court that time gap could impact on a child's recollection.
He said the nine months that had passed since the first alleged offence in May 2012 could have made recall ''very, very poor'' and led to the omission and confusion of facts.
Professor Thomson expressed concern that the girl appeared to have discussed the issue with her mother.
It was also concerning that the girl appeared to have constructed the story about her grandfather with considerable detail and complexity.
He said if she could make up such a story about her grandfather, she could do it to any other person.
The trial continues before Justice Richard Refshauge on Wednesday, when both defence and prosecution are expected to give their closing submissions to the jury.
Saturday, January 12, 2013
"Bitter" dad who wanted custody urged 9-year-old son to poison mom (Bradford, England)
UNNAMED DAD.
Another one of those cases that reveals fathers rights group lies for what they are.
Lie # 1: Only "bitter" mothers alienate the kids.
WRONG. The biggest bad-mouthers are abusive fathers and their allies, who are generally intent on destroying the mother-child bond in their efforts to gain control and/or "punish" the mother for leaving him. This is exactly what we see here.
Lie #2: Daddies only "act out" (use violence) because they are unfairly deprived of their children.
WRONG. Notice that this mother never tried to stop this kook of a father from seeing their son. Her efforts were rewarded by this moron stealing money from her bank account and hatching a plan to kill her.
Lie #3: Only Moms make false claims of child abuse.
Wrong. This idiot of a father tried that too. All in his efforts to gain custody (control) and "punish" the mum.
Lie # 3: Daddies just want "shared parenting"! It's just selfish mothers who don't want to share.
Wrong. Dad wanted EXCLUSIVE CUSTODY. Which he would obviously get if Mom was dead and her new husband were implicated in her death.
Lie #4: Daddies are treated harshly by the authorities.
WRONG. As far as I can tell, there was credible evidence that this freak truly intended to kill this woman. Over 3,000 messages urging this son to poison his mother? Yet Judge JONATHAN ROSE chose to simply ignore the evidence and not believe it.
http://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/10157814._Bitter__father_urged_son__nine__to_poison_mother__court_told/
'Bitter' father urged son, nine, to poison mother, court told
7:00am Saturday 12th January 2013 in News
A hate-fuelled man who urged his nine-year-old son to poison his mother and frame her new partner for the murder has been jailed for 18 months.
Bradford Crown Court heard that the “diabolical” plot was hatched in more than 3,000 Facebook messages between father and son.
The man first got the child to steal his mother’s bank card and pass on her pin number. He withdrew £300 from her account after telling his son to hide the stolen card under a rock.
The man, who cannot be named to protect the identity of his son, referred to the woman’s new partner as “knob” and the child’s grandmother as “grandma bitch.”
In “brainwashing” messages to the boy, who lives in Bradford with his family, he urged him to complain that “Mummy is very selfish. I hate living with them. She got rid of our pets.”
The court heard yesterday that events took a sinister turn when the man, from the Ilkley area, began messaging in detail to his son about poisoning his mother with nicotine. He was a smoker and suggested he could extract it and it could be applied lethally to the woman’s skin.
The man suggested to his son that his mother’s new partner could be implicated by putting one of his hair’s in the jar of poison.
The man told his son it would “kill two birds with one stone.” “I’d do the lot of them if I could,” he said.
The man pleaded guilty to theft, fraud and perverting the course of justice.
A charge of encouraging or assisting in the commission of causing grievous bodily harm was dropped. Judge Jonathan Rose said he was satisfied the man did not intend to kill or seriously injure the woman.
Prosecutor Kitty Taylor said the man wanted his son to live with him after his relationship with the boy’s mother ended and she met a new partner. Between June and September last year, he maliciously incited the boy to steal and to claim his mother had punched him in the face.
“It was punishment to her from an embittered ex-partner,” Mrs Taylor said.
The boy was torn between two parents. His father secretly handed him a phone with a password and met up with him at school without his mother’s knowledge.
Judge Rose said the man vented his anger, malice and hatred on the boy’s mother who had never tried to stop him seeing his son.
“I use the word reprehensible. It is unforgivable,” the judge told him.
It was cruel to the child to make him keep secrets from his mother and he was left hurt, harmed and damaged.
The prison sentence reflected “the public horror that a man could act in such a despicable way to his own son.”
The defendant’s lawyer, Ian Hudson, conceded they were “disgraceful, despicable, diabolical,” offences from a “bitter, spiteful and angry” man.
Remand in jail was a horrific experience for him. He had learned his lesson and was deeply ashamed, said Mr Hudson.
Another one of those cases that reveals fathers rights group lies for what they are.
Lie # 1: Only "bitter" mothers alienate the kids.
WRONG. The biggest bad-mouthers are abusive fathers and their allies, who are generally intent on destroying the mother-child bond in their efforts to gain control and/or "punish" the mother for leaving him. This is exactly what we see here.
Lie #2: Daddies only "act out" (use violence) because they are unfairly deprived of their children.
WRONG. Notice that this mother never tried to stop this kook of a father from seeing their son. Her efforts were rewarded by this moron stealing money from her bank account and hatching a plan to kill her.
Lie #3: Only Moms make false claims of child abuse.
Wrong. This idiot of a father tried that too. All in his efforts to gain custody (control) and "punish" the mum.
Lie # 3: Daddies just want "shared parenting"! It's just selfish mothers who don't want to share.
Wrong. Dad wanted EXCLUSIVE CUSTODY. Which he would obviously get if Mom was dead and her new husband were implicated in her death.
Lie #4: Daddies are treated harshly by the authorities.
WRONG. As far as I can tell, there was credible evidence that this freak truly intended to kill this woman. Over 3,000 messages urging this son to poison his mother? Yet Judge JONATHAN ROSE chose to simply ignore the evidence and not believe it.
http://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/10157814._Bitter__father_urged_son__nine__to_poison_mother__court_told/
'Bitter' father urged son, nine, to poison mother, court told
7:00am Saturday 12th January 2013 in News
A hate-fuelled man who urged his nine-year-old son to poison his mother and frame her new partner for the murder has been jailed for 18 months.
Bradford Crown Court heard that the “diabolical” plot was hatched in more than 3,000 Facebook messages between father and son.
The man first got the child to steal his mother’s bank card and pass on her pin number. He withdrew £300 from her account after telling his son to hide the stolen card under a rock.
The man, who cannot be named to protect the identity of his son, referred to the woman’s new partner as “knob” and the child’s grandmother as “grandma bitch.”
In “brainwashing” messages to the boy, who lives in Bradford with his family, he urged him to complain that “Mummy is very selfish. I hate living with them. She got rid of our pets.”
The court heard yesterday that events took a sinister turn when the man, from the Ilkley area, began messaging in detail to his son about poisoning his mother with nicotine. He was a smoker and suggested he could extract it and it could be applied lethally to the woman’s skin.
The man suggested to his son that his mother’s new partner could be implicated by putting one of his hair’s in the jar of poison.
The man told his son it would “kill two birds with one stone.” “I’d do the lot of them if I could,” he said.
The man pleaded guilty to theft, fraud and perverting the course of justice.
A charge of encouraging or assisting in the commission of causing grievous bodily harm was dropped. Judge Jonathan Rose said he was satisfied the man did not intend to kill or seriously injure the woman.
Prosecutor Kitty Taylor said the man wanted his son to live with him after his relationship with the boy’s mother ended and she met a new partner. Between June and September last year, he maliciously incited the boy to steal and to claim his mother had punched him in the face.
“It was punishment to her from an embittered ex-partner,” Mrs Taylor said.
The boy was torn between two parents. His father secretly handed him a phone with a password and met up with him at school without his mother’s knowledge.
Judge Rose said the man vented his anger, malice and hatred on the boy’s mother who had never tried to stop him seeing his son.
“I use the word reprehensible. It is unforgivable,” the judge told him.
It was cruel to the child to make him keep secrets from his mother and he was left hurt, harmed and damaged.
The prison sentence reflected “the public horror that a man could act in such a despicable way to his own son.”
The defendant’s lawyer, Ian Hudson, conceded they were “disgraceful, despicable, diabolical,” offences from a “bitter, spiteful and angry” man.
Remand in jail was a horrific experience for him. He had learned his lesson and was deeply ashamed, said Mr Hudson.
Monday, April 2, 2012
Jury reaches "no decision" in trial of dad accused of sexually abusing daughter (Powhatan, Virginia)
Basically UNNAMED DAD and his legal team muddied the waters with the same old Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) game. This is a well-known tactic used by sexual abusers--and it worked. Basically, we accuse the mom and anybody else who is collaborating the abuse of "alienation" or coaching and the like--even if there is no evidence of the same.
http://www.powhatantoday.com/index.php/news/article/child-abuse-case-declared-a-mistrial/27329/
Child abuse case declared a mistrial
Published: April 02, 2012
by Emily Darrell
Staff Writer
(Due to the nature of this case and the age of the alleged victim, names and other identifying details have been purposely omitted from this story.)
After approximately 6 hours of deliberation on Friday, a 12-member jury in Powhatan Circuit Court could not reach a decision as to whether the defendant had committed eight counts of sexual abuse against his daughter, when she was aged 5 to age 9.
The girl, now 11, testified against her father in court, alleging that he inappropriately touched her on a regular basis for around four years – from the time she was in kindergarten to the time her parents separated and her father moved out of the house.
The defendant testified that he had in fact allowed his younger daughter to regularly sleep in his bed while his wife, the girl’s mother, was downstairs working late. However, he denied that he had ever touched her in an inappropriate or sexual manner.
Both the defendant and his attorneys made mention of an alimony case that occurred two months prior to the girl telling a therapist about the abuse. The defense seemed to be building an implicit case against the mother, apparently hoping the jury would believe she had coached or prompted her daughter to lie as a sort of vengeance for not getting the alimony she had requested.
The therapist, who had been hired by the girl’s mother to help her cope with her parents’ divorce, told the court that the girl had confessed to her about the abuse “spontaneously” and without prompting or leading questions.
The girl’s older sister, who is a student at Powhatan High School, testified that she often saw her father carrying her younger sister into his bedroom while the mother was downstairs working or watching TV. Allegedly, neither the mother nor the older sister were aware of the abuse until the girl told her therapist about it.
Though the mother was present in the courtroom on Friday, she did not take the stand.
Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Tara Hatcher and Commonwealth’s Attorney Bob Beasley were the prosecuting attorneys.
Because the jury could not reach a unanimous decision a mistrial was declared. Beasley said the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office plans to retry the case.
http://www.powhatantoday.com/index.php/news/article/child-abuse-case-declared-a-mistrial/27329/
Child abuse case declared a mistrial
Published: April 02, 2012
by Emily Darrell
Staff Writer
(Due to the nature of this case and the age of the alleged victim, names and other identifying details have been purposely omitted from this story.)
After approximately 6 hours of deliberation on Friday, a 12-member jury in Powhatan Circuit Court could not reach a decision as to whether the defendant had committed eight counts of sexual abuse against his daughter, when she was aged 5 to age 9.
The girl, now 11, testified against her father in court, alleging that he inappropriately touched her on a regular basis for around four years – from the time she was in kindergarten to the time her parents separated and her father moved out of the house.
The defendant testified that he had in fact allowed his younger daughter to regularly sleep in his bed while his wife, the girl’s mother, was downstairs working late. However, he denied that he had ever touched her in an inappropriate or sexual manner.
Both the defendant and his attorneys made mention of an alimony case that occurred two months prior to the girl telling a therapist about the abuse. The defense seemed to be building an implicit case against the mother, apparently hoping the jury would believe she had coached or prompted her daughter to lie as a sort of vengeance for not getting the alimony she had requested.
The therapist, who had been hired by the girl’s mother to help her cope with her parents’ divorce, told the court that the girl had confessed to her about the abuse “spontaneously” and without prompting or leading questions.
The girl’s older sister, who is a student at Powhatan High School, testified that she often saw her father carrying her younger sister into his bedroom while the mother was downstairs working or watching TV. Allegedly, neither the mother nor the older sister were aware of the abuse until the girl told her therapist about it.
Though the mother was present in the courtroom on Friday, she did not take the stand.
Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Tara Hatcher and Commonwealth’s Attorney Bob Beasley were the prosecuting attorneys.
Because the jury could not reach a unanimous decision a mistrial was declared. Beasley said the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office plans to retry the case.
Friday, March 9, 2012
The Southern Poverty Law Center on the Fathers Rights Movement (USA)
A must read.
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2012/spring/a-war-on-women
Intelligence Report, Spring 2012, Issue Number: 145
Leader’s Suicide Brings Attention to Men’s Rights Movement
By Arthur Goldwag
After 10 years of custody battles, court-ordered counseling and imminent imprisonment for non-payment of child support, Thomas James Ball, a leader of the Worcester branch of the Massachusetts-based Fatherhood Coalition, had reached his limit. On June 15, 2011, he doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire just outside the Cheshire County, N.H., Courthouse. He was dead within minutes.
In a lengthy “Last Statement,” which arrived posthumously at the Keene Sentinel, Tom Ball told his story. All he had done, he said, was smack his 4-year-old daughter and bloody her mouth after she licked his hand as he was putting her to bed. Feminist-crafted anti-domestic violence legislation did the rest. “Twenty-five years ago,” he wrote, “the federal government declared war on men. It is time to see how committed they are to their cause. It is time, boys, to give them a taste of war.” Calling for all-out insurrection, he offered tips on making Molotov cocktails and urged his readers to use them against courthouses and police stations. “There will be some casualties in this war,” he predicted. “Some killed, some wounded, some captured. Some of them will be theirs. Some of the casualties will be ours.”
For people who associate the men’s and fathers’ rights movements with New Age drum circles in the woods, the ferocity of Ball’s rhetoric, the horror of his act, and, in particular, the widespread and blatantly misogynistic reaction to it may come as something of a revelation. When the feminist Amanda Marcotte, a bête noire of the men’s rights movement, remarked that “setting yourself on fire is an extremely effective tool if your goal is to make your ex-wife’s life a living hell,” a poster at the blog Misandry.com went ballistic. “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black,” he raged. “She is evil and such a vile evil that she is a disease that needs to be cut out of the human [consciousness] just like the rest of the femanazi ass harpies.”
It’s not much of a surprise that significant numbers of men in Western societies feel threatened by dramatic changes in their roles and that of the family in recent decades. Similar backlashes, after all, came in response to the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, and other major societal revolutions. What is something of a shock is the verbal and physical violence of that reaction.
Ball’s suicide brought attention to an underworld of misogynists, woman-haters whose fury goes well beyond criticism of the family court system, domestic violence laws, and false rape accusations. There are literally hundreds of websites, blogs and forums devoted to attacking virtually all women (or, at least, Westernized ones) — the so-called “manosphere,” which now also includes a tribute page for Tom Ball (“He Died For Our Children”). While some of them voice legitimate and sometimes disturbing complaints about the treatment of men, what is most remarkable is the misogynistic tone that pervades so many. Women are routinely maligned as sluts, gold-diggers, temptresses and worse; overly sympathetic men are dubbed “manginas”; and police and other officials are called their armed enablers. Even Ball — who did not directly blame his ex-wife for his troubles, but instead depicted her and their three children as co-victims of the authorities — vilified “man-hating feminists” as evil destroyers of all that is good.
This kind of woman-hatred is increasingly visible in most Western societies, and it tends to be allied with other anti-modern emotions — opposition to same-sex marriage, to non-Christian immigration, to women in the workplace, and even, in some cases, to the advancement of African Americans. Just a few weeks after Ball’s death, while scorch marks were still visible on the sidewalk in Keene, N.H., that was made clear once more by a Norwegian named Anders Behring Breivik.
On July 22, Breivik slaughtered 77 of his countrymen, most of them teenagers, in Oslo and at a summer camp on the island of Utøya, because he thought they or their parents were the kinds of “politically correct” liberals who were enabling Muslim immigration. But Breivik was almost as voluble on the subjects of feminism, the family, and fathers’ rights as he was on Islam. “The most direct threat to the family is ‘divorce on demand,’” he wrote in the manifesto he posted just before he began his deadly spree. “The system must be reformed so that the father will be awarded custody rights by default.”
The manosphere lit up. Said one approving poster at The Spearhead, an online men’s rights magazine for the “defense of ourselves, our families and our fellow men”: “What could be more ‘an eye for an eye’ than to kill the children of those who were so willing to destroy men’s families and destroy the homeland of men?”
‘The Homeland of Men’
The men’s rights movement, also referred to as the fathers’ rights movement, is made up of a number of disparate, often overlapping, types of groups and individuals. Some most certainly do have legitimate grievances, having endured prison, impoverishment or heartrending separations from genuinely loved children.
Jocelyn Crowley, a Rutgers political scientist and the author of Defiant Dads: Fathers’ Rights Activists in America, says that most men who join real (as opposed to virtual) men’s rights groups aren’t seeking to attack the family court system so much as they are simply struggling to navigate it. What they talk most about when they meet face to face, she says, are strategies to deal with their ex-partners and have better relationships with their children.
But Molly Dragiewicz, a criminologist at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology and the author of Equality With a Vengeance: Men’s Rights Groups, Battered Women, and Antifeminist Backlash, argues that cases in which fathers are badly treated by courts and other officials are not remotely the norm. The small percentage of divorces that end up in litigation are disproportionately those where abuse and other issues make joint custody a dubious proposition. Even when a woman can satisfactorily document her ex-husband’s abuse, Dragiewicz says, she is no more likely to receive full custody of her children than if she couldn’t.
The men’s movement also includes mail-order-bride shoppers, unregenerate batterers, and wannabe pickup artists who are eager to learn the secrets of “game”—the psychological tricks that supposedly make it easy to seduce women. George Sodini, who confided his seething rage at women to his blog before shooting 12 women, three of them fatally, was one of the latter. Before his 2009 murder spree at a Pittsburgh-area gym, he was a student — though clearly not a very apt one — of R. Don Steele, the author of How to Date Young Women: For Men Over 35. “I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne — yet 30 million women rejected me over an 18 or 25-year period,” Sodini wrote with the kind of pathos presumably typical of Steele’s readers.
Other movement adherents have forsworn sex altogether, or at least romantic relationships and marriage; the acronym they use for themselves is MGTOW, for “Men Going Their Own Way.” “If you are willing to marry a woman — any woman — in the West then you must also be willing to become the next murder-suicide story when she threatens to file for divorce, steal your kids out of your life and extort you for every current and future dollar you will ever earn,” wrote one commenter at The Spearhead. “If a man kidnapped your children, stole your home, your wallet and your bank account, you’d be more than willing to kill him in self defense. Why is it any different when ex-wives do it with the full force of the law behind them?”
Some take an inordinate interest in extremely young women, or fetishize what they see as the ultra-feminine (read: docile) characteristics of South American and Asian women. Others, who have internalized Christian “headship” doctrine, are desperately seeking the “submissive” women such doctrine celebrates. Still others are simply sexually awkward, and nonplussed and befuddled by society’s changing mores. The common denominator is their resentment of feminism and of females in general.
“It’s ironic,” the feminist writer Amanda Marcotte observes. “These [misogynist Web] sites owe their existence to feminism’s successes. At some point in the last couple of years, the zeitgeist hit a tipping point where female power — Hillary Clinton’s, Rachel Maddow’s, even Sarah Palin’s — stopped being questioned. Being sexist has become less acceptable than it used to be. This makes some men particularly anxious.” At the same time, of course, domestic violence and sex crimes are much more likely to be prosecuted than they were even a decade ago. Shelters, social services and legal aid are more available to most battered women than in the past.
But some experts argue that men’s rights groups have been remarkably successful. The groups, says Rita Smith, director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, “have taken over the way courts deal with custody issues, particularly when there are allegations of abuse,” largely by convincing them that there is such a thing as “Parental Alienation Syndrome” (PAS). (PAS is a supposed clinical disorder in which a child compulsively belittles one parent due to indoctrination by the other — frequently leveling false allegations of abuse. It is not recognized as a clinical disorder by either the American Psychiatric Association or the World Health Organization.) Citing studies that show that false domestic abuse accusations against men are far less common than men’s groups and PAS enthusiasts claim, Smith says the groups nevertheless have “been able to get custody evaluators, mediators, guardians ad litem and child protective service workers to believe that women and children lie about abuse.”
Threats and Abuse
One kind of abuse that is undeniable is the vilification of individual women on certain men’s group websites. The best example of that may be Register-Her, a registry of women who “have caused significant harm to innocent individuals either by the direct action of crimes like rape, assault, child molestation and murder, or by the false accusation of crimes against others.” The site was set up by Paul Elam, the blogger behind A Voice for Men, less than two weeks after Ball’s suicide. “If Mary Jane Rottencrotch decides to falsely accuse her husband of domestic violence in order to get the upper hand in a divorce,” Elam boasted on his Internet radio show, “we can publish all her personal information on the website, including her name, address, phone number … even her routes to and from work.”
Under a headline reading, “Why are these women not in prison?” the site features photos and information about some 250 alleged malefactors, including notorious women like Lorena Bobbitt and Tonya Harding, although Elam hasn’t made good on his threat to publish home addresses or phone numbers. Many of those listed received prison sentences for various crimes, but large numbers were acquitted in court, while others were never accused of any lawbreaking. A well-known feminist, for example, is listed for “anti-male bigotry,” which is compared to racism.
Elam’s site can be frightening to its targets. In one case, he offered a cash reward to the first reader to ferret out a pseudonymous feminist blogger’s real name. In another, Elam singled out a part-time blogger at ChicagoNow who describes herself as a “vegetarian park activist with two baby girls.” The woman’s mistake was to write about her discomfort with male adults helping female toddlers in the bathroom at her daughter’s preschool. The blogger conceded that she was being sexist, but wrote that “I’d rather be wrong than find out if I’m right.”
After the woman was listed, she was widely attacked on men’s movement sites. “I don’t always use the word ‘cunt’ to describe a woman,” one poster raged, “but when I do it’s because of reasons like these.” Shocked, the “Mommy blogger” took down her original post and apologized for her “demonization of men.”
It wasn’t enough. “You targeted fathers, and just fathers,” Elam rebuked her. “It strikes me that you have never really been held to account for any of your actions in life. It is quite likely that the concept of complete, selfless accountability is just completely foreign to you.” Over at the Reddit Mens Rights forum, another poster fumed: “This entire episode should be a warning to all those male hating feminists out there who believe that they are safe screaming their hate messages on the web. Finally, they are held accountable for their hate messages and finally the rest of the world will find out exactly what type of depraved people they really are.”
Amanda Marcotte, who is a prime Register-Her target, writes about men’s rights activists less than she used to. That’s not because she doesn’t take them seriously — they introduce too many “anti-woman, anti-child, pro-abuse, pro-rape ideas into the public discourse” not to — but because “they’re so doggedly mean. It becomes frightening after a while.” Marcotte says the registry may incite violence against its targets, especially because many angry male activists are active abusers. “They interact with their ideological adversaries online,” she says, “much as they do with their spouses and children: ‘I’ll give you something to cry about!’”
“I don’t know if Thomas James Ball ever visited this site,” Elam wrote on his blog when he started Register-Her. “What I do believe is, though, that he, if convinced to stay alive, would have been a hell of a soldier in this war.”
Soldiers in the War
The first shots in this so-called war on feminism were fired 22 years before Tom Ball’s suicide. On Dec. 6, 1989, Marc Lépine, a troubled 25-year-old computer student, strolled into the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, Canada, carrying a Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle and a hunting knife. He walked into a classroom, ordered the men to leave, and lined the women up against a wall.
“I am fighting feminism,” he announced before opening fire. “You’re women, you’re going to be engineers. You’re all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists.”
By the time he turned the gun on himself, 14 women were dead and 10 were wounded; four men were hurt as well. The suicide note in Lépine’s pocket contained a list of 19 “radical feminists” he hoped to kill, and this: “I have decided to send the feminists, who have always ruined my life, to their Maker. … They want to keep the advantages of women … while seizing for themselves those of men.”
Today, that kind of rage is often directed at all women, not only perceived feminists. “Women don’t need the powers-that-be to get them to hate and use men,” the blogger Alcuin wrote recently. “They have always used men; maybe they have always hated us too.” Added another blogger, Angry Harry: “There are now, literally, billions of dollars, numerous empires, and millions of jobs that depend on the public swallowing the idea that women need to be defended from men.”
“A word to the wise,” offered the blogger known as Rebuking Feminism. “The animals women have become want one thing, resources and genes. … See them as the animals they have become and plan … accordingly.”
And many are quick to endorse violence against women. “There are women, and plenty of them, for which [sic] a solid ass kicking would be the least they deserve,” Paul Elam wrote in an essay with the provocative title, “When is it OK to Punch Your Wife?” “The real question here is not whether these women deserve the business end of a right hook, they obviously do, and some of them deserve one hard enough to leave them in an unconscious, innocuous pile on the ground if it serves to protect the innocent from imminent harm. The real question is whether men deserve to be able to physically defend themselves from assault … from a woman.”
For some, it’s more than just talk. In 2006, Darren Mack, a member of a fathers’ rights group in Reno, Nev., stabbed his estranged wife to death and then shot and wounded the family court judge who was handling his divorce.
That kind of violence continues right up to the present.
In Seal Beach, Calif. last Oct. 12, a day after Scott Evans Dekraai and his ex-wife had been in court to fight over custody of their 8-year-old son (Dekraai had 56% custody but wanted full custody and “final decision making authority” on matters of the child’s education and medical treatment), Dekraai walked into the hair salon where his ex-wife worked armed with three handguns. There, he allegedly shot seven women, six of them fatally; he also is accused of killing two men — the salon’s owner, as he attempted to flee, and a man in a car outside.
Michelle Fournier, Dekraai’s ex-wife, had testified that Dekraai was not taking his bipolar medicine and that he was suicidal and dangerous. If she had survived his rampage, she might have enjoyed having the last word about his propensity for violence. But she did not, becoming instead the latest in a long, sad line of victims of women-hating men.
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2012/spring/a-war-on-women
Intelligence Report, Spring 2012, Issue Number: 145
Leader’s Suicide Brings Attention to Men’s Rights Movement
By Arthur Goldwag
After 10 years of custody battles, court-ordered counseling and imminent imprisonment for non-payment of child support, Thomas James Ball, a leader of the Worcester branch of the Massachusetts-based Fatherhood Coalition, had reached his limit. On June 15, 2011, he doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire just outside the Cheshire County, N.H., Courthouse. He was dead within minutes.
In a lengthy “Last Statement,” which arrived posthumously at the Keene Sentinel, Tom Ball told his story. All he had done, he said, was smack his 4-year-old daughter and bloody her mouth after she licked his hand as he was putting her to bed. Feminist-crafted anti-domestic violence legislation did the rest. “Twenty-five years ago,” he wrote, “the federal government declared war on men. It is time to see how committed they are to their cause. It is time, boys, to give them a taste of war.” Calling for all-out insurrection, he offered tips on making Molotov cocktails and urged his readers to use them against courthouses and police stations. “There will be some casualties in this war,” he predicted. “Some killed, some wounded, some captured. Some of them will be theirs. Some of the casualties will be ours.”
For people who associate the men’s and fathers’ rights movements with New Age drum circles in the woods, the ferocity of Ball’s rhetoric, the horror of his act, and, in particular, the widespread and blatantly misogynistic reaction to it may come as something of a revelation. When the feminist Amanda Marcotte, a bête noire of the men’s rights movement, remarked that “setting yourself on fire is an extremely effective tool if your goal is to make your ex-wife’s life a living hell,” a poster at the blog Misandry.com went ballistic. “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black,” he raged. “She is evil and such a vile evil that she is a disease that needs to be cut out of the human [consciousness] just like the rest of the femanazi ass harpies.”
It’s not much of a surprise that significant numbers of men in Western societies feel threatened by dramatic changes in their roles and that of the family in recent decades. Similar backlashes, after all, came in response to the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, and other major societal revolutions. What is something of a shock is the verbal and physical violence of that reaction.
Ball’s suicide brought attention to an underworld of misogynists, woman-haters whose fury goes well beyond criticism of the family court system, domestic violence laws, and false rape accusations. There are literally hundreds of websites, blogs and forums devoted to attacking virtually all women (or, at least, Westernized ones) — the so-called “manosphere,” which now also includes a tribute page for Tom Ball (“He Died For Our Children”). While some of them voice legitimate and sometimes disturbing complaints about the treatment of men, what is most remarkable is the misogynistic tone that pervades so many. Women are routinely maligned as sluts, gold-diggers, temptresses and worse; overly sympathetic men are dubbed “manginas”; and police and other officials are called their armed enablers. Even Ball — who did not directly blame his ex-wife for his troubles, but instead depicted her and their three children as co-victims of the authorities — vilified “man-hating feminists” as evil destroyers of all that is good.
This kind of woman-hatred is increasingly visible in most Western societies, and it tends to be allied with other anti-modern emotions — opposition to same-sex marriage, to non-Christian immigration, to women in the workplace, and even, in some cases, to the advancement of African Americans. Just a few weeks after Ball’s death, while scorch marks were still visible on the sidewalk in Keene, N.H., that was made clear once more by a Norwegian named Anders Behring Breivik.
On July 22, Breivik slaughtered 77 of his countrymen, most of them teenagers, in Oslo and at a summer camp on the island of Utøya, because he thought they or their parents were the kinds of “politically correct” liberals who were enabling Muslim immigration. But Breivik was almost as voluble on the subjects of feminism, the family, and fathers’ rights as he was on Islam. “The most direct threat to the family is ‘divorce on demand,’” he wrote in the manifesto he posted just before he began his deadly spree. “The system must be reformed so that the father will be awarded custody rights by default.”
The manosphere lit up. Said one approving poster at The Spearhead, an online men’s rights magazine for the “defense of ourselves, our families and our fellow men”: “What could be more ‘an eye for an eye’ than to kill the children of those who were so willing to destroy men’s families and destroy the homeland of men?”
‘The Homeland of Men’
The men’s rights movement, also referred to as the fathers’ rights movement, is made up of a number of disparate, often overlapping, types of groups and individuals. Some most certainly do have legitimate grievances, having endured prison, impoverishment or heartrending separations from genuinely loved children.
Jocelyn Crowley, a Rutgers political scientist and the author of Defiant Dads: Fathers’ Rights Activists in America, says that most men who join real (as opposed to virtual) men’s rights groups aren’t seeking to attack the family court system so much as they are simply struggling to navigate it. What they talk most about when they meet face to face, she says, are strategies to deal with their ex-partners and have better relationships with their children.
But Molly Dragiewicz, a criminologist at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology and the author of Equality With a Vengeance: Men’s Rights Groups, Battered Women, and Antifeminist Backlash, argues that cases in which fathers are badly treated by courts and other officials are not remotely the norm. The small percentage of divorces that end up in litigation are disproportionately those where abuse and other issues make joint custody a dubious proposition. Even when a woman can satisfactorily document her ex-husband’s abuse, Dragiewicz says, she is no more likely to receive full custody of her children than if she couldn’t.
The men’s movement also includes mail-order-bride shoppers, unregenerate batterers, and wannabe pickup artists who are eager to learn the secrets of “game”—the psychological tricks that supposedly make it easy to seduce women. George Sodini, who confided his seething rage at women to his blog before shooting 12 women, three of them fatally, was one of the latter. Before his 2009 murder spree at a Pittsburgh-area gym, he was a student — though clearly not a very apt one — of R. Don Steele, the author of How to Date Young Women: For Men Over 35. “I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne — yet 30 million women rejected me over an 18 or 25-year period,” Sodini wrote with the kind of pathos presumably typical of Steele’s readers.
Other movement adherents have forsworn sex altogether, or at least romantic relationships and marriage; the acronym they use for themselves is MGTOW, for “Men Going Their Own Way.” “If you are willing to marry a woman — any woman — in the West then you must also be willing to become the next murder-suicide story when she threatens to file for divorce, steal your kids out of your life and extort you for every current and future dollar you will ever earn,” wrote one commenter at The Spearhead. “If a man kidnapped your children, stole your home, your wallet and your bank account, you’d be more than willing to kill him in self defense. Why is it any different when ex-wives do it with the full force of the law behind them?”
Some take an inordinate interest in extremely young women, or fetishize what they see as the ultra-feminine (read: docile) characteristics of South American and Asian women. Others, who have internalized Christian “headship” doctrine, are desperately seeking the “submissive” women such doctrine celebrates. Still others are simply sexually awkward, and nonplussed and befuddled by society’s changing mores. The common denominator is their resentment of feminism and of females in general.
“It’s ironic,” the feminist writer Amanda Marcotte observes. “These [misogynist Web] sites owe their existence to feminism’s successes. At some point in the last couple of years, the zeitgeist hit a tipping point where female power — Hillary Clinton’s, Rachel Maddow’s, even Sarah Palin’s — stopped being questioned. Being sexist has become less acceptable than it used to be. This makes some men particularly anxious.” At the same time, of course, domestic violence and sex crimes are much more likely to be prosecuted than they were even a decade ago. Shelters, social services and legal aid are more available to most battered women than in the past.
But some experts argue that men’s rights groups have been remarkably successful. The groups, says Rita Smith, director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, “have taken over the way courts deal with custody issues, particularly when there are allegations of abuse,” largely by convincing them that there is such a thing as “Parental Alienation Syndrome” (PAS). (PAS is a supposed clinical disorder in which a child compulsively belittles one parent due to indoctrination by the other — frequently leveling false allegations of abuse. It is not recognized as a clinical disorder by either the American Psychiatric Association or the World Health Organization.) Citing studies that show that false domestic abuse accusations against men are far less common than men’s groups and PAS enthusiasts claim, Smith says the groups nevertheless have “been able to get custody evaluators, mediators, guardians ad litem and child protective service workers to believe that women and children lie about abuse.”
Threats and Abuse
One kind of abuse that is undeniable is the vilification of individual women on certain men’s group websites. The best example of that may be Register-Her, a registry of women who “have caused significant harm to innocent individuals either by the direct action of crimes like rape, assault, child molestation and murder, or by the false accusation of crimes against others.” The site was set up by Paul Elam, the blogger behind A Voice for Men, less than two weeks after Ball’s suicide. “If Mary Jane Rottencrotch decides to falsely accuse her husband of domestic violence in order to get the upper hand in a divorce,” Elam boasted on his Internet radio show, “we can publish all her personal information on the website, including her name, address, phone number … even her routes to and from work.”
Under a headline reading, “Why are these women not in prison?” the site features photos and information about some 250 alleged malefactors, including notorious women like Lorena Bobbitt and Tonya Harding, although Elam hasn’t made good on his threat to publish home addresses or phone numbers. Many of those listed received prison sentences for various crimes, but large numbers were acquitted in court, while others were never accused of any lawbreaking. A well-known feminist, for example, is listed for “anti-male bigotry,” which is compared to racism.
Elam’s site can be frightening to its targets. In one case, he offered a cash reward to the first reader to ferret out a pseudonymous feminist blogger’s real name. In another, Elam singled out a part-time blogger at ChicagoNow who describes herself as a “vegetarian park activist with two baby girls.” The woman’s mistake was to write about her discomfort with male adults helping female toddlers in the bathroom at her daughter’s preschool. The blogger conceded that she was being sexist, but wrote that “I’d rather be wrong than find out if I’m right.”
After the woman was listed, she was widely attacked on men’s movement sites. “I don’t always use the word ‘cunt’ to describe a woman,” one poster raged, “but when I do it’s because of reasons like these.” Shocked, the “Mommy blogger” took down her original post and apologized for her “demonization of men.”
It wasn’t enough. “You targeted fathers, and just fathers,” Elam rebuked her. “It strikes me that you have never really been held to account for any of your actions in life. It is quite likely that the concept of complete, selfless accountability is just completely foreign to you.” Over at the Reddit Mens Rights forum, another poster fumed: “This entire episode should be a warning to all those male hating feminists out there who believe that they are safe screaming their hate messages on the web. Finally, they are held accountable for their hate messages and finally the rest of the world will find out exactly what type of depraved people they really are.”
Amanda Marcotte, who is a prime Register-Her target, writes about men’s rights activists less than she used to. That’s not because she doesn’t take them seriously — they introduce too many “anti-woman, anti-child, pro-abuse, pro-rape ideas into the public discourse” not to — but because “they’re so doggedly mean. It becomes frightening after a while.” Marcotte says the registry may incite violence against its targets, especially because many angry male activists are active abusers. “They interact with their ideological adversaries online,” she says, “much as they do with their spouses and children: ‘I’ll give you something to cry about!’”
“I don’t know if Thomas James Ball ever visited this site,” Elam wrote on his blog when he started Register-Her. “What I do believe is, though, that he, if convinced to stay alive, would have been a hell of a soldier in this war.”
Soldiers in the War
The first shots in this so-called war on feminism were fired 22 years before Tom Ball’s suicide. On Dec. 6, 1989, Marc Lépine, a troubled 25-year-old computer student, strolled into the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, Canada, carrying a Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle and a hunting knife. He walked into a classroom, ordered the men to leave, and lined the women up against a wall.
“I am fighting feminism,” he announced before opening fire. “You’re women, you’re going to be engineers. You’re all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists.”
By the time he turned the gun on himself, 14 women were dead and 10 were wounded; four men were hurt as well. The suicide note in Lépine’s pocket contained a list of 19 “radical feminists” he hoped to kill, and this: “I have decided to send the feminists, who have always ruined my life, to their Maker. … They want to keep the advantages of women … while seizing for themselves those of men.”
Today, that kind of rage is often directed at all women, not only perceived feminists. “Women don’t need the powers-that-be to get them to hate and use men,” the blogger Alcuin wrote recently. “They have always used men; maybe they have always hated us too.” Added another blogger, Angry Harry: “There are now, literally, billions of dollars, numerous empires, and millions of jobs that depend on the public swallowing the idea that women need to be defended from men.”
“A word to the wise,” offered the blogger known as Rebuking Feminism. “The animals women have become want one thing, resources and genes. … See them as the animals they have become and plan … accordingly.”
And many are quick to endorse violence against women. “There are women, and plenty of them, for which [sic] a solid ass kicking would be the least they deserve,” Paul Elam wrote in an essay with the provocative title, “When is it OK to Punch Your Wife?” “The real question here is not whether these women deserve the business end of a right hook, they obviously do, and some of them deserve one hard enough to leave them in an unconscious, innocuous pile on the ground if it serves to protect the innocent from imminent harm. The real question is whether men deserve to be able to physically defend themselves from assault … from a woman.”
For some, it’s more than just talk. In 2006, Darren Mack, a member of a fathers’ rights group in Reno, Nev., stabbed his estranged wife to death and then shot and wounded the family court judge who was handling his divorce.
That kind of violence continues right up to the present.
In Seal Beach, Calif. last Oct. 12, a day after Scott Evans Dekraai and his ex-wife had been in court to fight over custody of their 8-year-old son (Dekraai had 56% custody but wanted full custody and “final decision making authority” on matters of the child’s education and medical treatment), Dekraai walked into the hair salon where his ex-wife worked armed with three handguns. There, he allegedly shot seven women, six of them fatally; he also is accused of killing two men — the salon’s owner, as he attempted to flee, and a man in a car outside.
Michelle Fournier, Dekraai’s ex-wife, had testified that Dekraai was not taking his bipolar medicine and that he was suicidal and dangerous. If she had survived his rampage, she might have enjoyed having the last word about his propensity for violence. But she did not, becoming instead the latest in a long, sad line of victims of women-hating men.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Dad convicted of sexually abusing daughter for ten years; gets six years in prison (Lambton County, Ontario, Canada)
UNNAMED DAD gets a slap on the wrist; he will serve less time in prison than he did in making his daughter's life a living hell. Notice that we see yet another father who tried to blame the charges on a vengeful mother. Of course any protective mother will try to leave the father when child sexual abuse is disclosed; only the fathers rights crowd has now used this common sense notion to smear moms and strip them of custody.
http://www.theobserver.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=3495477
Father convicted of incest with daughter
By NEIL BOWEN, The Observer
Posted 2 hours ago
A Lambton County man who sexually abused his daughter for 10 years has been sentenced to six years in prison.
The 39-year-old man was convicted of multiple sex offences including incest and sexual assault and was sentenced Wednesday following a Superior Court trial that ended in November.
The abuse began with fondling in the family home when the girl was five and escalated over 10 years to oral sex and intercourse. The abuse ended in 2007.
It was the “highest breach of trust” for a man who should have been the girl’s protector and caregiver, said assistant Crown attorney Randy Evans, who sought a penitentiary sentence of eight years.
The negative impact of the abuse was indicated in a victim-impact statement filed with the the court.
The girl testified that she would always do as her father told her. In one instance, sex took place in the back seat of a car during a ride home from her part-time job, she said.
“I would keep my mouth shut. I was scared to say anything,” the girl said during the trial.
The man denied all the allegations, saying, “I never did this.”
He claimed the girl and her mother fabricated the story of abuse after the couple separated. The women denied they were motivated by anger when the allegations were made following the separation.
Following his arrest, the man gave a statement to police that Justice Joseph Donohue ruled as voluntary.
In the statement the man said a police officer’s suggestion that he had sex with his daughter 20 to 50 times was excessive. He said he only received oral sex from his daughter once.
The man testified he felt pressured by the officer to provide the statement, but could give no explanation for what he’d said.
False confessions do occur, defence lawyer Ken Marley said in his final trial submissions.
The man’s statement was an admission, Evans said in his final submission.
The allegations are the worst thing that can be said of a father and called for an immediate and clear denial, but none was given in the statement, he said.
In convicting the man Donohue said his testimony wasn’t believable, while the girl was a credible witness whose words had the ring of truth.
Deterrence was the primary sentencing concern because a child is a precious trust bestowed on a parent, and the man’s abuse was a flagrant breach of it, Donohue said.
The six-year jail sentence includes a year of pre-sentence custody.
A 10-year weapons ban was imposed and the man must give police a DNA sample. He will be on the sexual-offender registry for life.
A court order designed to protect the victim prohibits publication of the girl’s identity, which in this case prevents publication of the man’s identity.
http://www.theobserver.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=3495477
Father convicted of incest with daughter
By NEIL BOWEN, The Observer
Posted 2 hours ago
A Lambton County man who sexually abused his daughter for 10 years has been sentenced to six years in prison.
The 39-year-old man was convicted of multiple sex offences including incest and sexual assault and was sentenced Wednesday following a Superior Court trial that ended in November.
The abuse began with fondling in the family home when the girl was five and escalated over 10 years to oral sex and intercourse. The abuse ended in 2007.
It was the “highest breach of trust” for a man who should have been the girl’s protector and caregiver, said assistant Crown attorney Randy Evans, who sought a penitentiary sentence of eight years.
The negative impact of the abuse was indicated in a victim-impact statement filed with the the court.
The girl testified that she would always do as her father told her. In one instance, sex took place in the back seat of a car during a ride home from her part-time job, she said.
“I would keep my mouth shut. I was scared to say anything,” the girl said during the trial.
The man denied all the allegations, saying, “I never did this.”
He claimed the girl and her mother fabricated the story of abuse after the couple separated. The women denied they were motivated by anger when the allegations were made following the separation.
Following his arrest, the man gave a statement to police that Justice Joseph Donohue ruled as voluntary.
In the statement the man said a police officer’s suggestion that he had sex with his daughter 20 to 50 times was excessive. He said he only received oral sex from his daughter once.
The man testified he felt pressured by the officer to provide the statement, but could give no explanation for what he’d said.
False confessions do occur, defence lawyer Ken Marley said in his final trial submissions.
The man’s statement was an admission, Evans said in his final submission.
The allegations are the worst thing that can be said of a father and called for an immediate and clear denial, but none was given in the statement, he said.
In convicting the man Donohue said his testimony wasn’t believable, while the girl was a credible witness whose words had the ring of truth.
Deterrence was the primary sentencing concern because a child is a precious trust bestowed on a parent, and the man’s abuse was a flagrant breach of it, Donohue said.
The six-year jail sentence includes a year of pre-sentence custody.
A 10-year weapons ban was imposed and the man must give police a DNA sample. He will be on the sexual-offender registry for life.
A court order designed to protect the victim prohibits publication of the girl’s identity, which in this case prevents publication of the man’s identity.
Monday, January 9, 2012
Battered women gain advice (Colonie, New York)
This has always been an excellent conference. Wish I could have gone this year....
http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Battered-women-gain-advice-2448334.php#ixzz1iv2xDZIh
Battered women gain advice
Advocates at conference in Colonie say push for better laws must go on
Times Union
By SCOTT WALDMAN, Staff writer
Published 09:05 p.m., Saturday, January 7, 2012
COLONIE — There's a dirty term among domestic violence survivors trying to regain custody of their children, "parental alienation syndrome."
At a conference for battered women on Saturday, hands went up throughout a large room when the question was asked about how many had heard that phrase used in cases against them in court. The controversial term describes when a child has been manipulated to side with one parent in a custody battle and denigrates the other parent. Women's rights advocates say attorneys for fathers regularly cite the syndrome when arguing their clients have been falsely accused of abusing their children.
A number of the women had traveled to the Holiday Inn on Wolf Road from other states for the annual Battered Mothers Custody Conference to hear the stories of other victims and to meet with lawyers and activists for guidance. Speakers conducted workshops on court rulings, domestic violence in the military and the custody system.
"Be strong. If you don't advocate for yourself and your children, no one will," said Michelle Weiss, who traveled from New York City. She said she has battled unsuccessfully to regain custody of her children for years. She said she has not seen them since September 2010 because the courts are stacked against women who accuse a partner of abuse.
Conference organizer Mo Therese Hannah, a psychology professor at Siena College, said women have far more support than ever when they are ready to break from an abusive marriage. She said the public is also more aware of the difficulty battered women face than when the conference was launched nine years ago. Still, she said, advocates must keep pushing for more legislative changes so that battered women know they are not alone.
Holly Collins, a speaker at the conference, felt that way. She fled the United States in 1994 with her children to protect them after the courts granted custody to her ex-husband despite numerous documented instances of abuse. She was granted asylum in the Netherlands and remained in hiding for more than a decade until federal charges were eventually dismissed.
Collins, whose daughter Jennifer now advocates for abused children across the country, said it's a myth that courts are hesitant to take children from their mothers, and that the courts ignore abuse.
"If the kids are being abused," she said, "a man's right to his children is not more important than the safety of his children."
http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Battered-women-gain-advice-2448334.php#ixzz1iv2xDZIh
Battered women gain advice
Advocates at conference in Colonie say push for better laws must go on
Times Union
By SCOTT WALDMAN, Staff writer
Published 09:05 p.m., Saturday, January 7, 2012
COLONIE — There's a dirty term among domestic violence survivors trying to regain custody of their children, "parental alienation syndrome."
At a conference for battered women on Saturday, hands went up throughout a large room when the question was asked about how many had heard that phrase used in cases against them in court. The controversial term describes when a child has been manipulated to side with one parent in a custody battle and denigrates the other parent. Women's rights advocates say attorneys for fathers regularly cite the syndrome when arguing their clients have been falsely accused of abusing their children.
A number of the women had traveled to the Holiday Inn on Wolf Road from other states for the annual Battered Mothers Custody Conference to hear the stories of other victims and to meet with lawyers and activists for guidance. Speakers conducted workshops on court rulings, domestic violence in the military and the custody system.
"Be strong. If you don't advocate for yourself and your children, no one will," said Michelle Weiss, who traveled from New York City. She said she has battled unsuccessfully to regain custody of her children for years. She said she has not seen them since September 2010 because the courts are stacked against women who accuse a partner of abuse.
Conference organizer Mo Therese Hannah, a psychology professor at Siena College, said women have far more support than ever when they are ready to break from an abusive marriage. She said the public is also more aware of the difficulty battered women face than when the conference was launched nine years ago. Still, she said, advocates must keep pushing for more legislative changes so that battered women know they are not alone.
Holly Collins, a speaker at the conference, felt that way. She fled the United States in 1994 with her children to protect them after the courts granted custody to her ex-husband despite numerous documented instances of abuse. She was granted asylum in the Netherlands and remained in hiding for more than a decade until federal charges were eventually dismissed.
Collins, whose daughter Jennifer now advocates for abused children across the country, said it's a myth that courts are hesitant to take children from their mothers, and that the courts ignore abuse.
"If the kids are being abused," she said, "a man's right to his children is not more important than the safety of his children."
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
New documentary tackles flawed family court system (Boston, Massachusetts)
Sounds like a must-see movie.
http://buquad.com/2011/12/05/no-way-out-but-one-bu-professor-presents-a-documentary-highlighting-americas-flawed-family-court-system/
New Documentary by BU Professor Tackles Flawed Family Court System
By Lauren Michael | Dec 5th, 2011
In 1992, Holly Collins went to a Minnesota family court intending to secure full custody of her two children, Zackary and Jennifer. She had believed that if she told the truth–that her ex-husband had repeatedly abused her and their children–everything would be okay. But her evidence of abuse, including several medical records and the children’s statements that they always feared visiting their dad, were repeatedly rejected by the court. Her husband claimed she was lying and trying to alienate their children from him. Then, like thousands of battered women each year, Holly lost full custody of her children to their abusive father.
After two years with limited supervised visitation, in which the children weren’t permitted to discuss the ongoing abuse, Holly decided to do something. One day, she asked her kids to meet her at a video store near their dad’s house. They got into a car and started driving. They tried going to Canada, Mexico and Guatemala. Knowing the FBI was searching for them because Holly had in fact kidnapped her kids, she decided to try escaping to Australia or New Zealand. They managed to sneak through airport security without passports and got onto a flight to Amsterdam. There, they were detained and sent to a refugee camp. Years later upon finding a lawyer willing to take her case, Holly became the first U.S. citizen to be granted asylum by the Netherlands on the grounds of domestic violence.
For COM Professor Garland Waller, Holly Collins’ story was the perfect outlet for her to make a documentary on the shortcomings of the American family court system. “My first documentary was about three women who all lost custody of their kids to men who had battered them and sexually abused them,” she said to me when I interviewed her last Thursday. The documentary was never aired for the public, however, because people considered it way too controversial.
“I thought, I know this is an issue that is going on in the family courts, every single day,” Professor Waller explicated. “How can we do a story on this issue of domestic violence and child abuse that people will want to see; that will have a story that has a beginning, middle, and end; that has a hero; and that doesn’t make them feel suicidal at the end?” That’s why she decided to center her film around Holly’s story. ”Holly is one of the few women who has been able to save her children from years of being abused,” she affirmed.
On December 2 at 7pm in COM 101, Professor Waller and her production team screened the film No Way Out But One for a packed lecture hall of students and faculty. The hour-and-a-half long documentary, which was followed by a Q;A session, follows Holly’s story and also outlines the grievous problems 0f the American family court system. Made for under $40,000, the not-for-profit film was a way for Professor Waller and her husband Barry Nolan (who also produced and narrated the film) to make a difference.
“This is what I do to give back,” she explained. “Some people work for charity, some people give to the United Way, but this is what I do.”
As the documentary cites, each year 58,000 children are placed in contact with an abuse parent after divorce, and batterers win custody in 70% of family court cases where abuse is involved.
Professor Waller also cited the lingering gender bias in the family courts. “Courts do not have to consider domestic violence in their rulings, ” she said. “Now that is anti-woman, because it’s usually the women who get beaten up.” Money, she says, is also involved. “The men who want custody are the ones who can afford to have the kids, and you have to be able to pay the court costs,” she explained. “This is something that doesn’t happen in poor families…it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay all these people.” If the father is paying for the court evaluator, she says, often they’ll skew the evidence in his favor.
But even in ugly divorces, she says, usually the parents still want to do what’s best for their children. “When there are cases that involve domestic violence and child abuse, that is not the case,” she explained. “Women often get custody when there’s not domestic violence. But oddly, a batterer is more likely to go after custody than a non-batterer. So its a very complicated issue.”
Since the release of No Way Out But One, Professor Waller and her husband deal with angry father’s rights groups every day. These groups, like Fathers and Families, make an impassioned–if not entirely factual–argument for why they believe the Holly Collins case is a hoax. “After a nice review in a Boston Magazine blog, many pro-father’s rights men were highly critical,” she explained, but “none of them had seen the film and none of them had access to all the thousands of pages of legal documents and medical records and correspondence from experts and FBI documents that we had.” Many of these documents are shown and quoted in the film.
In their writings against Holly Collins, father’s rights groups cite Parental Alienation Syndrome, which means that a mother is trying to alienate her children from their father. Though it is not accepted as a legitimate diagnosis by the American Medical Association or the American Psychological Association (the psychologist who first wrote about PAS had conducted no actual studies), in family court it is often used to legitimize giving custody to an abusive parent.
As Nolan puts it, “these are people who do not and will not respond to evidence, or facts, or medical records, or court transcripts, or expert testimony if it does not fit their preconceived notions.” The groups say that Holly fabricated the evidence of her husband’s abuse, but in reality false allegations of abuse are very rare.
“Holly may not be perfect, but she was clearly a battered woman who only wanted to protect her children from abuse,” Professor Waller affirmed.
Still, this is an issue that has mainly been ignored by the mainstream media. “The mainstream media is terrified of getting sued, and this is a subject where everybody sues everyone all the time,” she explained. “It’s all he said/she said…so the mainstream media says, this is a mess and we’re not going to get into it. Just as the mainstream media did not cover pedophile priests abusing children, just as for years they did not cover the things that were going on at Penn State, it is the same thing only worse by thousands in terms of the children who are being abused.”
Many years after their mother kidnapped them, the Collins kids, now adults, are healthy and grateful for everything their mother has done for them. Jennifer Collins, Holly’s oldest daughter, is the executive director of Courageous Kids, an organization for young adults who suffered from court injustice as children to speak out and share their stories.
“I guess for me, the most important thing is that I would like people to realize that this is a national issue that is not going away until people begin to understand that in a family court, if you beat your wife and abuse your child, and go after custody, most of the time you will get it,” Professor Waller concluded. “I want to live in an America that protects the children.”
For more information about the film, go to http://www.nowayoutbutone.com/index.html.
http://buquad.com/2011/12/05/no-way-out-but-one-bu-professor-presents-a-documentary-highlighting-americas-flawed-family-court-system/
New Documentary by BU Professor Tackles Flawed Family Court System
By Lauren Michael | Dec 5th, 2011
In 1992, Holly Collins went to a Minnesota family court intending to secure full custody of her two children, Zackary and Jennifer. She had believed that if she told the truth–that her ex-husband had repeatedly abused her and their children–everything would be okay. But her evidence of abuse, including several medical records and the children’s statements that they always feared visiting their dad, were repeatedly rejected by the court. Her husband claimed she was lying and trying to alienate their children from him. Then, like thousands of battered women each year, Holly lost full custody of her children to their abusive father.
After two years with limited supervised visitation, in which the children weren’t permitted to discuss the ongoing abuse, Holly decided to do something. One day, she asked her kids to meet her at a video store near their dad’s house. They got into a car and started driving. They tried going to Canada, Mexico and Guatemala. Knowing the FBI was searching for them because Holly had in fact kidnapped her kids, she decided to try escaping to Australia or New Zealand. They managed to sneak through airport security without passports and got onto a flight to Amsterdam. There, they were detained and sent to a refugee camp. Years later upon finding a lawyer willing to take her case, Holly became the first U.S. citizen to be granted asylum by the Netherlands on the grounds of domestic violence.
For COM Professor Garland Waller, Holly Collins’ story was the perfect outlet for her to make a documentary on the shortcomings of the American family court system. “My first documentary was about three women who all lost custody of their kids to men who had battered them and sexually abused them,” she said to me when I interviewed her last Thursday. The documentary was never aired for the public, however, because people considered it way too controversial.
“I thought, I know this is an issue that is going on in the family courts, every single day,” Professor Waller explicated. “How can we do a story on this issue of domestic violence and child abuse that people will want to see; that will have a story that has a beginning, middle, and end; that has a hero; and that doesn’t make them feel suicidal at the end?” That’s why she decided to center her film around Holly’s story. ”Holly is one of the few women who has been able to save her children from years of being abused,” she affirmed.
On December 2 at 7pm in COM 101, Professor Waller and her production team screened the film No Way Out But One for a packed lecture hall of students and faculty. The hour-and-a-half long documentary, which was followed by a Q;A session, follows Holly’s story and also outlines the grievous problems 0f the American family court system. Made for under $40,000, the not-for-profit film was a way for Professor Waller and her husband Barry Nolan (who also produced and narrated the film) to make a difference.
“This is what I do to give back,” she explained. “Some people work for charity, some people give to the United Way, but this is what I do.”
As the documentary cites, each year 58,000 children are placed in contact with an abuse parent after divorce, and batterers win custody in 70% of family court cases where abuse is involved.
Professor Waller also cited the lingering gender bias in the family courts. “Courts do not have to consider domestic violence in their rulings, ” she said. “Now that is anti-woman, because it’s usually the women who get beaten up.” Money, she says, is also involved. “The men who want custody are the ones who can afford to have the kids, and you have to be able to pay the court costs,” she explained. “This is something that doesn’t happen in poor families…it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay all these people.” If the father is paying for the court evaluator, she says, often they’ll skew the evidence in his favor.
But even in ugly divorces, she says, usually the parents still want to do what’s best for their children. “When there are cases that involve domestic violence and child abuse, that is not the case,” she explained. “Women often get custody when there’s not domestic violence. But oddly, a batterer is more likely to go after custody than a non-batterer. So its a very complicated issue.”
Since the release of No Way Out But One, Professor Waller and her husband deal with angry father’s rights groups every day. These groups, like Fathers and Families, make an impassioned–if not entirely factual–argument for why they believe the Holly Collins case is a hoax. “After a nice review in a Boston Magazine blog, many pro-father’s rights men were highly critical,” she explained, but “none of them had seen the film and none of them had access to all the thousands of pages of legal documents and medical records and correspondence from experts and FBI documents that we had.” Many of these documents are shown and quoted in the film.
In their writings against Holly Collins, father’s rights groups cite Parental Alienation Syndrome, which means that a mother is trying to alienate her children from their father. Though it is not accepted as a legitimate diagnosis by the American Medical Association or the American Psychological Association (the psychologist who first wrote about PAS had conducted no actual studies), in family court it is often used to legitimize giving custody to an abusive parent.
As Nolan puts it, “these are people who do not and will not respond to evidence, or facts, or medical records, or court transcripts, or expert testimony if it does not fit their preconceived notions.” The groups say that Holly fabricated the evidence of her husband’s abuse, but in reality false allegations of abuse are very rare.
“Holly may not be perfect, but she was clearly a battered woman who only wanted to protect her children from abuse,” Professor Waller affirmed.
Still, this is an issue that has mainly been ignored by the mainstream media. “The mainstream media is terrified of getting sued, and this is a subject where everybody sues everyone all the time,” she explained. “It’s all he said/she said…so the mainstream media says, this is a mess and we’re not going to get into it. Just as the mainstream media did not cover pedophile priests abusing children, just as for years they did not cover the things that were going on at Penn State, it is the same thing only worse by thousands in terms of the children who are being abused.”
Many years after their mother kidnapped them, the Collins kids, now adults, are healthy and grateful for everything their mother has done for them. Jennifer Collins, Holly’s oldest daughter, is the executive director of Courageous Kids, an organization for young adults who suffered from court injustice as children to speak out and share their stories.
“I guess for me, the most important thing is that I would like people to realize that this is a national issue that is not going away until people begin to understand that in a family court, if you beat your wife and abuse your child, and go after custody, most of the time you will get it,” Professor Waller concluded. “I want to live in an America that protects the children.”
For more information about the film, go to http://www.nowayoutbutone.com/index.html.
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