Family Dissolution and Betrayal of our Children's Best Interests
"We have permitted the courts to sever the relationship between his or
her biological father. This is something that no court should have an
opportunity to do."
Margaret Mead
Male Denial
Men are stupid. Most men have a shocking lack of awareness of the
ever-increasing family issues, including divorce, custodial conflict and
parental loss. Male ignorance crosses over all racial, religious, social and
national divides.
Unmarried men live in a world of romance and optimistic expectation.
This state of mind is part of our historical socialization. Married men go
about their lives also without thinking about these painful issues. Neither
group even recognizes let alone accepts the uncomfortable facts about family
crisis and the breakdown of modern marriages. Men fear opening the
proverbial Pandora's box threatening their inherited and reinforced systems
of belief. Men are living in denial.
When fathers are suddenly confronted by separation and divorce, by
breakdown of their own family lives and the potential loss of their
children, these problems are perceived as existing in a vacuum. Fathers
often see nothing more than a miserable personal experience unrelated to
outside influences, trends or policies. Wrong!
Men are not only ill informed on the issues, but are the most
vociferous of all in denial of the facts. They are the last to acknowledge
the existence of covert court custody policies set up to deny their rights
to relationships with their children -until it is too late to resist. They
cannot imagine the full extent of the family court's wide-ranging
discretionary powers. They cannot conceive of the existence of radical and
cultural feminist conspiracies that seriously impact maternal preference
court policy. They do not imagine that their former wives or girlfriends
would ever act to harm the children.
Fathers believe, rather naively, that justice will prevail in their
'personal' cases, that no court would ever take away their children from
them. Friends and relatives will also deny realities, either reinforcing a
misguided trust in the family law system, or distancing themselves from the
'dead or dying' fathers. See Dr. Bakalar
Secretly, family members will ask, "What did he do to her? He must
have done something to get her this angry?"
Men hiring lawyers think they can simply leave it to their
representative to protect them and their children. Pro se fathers believe
they are capable of self-representation in a hostile and complex legal
forum. Both sets of fathers often have come to see me seeking advice, after
the fact, after their cases have gone horribly wrong, when they are
desperate, alone and defeated.
Male perceptions are simply out of tune with the facts!
Lets start with a few relevant, staggering and quite conservative
statistics from the "The Stepfamily Foundation" that set the scale of the
problem for children and fathers.
"One out of two marriages end in divorce.
60% of second marriages fail, according to the U.S. Census Bureau
66% of marriages and living together situations end in break up, when
children are actively involved, according to Stepfamily Foundation
statistics.
It is predicted that 50% of children (35 million) in the US will go
through a divorce before they are 18.
At present there are over 22.5 million children in the US living in
single-parent homes, nearly all with a female parent."[1]
Sole maternal custody court policies have led to the undeniable
statistical fact of a rapid and painful disappearance of fatherhood. See
Graphs on single-parent families-Divorces Along with that disappearing dad
has come misleading and injurious terms like 'dead-beat' dad and 'absent
parent' that have sprung into the modern vocabulary. But the truth is that
vast majority of men are not 'dead beat' dads or voluntary 'absent parents'.
Very few men abandon their children. The truth is that tens of millions of
women are delimiting and obliterating contact between their former spouses
and the children. See Myth of the Dead-Beat Dad
This catastrophic scenario of divorce, separation, custodial conflict
and parental loss did not erupt without warning. In an early study by
Heatherington (1977) it was found that,
" Within two years some fathers could not cope with seeing their
children only occasionally and gave up on visitation refusing to become
"Disneyland Dads" in the face of stern and unrelenting opposition by their
former wives" (Marriages and Families, Mary Anne Lamanna and Agnes
Riedmann).
In year 2000, at the time of writing, one such estranged and
destabilized dad just holed up with a gun and hostages at that very same
'Disneyland', threatening suicide and murder. Nothing changes! All he wanted
was access to his children. He is not alone. Figures show that tens of
millions of other fathers are living out that same crisis.
Ironically, as shown by three separate studies, when men are entrusted
with sole custody they do not act to betray their children's trust and
rights,
"Children living with fathers typically have more contact and are
emotionally closer to parents, that is, their mothers" (Grief 1985, Grief
and Pabst in 1988, and Lewin in 1990)
Fathers, unlike huge numbers of mothers, do not act to destroy the
rights and interests of their children when placed in positions of control
and power. Studies on paternal custody should be contrasted (and used in
court) by studies on maternal custody showing that mothers with sole custody
interfere, delimit, and act to destroy paternal relationships to children
after divorce. See Source Material on Maternal Abuse of Sole Custody Orders
The studies are extremely important given Psychiatrist John W. Jacobs
report that many of his colleagues believe ALL marriages will end in divorce
and that we will marry at least three times in our lives. Present studies
indicate that the average marriage lasts only for seven years.
There are also between 500,000 and 650,000 parental child abductions
in the US alone each year directly related to custody conflicts, with many
more going unreported. This heralds in an era of enormous crisis in family
relations in America and the rest of the western world. According to The
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, "the incidence of child
abduction by family members is growing at an alarming rate in the United
States and will become a greater policy challenge for elected officials each
year." See The Phenomena of Parental Child Abduction
Anecdotal evidence, supplied by a highly placed source at The US State
Dept., suggests that the vast majority of these parental kidnappings are
carried out by women, mothers. My own research supports that finding.
The statistics and problems cited, as well as those to follow, are
some of the consequences of a tragic three-step process; commencing with the
facile breakdown of traditional 'intact' families, the advent of 'on demand'
no fault divorce, and, finally, the imposition of universal sole maternal
custody orders making children fatherless.
The knock-on effects and consequences to children of this invidious
process include serious pathologies developed in childhood, adolescence and
adulthood as reported by The Utopia Foundation as recently as 1997:
"Over 85% of all youths sitting in prisons grew up in fatherless
homes, according to: Fulton County Georgia Jail Population and Texas
Department of Corrections (1992)
70% of juveniles in state operated institutions, come from homes where
the biological father is not present (US Dept. of Justice Special Report,
1988)
71% of all high school dropouts come from homes where the biological
father is not present (National Principles Association Report on the State
of High Schools)
85% of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders come from homes
where the biological father is not present (Center for Disease Control)
63% of youth suicides are from homes where the biological father is
not present (US D.H.H.S. Bureau of the Census)"
Fathers involved in custody battles in hostile forums MUST use those
and other statistics in a reasoned defense of their children's best
interests, arguing for joint physical and legal custody.
Even if mother, or her lawyer, attempts to undercut the statistical
validity (citing other factors), there is no overcoming an 'a priori' (on
its face) case that father absence is an unmitigated disaster. These
statistics, together with others and the studies in this book make a
compelling case for the shared parenting of children, See A Father's Guide
to the Courts. See Parental Deprivation and Consequences on Children. See
Appendix C on US Government Statistics Visitation and Child Support
How relevant is all this?
Who has not either suffered marriage or non-marital disruption
personally or experienced it through a close friend, or family member? How
many have experienced the pain and suffering of missed children, or
grandchildren, when they have been whisked out of lives as a result of
former partners desire to dispose of father? The odds are that all of you
will have had one experience or the other. And further, if you have not
lived through this pain, the odds are that you will within your lifetime.
"How intimate is the link between the nature of society and how its
children are raised? Or as we have so often asked: Is man the father of
society, or society the father of man? This question becomes no less burning
with the passing of millennia". Bruno Bettelheim, "The Children of the
Dream".
Perhaps a more compelling question, heralding in the dawn of a new
millennium, is how to preserve, protect, or indeed, even salvage our most
fundamental unit of society -the family- from disappearing into a black hole
of interpersonal gender based chaos and animosity, while guarding the
inalienable rights of our children to be nurtured, loved and guided into a
healthy adulthood.
But society has failed to address, let alone confront the issues of
rising gender warfare, divorce, fatherlessness and an unparalleled social
re-organization driving us towards female-headed single-parent families.
Collectively, judges, lawyers, social workers, psychologists, law guardians
and tens of millions of mothers have failed to cherish and protect our
children's rights. Fathers have failed to reverse the trend, or even put a
dent in it.
Despite existing evidence that 'traditional' family structure is, as
the UN has declared, "the most fundamental social unit of organized
society", we have allowed it to crumble to the point of devastation.
We were forewarned by US and UK studies, as far back as 1988, reported
by David White and Anne Woollett, lecturers in Developmental Psychology,
that this epidemic was well underway but have ignored the consequences:
"Figures from the US census returns showed 21 percent of children in
single-parent homes (mother)(Laosa 1988). In the UK, in 1988, 16 percent of
the families with dependent children were headed by a single parent
(mother). (OPCS 1989) Those figures have escalated in both countries
through the nineteen nineties."
Having gone on to account for extremely insignificant 'other causes'
of single parenting (death, abandonment), they restated:
"Looking at these statistics in a different way, figures from the US
show that 38 percent of the children born in the period 1965-69 were not
living with both natural parents by age 16 years."
It is estimated that 50 percent or more of children born in the late
1970's will spend some time in a single-parent family before they reach the
age of 16 years (Bumpass, 1984; Hofferth, 1985)."
Those statistics are shocking enough, but both the estimates and
projections have been seriously under-reported. The trend toward
female-headed single-parent families has escalated off the top of the
charts. Yet, we have taken no steps, to halt the trend, implement reform
legislation, alter unworkable policies or offer moral leadership.
The bells are tolling for the tens of millions of innocent children
fallen tragic victims to the onslaught of divorce and estrangement from male
parents, suffering the imposition of a destructive female-headed
single-parent family system.
Association of Children's and Father's Rights
This book is written from the child's perspective. I wanted to speak
out for the tens of millions of silent suffering children. Unfortunately,
many children's rights issues are clouded and get merged into interpersonal
relationships within the family nexus. Therefore, it is necessary to clarify
a few things.
First, to me, men's issues are only of interest if dependent on, and
annexed to, those of the child. Women's issues are addressed only in terms
of their interconnection to children's rights. The child's interests are
paramount.
But, having said that, one has great difficulty separating the
interests of children and fathers in present circumstances. There is, from
the child's perspective, a relative association of children's and father's
rights. Both groups, forming two-thirds of the family nexus, have equally
become (in a constitutional sense) cognizable minority classifications whose
natural and legal rights have been seriously impaired. Both groups, in the
aftermath of 'traditional' family breakdown and conflictual divorce, have
become the psychological victims of millions of women.
Although White and Wollett reported in "Families: A Context for
Development (1992)" that there had been recent moves in the US and UK to
make joint custody arrangements to ensure the child's rights to maintain
contact with both parents in the aftermath of divorce, they had to admit to
the hypocrisy of family courts in failing to put shared parenting into
practice;
"However, the evidence suggests that changes in the legal arrangement
are not reflected in the living arrangements of families post-divorce."
In other words, policies rooted in the outmoded doctrines of 'tender
years' and 'maternal attachment' discussed in later chapters, leave sole
maternal custody firmly in place despite recent lip-service paid to shared
parenting and vague 'gender neutral' legislation. See 'The Psychiatric &
Psychological Literature on the Child', See 'The Legal System.
Family courts worldwide, remain driven by radical feminist politics
and pressure. See NOW Opposition to Shared Parenting Bills
Courts continue to exercise wide ranging discretionary powers allowing
them to bypass, ignore, abuse and contravene legislative intent. Courts
remain committed to personal prejudices and private political agendas
supported by outdated and erroneous research in the psychiatric literature.
See Rebuttal to Freud, Solnit and Goldstein
Universal sole maternal custody not merely rules, but is identifiable
as a root cause of serious trauma imposed on our children. See Consequence
of Parental Deprivations on Children
White and Wollett continued on to also point out that:
"Children generally live with only one parent and have few overnight
stays with the other parent. Only a small percentage of children spend large
amounts of time with both parents."
Their finding was echoed in another study,
"In general, children do not see a great deal of their (other) parent
(Maccoby et al. 1988)".
And in 2000, twelve years later, conditions have worsened as numbers
have swelled. What other outcome could we expect in these circumstances?
Sole maternal custody is granted almost exclusively. Control and power are
vested in a party (mother) that seems to have, and act out of, a number of
subjective and objective reasons to limit or completely deny child and
father their most vital and appropriate relationship. That's what the
statistics and studies in this book go to prove.
Women have brazenly admitted in surveys that, 'they see no value in
fatherhood and to having interfered with visitation between their former
spouses and the children'. See Surveys of Divorced Mothers. See US Census
Data Appendix C and below
Given that bizarre and rather cruel admission it is, therefore, not
surprising that only in:
"About 20 percent of cases the parents (men) see their children once a
week or more (Furstenberg 1988). Contact with the parent declines with the
passage of time with fathers showing a more marked decline in the frequency
of their visits (Hetherington et al 1982)".
These are the kinds of emerging patterns and trends that have
continued and accelerated through the 1990's and into the twenty first
century, as women seek divorces, and dispose of male parents using legal
process to do so.
In 1994, US government sources reported that a shocking 37.8 percent
of fathers were denied any access to their children by the courts and over
54.9 percent were given little access and virtually no enforcement of that
contact. See Appendix C. That means that in a child population in the US of
some 77 million kids, roughly sixty percent of them are children of divorce.
Of those, 92.7 percent of them have no fathers. While Dr. John Campion in
England confirms the fact that over 50% of children of divorce in his
country do not see their fathers at all. These statistics tell a sad tale of
injustice and deceit.
Why are intact family models being desecrated?
Why are millions of women obliterating the interpersonal relationships
between their former spouses and the children?
How are they affecting this destructive process?
How can we as a society find more humane and rational solutions, than
we have during the past twenty years, to the dilemma of family breakdown and
parental loss?
What can fathers do to protect the emotional and legal rights of their
children?
First of all fathers must come to even recognize the nature of the
problem!
The Disappearance of Fatherhood
It is undeniable that two phenomena are occurring simultaneously:
massive divorce rates and the disappearance of fatherhood. These bad twins
are symptoms of a society being split into disharmonious gender halves by
myopic radical feminists and their allies. There is no discounting radical
feminist influence on women or the existing causal connection between
feminist ideology and fatherlessness.
There has been a drastic re-shaping of "societies most fundamental
unit" (the family) while a popular myth has been created that it can be
transmuted into and be maintained by a female single parent supported by the
state. This is not merely a gross misunderstanding of human nature, but a
powerful vehicle for creation of cycles of deprivation and dysfunction in
our children. That's what the available studies already show is happening.
One longtime and respected critic of present court custody policies is
American Psychiatrist Mel Roman. He calls for a joint custody approach,
characterizing present policies as anachronistic and unjust:
"The assumptions that underlie the policy of generally granting
custody to mothers are outmoded, unrealistic and damaging. They are as
inappropriate to the contemporary intellectual and socio-cultural Zeitgeist
as were the rights of fathers in ancient Rome to sell their child or put it
to death."
Driven by huge increases in the numbers of non-marital separations and
conflictual divorces, we are being swept away in a rising tide of
destabilization in the lives of our children.
Few among the empowered elite wish to acknowledge this fact. While
numerous apologists leap forward to address only superficial aspects of the
problem, acting only to reinforce the underlying policies causing these
disastrous consequences for children.
While Dr. Roman rejects past gender stereotyping and the discredited
psychoanalytical theories of Freud, Solnit and Goldstein (see Chapter II)
that support sole maternal custody, reminding us that,
"Maternal custody as a presumed preference is the shadow of a world
that no longer exists except in the minds of those who unrealistically
cherish the imperfect past."
In fact I would go much further, as that world never truly existed. It
was largely mythological and was limited to an extremely brief historical
period (Industrial Revolution).
Maternal preference must be rejected. Professor Daniel Amneus warned
with justifiable impatience in his book, "The Garbage Generation",
"What needs to be done is to stop the flow of messed-up kids through
the pipeline running from the divorce courts and into female-headed
families, through pathological childhoods into disruptive adolescence and
demoralized adulthood--the process now in full swing and programmed to
continue into the next Garbage Generation in the 21st century."
Dr. Amneus response calls for a return to Patriarchy of the family and
for father custody where the family has been disabled.
My position on custody is that we MUST make joint physical and legal
custody (shared parenting) the presumption in law as a first step forward in
safeguarding the rights of children. Family law should be federal and not
subject to state vagaries. National 'joint custody' law can still provide
for the flexibility to make sole custody orders in extreme or exceptional
(anomalous) cases. But even in those cases, concrete evidence must be
adduced meeting with all other civil and criminal law standards, unlike the
allegation driven process in family law courts. See Chapters on the Law, See
Objective Evidence tests
In principle, commonsense, intuition, logic and modern research all
argue for the continuing need and rights of the child to be nurtured by his
or her two psychological parents in the aftermath of separation and divorce.
These needs are best served by judicially mandated joint custody or shared
parenting. I believe that the material in this book conclusively supports
this view.
Sole maternal custody must be understood in practice as equating to
nothing less than a serious parental loss (See Dr. Jacobs). No reputable
mental health professional can dispute the idea that the most significant
loss to a child is the loss of one or both of its parents. Yet, this loss is
artificially created and imposed on our children when making custody
decisions removing one parent (father) from the child's life. Especially
when such removal is based on nothing more than sexual or gender stereotypes
and abuse of power. It is not made more palatable by rationalizations like,
it must be done for 'the sake of regularity and order', 'reducing
hostilities' or as 'the least detrimental solution'. Sole maternal custody
cannot be used as a quick, practical means to dispose of the tens of
millions of cases that flow through national and foreign courts.
Even if maternal preference strategies were applied to more
'traditional' family models, there are a multitude of sound arguments
against them. But applied to the 'post-nuclear' family models in which men,
at women's insistence, have taken on ever increasing roles as co-nurturers,
they become indefensible. They are cruel, irrational, and visit a miserable
injustice on our children. As leading psychiatrist, Dr. Jacobs, told me
during a television interview:
"If the loss of a parent through natural causes presents a child with
an important loss, can you imagine the traumatic affects on the child from
the enforced loss of a parent due to a conflictual divorce, separation and
an artificial severance of it's precious relationship." ("Wednesday's
Children" 1997)
Sadly, I can imagine such trauma, and so have many responsible mental
health professionals. Aspects of 'parental loss syndrome' represented by
reunion fantasies and a quest for the missing parent are dealt with in the
Chapter on Parental Rights Deprivations.
Further, suggestions that fathers still maintain 'rights of
visitation' when mothers are granted sole custody, are spurious in the
extreme. Those arguments fly in the face of reality. The statistical facts
and research demonstrates that paternal ties to children are lost, not
maintained, through supposed visitation rights. See US Census Figures See
Custody and Visitation See Dr. Fay An End to Visitation
But despite the known affects of paternal loss on children, case law
denial of the child's rights persists through continuation of sole maternal
custody policies. Children's rights to treasured relationships are
shattered, as the research shows, without judicial concern for the child's
immediate trauma, long-term harmful effects or dysfunctionality directly
linked to those policies. The legal systems of The United States, Europe,
Israel as well as Canada, New Zealand, Australia and others, are all alike
in this betrayal of the rights and best interests of children.
The insensitivity and corruption of present family court process is
not confined to married persons but extends to the millions and millions of
de facto (common law) marriages in which children are produced. Unmarried
fathers are treated even worse than married ones by the courts in custody
and visitation matters. One sick joke arising out of modern common law
marriages (no longer recognized by most states) is that 'paternity suits'
once used to force men into submission and recognition of their paternal
responsibilities are now having to be used by men to force women into
acceptance of male parentage and paternal rights.
While in one particular case, even the US Supreme Court has gone so
far as to create a legal fiction (based on gender discrimination and an
arcane California statute) that the biological and psychological father of a
young child-was not (in law) its father. In this exasperating case, an
unmarried father went on a twelve year Odyssey through state, federal and
international courts to establish his relationship to his daughter only to
be defeated. See the extraordinary case of Michael H. v. Gerald D. in
International law, UN Convention on the Rights of the Child/ International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. See Orders of Filiation, See
Parental Responsibility Orders
If we all (especially fathers) fail to understand the source and
nature of both internal and external forces driving family court policy, we
cannot change its direction. Not as individual parents fighting cases or as
advocates for broad social and legal reform.
But for all those outside forces, we return to the mother for one of
the first questions that springs to mind: Why would millions of women, long
since liberated from, what all feminists call, the bonds of patriarchal,
conservative, stereo-typical and 'traditional' long term relationships,
(having demanded that men become co-nurturing partners) revert back to
pre-liberation positions characterizing men as mere 'providers' and
themselves as 'homemakers'?
Women, ironically, when dissolving the new style 'mutual' marital
relationship, disposing of their spouses as parents to their children, are
doing precisely that. The very qualities women claimed to seek in men as
husbands and fathers (partners, co-nurturers), are suddenly, in the
circumstances of divorce, completely repudiated as huge numbers have
enforced maternal sole custody on their children.
Gender Warfare and Fatherlessness
One part of the answer to the question lies in the attitudinal changes
of women towards men. Changes in the female view of men has been energized
by social circumstances, modified behavior patterns and the fostering and
interposition of an aberrant brand of cultural or radical feminism. Over
time, anti-male feminism has infused itself into millions of individual
male-female interpersonal relationships. See Social Changes in Family
Structure One frightening aspect of the present trend toward dissembled
families and conflictual relationships, is the collective wedge forged by
women between themselves and men. We are only now seeing the first signs of
this gender division as revealed by a study on adult male and female sexual
dysfunction. See Edward Laumann Study, U. of Chicago
As this has far reaching implications for the children of divorce, it
needs discussion.
The developments of the past 30 years involving a negative shift in
perceptions by women (anti-male feminism) has had a powerful impact on their
conscious and unconscious expectations of men. It has affected their conduct
in marriage and child rearing. It has impacted on their choices of the means
and style of divorce. Over a prolonged period, an invisible threshold was
reached and crossed, making men the unwitting and unwilling enemies of
women. And an undeclared war has been started. The old cliché 'it takes two
to make an argument' is proved false in light of family disruptions and
aggrandizements by millions of mothers in divorce.
Devaluation: Man as Thing or Person?
What has all this to do with MY divorce and custody conflict?
In order to deal with the reality of custodial conflict fathers must
understand the female psychological mindset operating during the divorce
period. First, consider a useful general definition of man given by the
Anthropologist Paul Bohannan.
"Man is, first of all, a mammal, which is to say that he reproduces
sexually. Man is a sentient being. He has, in his classification of species,
called himself Homo sapiens-"man the knowing" or "man the perceiving". Man
is a social being. Man is a being who lives by culture." Whereas Bohannan
differentiates between man and other mammals insofar that:
"But social man is man in touch with his own kind. Alone, without
communication with other human beings, he is not wholly human."
What happens to man (and his children) when woman, in practice
(divorce), acts to denies him sociality and communication? What happens when
she ex-communicates him in fact from the family? Does he, from the point of
view of woman become something less than a person (subhuman) and more of a
thing? Does that enable her to harm him, and of course the children?
These questions are relevant to fathers, before, during and after
marriages have ended. The great gender divide is based on artificially
induced negative perceptions of men highlighted by prodigious male
scapegoating instigated by cultural and radical feminists.
As the English philosopher Wittgenstein put it, 'the thought is the
language'.
The Linguistic Merry-go-Round
This is not an exercise in semantics. Social anthropologists have
always characterized historical man as man the 'hunter-gatherer'. In other
words, man as a person described by one of the tasks representing a part of
his whole function. The term in no way implies a pejorative value or
diminishes a man's worth.
But an important early twentieth century shift in the characterization
of man to 'provider' (initiated by the psychiatric literature, not by
Anthropologists) carried an entirely different connotation. Perhaps, subtle
and even accidental, this shift downgraded man from a person to a thing,
reducing his significance in the family. The use of the language made it
clear that man, in a family context, had no role other than provider. This
is the world that Dr. Roman referred to in his rejection of maternal sole
custody practices.
Much later, the feminist intellectual culture reinvented man as
person, at least in theory. During the sixties revolution it became
extremely convenient for feminist women to describe men as 'nurturers' and
'co-parents', not merely as providers. Simultaneously, women sought freedom
from homemaking-nurturing roles and expansion of their personal lifestyles.
The term 'provider' was rejected (as was nurturer-homemaker for women) and
completely dropped out of the vocabulary replaced by new, enhancing terms
such as sharer, partner, and co-nurturer.
However, from the eighties onward, co-incidental to marked increases
in divorces steered by radical feminist influences, men were redefined
again. Men were scapegoated and portrayed as oppressors, perpetrators of
violence, sexual abusers, rapists, dead-beat dads, and absent parents. Man
had become a 'thing' and a dirty one at that. This was not historical
accident. It was carefully orchestrated through media propaganda, social
pressure, and legislative lobbying. It has had an unfortunate affect on the
real lives of ordinary men, women and children. It operates at the back of
each and every conflictual custody case.
Feminist June Carbone even saw fit to meekly caution her female
colleagues that some women might start to reject the feminist label because,
"Their focus has raised fears that feminists are anti-men and,
therefore, antifamily."(Carbone, "A Feminist Perspective on Divorce" The
Future of Children 1994-Notes)
It is not their focus that has raised such fears as much as it is
their rhetoric, policies and extravagant deprecation of men as a collective.
They are anti-male.
It is also obvious that they are anti-integrated family. Their
literature demonstrates the pursuit of policy objectives fostering
implementation of a matriarchal system, making men peripheral, second-class
citizens, if not indentured servants.
Comparing present circumstances with pre-sixties traditional family
settings in which men and women had to remain committed to one another and
work at relationships, one can readily understand the reasons for a similar
lack of commitment in our new post-nuclear family.
Radical feminist polemic, abstract condemnation of men and the
existence of alternative opportunity have taken a huge toll on women's
commitment to family values. Women's new freedoms combined with their
pre-emptive negative expectations and distorted imagery of men has made
divorce viable. The divorce climate guaranteeing 'equal distribution' of
family assets and the sole custody of the children, has actually made
divorce an extremely attractive alternative to resolving even the lowest
levels of family discord. See Chapter and discussion on divorce law reform.
The generic scapegoating and deprecation of men finally caused
moderate feminist Lynne Segal to bravely warn women against this kind of
anti-male radical-feminism that,
"Celebrates women's superior virtue and spirituality and decries
'male' violence and technology. Such celebration of the 'female' and
denunciation of the 'male,' however, arouses fear and suspicion in feminists
who, like me, recall that we joined the women's movement to challenge the
myths of women's special nature."(Amneus 1996)
The central ingredients to present gender warfare are, on the one,
hand women's natural bio-chemical predisposition to pro-create and, on the
other, an increasingly destructive and distorted perception of the males
they require to complete their sexual function. Given these ingredients and
the new unbridled freedom of women to, express themselves, earn independent
livelihoods and extricate themselves from unwanted marital relationships
(through recent law reform), is it surprising that we are tumbling towards
rapid dissolution of marital and non-marital pro-creational relationships,
at just a whisper of discord or stress.
Divorce and The De-Personalization of Fathers
So from the abstract, one inevitably arrives at real life conflictual
family dissolution and unjust custodial arrangements. Seeing female
de-personalization of ex-husbands and fathers at work in the legal forum,
confirms the flow -man's theoretical reduction in status translated into the
real life trauma of divorce.
Fathers involved in conflictual custody cases must be aware of this
factor. In the millions of cases that occur, women's mindset is best
described by psychiatrist R.D. Laing in his classic work on Schizophrenia
"The Divided Self", work analogous to what we call more or less 'normal'
social interactions.
According to Laing:
"Depersonalization is a technique that is universally used in dealing
with the other (husband) when he becomes too tiresome or disturbing. One no
longer allows oneself (herself) to be responsive to his feelings and may be
prepared to regard him and treat him as though he had no feelings. A partial
depersonalization of others is extensively practiced in everyday life and is
regarded as normal if not highly undesirable."
The conduct of a majority of women in millions of conflictual custody
cases, framed by selfish and practical motivations, is dependent on their
ability to invent a convenient rationalization that relieves them of feeling
any guilt.
Mothers first accept the radical feminist ideas that broadly
dehumanize man, reducing his value and status, transitioning him from being
to thing. They then impose real life de-personalization of the former loved
one in custody cases. Spouses (former loved ones) are summarily dismissed as
husbands, devalued and disposed of as fathers of the children.
This de-personalization is easily crystallized. There is separation
from the spouse using negative imagery and expectations (he is dangerous).
Subjective and distorted views of the individual conflictual family
experience (I am threatened, victimized, vulnerable, isolated, entrapped)
are developed. The role of husband (oppressor, source of entrapment) and
subsequently that of father (un-necessary) is devalued. Finally, mothers
acquire psychological confirmation and support from outside sources (radical
feminists, complaisant mental health professionals, judges, social workers,
friends and family).
This process is confirmed by studies showing that women are guilty of
an unusual degree of distorted thinking linked to their de-personalization
of the former spouse as the following one illustrates. Incidentally the
study also shows why women should not be given sole custody orders in the
first place:
"Overall, approximately 50% of mothers "see no value in the father's
continued contact with his children" (pg. 125, 4, lines 1 and 2) "Surviving
the Breakup" Joan Berlin Kelly and Judith S. Wallerstein"
This preposterous declaration and shocking result of interviews with
divorced or divorcing mothers underscores my argument. I am certain that it
also comes as a surprise to unsuspecting fathers. Do mothers say such things
while content in the marriage? No. Quite the opposite, they call for,
encourage and laud the male parent's co-parenting qualities and capacities.
Mother's denigration of father is clearly derivative of the divorce process
and the unspoken drives behind it.
Women still feel the need to rationalize stripping the child of his or
her male co-caregiver and co-nurturer while fulfilling the practical need to
obtain financial security (protection) from him using the complaisant legal
system. The marvel in this system of false self is that it allows these
mothers to remain guiltless, lacking in remorse or concern. Dr. Jacobs and
others have described this process as the 'parentectomy' of father.
This behavioral style is encouraged by the Women's Movement where
according to critic Warren Farrell Ph.D. a former board member of N.O.W.
(National Organization of Women),
"There are two fundamental faces of the Women's Movement.the other
part has honed victim power to a fine art creating a problem few people
understand. With victim power goes the underlying belief you can kill the
victimizer and feel no remorse." While Amneus reports that: "Dr. Lenore
Weitzman's book "The Divorce Revolution", argues that ex-husbands owe
ex-wives far more alimony and child support money than divorce courts now
compel them to pay. The problem of the feminist movement, as Dr. Weitzman
articulates it, is to use the Motherhood Card and the Mutilated Beggar
argument to get that peripheral male out of the home without losing his
paycheck."
Ridding the home of the father (parentectomy) is accomplished in two
stages, first by de-personalization and second using legal intervention.
Amneus continues:
"The problem of patriarchal society and, of the men's rights movement
is to ensure that this separation of a man from his paycheck and his family
does not occur." ("The Garbage Generation")
Ironically, as seen from following chapters, within the framework of
our rapidly dissolving two-parent family structure transposing into a female
headed single-parent family, women have come to perceive of all males as
disposable lovers, partners and parents. While mothers have foolishly and
narcissistically come to believe that our children are their own private
property, thereby substituting one arcane system of injustice in which they
claimed to be victims (patriarchy), with another in which they become
oppressors (matriarchy).
Mothers are supported by the legal system, by erroneous psychological
literature, propaganda and media control, legislation, complaisant feminist
males and general indifference from the public.
From the child's perspective I would rephrase the Amneus quotation.
The problem of all society and of the children's rights movement is to
ensure that the separation of child and father does not and is not permitted
to occur.
