As exhaustively detailed in the past, Kellett took allegations by Ligia Filler, wife of Vladek Filler, that he had sexually abused her and sought a conviction despite the fact that (a) the charges had been made in the course of child custody litigation, (b) the charges were unsubstantiated by any evidence apart from Ligia’s word, (c) Ligia Filler was at the time mentally and emotionally unstable and (d) Ligia Filler had previously made unsubstantiated claims against Vladek.

Now, the canons of ethics for prosecutors demand that they assess all allegations of criminal wrongdoing for probable cause and decline to charge if there is none.  Kellett ignored that canon and others.  She took the case to trial and initially won a conviction, but was able to do so only by recourse to plainly unethical actions and others that violated the Maine Rules of Evidence.  Most of that is detailed in the Bar Counsel’s complaint.  Despite the fact that gaining the upper hand in the custody case was Ligia’s motive for making up the charges in the first place, Kellett objected to the introduction of any evidence regarding the custody case, and the judge agreed.  Nevertheless, Kellett argued to the jury that there’d been no custody case and therefore that couldn’t have been Ligia’s motive.  In short, she lied to the jury and violated the court’s order.

Perhaps worse, Kellett refused to turn over important and possibly exculpatory evidence to Vladek’s defense counsel.  Attorney Daniel Pileggi requested numerous documents, audio and video recordings, statements by Ligia and Vladek Filler, police statements and the like as part of his preparation for trial.  He requested these by letter on several different occasions, but Kellett simply ignored him, neither providing the requested information nor even acknowledging the request.  Pileggi persisted.  He filed motions.  They were granted.  Kellett ignored the court’s order to produce the material.  Finally, Pileggi simply subpoenaed the documents from the police.  Amazingly, instead of simply complying with the subpoena (which is, after all, a court order, failure to comply with which constituted contempt of court) the police officer asked Kellett what he should do.  Her response?  Ignore it.  And so he did.

All of that of course is the most egregious misconduct.  When brought to light, the trial judge declared a mistrial which was upheld by an appellate court.  Tried a second time, this time armed with the information Kellett had intentionally withheld, Vladek was acquitted of all the serious charges and only convicted of the misdemeanor of pouring a glass of water on his wife.  Of course there was no evidence that he’d done so apart from her say-so, but as usual, that’s sufficient.  Amazingly, he was sentenced to serve 21 days in jail.

In the mean time, the family court had seen the obvious – that Ligia Filler was an unstable and abusive mother, whose allegations against Vladek were entirely without substance and made for the sole purpose of trying to separate a decent, loving father from his children.  That attempt failed and Vladek was granted sole custody that he happily maintains to this day.

But Vladek Filler was never going to be satisfied with just a misdemeanor on his record and custody of his kids.  He filed ethics charges against Kellett, something someone should have done long ago.  Now, state bar associations are charged with maintaining discipline over their members which amounts to the fox judging other foxes.  Unsurprisingly, a lawyer has to behave outrageously to be disciplined by a state bar.  And that desire to protect their own was on full display at the first hearing into Vladek’s charges against Kellett.

To begin with, the judge who sentenced Vladek to serve 21 days in jail, just so happened to schedule his jail time for the exact period in which the Kellett hearing would be held.  What a coincidence!  That meant that Vladek couldn’t communicate with the state Bar Counsel and had to show up for the hearing in jail garb and fully manacled.  To top it off, when he attempted to introduce into evidence a huge stack of information demonstrating a long pattern of prosecutorial abuse by Kellett, the Bar attempted to prevent it.  Carla Bossano, Kellett’s boss, was present and attempted to have a guard physically remove Vladek from the witness stand before he could introduce his evidence.  The attempt failed and the evidence was introduced, but the pro-attorney/anti-complainant nature of the affair was clear for all to see.

Eventually however, the Bar Counsel recommended that Kellett be disciplined for her multiple and severe violations of the canons of ethics, the rules of evidence and court orders.  We’ll soon find out if she will be.

To read the allegations against Kellett by the Overseers of the Maine State Bar is to receive one message loudly and clearly: for Mary Kellett, this was business as usual.  Most obviously, time and again, over the course of a year, she simply ignored the requests for information from Vladek’s attorney.  She didn’t call him, didn’t write him a letter, didn’t file a response in court.  Nothing.  When he got a court order, she ignored that too.  Once he’d been convicted, Vladek himself asked the police for the same documents, audio and video tapes, etc. and they gave it all to him.  In other words, Kellett could have turned the information over to Pileggi easily, but she chose not to.

More outrageously still, she actively intervened to stop them from doing so when the police asked if they should turn the material over.  The former is a clear violation of the code of ethics governing prosecutors, but the latter is a crime.  It’s tampering with a witness and Kellett should go to prison for it.

But whatever happens with that matter, it’s all too plain that what Mary Kellett did in Vladek Filler’s case, she’s done countless times before and gotten away with it.  She’s received no discipline from either courts or her superior, Carla Bassano.  Nothing else explains her cavalier dismissal of every one of Pileggi’s requests.  Nothing else explains her ignoring of the court’s order.  And nothing else explains (a) why a police officer would ask her whether to comply with a subpoena and (b) her casual instructions to him to ignore it.

And sure enough, she’s managed to take to trial allegations of sexual impropriety against men that were every bit as flimsy as those against Vladek Filler.  The courts’ records are replete with Kellett cases in which a man was tried when there was either no evidence against him or what there was was so patently weak that the charges were dismissed.

Mary Kellett is a woman who will take any charge to trial as long as it’s a charge of sexual wrongdoing and it’s against a man.  The website A Voice for Men reports here that at least three such charges have been dismissed in this year alone, with more doubtless to come.  Mary Kellett needs to find a new job.  The judge hearing her case should disbar her.  Mary Kellett is not a prosecutor, she’s a political operative.  She’s a feminist who never met an innocent man.  She’s a serial abuser of the power the State of Maine places in her hands.

Finally, it must be noted that Kellett’s history of wrongdoing comes against a backdrop of prosecutorial abuse that seems to have reached epidemic proportions.  Just last year, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns’ piece on the “Central Park Five” roiled the waters of public opinion, and rightly so.  There, five minors who were entirely innocent of the brutal crime – the rape and beating of a female jogger in New York’s Central Park – were coerced into pleading guilty to the crime.  No DNA evidence connected them to the crime and their confessions bore little resemblance to the objective facts of the offense.  All this was known to prosecutor Elizabeth Lederer, but she went ahead anyway.  Meanwhile, the real perpetrator, a serial rapist, walked around free as a bird.

More recently, Brian Banks was released from prison after serving five years for a crime that he not only didn’t commit, but that never occurred.  A young woman claimed he’d raped her and again, without any evidence, a prosecutor was able to browbeat a young man into pleading guilty.  His false accuser was handed almost $1 million as compensation for her “trauma” and, now that she’s admitted she made the whole thing up, no one has lifted a finger to get her to pay it back.

Then there was the infamous Duke Lacrosse case.  What happened to prosecutor Mike Nifong should happen to Mary Kellett.  He did just what she’s done – withhold exculpatory evidence and proceed against a defendant on charges for which there’s no evidence.  Into the bargain, Nifong’s complainant bears some resemblance to Ligia Filler in that both are mentally unstable and had clear ulterior motives for leveling the charges they did.

The epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct is far too vast to describe in detail.  But suffice it to say that allegations of sex crimes and those of domestic violence play a leading role in it.  Those are almost invariably aimed at men, usually fathers.  They’re often done to gain the upper hand in custody cases and the entire process is enthusiastically supported by feminist organizations and feminist ideology that hold that women rarely lie about abuse and that men are genetically and culturally programmed to abuse.  My guess is that Mary Kellett is a true believer of both.

That unholy alliance of state power and feminist ideology constitutes a grave danger to the men of this country, particularly fathers.  As such, it likewise constitutes a grave danger to the children of this country because one of its major aims is the removal of children from those fathers.  It’s a bullet aimed directly at the heart of this society and culture.  It barely missed Vladek Filler.  Most targeted men aren’t so lucky.

The National Parents Organization Promotes Shared Parenting

The National Parents Organization is a non-profit organization that is educating the public, families, educators, and legislators about the importance of shared parenting and how it can reduce conflict in children, parents and extended families. If you would like to get involved in our organization, you can do so several ways. First, we would love to have you as an official member of the the National Parents Organization team. Second, the National Parents Organization is an organization that believes in the importance of using social media as a means to spread the word about shared parenting and other topics, and you can visit us on our Facebook Page to learn more about our efforts. Last, we hope you will share this article with other families using the many social networking sites so that we can bring about greater awareness of shared parenting.  Thank you for your support.

I am a feminist. I have marched at the barricades, subscribed to Ms. magazine, and knocked on many a door in support of progressive candidates committed to women’s rights. Until a month ago, I would have expressed unqualified support for Title IX and for the Violence Against Women Act.

But that was before my son, a senior at a small liberal-arts college in New England, was charged—by an ex-girlfriend—with alleged acts of “nonconsensual sex” that supposedly occurred during the course of their relationship a few years earlier.

What followed was a nightmare—a fall through Alice’s looking-glass into a world that I could not possibly have believed existed, least of all behind the ivy-covered walls thought to protect an ostensible dedication to enlightenment and intellectual betterment.

It began with a text of desperation. “CALL ME. URGENT. NOW.”

“Could not possibly have believed existed…”?  Really?  Ms. Grossman is a feminist who doesn’t know what much feminism consists of.  The idea that she has a son in college and didn’t know about the feminist-inspired and backed attacks on male sexuality, particularly on college campuses beggars belief.  After all, how long has it been since we heard about The Antioch Rules under which every male student must obtain clear verbal assent to every single thing he does with a woman.  Failure to do so can result in academic discipline up to and including expulsion.  “Is it perfume from a dress that makes me so digress?”

Needless to say, no woman on Antioch’s campus need do the same toward her male date.  That’s because, in the time-honored feminist tradition, women are deemed incapable of any form of sexual offense against men, but men are pretty much walking rape machines.

So Ms. Grossman wants us to believe that, highly intelligent, highly educated feminist that she is, she’s never heard of the Antioch rules or the agitprop that passes for education about healthy male/female relationships on college campuses.  She claims to be a shocking revelation the “Dear Colleague” letter sent to every college and university in the land by the director of the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, feminist Russlyn Ali, last year informing them that henceforth allegations of sexual assault must be adjudicated by campus officials using the lowest standard of evidence in American jurisprudence, that of a “preponderance of evidence.”  This informed feminist pretends that she’s never heard of the many cases of false allegations or the railroading of men off campus and sometimes into prison.  She claims she doesn’t know about the more than 100 separate organizations that have spoken out against Russlyn Ali’s “Dear Colleague” letter.

I, for one, am not buying it.  Her WSJ piece comes directly under the heading of the famous line from “Casablanca.”  Grossman is “shocked, shocked!” at the news that college campuses are traps for male students accused of even the slightest sexual impropriety.

Still, she’s writing in the pages of a very influential and widely-read newspaper, so her “discovery” that campus sexual assault policies come close to Stalinism in their “guilty till proven innocent” mindset is welcome.

That was how my son informed me that not only had charges been brought against him but that he was ordered to appear to answer these allegations in a matter of days. There was no preliminary inquiry on the part of anyone at the school into these accusations about behavior alleged to have taken place a few years earlier, no consideration of the possibility that jealousy or revenge might be motivating a spurned young ex-lover to lash out. Worst of all, my son would not be afforded a presumption of innocence.

In fact, Title IX, that so-called guarantor of equality between the sexes on college campuses, and as applied by a recent directive from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, has obliterated the presumption of innocence that is so foundational to our traditions of justice. On today’s college campuses, neither “beyond a reasonable doubt,” nor even the lesser “by clear and convincing evidence” standard of proof is required to establish guilt of sexual misconduct.

These safeguards of due process have, by order of the federal government, been replaced by what is known as “a preponderance of the evidence.” What this means, in plain English, is that all my son’s accuser needed to establish before a campus tribunal is that the allegations were “more likely than not” to have occurred by a margin of proof that can be as slim as 50.1% to 49.9%.

How does this campus tribunal proceed to evaluate the accusations? Upon what evidence is it able to make a judgment?

The frightening answer is that like the proverbial 800-pound gorilla, the tribunal does pretty much whatever it wants, showing scant regard for fundamental fairness, due process of law, and the well-established rules and procedures that have evolved under the Constitution for citizens’ protection. Who knew that American college students are required to surrender the Bill of Rights at the campus gates?

My son was given written notice of the charges against him, in the form of a letter from the campus Title IX officer. But instead of affording him the right to be fully informed, the separately listed allegations were a barrage of vague statements, rendering any defense virtually impossible. The letter lacked even the most basic information about the acts alleged to have happened years before. Nor were the allegations supported by any evidence other than the word of the ex-girlfriend.

The hearing itself was a two-hour ordeal of unabated grilling by the school’s committee, during which, my son later reported, he was expressly denied his request to be represented by counsel or even to have an attorney outside the door of the room. The questioning, he said, ran far afield even from the vaguely stated allegations contained in the so-called notice. Questions from the distant past, even about unrelated matters, were flung at him with no opportunity for him to give thoughtful answers.

The many pages of written documentation that my son had put together—which were directly on point about his relationship with his accuser during the time period of his alleged wrongful conduct—were dismissed as somehow not relevant. What was relevant, however, according to the committee, was the unsworn testimony of “witnesses” deemed to have observable knowledge about the long-ago relationship between my son and his accuser.

That the recollections of these young people (made under intense peer pressure and with none of the safeguards consistent with fundamental fairness) were relevant—while records of the accuser’s email and social media postings were not—made a mockery of the very term. While my son was instructed by the committee not to “discuss this matter” with any potential witnesses, these witnesses against him were not identified to him, nor was he allowed to confront or question either them or his accuser.

And that, my friends, is a pretty fair summary of what’s laughingly called “due process” regarding allegations of sexual misconduct on campus.  It’s a perfect description of a system that’s designed to do one thing - convict.  Noon is a dark time on campus these days.

And of course, lest anyone think the consequences of said system stop at the campus gates, think again.  The accused is essentially required to defend himself and without access to an attorney, so he’ll likely say a lot to try to clear his name.  What he probably doesn’t know is that, if he’s ever brought before a criminal tribunal, every word he said at the college hearing can be used against him in the criminal trial.

Grossman is an attorney and was able to help her son through his Star Chamber ordeal without punishment.  Good for her.  Better is her “death row” conversion.

I am also keenly aware not only of how easily this all could have gone the other way—with life-altering consequences—but how all too often it does…

I fear that in the current climate the goal of “women’s rights,” with the compliance of politically motivated government policy and the tacit complicity of college administrators, runs the risk of grounding our most cherished institutions in a veritable snake pit of injustice—not unlike the very injustices the movement itself has for so long sought to correct. Unbridled feminist orthodoxy is no more the answer than are attitudes and policies that victimize the victim.

Has her son’s experience truly made her understand her own complicity in it?  She’s a feminist, so what was she doing while Russlyn Ali and countless other feminists were doing everything in their power to make sexual assault an ever broader term and sexual assault claims ever easier to prove?  Did she, as part of her activist zeal, ever write a letter to NOW, to Ms., to any of the feminist organizations that blatantly demand one set of standards for the sexual behavior of men and another for that of women?  She’s a lawyer, so what’s she done about false claims of domestic or sexual abuse as part of a campaign to deny children real, ongoing relationships with their fathers?

We hear a lot from feminists to the effect that there’s a Great Silent Majority of them who aren’t radical, who don’t hate men, who would never lie about domestic violence, the wage gap, patriarchy, the “rape culture,” etc.  But the fact is that if there were that many feminists who differed from what feminism has become, well, it wouldn’t have become what it is.  Grossman’s anguish is real enough, but only because it was her son whose head was on the block.  Had it been another young man’s – and it has been far more than she has any idea – she’d have ignored it completely.

But of course, that’s how the fathers’ and men’s rights movements get so many of their adherents.  Second wives of fathers who pay too much child support but don’t get to see their kids, or who pay alimony to an ex who wouldn’t dream of getting a job and off the gravy train are a constant stream of new recruits for us.  Mothers whose sons find themselves the victims of paternity fraud or see their children adopted away without their consent are too.  And of course there are many others.

Judith Grossman should be ashamed of herself.  She was always oh-so aware of injustice except when it was done to others and when it was done by those on “her side.”  It’s only when her ox is gored that she wakes up and sees what she and her comrades have wrought over the years.

On the other hand, at least she sees it now and wrote a piece for millions to see about her tardy epiphany.

The National Parents Organization Promotes Shared Parenting

The National Parents Organization is a non-profit organization that is educating the public, families, educators, and legislators about the importance of shared parenting and how it can reduce conflict in children, parents and extended families. If you would like to get involved in our organization, you can do so several ways. First, we would love to have you as an official member of the the National Parents Organization team. Second, the National Parents Organization is an organization that believes in the importance of using social media as a means to spread the word about shared parenting and other topics, and you can visit us on our Facebook Page to learn more about our efforts. Last, we hope you will share this article with other families using the many social networking sites so that we can bring about greater awareness of shared parenting.  Thank you for your support.

More married men (2.3 per cent) suffered from partner abuse last year than married women, according to the latest British Crime Survey. Yet help is still much harder to find for men.

See here (The Independent, 4/14/13)?  The news media really can tell the truth about domestic violence.

It’s as rare rain in the Gobi Desert, so when it happens it’s cause for celebration.  The Independent article actually takes on the topic of men as victims of intimate partner violence and does so in a way that encourages both belief in their stories and empathy for their plight.  These are men, not women.  As such, they have their own uniquely masculine problems in trying to deal with the violence directed at them by their female partners.  In the vast majority of articles in the mainstream media, men are ignored altogether as victims or slighted by the claim that, in some way, they embellish or even misrepresent what happens to them.  In the most typical of sexist ways, because they’re men, they’re expected to either not be hurt at all or to deal with it without complaining.  The Independent article eschews all that and what’s left are a couple of actual men and their actual responses to being assaulted by their wives/girlfriends.

An inch under six foot tall, Dave, a gardener with a deep, gravelly voice is not most people’s idea of a domestic violence victim. But he suffered two years of abuse at the hands of his girlfriend and was too embarrassed and loyal to report her to the police. He slept in his car for weeks before speaking to his local council, who found him a place at a men’s refuge.

(Third in a Series on Child Support)

The United States has spent large amounts of money and employed draconian tactics to collect child support for almost 25 years. Have these policies been effective? And at what price?

In the late 1980s, the federal government passed a law requiring each state to develop a formula that would dictate the amount of child support ordered in most cases. The formula, called the Child Support Guidelines, was supposed to be based on actual costs of raising children, although we know this has not been the case. The federal law also required each state to establish laws, policies, and procedures to maximize the number of cases in which a child support order was established, and to enforce child support collection.

There is no question that the percentage of people who paid child support and the average amounts paid increased shortly thereafter. It seems most likely that the early increases in these measures were due primarily to establishing a court order for payment, as opposed to the enforcement measures. When a court order was made, parents who had money paid it.

How have we done in more recent years? I have examined data from the US Census Bureau (Table 1) on child support from 1993 through 2009. Basically, they show little or no further improvement despite the expenditure of about $5 billion per year to collect child support.

To simplify the presentation, I compare 1995 to 2007. I don’t use 1993 because results in that year could still reflect the after-effects of the 1991 recession. And I don’t use 2009, because it definitely shows the effects of the recession that began in December, 2007. Also, I am reporting only those data in which fathers are the child support payers, not mothers, since my previous columns have shown that child support collection efforts are more vigorously pursued against fathers.

The percent of custodial mothers who were awarded any child support order at all was 61% in 1995 and 60% in 2007—no increase. Of those who had an order to receive child support, the percentage of mothers who actually received any child support at all was 76% in 1995 and 76% in 2007—no improvement. Of those who were supposed to receive child support, the percentage who received the full amount was 42% in 1995 and 47% in 2007—a small improvement. The average percentage of the child support order that was actually paid was 66% in 1995 and 63% in 2007—a small decline.

All of these measures declined in 2009, clearly as a result of the recession.

These results show that from 1995 through 2009, intensive efforts to increase the collection of child support have had little effect. The data from 2009 shows that economic factors are more important in determining compliance than enforcement of child support orders. In other words, when fathers have the money, they mostly pay it. (Of course, this has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt in numerous careful studies).

What is left to do? The obvious answer is shared parenting. Studies show that child support compliance improves with shared parenting. This stands to reason. Why is it that parents who are migrant workers living in barracks thousands of miles from their children send their meager earnings back home? Why is it that parents work two or three jobs making it almost impossible for them to enjoy time with their children? Obviously, to support their children. Why do parents work in deadly dangerous jobs? Again, for their children.

The answer is so simple—parents will sacrifice for children they feel belong to them. Take their children away, eliminate their voice in decision-making, let the custodial parent move far away, prohibit contact with children based on a phony restraining order, or place parental rights in the hands of a hostile ex, and they no longer feel like parents. Although most will pay child support anyway, many will not walk the last mile for kids who no longer belong to them.

Shared parenting will improve the financial support of children.

A new report concludes that between 95% and 98.5% of all incarcerations in Massachusetts sentenced from the Massachusetts Probate and Family Courts from 2001 through 2011 have been men. Moreover, this percentage may be increasing, with an average of 94.5% from 2001 to 2008, and 96.2% from 2009 through 2011. It is likely that most of these incarcerations are for incomplete payment of child support.

Further analysis suggests that women who fail to pay all of their child support are incarcerated only one-eighth as often as men with similar violations. Several possible explanations of these results other than gender bias are unsupported by the data, strengthening the view that gender bias against fathers is a major factor in the family courts.

The report was painstakingly compiled by Fathers and Families member Terry Brennan, a task that required at least seven months and dozens of patient letters to Massachusetts officials. Invoking the Massachusetts Public Disclosure Law (“Freedom of Information Act”), Brennan wrote to the sheriff of each county and to the Massachusetts Department of Corrections to obtain the data. The sheriffs of three counties (Bristol, Hampden, and Worcester) either refused to provide data, or claimed their record systems made it impossible to do so. The absence of data from these counties is unlikely to change the overall results. Brennan deserves respect for his tenacity, intelligence, and patience in carrying out this valuable study.

The large majority of incarcerations from the Probate and Family Courts are due to findings of contempt of court for incomplete payment of child support orders. A small number could be due to non-payment of attorney fees, GAL fees, or alimony. Violations of restraining orders are unlikely to be a factor in this data because violators are incarcerated after trials in the District Courts, not from the Probate and Family Courts.

Perhaps there are reasons other than gender bias that could account for the stunning gender differences in incarcerations from the Massachusetts Probate and Family Courts. Many more fathers than mothers are non-custodial parents, so it would be expected that more of them would be incarcerated for incomplete payment. The latest national data from the US Census Bureau shows that mothers are the custodial parents in 82% of cases, and fathers in only 18% (which may in itself reflect gender bias). (see Table below.) Even so, if incomplete payment of child support occurred in exact proportion to custodial status, then we would expect mothers to account for 18% of incarcerations, not 1.5% to 5%.

However, not all custodial parents have a court order entitling them to child support. In fact, only 54.9% of custodial mothers have such a court order, while only 30.4% of custodial fathers have such an order (this large disparity may again suggest gender bias). Taking the Census Bureau data further, we find that 58% of custodial mothers with a child support order did not receive the full amount — in other words, the fathers were in arrears in 58% of those cases where a child support order had been made against them. Custodial fathers failed to receive the full amount of child support ordered from the mothers in 65.9% of cases. In other words, mothers ordered to pay child support pay in full less frequently than fathers who are ordered to pay child support.

If one carries through the arithmetic, one finds that 12% of those in arrears are mothers, and 88% of those in arrears are fathers, based on national data. This disparity is mostly due to the fact that so few fathers are awarded custody of their children, and even when they are, so few of the mothers are required to pay child support.

Based on national data, if incarceration for non-payment of child support occurred at equal rates for men and women who are in arrears, 88% of those incarcerated would be men, not 95% to 98.5%, and 12% would be women (since 12% of those in arrears are women). If, as Brennan’s report shows, as few as 1.5% of those incarcerated for non-payment of child support in Massachusetts are women, instead of the expected 12%, then women in arrears are incarcerated at a rate eight times less than their numbers warrant.

Perhaps it is possible that mothers in arrears escape incarceration because the amounts of money they owe are so small as to be unimportant. It is true, based on the national data from the US Census Bureau, that non-custodial mothers are not ordered to pay as much as are non-custodial fathers, but the difference is not large ($5,601 versus $5,997 per year). (Since child support amounts are governed by fixed formulae called Child Support Guidelines, they may be less susceptible to gender bias. This disparity is probably due to the fact that women on average earn less than men.)

How much of the child support order is paid, on average? Once again, fathers ordered to pay child support do better than mothers ordered to pay child support, paying 45% of the order on average, versus 38% of the order on average paid by non-custodial mothers. Thus, the average dollar amount of arrearages is greater for mothers than it is for fathers ($2,295 not paid by fathers versus $2,542 not paid by mothers). Thus, although mothers with orders to pay child support have a higher rate of incomplete payment, pay a smaller percentage of their child support order, and have larger dollar arrears than fathers, they are incarcerated at lower rates.

In summary, Brennan’s research shows stunning results: up to 98.5% of those incarcerated from 2001 through 2011 from the Massachusetts Probate and Family Courts are men. The majority of these incarcerations are for incomplete payment of child support.

For the first time, we have direct evidence that the large excess of fathers incarcerated for child support arrearages compared to mothers cannot be accounted for simply by the fact that there are more fathers ordered to pay child support. Mothers with child support arrears are incarcerated at approximately one-eighth of the rate that would be justified by their numbers if fathers and mothers in arrears were treated equally. Mothers in arrears are incarcerated at lower rates even though they have higher rates of incomplete payment, pay a smaller percentage of their child support order, and have larger arrears than fathers. In the absence of other explanations, these data suggest that gender bias against fathers plays a large role in family court-ordered incarcerations.

Next week: Are some family court judges running wild when it comes to incarcerating fathers for incomplete child support payment?

Remember Jeff Chafin?  For a refresher on his case, go to my first post on him here (Fathers and Families, 11/3/11).  Here’s the Supreme Court’s opinion.

Briefly, Chafin is a man of impeccable credentials.  He’s a Sergeant First Class in the U. S. Army, stationed at Redstone Armory in Alabama.  His wife Lynne is a Scot and they have a daughter who’s six now.  The family moved to Alabama where Jeff was stationed, but life was not good.  Lynne is a violent drunk.  She attacked Jeff on numerous occasions, including once with a knife, and she was arrested many times on charges related to domestic violence and alcohol abuse.  She attacked Jeff twice in the presence of their daughter Eris.  She was well known to the police and eventually, her abusive behavior got the attention of immigration authorities.  They noticed that she’d overstayed her 90-day visa by about a year and deported her to her native country.

She immediately filed a proceeding under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction claiming incredibly that Jeff had wrongly “retained” Eris in the United States.  And, just as incredibly, Federal Judge Inge Johnson agreed.  For the full anti-father meaning of that ruling, by all means read my previous post on Chafin’s case.  Johnson’s ruling was so utterly at odds with the plain meaning of the Hague Convention, so completely unsupported by the evidence and so plainly contrary to the best interests of Eris that only anti-father bias explains it.

Federal Judge Inge Johnson Turned Child Over to Violent, Alcoholic Mother

Lynne’s entire case hinged on her assertion that, under the Convention, Scotland, not the U.S. was Eris’s settled place of residence.  That was a tough claim to prove given that the little girl had, at the time of trial, spent about two-thirds of her life outside of Scotland, most of it in Alabama.  So Lynne claimed they’d never intended to stay long in the U.S.  The problem with that was that 100% of the evidence contradicted the claim.  The very first question Jeff’s attorney asked Lynne at trial was “do you have any evidence to support what you’re saying?”  Her answer was “no.”

Face it, when your sole witness admits she has no evidence to support her one key factual allegation, the one on which her entire case hangs, and you still win, you know the judge had decided the case long before trial.

So Jeff appealed and something almost as astonishing happened before the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.  Judges there declared the case moot and therefore not subject to appeal.  Now, I won’t go into the dry details of mootness law, but suffice it to say that the courts of this country only have jurisdiction over live “cases and controversies.”  So, if a case were once a real case or controversy, but had ceased to be prior to being filed, the court can’t hear it.  Constitutionally, it had no jurisdiction.

(One of Roe v. Wade’s less well known precedents is its ruling on the mootness issue.  Prior to Roe, a pregnant woman who wanted to challenge some legal aspect of her pregnancy invariably failed because, by the time she got to court, the baby had been born and there was therefore no active case or controversy to adjudicate.  Roe dealt with that by saying that, since the condition of pregnancy was capable of recurring, the case wasn’t moot.)

In Chafin’s case, no sensible person believes his case was moot.  The appellate court said it was because Lynne had taken Eris to Scotland, i.e. beyond the jurisdiction of the Alabama federal court.  Therefore, according to the court, even if they ruled for Jeff, the ruling would be meaningless because no U.S. court has jurisdiction over Eris as long as she’s in Scotland.  But the Supreme Court put that notion to rest very quickly saying that Jeff had many adjudicable rights that were very much alive and kicking.  For example, if the trial court’s ruling is reversed, it may be that the courts of Scotland will honor it and return Eris here.  It may be that some day Lynne will return to the U.S. and thereby subject herself to the jurisdiction of our courts.  In short, there are many scenarios under which a reversal by the Eleventh Circuit may redound to Jeff’s benefit.

So the Supreme Court voted unanimously to overrule the Eleventh Circuit and return Jeff’s case to it for a hearing on Judge Johnson’s ruling.

Will Jeff win his appeal?  He should.  Whatever the outcome, we’ll know soon enough.  If he does, his case will likely return to Judge Johnson for retrial, a prospect that doesn’t bode well for his possibility of success.  Again, we’ll see.

In the mean time, Jeff hasn’t been able to see his daughter.  After all, it’s hard to do that when you’re stationed in Alabama and your child is thousands of miles away.  The legal process is excruciatingly slow, and little girls don’t grow up any slower to accommodate the courts.  By the time Jeff wins his appeal, if he does, there’ll be little to prevent Judge Johnson from declaring that the fait accompli carries the day.  That is, Eris has already spent so much time in Scotland, thanks to Johnson’s clearly erroneous ruling, that her best interests require her to remain there.  And presto! another father’s rights will be decided, not by the law and not according to what’s good for his child, but by pro-mother judicial bias.

Fathers and Families is a Shared Parenting Organization

Fathers and Families is a non-profit organization that is educating the public, families, educators, and legislators about the importance of shared parenting and how it can reduce conflict in children, parents and extended families. If you would like to get involved in our organization, you can do so several ways. First, we would love to have you as an official member of the Fathers and Families team. Second, Fathers and Families is an organization that believes in the importance of using social media as a means to spread the word about shared parenting and other topics, and you can visit us on our Facebook Page to learn more about our efforts. Last, we hope you will share this article with other families using the many social networking sites so that we can bring about greater awareness of shared parenting.  Thank you for your support.

The decision on suspension came about because of Kellett’s behavior in the case of Vladek Filler whose wife accused him of raping her.  The accusation came during Filler’s divorce and custody case.  Even though Kellett managed to get a conviction of Filler in the first trial, the facts of the case were so obviously shaky that the family court gave him custody of his children.  Due to Kellett’s violations of the rules of procedure, the rules of evidence and the State Bar’s rules of ethics for prosecutors, Filler’s conviction was overturned on appeal.  After three years, he was finally convicted of pouring water on his wife, Ligia Filler.

In the mean time, Filler, who now lives in Georgia with his children, brought nine charges of misconduct against Kellett.  The State Bar’s counsel recommended that Kellett be disciplined and now the Board of Overseers has agreed.   That’s true despite the fact that Kellett has never been disciplined before.  In most cases, suspension is a punishment meted out to an attorney with a history of infractions in which more lenient discipline, such as reprimand, has been ordered.  That strongly suggests that, even though they weren’t part of the record regarding Filler’s complaints, the Board was aware of the many previous cases in which Kellett has abused the power of her office in an attempt to railroad men accused of sex crimes into prison even though there was insufficient evidence of guilt or even evidence of actual innocence.

Indeed, Stop Abusive and Violent Environments lists some nine separate cases in which Kellett ignored the ethical requirements of prosecutors in cases in which men were charged with sex crimes.

The simple fact is that, at least when it comes to allegations of sex crimes, Mary Kellett is a rogue prosecutor.  At this far remove, her behavior looks tragically typical of a certain kind of person who’s been taught to believe that men are uniquely dangerous creatures, that women don’t lie about sexual assault and therefore that every allegation, regardless of how unbelievable, must be prosecuted with maximum vigor.

Even a casual reading of the ethical requirements for prosecutors shows that to be wrong, but it looks to have been Kellett’s MO anyway.  Unlike all other attorneys, because they exercise the vast power of the state, prosecutors are ethically bound to carefully analyze cases and only pursue those allegations that are backed by probable cause to arrest and charge an individual.  Other lawyers can take a shaky case to court and see if they can get a jury to rule for their client.  Prosecutors may not do that, but Mary Kellett routinely ignored those ethical rules.

So, apparently, did her supervisor who did nothing to rein in her subordinate.  I would argue that, once Kellett is disciplined, the District Attorney of Hancock County should be investigated for ethical violations and punished if any are found.  My strong suspicion is that the attitudes displayed daily by Mary Kellett aren’t unique to her.  If she had only attacked Vladek Filler, I’d say she acted alone, but her misdeeds go back many years and that can only happen when a supervisor either turns a blind eye or actively encourages unethical behavior.  My guess is that Mary Kellett and her supervisor are birds of a feather.  My further guess is that they share the belief in women’s innocence and men’s corruption and used the power of the District Attorney’s office to put that belief into practice.

Kellett’s Anti-Male Bias Common in Criminal, Family Courts

It’s an unhealthy and dangerous mindset that we see all too often in the law when it tries to adjudicate disputes between men and women, fathers and mothers.  Just recently, for example, we’ve seen the New Jersey psychologist Marsha Kleinman have her license to practice revoked because of her unstinting efforts to get small children to make make claims of sexual abuse against their fathers.  Kleinman, like Kellett, seems never to have seen a claim of sexual abuse against a man that she didn’t believe and actively participate in fabricating evidence to prove.

Then there’s the study of social workers in Scotland.  They’re the ones who are involved in investigating allegations of abuse against fathers.  The study reports case after case in which social workers assumed the dad’s guilt despite obvious signs of innocence, that the mother had reason to lie, that the mother was in fact the bad actor, etc.  The study was unambiguous in describing exactly the same sort of Kellett/Kleinman mindset on the part of the social workers.

Back in the United States, we need look no further than the absurd utterances of Vice President Biden on issues of domestic violence or indeed the Violence Against Women Act itself to find the same mindset.  For his part, Biden has never owned up to the fact that women assault their male partners and sometimes seriously injure or even kill them.  When confronted on national television by Whoopi Goldberg on that exact point, Biden literally threw up his hands.

And of course VAWA funding goes almost exclusively to female victims of domestic violence, leaving male victims to fend for themselves.  The same holds true when it comes to perpetrators.  Female abusers find themselves unable to get help for their violent tendencies while men who commit domestic abuse are “treated” with Duluth Model indoctrination that – you guessed it – looks very much like the Kellett/Kleinman mindset.

Kleinman’s license revocation and Kellett’s likely suspension are clearly steps in the right direction.  Both say loudly and clearly that lawyers and mental health professionals adopt that mindset at their peril.  The headlong rush to condemn men at all costs for real or imagined infractions may be acceptable in Women’s Studies programs, but can meet with resistance from those who understand that indoctrination to be the dangerous workings of rogue state power.

So it’s interesting that the linked-to article, courtesy of the Maine Public Broadcasting Network and reporter Susan Sharon, does its best to apologize for Mary Kellett’s misbehavior and obscure its many ill effects.  Reading it, you’d have no idea about the nine previous cases in which Kellett has wasted state resources in a blind effort to convict innocent men.  There’s no suggestion that Ligia Filler is the mentally unstable person she was at the time of her divorce, unfit to parent her children and who clearly leveled false charges at her husband in a vain effort to gain an advantage in their custody battle.  Sharon’s article betrays not a hint of the repeated abuse of state power by Kellett and the Hancock County District Attorney’s Office.

There was a time when the liberal press, like Maine Public Broadcasting, showed a healthy mistrust of state power and criticized its overuse.  In some cases, it still does.  When it comes to findings of actual innocence by The Innocence Project for example, public broadcasting stations can be relied on to provide a framework that’s critical of state power.  But that’s often placed in the context of the obvious and outrageous racial and class disparities with which the criminal justice system has always been rife.

What the liberal press never seems to notice is the rampant bias against men by that same system.  Yes, it’s true that men commit more crimes than do women and that men commit more crimes of violence.  But what goes entirely unnoticed and unmentioned is that study after study shows the system to be far more lenient toward female perpetrators than toward their male counterparts.  All things being equal, a woman is far less likely than a man to receive a custodial sentence and, when she does, she serves markedly less time that he does.

This criticism of the overreaching by the state when it comes to race and class, while embracing the exact same behavior when targeting men, leaves liberal commentators twisting in a gale of their own making.  Maybe the obvious-for-all-to-see contradictions in those positions will someday occur to them, or maybe not.  Whatever the case, Susan Sharon’s regret at the discipline of Mary Kellett is based predictably not on her draconian abuse of state power against individuals, but on the fact that losing her license will hinder Hancock County from doing more of the same.  Unsurprisingly, she quotes another prosecutor.

“Well, I think that from the perspective of a prosecutor, I’m sure that this is pretty devastating to, not just to Mary Kellett and the DA’s Office in Hancock County, but to all of us, because our job is a difficult one and we make a lot of split-second decisions. So when you have people reviewing our conduct that have less than a large familiarity with what we do, it puts us at a disadvantage – and I say that in all due respect to the finders here, to the people who made a decision.”

Stated another way, let prosecutors decide whether prosecutors have done wrong; let the fox guard the hen house.

Thanks to Tatyana, Kevin and many others for the heads-up.

Fathers and Families is a Shared Parenting Organization

Fathers and Families is a non-profit organization that is educating the public, families, educators, and legislators about the importance of shared parenting and how it can reduce conflict in children, parents and extended families. If you would like to get involved in our organization, you can do so several ways. First, we would love to have you as an official member of the Fathers and Families team. Second, Fathers and Families is an organization that believes in the importance of using social media as a means to spread the word about shared parenting and other topics, and you can visit us on our Facebook Page to learn more about our efforts. Last, we hope you will share this article with other families using the many social networking sites so that we can bring about greater awareness of shared parenting.  Thank you for your support.

It’s always seemed to me that that preference for foster care over father care comes in part from an anti-father bias on the part of social workers at those child welfare agencies.  Now this extremely important study out of Scotland demonstrates the antipathy with which fathers are held by child welfare workers in that country (Circle, 11/2012).  It is at once a shocking read and one that confirms much of what I’ve suspected all along.  Here’s an article about the study (Herald Scotland, 11/21/12).

It was conducted by researchers at the University of Edinburgh and Circle, a Scottish charity dedicated to supporting children and families in marginalized communities.  The researchers summarized earlier findings on child protective agencies and the social workers who make up the majority of caseworkers and supervisors therein.  It then asked fathers to describe their experiences with those agencies and verified what they said.  The fathers came to the attention of  the child protection agencies in a variety of circumstances, but all had been accused of some form of violence or abuse. The study goes on to make recommendations for change.

To say the least, the attitudes and behaviors of the social workers and agencies are outrageous, bred of an attitude taught in schools, that men are dangerous and not to be trusted.  To its credit, the study doesn’t pull its punches.  It’s about as straightforward as academic prose is likely to be.

In the 1980s when high unemployment blighted large parts of the UK, the breadwinner role was lost to many men, and largely negative stereotypes about their role in society generally, and in childrearing in particular, began to take root. These stereotypes have both influenced psychologies of men as well as professional responses to, and expectations of, men…

In the same year that Dad’s the Word was published, Christie (2001) noted how fathers were systematically excluded from the child protection system…

Since then there have been a number of developments. On the positive side, there has been a burgeoning interest and an upsurge in research in fathers and fatherhood (see Lewis and Lamb, 2007). The advantages of fathers’ involvement in bringing up children are now well established (Lamb, 2003)…

At a policy level the Gender Equality Duty [GED] came into force in the UK in April 2007. This requires that public authorities and publicly-funded services promote gender equality and tackle sex discrimination. This ought to mean that they take steps to address the needs of both mothers and fathers to parent their children. It is questionable whether the full implications of the GED have yet been understood by public authorities…

Social work, however, has remained largely impervious to the growing awareness of the importance of fathers in children’s lives…

More significantly perhaps, social work has been influenced by feminist theory, or at least by second wave feminism (Orme, 2003, Scourfield and Coffey, 2002)…

The survival of patriarchy as an organising construct is especially strong in social work (Scourfield and Coffey, 2002). In the UK, the education and training of social workers has contributed to an oversimplification of discussions around gender (Orme, 2003)… In this climate, gender perspectives have struggled to move beyond the grand narrative of patriarchy.

Patriarchy has become a dominant theoretical construct influencing approaches to men in social work, particularly in relation to domestic violence, which has, understandably, risen up the policy and professional agenda over the past decade. It underpins the major approaches to working with those accused of domestic abuse, based around the Duluth model, a North American domestic violence programme…

The Duluth model has, in fact, been compellingly critiqued both on account of its underlying ideological precepts but also on account of its low success rates (Dutton and Corvo, 2007). It nevertheless continues to exert an influence on practice far beyond any empirical assessment of its utility might justify.

Given that background, it’s no surprise that social workers enter the practice with profoundly negative and inaccurate preconceptions of men and fathers.  Ethnographic studies of British social workers “identified prevalent professional discourses of masculinity: men as a threat (sexual abuse and/or violence), men as no use (not working but not participating in child care), men as absent (potential clients to social worker but render themselves deliberately invisible), men as no different to women (in the context of long standing family problems where violence is seen as bi-directional), men as better than women (this occurs relative to perceived deficiencies in mothers’ parenting capacity). “Responses to fathers can be one dimensional, epitomizing a rather binary classification of them as ‘bad’ and mothers as ‘good’, or at least better than the father” (Lonne et al. 2008: 86). Fathers are effectively “missing in action”…’

Clapton (2009), having analysed social work publications, points out that fathers are either invisible or more likely framed as child abusers in social work texts and policy documents.

Child Protective Services Marginalize Fathers, but Mothers More Likely to Abuse or Neglect Kids

That’s true despite the fact that mothers commit far more child abuse and neglect than do fathers.

All this often results in a self-fulfilling prophesy on the part of social workers.  When a father finds himself involved with a child protective agency, he learns that social workers view him as dangerous and any claim he makes to the contrary is regarded as false and an attempt to game the system.  His legitimate needs, assertions of fact, etc. are ignored, resulting in his frustration.  His natural response is to become more assertive and demanding which labels him an “aggressor” and therefore likely an abuser, marginalizing him still further.

Of the studies which have sought to elicit the views of fathers to understand their perception of social services the message emerges of a marginalised group who feel disenfranchised from processes which impact on their family life (Dominelli et al, 2011; Gilligan et al 2012; Storhaug & Oien, 2012; Walker, 2012). These feelings of marginalisation might be understood within a wider critique of child protection as a system that is “close to bankrupt… which may be doing more harm than good…. and is shattering communities with dire consequences for civil society.” (Lonne et al, 2008: 4)

The upshot of all of this is that children and family services in Scotland remain female dominated and focussed primarily on mother-child relations (Children In Scotland, 2010). At the same time, responses to complex social problems remain narrow, unimaginative and often punitive, and merely reproduce the kind of oppressive relationships they seek to challenge, reinforcing what increasingly seems like a turn towards the criminalisation of social problems (Kim, 2012).

It is against this backdrop that this study seeks to hear the accounts of men caught up in the child protection system. Their voices are largely submerged within current social work discourse.

I’ll write more about this important study in a later piece.

Fathers and Families is a Shared Parenting Organization

Fathers and Families is a non-profit organization that is educating the public, families, educators, and legislators about the importance of shared parenting and how it can reduce conflict in children, parents and extended families. If you would like to get involved in our organization, you can do so several ways. First, we would love to have you as an official member of the Fathers and Families team. Second, Fathers and Families is an organization that believes in the importance of using social media as a means to spread the word about shared parenting and other topics, and you can visit us on our Facebook Page to learn more about our efforts. Last, we hope you will share this article with other families using the many social networking sites so that we can bring about greater awareness of shared parenting.  Thank you for your support.

What gives, as it turns out, is that I’m a man and she’s a woman.  The Affordable Care Act has a list of preventive care for adults (i.e. men and women), a list of preventive care for women, and a list for children.  Who’s missing?  That’s right, I am.  I’m an adult, so I get whatever is on the ‘adult’ list as does my wife.  But are my uniquely-male medical needs addressed?  Nope.  There’s nary a peep about prostate cancer screening, testicular cancer or well man exams.  Nothing.  In a law that runs to thousands of pages, that covers every possible situation, they managed to neglect half the adult population.  Amazing, but true.

So here’s a petition I signed and I hope you will too.  It’s about bringing gender equality into the Affordable Care Act.  What a concept!  It doesn’t matter if you like or dislike the Affordable Care Act.  The fact is that it’s the law of the land and will continue to be for the foreseeable future and probably longer.  So given that it’s a fait accompli, let’s do that strange, even freakish thing – make it fair.  Force those in Washington who daily kick men to the curb to do the right thing, the just thing, the moral thing.  I know it’s not in their nature, but maybe they can change.

Here’s the petition.

I’ve written a fair amount about the upcoming changes to British family law.  The Cameron/Clegg coalition government has pronounced itself determined to change the law to encourage courts to give children a meaningful relationship with the fathers post-divorce.  Recently though, they’ve gotten some push-back from Labour MPs who apparently find the fatherless state of 33% of British kids to be the best of all possible worlds.  The government hasn’t actually firmed up what changes it wants Parliament to make, and when it does, you can bet the anti-dad crowd will scream bloody murder, whatever the recommendations may be.  As we’ve learned in Australia, Canada and several U.S. states, no reform that seeks to connect fathers and children is too insignificant to excite anti-father zealots to action.  Soon we’ll be informed that a single line in the family law timorously pleading for judges to include fathers in the lives of their children constitutes “Abusive Fathers Getting Custody.”  I know this from long experience.  Those opposed to children having a father are a one-string fiddle; they strike the same note every time.

And why not?  After all, it works.  Just count the number of family laws that actually afford fathers real rights, real access to their kids.  That’s right, there aren’t any.  By “real” I mean the type of rights, the type of access that can’t be thwarted by the mother any time she wishes with little more than one or two well-placed lies.

So if you’re wondering what’ll happen with British family law in the near future, I’d urge you to look, not at the government’s various statements of good intentions, but at the doings of the NHS.  It’s my bet that the Health Service’s redaction of fathers from its printed matter is a better measure of the elite zeitgeist than the squeaks issuing from 10 Downing Street.

My guess is that most people think mothers and fathers ought to have equal rights and that kids should have a chance at good relationships with both post-divorce.  That’s certainly the way it is in Canada as many surveys have consistently shown.  But what We the People want, what we think is best for us, matters little to our betters who actually decide what the laws will be and how they’re to be interpreted.

So let’s be clear; in British family courts, fathers are second class citizens.  They’re rarely given custody and their visitation rights go almost uniformly unenforced.  Now the National Health Service has followed suit, deleting even the concept of ‘father’ from its literature.

It’s a disgrace and one that’s made all the more so for being so common.

Thanks to Tom for the heads-up.