So far, all the parties in the case remain unnamed by the news media.  Here’s another article (Fraser Coast Chronicle, 5/14/12).  And here’s another (Sydney Morning Herald, 5/15/12).

When she was 15, the mother went to Italy to study the language.  Two years later she married an Italian man with whom she had four daughters who are now aged 15, 13, 11 and 9.  Two years ago she took all the girls and moved to Australia in Queensland, apparently near Brisbane.  Six months ago, he filed a petition asserting his parental rights under the Hague Convention.  She countered that he was an abuser and the children would be in danger in his care.  More to the point, the mother didn’t want to leave her native Australia and neither did the girls who’d made friends there.

The judge considered the evidence and ruled that, while the father had an “authoritarian” manner of parenting, the children were in no danger.  Clearly the mother had abducted the girls from their place of residence and, since returning there would not impair their well-being, they must return to their father in Italy.

That ruling came in March and the police are now saying that it’s time for the children to return to Italy and, if they refuse, they’ll be forcibly returned.  The girls have now disappeared.  They’re likely in the company of an adult relative, although, unbelievably, the mother claims she “has no idea of” where they are.  The mother also has had her local MP contact Prime Minister Julia Gillard requesting her intervention which Gillard sensibly has refused.

Assuming the girls are located and returned to Italy, the salient feature of this case is that the Hague Convention process worked.  We don’t see that very often, but in this case, it seems to have functioned approximately as intended.  The Convention seeks a judicial decision within 60 days, and in this case it took about twice that long, but otherwise it did what it’s supposed to do – ensure the return of abducted children as long as it’s safe to do so.

But that’s not the way the Australian media are playing it.  No, media coverage there has been essentially 100% pro-mother.  Lurid claims that Australian authorities intend to drug the girls, handcuff them and force them aboard an airplane bound for Italy have appeared in essentially every article.  Into the bargain, the mother’s claims of abuse by the father are unquestioningly reprised despite the fact that the Australian judge considered and rejected them.  Stranger still is the notion that, for some reason, Australia shouldn’t be bound by the terms of a Convention it signed.  As such of course, it is part of the law of the land, but more than one article suggests that Australian courts should refuse to honor it.

And then of course there’s the matter of the father.  Of the half dozen or so articles I’ve read on the case, not one reporter has picked up the phone, called the guy and asked him for his side of the story.  Does no one in any media outlet speak Italian or know someone who does?  Somehow I doubt it.  Nor does a single one consider the heartbreaking loss to a father when his children are taken from him or the emotional/psychological damage done to children when they lose one of their parents and the only life they’ve ever known.

As with every case of abduction, there’s a court in the country of origin that was available to hear the mother’s claims of abuse and rule on them.  I don’t know Italian custody law, but my guess is it includes restrictions on custody and child access to abusive parents.  So why didn’t the mother just apply to the appropriate Italian court and have her claims adjudicated there instead of committing the crime of child kidnapping?  Unsurprisingly, the articles decline to address that question.  I’d say she didn’t because she didn’t have the evidence to support her case and she figured that, after a few years in Australia, the courts would just accept the fait accompli on behalf of an Australian citizen.  Hence her dismay and incomprehension when the courts actually enforced the law as it’s written and intended.

Finally, there’s the fact that the mother committed a crime.  Parental kidnapping is a crime in Australia, but apparently no authority has seen fit to prosecute the mother.  So, by any stretch of the imagination, she’s been given a significant break by law enforcement and the courts, but to read the media coverage, you’d think she was a victim of a horrendous miscarriage of justice.

The media coverage of this case is in many ways a throwback to the bad old days in which fathers, their rights and their humanity were routinely ignored in favor of the most outrageous claims against them.  Sometimes I think the world is changing to finally acknowledge the reality of fathers and their value to children, and mostly I think I’m right.  But the reporting on cases like this, in which the father becomes a non-entity, entirely deprived of a voice regarding the children he helped bring into the world and raise for almost all of their lives, shows us that the fight for fathers’ equality with mothers is ongoing and likely will be far into the future.

Barely two weeks ago I reported on a Mexican father in almost exactly the same situation in Idaho.  He’d worked in the U.S. without papers and was deported.  His child stayed with her mother until she was determined to be unfit by the state’s child welfare agency.  He attempted to return to the U.S. to take care of his daughter, but was apprehended and once again returned to Mexico.  Meanwhile, someone in the child welfare agency decided he/she was going to adopt the little girl, i.e. the agency had become a broker of children for adoption.  But sensibly, the Idaho Supreme Court put a stop to that, pointing out that (a) he has constitutionally protected parental rights and (b) the agency’s role in providing a child for one of its own employees to adopt was just too blatant an abuse of its power.  The man got his child back.

But not so in the Michigan case.  There the father worked in Michigan, was deported, but returned when his three children’s mother died.  The children were split up by the state Department of Human Services, the daughter went to one foster family that intends to adopt her, but the two brothers are with another family that cannot adopt them, a fact the boys don’t yet know.  When the dad presented himself to try to regain custody of his kids, he was once again apprehended and placed in detention.

The man had presented himself to the county’s foster system last year to regain custody of his children. He soon came under government scrutiny – and was picked up by immigration.

He sat in detention for about a year before he relinquished his parental rights in March in front of a judge, according to Laura Sanders, co-founder of the WICIF.

Returning to the country as an illegal immigrant after being deported is a felony offense.

Got that?  They held him in detention until he relinquished his rights; then they sent him home.  They could have kept him in prison because he’d committed a felony, but they didn’t.  In other words, they offered him a deal – give up your children and we’ll let you go; continue trying to get custody of them and we’ll send you to prison and you’ll lose them anyway.  Nice.

So there’s not much the father can do at this point.  He’s relinquished his rights and has no chance of ever caring for his children again.  The case has garnered considerable attention among the Spanish-speaking community and will be the subject of a documentary on Univision later in the month.

The case stands at the collision point between parent’s rights and immigration law and it’s no surprise that, when the parent is a father, immigration law wins over fathers’ rights.  Keep in mind that several decades of Supreme Court precedent hold that states may not deprive parents of parental rights absent a showing of unfitness, but that’s exactly what happened here.  No one questions the dad’s ability to parent his children or his desire to do so.  And of course the children could have been sent to live with him in Guatemala, but for some reason they weren’t.  No one is letting on about what that reason is, but  Laura Sanders, head of the Washetenaw Interfaith Coalition for Immigrant Rights seems to have hit on something.

Laura Sanders, one of the co-founders of the WICIR, said she’s pressed the Michigan Department of Human Services and the courts on the issue and the argument she’s heard back is it’s “just common sense” that children shouldn’t be placed in undocumented households.

Really?  Why is that “just common sense?”  Parents without papers can’t care for their children?  They might get deported, so keeping the family together would mean deporting the children too?  I guess I’m lacking in common sense, because I don’t get it.

What it looks like from here is part of the adoption racket.  There’s a large market for adoptable children and in case after case, CPS looks more than willing to help with the supply side of that market.  In the Idaho case, that’s exactly what happened and in truth it happens time and again.  Indeed, the article reports that currently in Michigan alone, there are some 5,100 children of deported immigrants awaiting adoption.  That’s quite a racket, the only problem being that there aren’t nearly enough adoptive parents for all the kids who really don’t have parents.  So adding to the supply of children doesn’t help.  And adding to the supply of children by taking them from fit parents for no apparent reason is, if not criminal, ought to be.

It was only last year that the government’s inquiry into family courts recommended that there be no change in custody practices.  For them the fact that one-third of British children of divorce have little or no contact with their fathers is not cause to lift a finger to ameliorate family court practices.  Nor, apparently is the fact that family courts routinely ignore mothers’ refusal to comply with contact orders.

Friedman, along with much of the rest of the country, knows the Norgrove Report was just an exercise in tolerating dysfunction at the expense of children and fathers.  But unlike a lot of people, Friedman knows it from her experience in family court and from dealing with distraught dads in her psychotherapy practice.

My experience both when I was a family lawyer and now as a therapist is that it is so much harder for a father to maintain a close or sometimes any relationship with his children after divorce or separation. My experience is that if a mother alienates her children against the father or subverts contact, then the court really can do and does do very little about it. It is all very well, bringing a mother back to court for breaching a contact order, but if the only sanction is to have a Judge say that you must allow your child to have contact, then the situation will continue. Sometimes, very rarely, the court removes the children and places them with the father. That is because the Court will say that it is emotionally abusive to make your children not want to go for contact. However, if you balance, that emotional abuse against taking children away from their mother where apart from no contact, they are settled and happy, then 9 times out of 10, the court will decide its best to leave them where they are. There are many fathers up and down the country who would dearly love to see their children and have a full and meaningful relationship with them.

And Friedman is under no illusion about which parent the family courts empower to separate the children from the other parent.

There are many children up and down the country who don’t see their father because of how their parent’s separation has been handled, normally by the resident parent.

And she sees the impact the whole rotten system has on children.

Those children will grow up feeling that their father has abandoned them or that their father is not a sufficiently good person for them to have a relationship with him. Given that every child is made up of half of each of his parents, thinking that your father is ‘bad’ is not a great way to foster self-esteem or encourage healthy adult relationships in later life.

Given that courts are often unwilling to enforce contact orders to permit a continuing relationship between the child and the father, Friedman is skeptical about how effective any new law designed to promote just  that might be.  After all, if they don’t enforce their own contact orders that would promote father/child relationships, what good will new wording do?

If we can’t stop mothers alienating children or being implacably hostile to their ex-partner in front of the children, then at least we can provide some sanction which will release the children from that bind and enable them to have a good enough relationship with their father. Will legislation that simply promotes an ongoing relationship with both parents achieve that? I think not. Will it make any difference to what has been going on and silently sanctioned by our Courts for years?

Again, I think not.

Sadly, for all those fathers who suffer so much by being marginalized in their children’s lives, this legislation when it comes, will be too little, too ineffective and just another example of wasted rhetoric. If the Government means business and truly believes that our society, present and future would be better if children had a good, loving unfettered relationship with both parents, then legislation needs to be introduced which reflects that. The evidence is there, it needs to be acted on.

For my part, I’m a bit more optimistic about legal language that requires promotion of the child’s relationship with the other parent.  The fact is that, in many cases, violation of a visitation order can be tough for a non-custodial parent to prove.  She said the child was sick, the dad didn’t show up for the drop off/pick up, the child didn’t want to go with dad, etc.  How does the father prove those things didn’t happen?  It can be hard sometimes.

Promoting the child’s relationship with the other parent, on the other hand, offers the opportunity to dad to open the evidentiary field up a bit.  Does she leave instructions with school officials that dad is to be allowed access to school records, be informed of school events, etc.?  That’s easy to prove or disprove; just subpoena the school records.  Ditto doctors records to prove whether she instructed the doctor to allow dad access to them.  The same holds true for extracurricular activities like sports.  Did she tell the coach that it’s OK to let Dad know when little Andy or Jenny’s next soccer game is?  It’s easy to find out, and of such things is “promotion of the non-custodial parent’s relationship with the child” made.  So I think the new language – if it comes about – will be a step in the right direction.

That said, I agree with Friedman.  Until courts start showing some spine in dealing with recalcitrant custodial parents, 83% of whom are mothers, we can expect their flouting of court orders to continue.  Why wouldn’t it?  As long as they know to a virtual certainty that no behavior of theirs, regardless of how outrageous, will trigger any sort of punishment by the court, it doesn’t much matter what the wording of the statute is.  They’ll continue to deny children contact with their fathers and courts will continue to turn a blind eye.  The reform language will only make turning that blind eye somewhat more difficult.

Friedman’s point is made at length and elaborated on by Australian historian John Hirst in his long essay, “Kangaroo Court: Family Law in Australia.”  Hirst makes the telling point that no other court takes the view of its contempt powers that family courts do.  All other courts, both civil and criminal know that their orders must be obeyed by the parties and that, when they aren’t, punishment must be meted out.  To do otherwise is to encourage the flouting of court orders.  All judges know this and act accordingly; all judges, that is, except those in family court.  They’re perfectly happy to let violations of contact orders go unpunished with the unsurprising result being that mothers continue to violate the orders.

Kudos to Charlotte Friedman for telling it like it is about the disgraceful behavior of family court judges in continuing to marginalize fathers in the lives of their children.  It’s a practice that harms fathers, children, society generally and does mothers no good.  It’s a practice that’s got to end.

The news is being greeted as evidence that American society is changing and the changes are reflected in court orders.  Women are earning more, so the story goes, and men are doing more childcare, so it’s no surprise that men are more and more on the receiving end of child support and alimony.

If only it were true.  But the survey only asked the lawyers for what they’ve observed, and those anecdotal observations, at least about child support, don’t square with the data.  For example, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2009 (the most recent year for which there are figures), just 30.4% of non-custodial mothers had been ordered to pay child support.  Percentage-wise, that’s the lowest since 1993.  And, despite the fact that more fathers have primary custody than at any time since 1993, fewer of them numerically have the benefit of a child support order.  Just 740,000 dads have a child support order out of 2.4 million with custody.

So whatever the lawyers may feel in their bones, mothers continue to get a break, even when they don’t have custody, which about 83% of them do.

Still, the lawyers were asked about the last three years, so the Census Bureau’s data may not really reflect what they’ve seen recently.  Even so though, I’ll believe it when I see it, and the data don’t bear out what the lawyers believe they’ve seen.

But as I said earlier, I wish it were true, and hope that it comes to pass.  That’s primarily because both our child support and our spousal support laws are woefully deficient in many ways and call out for reform.  And there’s nothing more likely to reform them than if the ox being gored is female.  The resistance of state legislatures to the reform of both sets of laws strongly suggests the anti-male/anti-father bias of a family law system that’s long been observed.  Spousal support in many states simply makes no sense in a world in which women support themselves.  Unlike Billy Pilgrim, it’s stuck in time, a past in which women were considered delicate flowers unable to cope with the rigors of the workplace.  That the vast majority of them did exactly that concerned no one bent on protecting women.

And, against all the odds, so it is today.  It was only a few months ago that the State of Massachusetts finally did away with permanent alimony.  But even at that, a woman can make out like a bandit by the simple expedient of saying “I do.”  Stories abound of women married for but a short time being awarded huge sums for indefinite periods of time.  That such an arrangement clearly promotes divorce apparently never occurs to legislators who routinely extol the virtues of marriage and their “family values.”

Alimony laws need to be reformed so that when it’s awarded, if it is, payments are tailored strictly for the purpose of allowing the paid ex time to get back on her feet and start paying her own way.  The notion now is that she’s entitled to the same lifestyle she had when she was married even though she no longer is.  That just doesn’t make sense.  Marriage shouldn’t be a free ticket to permanent financial security.  Generally speaking, adults need to support themselves.

Senseless as many alimony laws are, they remain in effect.  But if women really do become the ones on the long-term hook paying husbands who chose to stay home with the kids, you can bet they’ll start to complain.  And my guess is that when that happens, the sensible reforms that should have been made decades ago will start to come about.

And the same holds true for child support.  The list of problems with child support laws is too long to deal with here, but suffice it to say that support levels are set too high to begin with and when a father seeks a downward modification due to changed circumstances, he finds the deck stacked against him.  It takes far too long to get a hearing and the federal money that states collect for every dollar of child support taken in militates strongly against any downward modification.  Insiders at child support collection agencies in Michigan and Texas have reported to us that, for states, it’s all about the money.  The more they collect from dads, the more they collect from Washington, and that simple fact drives everything they do.  Not surprisingly, many state practices in child support collection are draconian, to put it mildly.  Those things include lying by state attorneys in establishing paternity as well as debtor’s prison for indigent dads who now, as per the U.S. Supreme Court, have no right to a state-appointed attorney.

Again, I’m hoping for the day when the phenomena perceived by the divorce lawyers polled come to pass.  And, ever the optimist, I’ll even say that maybe the lawyers have their finger on the pulse of change that’s not yet appeared in the nationwide data.  So far it’s mostly been men complaining, but when women start, my guess is that we’ll see the pace of reform pick up considerably.

And sure enough, the divorce attorneys also see that women faced with paying alimony and child support aren’t any happier about it than are the men.

Just as many men grumbled about paying alimony to their former wives, women are not pleased with the turnaround.

‘We see women who are every bit as angry as their male counterparts, maybe more so, when they are confronted with the concept of paying spousal support to a man,’ said [president-elect of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers Alton] Abramowitz.

Except for this article which I’m disappointed, thrilled and let down to see (Houston Chronicle, 5/13/12).  It’s entitled “Worst Moms Ever” and it’s less of an article than it is a slide show with captions.  The “writer” picked out a few mothers who were less than saintly and put a pictorial piece together about them.  There’s not much there, but it struck me because the paper chose to celebrate Mother’s Day by slamming bad mothers.  Strange.

That’s why I was disappointed by the piece, so why am I thrilled about it?  I’m thrilled about it because mothers are finally getting some of the same treatment on their day that fathers are routinely accorded on theirs.  It’s long been one of the salient features of Father’s Day that many, many media outlets seize on the event as an apt moment to heap abuse on dads.  It happens every year.  Father’s Day is the time when those who are largely ignorant of issues surrounding fatherhood crawl out of the woodwork to register their opinions on the – according to them – deficient nature of males with children.

So, disappointed as I am that we can’t manage to make one day of the year unambiguously a celebration of mothers and motherhood, I’m also glad to see a nod toward gender equality.  What’s sauce for the goose…

But then, why am I let down by the piece?  After all, doesn’t it point out that mothers often aren’t the walking vessels of virtue and goodness they’re often made out to be?  And isn’t that a good thing?  Well, it would be, except the slide show of worst mothers consists, almost exclusively of fictional characters.  There’s Carrie’s mom for example, the crazy religious zealot obsessed with sex.  There’s Angela Lansbury in “The Manchurian Candidate,” Jessica Lange in “American Horror Story” and the like.

All of which raises an obvious question: could the Chronicle blogger really not locate any lousy moms from real life?  The answer is that she could have done so easily; the news is full of them every day and an effective search term is all it takes to find them.  So why didn’t she?  Her piece eschews the hearts-and-flowers approach to Mother’s Day, presumably because she wants to skewer the notion that mothers are, in some way, morally superior to the rest of us.

Needless to say, her almost exclusive use of fictional characters undercuts the message.  It’s as if her real message is that bad mothers are fictional, the product solely of someone’s imagination.  As such, the piece that pretends  to the truth actually contradicts it.  Bad mothers are all too real; ask any CPS caseworker.  But to the Chronicle blogger they’re made-up.

Even the non-fictional mothers she includes, like Joan Crawford or Sybil’s evil mother, appear, not in their real selves but in fictionalized accounts of them.  The blogger includes a photo, not of Joan Crawford, but of Faye Dunaway playing her.  From the article’s point of view, even the real is fictional when it comes to bad moms.

What I thought was a step toward gender equality turned out to be less than I expected.  Far from giving mothers the same disrespectful treatment fathers get every year, the piece pulls its punches.  According to it, there are no actual bad mothers, only those brought to us by Hollywood where real children aren’t hurt, sexually abused or killed.

Every time I think we’re about to step out from the cloud of mythology surrounding mothers and fathers, and embrace the facts, I have to think again.

So let’s stop with the snarky pieces dissing dads and moms on their special days.  Let’s just play nice for a change.  Hey, there are 364 other days every year.

It shows a scene in the children’s section of a park.  There are benches, a large sand box and a slide.  About ten different parents shepherd their kids through various activities.  One is giving an infant a bottle; another holds a child’s hands as it learns to walk; yet another lifts a little boy up to smell the flowers on a tree.  One parent has just arrived pushing a little one in a stroller.  You get the picture.

But here’s the kicker and the part you probably didn’t anticipate:  all the parents at the play area are dads – all of them except one, the new arrival.  She’s a mother, the only female parent in the lot.  Moreover, the expression on her face is one of chagrin and disappointment; she’s come to the park with her daughter and all the parents there are men.  Bummer!

It’s a little difficult to grasp the iconography of the piece.  Of course it’s meant as humor, however subtle, but seems to suggest that, in some way, mothers are being displaced by fathers in the parenting game.  To the extent the piece promotes that idea of course, it’s dead wrong.  It’s not too hard to surmise that, since it’s the middle of the day, the parents are of the stay-at-home variety.  The 10:1 ratio of fathers to mothers, then, belies the 37:1 ratio of SAHMs to SAHDs in society generally.

And of course in custody cases in family courts, mothers still receive sole or primary custody in over 83% of cases, a fact that has altered not a bit in the past 18 years.  So the idea that, in some way, fathers are pushing mothers out of their role as primary parent, an idea the cartoon asserts, is just nonsense.

Moreover, the expression on the newly-arrived mother’s face strikingly reflects the feelings many stay-at-home fathers report on encountering just such a scene of mothers in the park with their children.  Those fathers report being shunned by the mothers as though they consider that a father in the park with a child in the middle of the day is sure to be a pedophile.  Indeed, stay-at-home fathers who have tried to join parenting groups have reported being asked to leave.  My guess is that, if the roles were reversed, as the cartoon depicts, the dads would welcome the woman to their group.  So the mother in the piece should have no call to feel unwanted, just the opposite.

But of course maybe it’s not the feeling of being an alien the woman on the NY cover experiences.  Maybe it’s the same feeling those mothers in the parenting group have about an interloping man – anti-father.  That is, the cartoon woman doesn’t feel alien, but just good old-fashioned misandric.

As with most images, The New Yorker cover is subject to a number of different interpretations.  But it is decidedly a statement about the current-day nature of parenting among educated and relatively affluent Americans.  And pretty much any way you look at it, it’s wrong.  Men no more dominate parenting than women dominate on-the-job injuries or deaths.  The facts about the parenting just don’t line up with what the cover portrays.

But there’s one other possibility.  Maybe the cover is just about some women’s perceptions about fathers and paternal child care.  Maybe the only reality it seeks to depict is what’s going on in mothers’ hearts and minds when they view the growing public clamor by fathers to be part of their children’s lives.  Whatever the factual reality, many mothers may feel their “territory” to be trespassed on when a father says “I want to work less and parent more.”  It’s an understandable response.  After all, women are told daily that motherhood is perhaps their highest calling and one no “real woman” would abjure.  So why not a wan look of defeat when seeing fathers doing competently what supposedly only a mother could.  How would you feel if your highest calling, your life’s work, turned out to be something pretty much anyone could do as well as you?

That feeling is driven home by the fact that, of the 10 fathers, none has a face.  Only the woman does.  One man sitting crosslegged on a bench obscures his face by drinking from a large cup.  The man beside him looks down at his daughter allowing his ball cap to block his face.  Still another turns away to watch a child slide down the slide.  So, unlike the one mother in the piece, all the dads are anonymous.  The message?  I’d say it’s something like this: fathers are less individuals than they are an undifferentiated threat to mothers.  They’re a faceless horde overrunning a mother’s rightful realm.

If that’s the message, it’s been brought to us by feminism.  The movement toward fathers’ rights to children and children’s rights to a father is a direct outgrowth of the feminist movement that rightly wanted more women in the workplace, but wrongly tried to engineer the break-up of families and the marginalization of fathers.  What we’re finding is that, with more women doing paid work, more fathers are doing childcare, and that’s as it should be.  Feminism’s twin antipathies for men and families have fetched up against the clear social science that says children need both parents and a generalized belief in the equality of the sexes that’s revealed in survey after survey.

So the mother in the cartoon can thank her sisters in the movement for the regret on her face.  But if she’s smart, she’ll replace it with a smile, sit down next to one of the dads and say “So, is she your first?”

Presumably, since the House and Senate bills differ, there will be a process of reconciliation and the reconciled bill sent to Governor Mark Dayton for his signature.

The 35% parenting time in the Senate bill could be ordered by judges using a one-week/two weeks formula during the school year and then tweaked to add a bit of time in the summer or on holidays.  That would mean that children would not be forced to pick up and move from house to house any more frequently than they already do in the standard “one weekend per fortnight plus one night per week” formula.  Indeed, their lives would be disrupted less.  But of course there are many ways in which judges can provide for 35% parenting time depending on the legitimate needs of the parties.

Assuming the bills are reconciled and the governor signs the new bill into law, we can expect opponents of fathers and children to begin their campaign of disinformation in an attempt to roll back the progress.  That’s what happened in Australia immediately following the 2006 amendments to the Family Law Act.  Long before conclusive data could be assembled, anti-father advocates proclaimed the reforms a failure that permitted abusive fathers to get custody.  Never mind that there was essentially no evidence for the proposition, likely because the law contained exceptions for domestic abuse.  But opponents of fathers and children rarely allow a little thing like facts to get in their way.  If they did that, they could hardly oppose children’s ongoing relationships with their dads, now could they?

What we’ll likely hear from the state’s family law practitioners will be complaints about process and from the anti-dad crowd that the new law in some way requires judges to give custody to abusive fathers.  In other words, the usual nonsense.  Like all custody laws I’ve ever seen or heard of, this one has ample protections against custody grants to abusers.  It rarely happens now, and it won’t in the future.  But, as Molly Olson of the Center for Parental Responsibility pointed out in her email to me and others,

The battle will never end. The opposition is powerful and well-funded and they will continue to everything they can to prevent the legislature from putting the power back in the hands of the people on this issue. Never sit on your laurels. If you care about this issue, always stay on top of any developments.

That’s sound advice.  And let’s underline in red Molly’s words “putting the power back in the hands of the people.”  Equal parenting post-divorce is favored by substantial majorities of adults and children alike.  Those who oppose it are small minorities of anti-father zealots and elites made up of family lawyers and judges whose pockets get lined by the current system.  Any victory for fathers and children is also a victory for mothers and society generally, all of whom have a stake in the healthier, happier, more productive children that equal parenting tends to raise.

While we’re at it, let’s give huge thanks to Molly Olson for her years of work on this issue.  She’s been the most dogged and effective of fathers’ rights promoters and she’s finally won even though, as she points out, victory is never final.  So send her a bottle of champagne or whatever best expresses your respect and gratitude for her tireless work.

Now let’s all start preparing for the next fight.

Now, when it came to fathers and children, the Queen didn’t go out on any limbs.  From what the article says, she basically approved of what’s already going on inside the coalition government of Conservative David Cameron and Liberal Democrat Nicholas Clegg.  As I’ve reported this year, that means a thorough rejection of the Norgrove Report in favor of legislation aimed at guaranteeing children a full relationship with both parents post-separation or divorce.

The government also wants to alter parental leave laws to allow fathers more time at home with a newborn.  Currently, the leave law is radically anti-father, allowing mothers 12 months of leave and fathers only two weeks.  Apparently the bill being worked out by the government will make parental leave “flexible,” but as yet no one seems to know what that means.  My guess is that it’ll involve set amounts of leave time for mothers and fathers that can then be traded between partners as they see fit.

A culture of secrecy in Oklahoma and many other states is hindering efforts to reduce child abuse deaths and serious injuries, according to a report by a national child advocacy organization.

“The death of an abused or neglected child is not only an unspeakable tragedy, it is also a red flag that something has gone terribly wrong with the child welfare system responsible for that child,” said Robert C. Fellmeth, executive director of the Children’s Advocacy Institute at the University of San Diego School of Law.

“Too often these cases are shrouded in secrecy and, as a result, literally fatal flaws in state systems go undetected and opportunities to fix them are missed,” Fellmeth said…

“The current undue emphasis on confidentiality only masks problems inherent in child protection systems,” the report said.

“Public exposure is a necessary step toward fixing these problems. Each year, millions of taxpayer dollars go to support child protective services investigations. Accordingly, the public has a right to know if the laws for the protection of children are being followed and its tax dollars well-spent.”

This is far from the first time we’ve seen this.  In California, Los Angeles County is currently refusing to turn over information to the state ombudsman appointed by the state legislature specifically to look into the county child welfare agency’s actions regarding some 70 children who died even though the agency knew them to be at risk.  In New York, Child Protective Services routinely ignores state law on reporting while diligently lobbying the legislature for more restrictions on what it can report.  Those efforts have met with failure, but still the agency refuses to report its actions regarding children’s deaths.  Arizona likely hews pretty close to the legal requirements for reporting, but those are so stringent that neither the public, the press nor public officials are permitted sufficient information to allow them to decide whether CPS is functioning in a way to give the best protection to children.

Oklahoma seems to fall into the same category as Arizona; it may not violate the law, but the law restricts the flow of vital information that would assist lawmakers in deciding how to improve matters.

Sheree Powell, spokeswoman for DHS, said federal and state laws limit what agency officials can do.

“DHS is governed by state and federal laws that require us to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the children and families we serve,” she said. “In communicating after the tragic event of child death, we release as much information about our agency’s involvement as is allowed by those laws.”

I’m glad that Oklahoma Department of Health Services complies with existing laws on reporting, but that scarcely solves the problem.  The fact is that in Oklahoma – as in many states, perhaps all of them, – the people of the state are prohibited by confidentiality laws from knowing what their child welfare agency is up to.  Since they don’t know what the agency is doing, they can’t know what it’s doing wrong, what it’s doing right, whether anything needs fixing and if so, what and how.

My belief is that secrecy invariably breeds error.  If child welfare workers and their management and supervisors know that they act behind a legal veil that shields them from public scrutiny, they’ll be more likely to make mistakes.  It’s human nature.  Caseworkers and indeed everyone in the chain of command know they answer only to the person above them.  That means they conform their behavior to the expectations of that person and not the wider world.  That invites mistakes; it encourages employees to do things the “company way” with no one else being allowed to know if that’s the best way.

I’ve argued the same about the secrecy imposed by British law on child custody proceedings.  Predictably, because the public can’t know what the judges are doing, they commit outrageous acts that look to many observers like serving mothers at the expense of fathers and children.  Just a few weeks ago, a study revealed that some 80% of the “experts” used by British family courts were entirely unqualified for the tasks set for them.  That’s a product of secrecy and, predictably, its result is incompetence.

The same is likely true in cases involving Child Protective Services.  Why wouldn’t it be?

The stated reason for secrecy both in CPS matters in the U.S. and in child custody cases in the U.K. is the welfare of children.  Presumably they’d be too traumatized by having the press report on their cases and so, in the interests of protecting children, their files are entirely closed to public view unless they end up dead.  Needless to say, that’s far more secrecy than necessary.  It’s true that children who are taken from their parents don’t want the fact bandied about in the press.  But if all cases were open to the public, only the tiniest fraction of cases would ever be reported by news media.  There are just too many of them.  And in any case, the names of children and parents, and other identifying information could be redacted to allow the important information to be revealed.  What we want to know is what the problem was and what CPS did about it if anything.  Who the parties were is far less important.

Currently, we’re only allowed to know about death cases.  That too has to change.  The worst abuses by CPS caseworkers often come not from doing too little but by doing too much.  Parents and mandatory reporters well know the enormous power wielded by CPS caseworkers.  Put simply, they can take your child any time for almost any reason.  And among those “reasons” is a parent’s standing up to a caseworker by, for example, demanding to see a warrant when the caseworker wants to enter the residence or by seeking the services of an attorney.

Curbing the overreaching of child welfare agencies will never be accomplished until we have a good idea of exactly what type of reports are made to them and how they’re handled.  By that I mean all types of reports, not just those in death cases which, thankfully, make up only a small percentage of CPS caseloads.

“My goal is to protect children,” [State Representative Jason Nelson] said. “We’re going to do what we think will protect children, and that is we’re going to have to be more open about these kinds of cases. Where that leads us, I don’t quite know yet, but we are committed to doing everything we can to open up more of these kinds of records and have more transparency.”

“Part of the reason we’re getting the reforms were getting today is because of the public disclosure that we’ve had,” he said. “There’s no interest in going backward.”

Good for him.  Let the sun shine in.