But—and this is a crucial point—this scenario is not actually representative of the reality of the family court system. The trope of the hard-done-by dad might be compelling, but in reality it’s an outlier. In fact, modern family law has never been more disposed towards securing a ‘fair deal’ for fathers than at this point in time, even in cases where the men have proven themselves a risk to the safety of the child and/or their mother. As the Walkley Award-winning journalist Jess Hill reported so brutally in her piece ‘Suffer the children: Trouble in the Family Court’ (The Monthly, November 2015), changes to family law in Australia in the last three decades have actually made it progressively more difficult for women to obtain sole custody.
In 1995, the Keating government introduced amendments to the Family Law Act 1975 that shifted the court’s focus from awarding custody to a child’s primary caregiver and instead emphasised the right of the child to have regular contact with both parents. Not a bad idea, right? But as Hill’s piece asserted:
By 2000, these reforms had in effect ‘turned back the clock’ on Family Court responses to domestic violence, according to legal practitioners quoted in an extensive study by the Family Court of Australia and the University of Sydney. This study found that the ‘safety from family violence’ provision had done nothing to dissuade abusive fathers from believing they now had a right to their kids; fathers who would never have even tried to get access before were now being encouraged to fight tooth and nail.
In 2006, the Howard government pushed these amendments even further, introducing changes that included the so-called ‘friendly parent’ provision which, as Hill reports, ‘mandated judges to consider the willingness of each parent to encourage a close relationship between the child and the other parent’. The consequences of this were devastating, resulting in a no-win situation for mothers who were seeking protection orders against abusive ex-partners:
Parents hoping to raise abuse allegations in the family law courts now faced what former Family Court judge Richard Chisholm termed ‘the victim’s dilemma’: abuse allegations could be viewed as vindictive or punitive, and consequently, a judge may order that the child be placed with the perpetrator for longer periods, to protect them from the other parent’s ‘alienating’ behaviour.
Hill’s piece is gut-wrenching, particularly in its detailing of the children whose testimonies of abuse experienced at the hands of their fathers has been interpreted by ‘single experts’ (third-party evaluators appointed by the parents or the court to assess children alleged to be victimised by one parent). One passage highlights how patriarchal notions of women’s ‘hysteria’ can be invoked when judging cases such as these. This is the story of Emily, a mother who filed abuse charges against her son’s father (who had also been abusing her for years) in 2006. Hill recounts:
The single expert assigned to Emily’s case wrote that she presented in a ‘self-absorbed manner’ and had an ‘over-valued idea’ that Alex had been abused. He noted that the father’s two former wives had also separately accused him of sexually abusing their young children, both under five. This was ‘hard to dismiss’, but he could see nothing in his assessment of the father or his relationship with Alex that confirmed sexual abuse. Alex’s ‘features of trauma’, he believed, were instead caused by a ‘toxic relationship’ with his mother, who overloaded Alex ‘with anxiety and the demands of the parental conflict’. If Alex continued to live with his mother, the single expert observed, it was unlikely he would have a relationship with his father. In a separate investigation instigated through the Family Court, child protection also concluded there was no risk of Alex being harmed by his father.
In the midst of Emily and Alex’s case, the Howard government’s amendments to the Act were passed. By fighting so vigorously to protect her son from a man Alex had told school staff he wanted ‘dead or in jail’ because he was ‘a bad man’, adding that he didn’t like it when ‘he kisses me or hugs me or licks me’, Emily failed to pass the ‘friendly parent’ provision. Under the modified Act, the judge was able to view Emily’s ‘alienating’ behaviour as a reason to grant interim custody to Alex’s father.
And this is exactly what happened, when Alex was only seven years old. Hill reports:
Emily can still remember the last thing she said in court. ‘I could see I was being painted as this terrible mother. In my last statement to the judge, I said, “If you have to take Alex away from me, please don’t give him to his father.” My lawyer told me later that was the exact moment I lost my son.’
For the first three months, Emily was denied all contact with Alex. It would be another three years before she was allowed to care for him on weekends. Alex repeatedly tried to report the physical and emotional abuse that his father inflicted on him, but found that no one believed him. When he was twelve, he ran away and went to Emily’s house, threatening to kill himself if he was forced to return to live with his father. A single expert was again appointed by the court to assess Alex. His conclusion was that it was all ‘stress-related’, and recommended that the judge return Alex to his father’s home and advised that ‘to help them reconnect emotionally, Alex should not contact his mother for a month’. The judge agreed.
Alex continued to reject the court orders, but was stymied at every turn. Eventually, the police applied for an AVO on his behalf. After spending two months in a refuge (because his father refused to allow him to stay with his maternal grandmother), Alex was finally granted a court order that allowed him to live with his mother. It had been five years since he’d been separated from her against his will, forced to live with a man he had consistently claimed had been abusing him and whom the courts acknowledged at the time had been accused by two former wives of sexually abusing their young children. And the Family Court is supposedly working in tandem with the feminazi government superpower to slander men on record and turn their children against them.
But this is what those in the men’s rights movement will never admit and perhaps lack the self-awareness to even understand. It isn’t women who lie about abuse to keep men from their children; it’s men already abusing women who use the loopholes that have been made available to them by the family courts to continue their campaign of violence. For example, a woman in Australia may have an existing family violence order in place that prevents her former partner from contacting her or being within 100 metres of her, but federal law allows for that order to be overridden under the Family Law Act. Basically, there’s no Australian AVO available that will prevent someone from continuing to harass, bully and abuse their former partner as long as they make sure to ask a question about their kids while they’re doing it.
More recently, political parties like One Nation have pledged their support for fathers’ rights groups, even those that advocated violence as a means of action. Ahead of the 2017 Queensland state election, the party unveiled a new policy platform that would ‘not unnecessarily restrict a father’s visitation rights [even though] a court had awarded an emergency protective order’. One Nation candidate Tracey Bell-Henselin argued that women claiming to have been victimised by violent partners should be forced to prove victimisation through their own injuries and medical files or their partner’s criminal past. In the financial year 2016–17, a record number of offenders—25,678 to be precise—breached domestic violence protection orders against them. Awesome work, One Nation! But, then, they also chose to align themselves with the Australian Brotherhood of Fathers, a terrorist group whose founder has urged men to suicide at their local MP’s office to ‘let them witness your final act in person’. Perhaps that’s where the ABF’s similarly bonkers #21fathers social media campaign gets its fabricated statistic from; the campaign claims that each week twenty-one Australian fathers are killing themselves as a result of vicious women and the family courts keeping them from their kids. I’ve tried repeatedly to get the mastermind behind #21fathers to reveal the source of this statistic, but his response has only ever been to direct me to his own website. Dude
, that’s not how data works.
Despite the sheer and obvious lunacy of these groups, the success of the MRA propaganda campaign has proven effective with a public easily swayed by feelings rather than facts. And the lies MRAs tell about their oppression at the hands of family court judges in particular have passed from fringe conspiracy theories into a commonly held belief system. A 2013 VicHealth survey found that 53 percent of respondents believed that mothers fabricate domestic abuse allegations against their partners in order to keep them away from their kids. As Hill illustrated so devastatingly in ‘Suffer the children’, even women who have existing orders against men are often too afraid to raise those matters in custody disputes because they fear they’ll be painted as vindictive and their children will be taken away from them. Even after the Gillard government removed Howard’s ‘friendly parent’ provision in 2012, women still reported feeling pressured both to sign consent orders and to avoid raising allegations of abuse in court because they risked being assessed as hostile. During the course of writing this chapter, I shared ‘Suffer the children’ on my Facebook page (again) only to read numerous defeated comments from women who reaffirmed that, based on their own current experiences, nothing has changed in the system. Worryingly, news broke in late May of 2018 that Australia’s federal government may have even done a backroom deal with One Nation to ‘reform’ the family courts. Power corrupts etc.
Okay, what about men elsewhere? After all, Elam (the modern grandfather of the men’s rights movement) is from America. Isn’t it possible that the system’s different there?
It’s true that a preference for sole maternal custody prevailed in America during the 1980s, but it’s been steadily dropping. A comprehensive study conducted in Wisconsin looked at the outcomes of divorce and custody proceedings between 1996 and 2007. Here, the percentage of cases in which mothers received sole custody dropped during this period from 60.4 to 45.7. On the flipside, the percentage of cases in which custody was determined to be shared equally doubled from 15.8 to 30.5. A 2018 survey conducted by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers found there’s also been an increase in mothers paying child support and alimony, which kind of challenges the deeply held MRA belief that money between estranged men and women only ever goes one way. Interestingly, the grand sum of child support forced out of Elam, before he agreed to terminate his parental rights, was a measly $1200. Those thieving women, though!
Speaking of child support, in Australia at least the national childcare debt sits at about $1.5 billion. Mothers are more likely to be financially worse off than fathers after a separation. And while heavy penalties exist for non-payers in other countries, no such formal punishment exists in Australia. Dr Andrew Lancaster, a former federal government economist, has even published an online guide titled How to Avoid Child Support Legally. Nice guy, hey.
In 2017, Kidspot journalist Alexandra Carlton asked readers to submit screenshots of the child support they were owed. Amounts ranged from a few thousand dollars to at least $65,000. One mother, whose ex-partner currently owed a backlog of $26,000 in child support payments, told Carlton, ‘He tells me he will never pay me a cent. Just bought himself a Harley [Davidson motorcycle].’ Another said, ‘My kids’ father pays $35 per month for 2 kids while he travels around Australia on permanent holiday earning cash money. I provide my kids with everything they need. If I thought I could count on their father I would still be with him.’
Stories like these abound, and it’s not like this inequality and economic burden gets bad just after a break-up. It’s telling how often women report feeling let down emotionally and financially by their partners after they have children, even when they’re together. It’s hard not to feel cynical about MRAs complaining they aren’t being allowed fifty-fifty shared care of their children when, both anecdotally and statistically speaking, there ain’t a whole lot of men fighting to do 50 percent of the work before their marriages disintegrate. And although I’ve found no official data to track this, I’d be really interested to know how many men pushing for fifty-fifty shared custody do so under circumstances where they’ve re-partnered. It’s a bit easier to parent when you can rely on your new girlfriend to do everything your old one did.
But back to the US where, like Australia, the ‘friendly parent’ provision has also marked a shift in family court decision-making. According to Hanna Rosin, in her article for Slate in 2014 called ‘Dad’s day in court’ about America’s family court system, ‘Mothers who get in the way of a father’s involvement can in fact be penalized by the courts.’ Contrary to the popular myth peddled by communities like AVFM and its ilk, since the 1970s ‘the vast majority of states moved toward an assumption of joint custody’. In fact, so beholden to the push for fathers’ rights is the American judicial system that women throughout the country have even found themselves fighting custody battles over children produced as a result of rape.
Yes, you read that correctly.
If that didn’t disgust you enough, here are some further sobering facts about rape and parental rights in the good old US of A:
• Seven states have no legislation whatsoever to prevent rapists from petitioning for custody.
• While forty-three states and the District of Columbia provide at least partial protection to rape survivors from having to fight their rapists over custody rights, in twenty of those states (and D.C.) the request for a termination of parental rights can only be made if a rape conviction has been secured.
• Some states have ‘carve out’ laws which provide exceptions based on the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator. For example, if a pregnancy occurs as a result of a man raping his wife or de facto partner, she may not be able to prevent him from petitioning for custody of that child. And given the prevalence with which sexual violence occurs as part of ongoing intimate partner violence, that’s a terrifying notion indeed.
• In April 2017, an all-male panel in Maryland shut down a proposed bill that would have allowed the mothers of children conceived by rape to block the parental rights of the men who raped them. It had been Maryland state delegate Kathleen M. Dumais’ ninth attempt at passing the bill.
This is abuse.
In fact, the MRA fixation on family court injustices isn’t just misguided, it’s also a deliberate and repetitive lie that undermines the already tenuous rights of women trying to escape abusive relationships—remembering, of course, that MRAs also cite divorce rates as being one of the many oppressions experienced by the world’s subjugated men. (And chew on that for a moment. To women, abuse is when their partners physically, emotionally and sexually violate them, often in situations in which they are held hostage out of fear that they and/or their children will be murdered. To MRAs, abuse is women leaving them.) Worse, the indulgence of the MRA male victim mentality, which is really just outrage at being suddenly unable to demand total obedience from family members they consider their lowly subjects, forces already at-risk women and children into even more dangerous situations.
There’s a pattern here, not just in how the men’s rights movement seeks to classify women but in how formal legislative bodies are actually reflecting that classification. Women lie about rape to punish men. We take our children away to punish men. We lie about being raped by men in order to stop them from seeing their kids, because we’re lying liars who hate men. The system hates men, and works with women to punish them even though the system is almost entirely run by men who systematically and wilfully fail to acknowledge and respect what it is women go through and need if we are to survive.
Men like Paul Elam, a man who abandoned his own children and refused to pay the meagre funds required of him to help support them, pretend to thousands of similarly frothing misogynists that they have been manipulated, abused and exploited by women. It’s no coincidence that the majority of men who are drawn to pages like A Voice for Men, Anti-Feminism Australia, #21fathers, the Australian Brotherhood of Fathers, Dads Are Kool Dudes (okay, I made that last one up)
are white, cis, straight and pissed off. There’s nothing wrong with caring about men’s issues (and lord knows, they gotta lotta them), but the men’s rights movement itself is less about equality between the sexes than it is about maintaining power and privilege over women. Women (with ugly, angry feminists at the helm) have been identified by MRAs as the source of an imaginary subjugation and emasculation that’s been steadily stripping them of power since the suffragettes first chained themselves to railings and demanded the right to vote.
And here we come to the heart of the MRA agenda. It isn’t to liberate men from the systems that, among other things, cause them to die earlier, to suffer in silence from debilitating mental health issues, to be denied the opportunities to express their emotional selves. Their agenda is to force women in the process of liberation back into the subservient roles that make all of patriarchy’s negative consequences for men easier to bear. Rather than look inwards to see how men can strive for a similar autonomy and independence—one that doesn’t, for example, involve women working as unpaid domestic maids for them, raising their children, cleaning their houses, cooking their food and servicing their dicks—they instead lash out, believing themselves to be oppressed.
Boys Will Be Boys Page 21