Stephen Baskerville holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and teaches political science at Howard University in Washington, DC.

He is an advisor to the American Coalition for Fathers and Children and the Men’s Health Network and spokesman for Men, Fathers, and Children, International, a coalition of 12 fatherhood organizations from 9 countries. He also serves on the board of affiliates of Gendercide Watch, a human rights organization that monitors gender-selective atrocities.

Is There Really a Fatherhood Crisis?
Part 1

By Stephen Baskerville © 2004

Abstract: Virtually every major social pathology has been linked to fatherless children: violent crime, drug and alcohol abuse, truancy, unwed pregnancy, suicide, and psychological disorders—all correlating more strongly with fatherlessness than with any other single factor. Tragically, however, government policies intended to deal with the “fatherhood crisis” have been ineffective at best because the root cause is not child abandonment by fathers but policies that give mothers an incentive to initiate marital separation and divorce.

During the past decade, family issues such as marriage and fatherhood have rocketed to the top of the domestic-policy agenda. The past two presidential administrations, along with numerous local governments, have responded to the continuing crisis of the family by devising measures to involve governmental machinery directly in the management of what had previously been considered private family life. The Bush administration has proposed $300 million annually to “promote responsible fatherhood” and for federal promotion of “healthy marriages.” Earlier, President Bill Clinton created a “Presidential Fatherhood Initiative,” and Vice President Al Gore chaired a federal staff conference on “nurturing fatherhood.” Congress has established bipartisan task forces on fatherhood promotion and issued a resolution affirming the importance of fathers. Almost 80 percent of the respondents to a 1996 Gallup poll saw fatherhood as the most serious social problem today (NCF 1996).

A generation of fatherhood advocates has emerged who insist that fatherlessness is the most critical social issue of our time. In Fatherless America, David Blankenhorn calls the crisis of fatherless children “the most destructive trend of our generation” (1995, 1). Their case is powerful. Virtually every major social pathology has been linked to fatherless children: violent crime, drug and alcohol abuse, truancy, unwed pregnancy, suicide, and psychological disorders—all correlating more strongly with fatherlessness than with any other single factor, surpassing even race and poverty. The majority of prisoners, juvenile detention inmates, high school dropouts, pregnant teenagers, adolescent murderers, and rapists come from fatherless homes (Daniels 1998, passim). Children from affluent but broken families are much more likely to get into trouble than children from poor but intact ones, and white children from separated families are at higher risk than black children in intact families (McLanahan 1998, 88). The connection between single-parent households and crime is so strong that controlling for this factor erases the relationship between race and crime as well as between low income and crime (Kamarck and Galston 1990, 14).

Given these seemingly irrefutable findings, a case might be made that both liberals and conservatives should rethink their priorities. Rather than spending more on antipoverty programs, as the left advocates, or on ever harsher law enforcement, beloved of the right, both sides should get together and help restore fatherhood as a solution to social ills. On its surface, the government’s fatherhood campaign seems to make good sense. As currently conceived, however, it may be having precisely the opposite effect of that advertised.

The policymakers’ discovery of fatherhood has a disturbing side. In August 2002, Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Tommy Thompson announced mass arrests of parents he says have disobeyed government orders, calling them the “most wanted deadbeat parents.” The roundups were carried out under a program started by the Clinton administration called Project Save Our Children. The Clinton years saw repeated and increasingly harsh measures against “deadbeat dads.” The 1998 Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act was accompanied by a “child support crackdown . . . to identify, analyze, and investigate [parents] for criminal prosecution.” HHS secretary Donna Shalala announced the Federal Case Registry to monitor almost 20 million parents, whether or not they had child-support arrearages, and the Directory of New Hires database, which records the name of every newly hired individual in the country (HHS 1998b).

Amid all this attention, little informed discussion has occurred about the appropriate role of public policy with respect to fatherhood and families. Marshalling federal agencies to “promote” something as private and personal as a parent’s relationship with his own children raises questions. The assumption that the government has a legitimate role in ameliorating the problem of fatherlessness also glides quickly over the more fundamental question of whether the government has had a role in creating the problem. What we see in the “fatherhood crisis” may be an optical illusion. What many are led to believe is a social problem may in reality be an exercise of power by the state.

The conventional wisdom—enunciated by political leaders, media commentators, and scholars—assumes that the problem stems from paternal abandonment. Clinton claimed that the fathers pursued by his administration “have chosen to abandon their children” (1992). Blankenhorn writes, “Today, the principal cause of fatherlessness is paternal choice . . . the rising rate of paternal abandonment” (1995, 22–23). David Popenoe, author of the essay “Life Without Father,” writes that fathers “choose to relinquish” the responsibilities of fatherhood (1998, 34). Yet none of these policymakers or writers cites any evidence for this claim; in fact, no government or academic study has ever shown that large numbers of fathers are abandoning their children. Moreover, studies that answer the question directly have arrived at a different conclusion.

In the largest federally funded study ever undertaken on the subject, Arizona State University psychologist Sanford Braver demonstrated that few married fathers voluntarily leave their children. Braver found that overwhelmingly it is mothers, not fathers, who are walking away from marriages. Moreover, most of these women do so not with legal grounds such as abuse or adultery but for reasons such as “not feeling loved or appreciated.” The forcibly divorced fathers were also found to pay virtually all child support when they are employed and when they are permitted to see the children they have allegedly abandoned (1998, chap. 7).

Other studies have reached similar conclusions. Margaret Brinig and Douglas Allen found that women file for divorce in some 70 percent of cases. “Not only do they file more often, but . . . they are more likely to instigate separation.” Most significantly, the principal incentive is not grounds such as desertion, adultery, or violence, but control of the children. “We have found that who gets the children is by far the most important component in deciding who files for divorce” (2000, 126–27, 129, 158, emphasis in original). One might interpret this statistic to mean that what we call divorce has become in effect a kind of legalized parental kidnapping.

Moreover, the vast machinery devoted to divorce and custody litigation now has the power not only to seize children whose parents have done nothing legally wrong, but also to turn forcibly divorced parents into outlaws without any wrong action on their part and in ways they are powerless to avoid. What we are seeing today is nothing less than the criminalization of parents, most often the fathers. A father who is legally unimpeachable can be turned into a criminal by the regime of involuntary divorce.

Partly responsible is “no-fault” divorce, or what marriage advocate Maggie Gallagher terms “unilateral” divorce, which allows one spouse to abrogate the marriage contract without incurring any liability for the consequences (1996, 143–52). “In all other areas of contract law those who break a contract are expected to compensate their partner or partners,” writes researcher Robert Whelan, “but under a system of ‘no fault’ divorce, this essential element of contract law is abrogated” (1995, 3). When children are involved, their separation from one parent is then enforced by the state, with criminal penalties against that parent for literally “no fault” of his own.

We do not know precisely how many are affected. Approximately 1.5 million divorces are granted annually in the United States. Some studies predict 65 percent of marriages will end in divorce. Some 80 percent of divorces are unilateral, and the figure may be higher when children are involved in approximately three-fifths of divorces. All told, more than a million children become victims of divorce each year (Furstenberg and Cherlin 1991, 22; Gallagher 1996, 5, 9, 22, 84–86; Martin and Bumpass 1989). These figures imply that at least 700,000 parents are involuntarily divorced each year, and control of their children is taken over by the government. For all we can be certain, all 12–20 million parents now being pursued as quasi-criminals by the federal government have been separated involuntarily from their children through no legal fault of their own (HHS 1998b; OCSEA 2001).

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this point, which contradicts the assumptions of policymakers who call for repeated crackdowns on allegedly dissolute fathers. “Children should not have to suffer twice for the decisions of their parents to divorce,” Senator Mike DeWine declared in June 1998, “once when they decide to divorce, and again when one of the parents evades the financial responsibility to care for them” (Congressional Record, June 5, 1998, S5734). Yet most fathers and noncustodial mothers make no such decision.

Punitive measures imposed on noncustodial parents might be justifiable if, as is popularly believed (and as government statements strongly imply), those parents were deserting their families, giving legitimate grounds for divorce or even agreeing to it. Parents who dissolve marriages arguably give the state an interest in ensuring the well-being of their children. It is not clear, however, what compelling public interest justifies removing children from parents who do not act to dissolve their marriages.

Some reply that even fathers whose children are taken from them through no fault or agreement of their own are still obliged to support them financially and to obey other court orders. That all parents have a legal and moral responsibility to care and provide for their children is not at issue. The question not being asked, however, is why parents charged with no civil or criminal wrongdoing must surrender to the government the right to rear their own children. Requiring an unimpeachable parent “to finance the filching of his own children,” as attorney Jed Abraham puts it (1999, 151), encourages government officials to seize control of the children, property, and persons of as many citizens as they can, thereby increasing their jurisdiction and the demand for their services.

Government’s Family Machinery

For all the recent concern about both family breakdown and judicial power, it is surprising that so little attention is focused on family courts. They are certainly the arm of government that routinely reaches deepest into individuals and families’ private lives. “The family court is the most powerful branch of the judiciary,” according to Judge Robert Page of the New Jersey Family Court. “The power of family court judges,” by their own assessment, “is almost unlimited” (1993, 9, 11). Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas once characterized them as “kangaroo court[s]” (In Re Gault, 387 U.S. 1, 27–28 [1967]).

Very little information is available on these courts. They usually operate behind closed doors and leave no records. Statistics are virtually nonexistent because judges and bar associations lobby to prevent the compilation of figures (Levy, Gang, and Thompson 1997).

Most strikingly, they claim exemption from due process of law and even from the Constitution itself. As one father reports being told by the chief judicial investigator in New Jersey, “The provisions of the U.S. Constitution do not apply in domestic relations cases since they are determined in a Court of Equity rather than [in a] Court of Law.”[1] A connected rule known as the “domestic relations exception” is said to justify the federal courts’ refusal to scrutinize family-law cases for constitutional rights violations (60 U.S.L.W. 4532 [June 15, 1992]). A substantial body of federal case law recognizes parenting as an “essential” constitutional right “far more precious than property rights” that “undeniably warrants deference, and, absent a powerful countervailing interest, protection.” This “fundamental liberty interest,” federal courts have held, “cannot be denied without violating those fundamental principles of liberty and justice which lie at the base of all our civil and political institutions” (Hubin 1999, 124). Yet divorce courts virtually never apply such apparently unequivocal constitutional principles, and the federal courts resist becoming involved.

A father brought before these courts is likely to have only a few hours’ notice of a hearing that may last thirty minutes or less, during which he will lose all decisionmaking authority over his children, be told when and where he is authorized to see them, and ordered to begin paying child support. His name will be entered on a federal registry, his wages will immediately be garnished, and the government will have access to all his financial information.

No allegations of wrongdoing, either civil or criminal, are required. And no agreement to a divorce or separation is necessary. Yet from this point, if he tries to see his children outside the authorized times or fails to pay the child support (or courtordered attorneys’ fees), he will be subject to arrest.

A parent pulled into divorce court against his will also must submit to questioning about his private life, questioning that Abraham has characterized as an “interrogation.” He can be forced to surrender personal diaries, correspondence, financial records, and other documents normally protected by the Fourth Amendment. His personal habits, movements, conversations, writings, and purchases are subject to inquiry by the court. His home can be entered by government agents. His visits with his children can be monitored and restricted to a “supervised visitation center.” Anything he says to his spouse or children as well as to family counselors and personal therapists can be used against him in court, and his children can be used to inform on his compliance. Fathers are asked intimate questions about how they “feel” about their children, what they do with them, where they take them, how they kiss them, how they feed and bathe them, what they buy for them, and what they discuss with them. According to Abraham, fathers against whom no evidence of wrongdoing is presented are ordered to submit to “plethysmographs,” a physical-response test in which an electronic sheath is placed over the penis while the father is forced to watch pornographic films of children (1999, 148, 58). A parent who refuses to cooperate can be summarily incarcerated or ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.

The parent from whom custody is removed no longer has any say in where the children reside, attend school, or worship. He has no necessary access to their school or medical records or any control over medications or drugs. He can be enjoined from taking his children to the doctor or dentist. He can be told what religious services he may (or must) attend with his children and what subjects he may discuss with them in private.

In family court, it is not unusual for a father earning $35,000 a year to amass $150,000 in attorney’s fees, according to Washington attorney William Dawes. Unlike any other debt, these fees may be collected by incarceration. In fact, unlike the inmates in a medieval debtors’ prison, he is punished even though he did not incur the debt voluntarily. One of the most astonishing practices of family courts is ordering fathers to pay the fees of attorneys, psychotherapists, and other officials they have not hired and summarily jailing them for not complying.

Family law is now criminalizing constitutionally protected activities as basic as free speech, freedom of the press, and even private conversations. In some jurisdictions, it is a crime to criticize family-court judges or otherwise to discuss family-law cases publicly, and fathers have been arrested for doing so. Fathers who speak out against family courts report that their children are used as weapons to silence their dissent, and attorneys regularly advise their clients not to join fathers’ rights groups, speak to the press, or otherwise criticize judges. Following his congressional testimony critical of the family courts, Jim Wagner of the Georgia Children’s Rights Council (CRC) was stripped of custody of his two children and ordered to pay $6,000 in legal fees. When he could not pay within fifteen days, the court jailed him. “We believe . . . the court is attempting to punish Wagner for exposing the court’s gender bias and misconduct to a congressional committee,” said Sonny Burmeister, president of the council (CRC 1992, 9). Though precluded by law from endorsing political ideologies, the U.S. Department of Justice publishes a paper by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, an association of ostensibly impartial judges who sit on actual cases, that attacks fathers’ groups for their “patriarchal values” and for advocating “the rights of fathers instead of their responsibilities.” The ostensibly apolitical judges ask, “How can we learn to counter the sound bites of fathers’ rights groups?” (qtd. in McHardy and Hofford 1999).

Like other state court judges, family-court judges are either elected or appointed and are promoted by commissions dominated by lawyers and other professionals (Tarr 1999, 61, 67, 69–70). These judges, in other words, occupy political positions and are answerable to the bar associations that naturally have an interest in maximizing the volume of litigation (Corsi 1984, 107–14; Watson and Downing 1969, 98, 336). They also wield extensive powers of patronage that enable them to force litigants to pay attorneys and expert witnesses. These powers are not limited to family courts; judges’ patronage powers have long been recognized (Jacob 1984, 112). Yet in no other courts has patronage so thoroughly eclipsed justice. Although family courts, like most courts, claim to be overburdened, it is clearly in their interest to be overburdened because judicial powers and earnings are determined by demand. As Judge Page explains, “Judges and staff work on matters that are emotionally and physically draining due to the quantity and quality of the disputes presented; they should be given every consideration for salary and the other ‘perks’ or other emoluments of their high office. . . . With the improved status of judges and family-court systems comes their proper position in judicial budgets as worthy of appropriate funding” (1993, 19). Though caseloads are large, the aim in improving the court’s status is apparently to increase that load still further. If the judiciary is viewed in part as a business, then the more satisfied the customers—in this case, the bar associations and divorcing parents who expect custody—the more customers will be attracted. Again, in Judge Page’s words, “With improved services more persons will come before the court seeking their availability. . . . As the court does a better job more persons will be attracted to it as a method of dispute resolution. . . . The better the family-court system functions the higher . . . the volume of the persons served” (1993, 20). In this view, the more attractive the courts make divorce settlements for custodial parents, the more prospective custodial parents will file for divorce and the more children will be removed from, in most instances, their fathers.

Batterers or Protectors?

A punitive quality seems to pervade the treatment of fathers in general throughout divorce court, but the presumption of guilt becomes explicit with accusations of spousal or child abuse. Fathers accused of abuse during divorce are seldom formally charged, tried, or convicted because there is usually no evidence against them; hence, they never receive due process of law or the opportunity to clear their names, let alone recover their children. Yet the accusation alone prohibits a father’s contact with his children and causes his name to be entered into a national database of sex offenders (Parke and Brott 1999, 49–50).

Although initial accusations do not necessarily result in the father’s arrest, they do confirm his status as a quasi-criminal whose movements are controlled by the court. This control takes the form of an ex parte restraining order, whose violation results in imprisonment. Orders separating fathers from their children for months, years, and even life are issued without the presentation of any evidence of wrongdoing. They are often issued at a hearing at which the father is not present and about which he may not even know, or they may be issued over the telephone or by fax with no hearing at all. A father receiving an order must vacate his residence immediately and make no further contact with his children.

Boston attorney Elaine Epstein, former president of the Massachusetts Women’s Bar Association, has written that “allegations of abuse are now used for tactical advantage” in custody cases and that restraining orders are doled out “like candy.” “Restraining orders and orders to vacate are granted to virtually all who apply,” and “the facts have become irrelevant,” she writes. “In virtually all cases, no notice, meaningful hearing, or impartial weighing of evidence is to be had.” Massachusetts judges alone issue some sixty thousand orders each year (1993, 1).

Arresting fathers for attending public events such as their children’s musical recitals or sports activities—events any stranger may attend—is common. In 1997, National Public Radio reported on a father arrested in church for attending his daughter’s first communion. During the segment, an eight-year-old girl wails and begs to know when her father will be able to see or call her. The answer, because of a lifetime restraining order, is never. Even accidental contact in public places is punished with arrest. New Jersey municipal court judge Richard Russell captured the rationale in a 1994 judges’ training seminar: “Your job is not to become concerned about the constitutional rights of the man that you’re violating as you grant a restraining order. Throw [the man] out on the street, give him the clothes on his back and tell him, see ya around. . . . They have declared domestic violence to be an evil in our society. So we don’t have to worry about the rights” (qtd. in Bleemer 1995, 1).

Some argue that judges must “balance” the rights of accused men with the genuine need of women for protection, yet we do not normally restrain citizens from their basic constitutional rights, including the right of free movement and free association (especially with their own children) merely because someone asks us to do so. We assume that all citizens are innocent until proven guilty, that they have a right to due process of law, that they should enjoy basic freedom until evidence of an infraction is presented against them, and that knowingly false accusations will be punished.

Some suggest that protective orders are issued on the principle of “better safe than sorry,” yet this suggestion begs the most telling question of how protective orders can prevent violence, inasmuch as violence is already illegal. A father whose wife obtained a restraining order against him was, according to the St. Petersburg Times, “enjoined and restrained from committing any domestic violence upon her” (Schroeder and Sharp 1992, 2). Was he, along with the rest of us, not so restrained to begin with? The orders seem designed not so much to prevent wrongdoing as to eliminate and criminalize fathers. Forcing a father to stay away from his children even though he has done no wrong may provoke precisely the kind of violent response it ostensibly intends to prevent. “Few lives, if any, have been saved, but much harm, and possibly loss of lives, has come from the issuance of restraining orders and the arrests and conflicts ensuing therefrom,” retired judge Milton Raphaelson of the Dudley, Massachusetts, District Court writes. “This is not only my opinion; it is the opinion of many who remain quiet due to the political climate. Innocent men and their children are deprived of each other” (2001, 4).

Connected here is the rapidly growing system of government-funded visitation centers for which fathers not necessarily convicted of any crime must pay as much as $80 an hour to see their own children under the gaze of social workers. “People yell at you in front of the children. They try to degrade the father in the child’s eyes,” the Massachusetts News quotes father Jim O’Brien in August 1999. “I wish I’d never come here. . . . They belittle you.” When O’Brien asked his daughter if she’d made her first communion in the six years since he had seen her, the social worker jumped in and said, “You’re not allowed to ask that!” (Maguire 2000).

The practice of supervised visits is promoted by the Supervised Visitation Network (SVN), a group whose membership has mushroomed since its founding in 1992. The “standards and guidelines” on SVN’s Internet site make clear that supervised visitation is not limited to cases of violence or potential violence by the noncustodial parent against the children, which it clearly regards as exceptional, but is appropriate in any circumstances of “conflict” between parents. SVN defines family violence to include matters that are not physical or illegal or, indeed, violent: “Family violence is any form of physical, sexual, or other abuse inflicted on any person in a household by a family or household member” (SVN 2001, emphasis added).

Domestic violence is now a major industry funded through interlocking government programs at the federal, state, and local levels and by private foundations and international organizations. The premise on which this industry is largely based—that domestic violence is a political crime perpetrated exclusively by men against women— has already been refuted by many studies that show that men and women commit domestic violence at roughly equally rates, so it requires no further treatment here (Fiebert 1997; Straus forthcoming). In a legal sense, of course, it does not matter what percentage of domestic violence is committed by which sex because the important issue is due process of law for every individual. Yet the very recognition of a special category of “domestic violence,” separate from other forms of assault—a category defined by the private relationship between the parties rather than by the nature of their actions—blurs the distinction between crime and noncriminal personal conflict.

The power to criminalize nonviolent private behavior, personal imperfections, and routine family disagreements is conveyed concisely in the term abuse, which is ambiguous and elastic enough to be stretched beyond what is usually considered physical and criminal. “You do not have to be hit to be abused” is now a standard line in the abuse literature. Abuse can be defined as “criticizing you for small things” and “making you feel bad about yourself.” Criminal justice agencies now accept these definitions in official publications. The National Victim Assistance Academy, a project funded by the U.S. Department of Justice and published on its Internet site, includes such items as “extreme jealousy and possessiveness,” “name calling and constant criticizing,” and “ignoring, dismissing, or ridiculing the victim’s needs” in its chapter on domestic violence (Coleman et al. 2000). By these criteria, violence becomes whatever the alleged victim says it is. In her influential book The Battered Woman, psychologist Lenore Walker excuses a woman who violently attacked her husband because he “had been battering her by ignoring her and by working late” (1979, xv).

What matters here is to what degree this domestic violence hysteria is aimed specifically at removing children from their fathers. There is reason to believe that this objective is the main thrust behind it. Feminists point out that most domestic violence occurs during “custody battles” and that the vast preponderance of domestic violence takes place among divorced and separated couples (Rennison and Welchans 2000, 4–5). Susan Sarnoff of Ohio State University points out that the Violence Against Women Act II, passed by Congress in 2000, not only legitimizes the making of knowingly false accusations, “but . . . offers abundant rewards for doing so—including the ‘rights’ to refuse custody and even visitation to accused fathers—with virtually no requirements of proof.” Moreover, “the bill’s definition of domestic violence . . . is so broad that it does not even require that the violence be physical” (1998, 1, 12).

The most serious effect of forcibly removing fathers after quasi-criminal accusations is the abuse of children it induces. Contrary to popular belief, it is not fathers, but mothers—especially single mothers—who are most likely to abuse children. An HHS study found that women ages twenty to forty-nine are almost twice as likely as men to be perpetrators of child maltreatment: “It is estimated that . . . almost twothirds [of child abusers] were females” (HHS 1998a, xi–xii). Given that male perpetrators are not necessarily fathers but more likely to be boyfriends and stepfathers, fathers emerge as the least likely child abusers. Researcher Robert Whelan found that children are as much as thirty-three times more likely to be abused when a live-in boyfriend or stepfather is present (1993, 29). And “[c]ontrary to public perception,” write Patrick Fagan and Dorothy Hanks of the Heritage Foundation, “the most likely physical abuser of a young child will be that child’s mother, not a male in the household” (1997, 16). Mothers accounted for 55 percent of child murders, according to a 1994 Justice Department report, whereas fathers were responsible for only a relatively tiny percentage (BJS 1994). From the father’s perspective, it appears that the real abusers have removed him from the family so they can abuse his children with impunity. Fatherhood advocate Adrienne Burgess writes that “fathers have often played the protector role inside families” (Burgess 1997, 54). This claim is confirmed by academic research, however diffident scholars may be about saying so. “The presence of the father . . . placed the child at lesser risk for child sexual abuse,” concludes a study of low-income families. “The protective effect from the father’s presence in most households was sufficiently strong to offset the risk incurred by the few paternal perpetrators” (Rowland, Zabin, and Emerson 2000).

Not only has this protective role become ideologically incorrect, but it may also criminalize the father. Such violence by men as does occur may be more often the result than the cause of fathers’ losing their children; common sense suggests that fathers with no previous proclivity to violence might well erupt when their children are taken from them. “A significant percentage of domestic violence occurs during litigated divorces in families who never had a history of it,” according to Douglas Schoenberg, a New Jersey divorce attorney and mediator (qtd. in Braver 1998, 240). Anne McMurray of Australia’s Griffith University found that domestic violence usually arose “during the process of marital separation and divorce, particularly in relation to disputes over child custody, support, and access.” McMurray’s subjects describe how violence “had not been a feature of the marriage but had been triggered by the separation” (1997, 543, 547).

Violent attacks against judges and lawyers are also usually connected with custody litigation. “Judges and lawyers nationwide agree . . . that family law is the most dangerous area in which to practice,” reports the California Law Week (McKee 1999). The year 1992 was “one of the bloodiest in divorce court history—a time when angry and bitter divorce litigants declared an open season on judges, lawyers, and the spouses who brought them to court” (Cheever 1992, 29). Dakota County, Minnesota, district attorney James Backstrom says family court produces far more violence than criminal court does: “We’re most concerned about the people in family court—the child support and divorce cases” (qtd. in Worden 2000). The Boston Globe reports that some judges now carry guns under their robes to protect themselves not from criminals but from fathers (McGrory 1994, 33). In December 1998, the ABC television magazine 20/20 also reported on this phenomenon. No father was quoted, but fathers generally were portrayed as little better than dangerous animals. One of the many lawyers interviewed comments, “You really don’t know what monsters lurk behind regular people.” It ought hardly to surprise anyone that interfering with their children is one way to find out.

Steven Baskerville © 2004