Fathers Bear the Brunt of Gender Bias in Family Courts
by
Glenn Sacks
© 2002
The National Organization
for Women (NOW) recently released Family Court Report 2002, which
claims that family courts are "wrought with gender bias" against
women. However, the respondents to the survey upon which the report is
based were not chosen at random, but instead were self-selected from
among those whom NOW calls its "constituents." If one selects a
survey's respondents, one can make the survey show almost anything.
For this reason, these types of "self-selected listener opinion polls"
(SLOPs) are viewed as junk social science by serious researchers.
NOW's report sounds the alarm on women's "loss of custody through
gender bias," but the vacuity of this claim can be demonstrated by
examining how rarely courts grant custody to fathers in contested
cases.
For example, a Stanford study of 1,000 divorced couples selected at
random found that divorcing mothers were awarded sole custody four
times as often as divorcing fathers in contested custody cases. A
study of all divorce-custody decrees in Arlington County, Va., during
an 18-month period found that no father was given sole or even joint
custody unless the mother agreed to it. According to Frank Bishop, the
former director of the Virginia Division of Child Support Enforcement,
almost 95 percent of custody cases in Virginia were won by mothers.
An Ohio study published in Family Advocate found that fathers seeking
sole custody obtain it in less than 10 percent of cases, and a Utah
study conducted over 23 years found similar results. According to the
2000 Census Bureau report, mothers constitute 85 percent of all
custodial parents.
Even the 80 percent to 95 percent maternal preference documented by
these studies and others understates family-court discrimination
against fathers by identifying many coerced child-custody arrangements
as "uncontested." The vast majority of divorces involving children are
initiated by women, and women usually are granted temporary custody of
the children. Judges are reluctant to switch children from the custody
of one parent to another.
Fathers, left to fight an uphill battle to gain custody — and often
out of both money and hope — sometimes give up. Others spend their
life's savings trying to obtain joint physical or sole custody so they
can remain a part of their children's lives. Devastated financially
and with little hope of winning, they often sign consent orders
granting custody to mothers. In both of these common scenarios, the
child-custody arrangement is "uncontested."
NOW has attempted to obscure this antifather family-court bias by
claiming "according to several studies, when there is a custody
dispute, fathers win custody in the majority of disputed cases." Yet
NOW's claim, proclaimed in its 1996 national conference resolution
attacking the fathers'-rights movement, and again in Family Court
Report 2002, is without merit. All three of the sources NOW cites used
survey pools that either were nonrandom or in which contested and
uncontested custody cases were lumped together.
Once custody is lost, divorced dads often are at the mercy of both
custodial mothers and the family courts. Divorced dads' complaints
include blocked visitation and unenforced visitation orders;
"move-away" spouses who permit or even use geography as a method of
driving noncustodial fathers out of their children's lives; acceptance
by the courts of false and/or uncorroborated accusations as a basis
for denying custody or even contact between father and child; rigid,
excessive and often punitive child-support awards; and burdensome
legal costs.
The presence (or absence) of a father in a child's life is the largest
factor in predicting whether a child will graduate from high school,
attend college, become involved in crime or drugs, or get pregnant
before age 18. The greatest and least recognized force behind
America's epidemic of fatherlessness is the way courts allow custodial
mothers to drive fathers out of their children's lives.
The solution to the problem is shared parenting, which creates
equality between divorcing couples by replacing the option of sole
physical custody, which occurs in the vast majority of custody cases,
with the presumption of joint legal and physical custody. If divorcing
parents are unable to agree on a shared-parenting plan, the courts
would order a plan that would afford both parents equal physical time
and decision-making power. Children gain from shared parenting because
it allows them to retain the ongoing emotional, physical and financial
support of both of their parents.
NOW has lobbied hard against shared-parenting legislation and today is
the main obstacle to equality in family court. Yet during the 1960s
and 1970s many of NOW's leaders, including former president Karen
DeCrow, were sympathetic to shared parenting as part of their efforts
to erase all gender inequalities. Family Court Report 2002 again
reveals just how far NOW has drifted from this admirable goal.
This article originally
appeared on the Glenn J. Sacks
Website
and appears here with the permission of the author.
Copyright 2001 Glenn
Sacks, all rights reserved
