Convicted Murderess Can Get Custody but Decent Fathers Can't
by
Glenn Sacks
© 2001
Clara Harris, a Texas woman who was convicted of
murdering her husband in
March, was just granted joint custody of her twin five year-old boys.
The ruling
validates what fathers' and children's advocates have been saying for
years--when it comes to children, many courts believe that mothers can
do no wrong.
While Clara Harris' murder conviction was not enough to deprive her of
equal
rights to her children, hundreds of thousands of fathers have been
thrown out
of their homes and driven out of their children's lives by unfounded
accusations of domestic violence. According to Washington family law
attorney Lisa Scott, most courts grant restraining orders to
practically any woman who applies, and domestic violence accusations
are very effective at depriving fathers of custody and visitation
rights after divorce. She says:
"Most restraining orders do not even involve an allegation of physical
violence. For most judges, the woman saying she ‘feels afraid' of her
husband is
enough. Men have no way to defend themselves against these
accusations. How do you argue against a feeling?"
While both the judge and the attorney appointed by the court to
represent
Harris' two sons saw value in preserving the bond between the children
and a
mother who is a convicted murderer, many courts are unable to see the
value of the
bonds between children and decent, law-abiding fathers. Studies show
that
visitation interference and move-aways are a major problem for
divorced fathers, yet courts are indifferent at best to enforcing
fathers' visitation rights,
and generally permit divorced mothers to move children hundreds or
thousands of miles away from their fathers. This is despite the fact
that the rates of
school dropouts, teenage pregnancy, juvenile crime, and teen drug
abuse are more tightly correlated with fatherlessness than with any
other major socioeconomic factor, including income and race.
While in the Harris case a mother was able to win joint custody from a
prison
cell, decent fathers who have never had any brush with the law beyond
a
traffic ticket often cannot. Studies show that in contested cases
mothers are
granted sole custody over fathers by a margin of eight to one.
According to
research conducted by Sanford Braver, author of Divorced Dads:
Shattering the Myths, divorced mothers are five times as likely to be
satisfied with their
post-divorce child custody arrangements as divorced fathers are. In
Braver's study, three-quarters of divorced men and one in four
divorced women believed that the system is slanted in favor of
mothers, while only one in 10 women and none of the men surveyed
thought it favors fathers.
The "woman good/man bad" mentality of our family courts often hurts
children
by blindly favoring mothers and placing barriers between fathers and
the
children who love them and need them. The Harris ruling--where even a
mother who is a convicted murderer is still not seen as being an unfit
parent--demonstrates just how deep-seated and destructive this
mentality is.
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
