Court orders breached, evidence ignored, biased rulings, maternal preference rule, silent voice of the child, promotion of conflict between parties, WHY WHY WHY?????
I think this writer sums up perfectly and concisely as to what is REALLY going on. Think, understand and open your eyes, then get up, print this article and paste it on your wall or pass it around to people going through a divorce. Catch a wake up!!
With debate in Australia raging between the judiciary, politicians, journalists, academics and community groups over the inquiry into joint custody and reform of family law and child support, attention naturally turns to the institutions which have arisen around thedivorce industry.
Professor Stephen Baskerville from the Department of Political Science at Howard University in Washington DC is one of the world's leading commentators on the corrosive social impacts of these courts.
Here is an edited extract from a recent a recent article by Professor Stephen Baskerville in the Summer Edition of the British political magazine The Salisbury Review and titled The Divorce Revolution.
For some thirty years now a quiet revolution has been waged throughout the Western world. Most people are now familiar with the social consequences of the divorce explosion: the growth of single-parent homes and massive increase in fatherless children. The Pandora's box of social problems this has released has also reached general awareness. Virtually every major personal and social pathology can be traced to fatherlessness more than to any other single factor: violent crime, substance abuse, unwed pregnancy, truancy, suicide, and more. Fatherlessness far surpasses both poverty and race as a predictor of social deviance.
These problems are alarming enough in themselves. What is seldom appreciated is that they are also responsible for a vast expansion in the power and reach of the state. In fact, so is divorce itself. In contrast to its social fallout, the political consequences of divorce are hardly understood at all, yet they may ultimately be the most destructive.
The result of three decades of unrestrained divorce is that huge numbers of people - many of them government officials - now have a vested professional and financial interest in encouraging it. Divorce today is not simply a phenomenon; it is a regime - a vast bureaucratic empire that permeates national and local governments, with hangers-on in the private sector. In the United States divorce and custody comprise over half of civil litigation, constituting the cash cow of the judiciary and bringing employment and earnings to a host of public and private officials, including judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, mediators, counsellors, social workers, child support enforcement agents, and others.
This growth industry derives from the impact of divorce on children. The divorce revolution has spawned a public-private industrial complex of legal, social service, and psychotherapeutic professionals devoted to the problems of children, and especially children in single-parent homes...
It is commonplace today that fathers are disadvantaged in divorce courts everywhere when it comes to child custody. In today' political jargon we attribute this to 'discrimination' and 'gender bias'. But this does not convey the half of it. Divorce courts and their huge entourage of personnel depend for their existence on broken, single-parent homes. The first principle of family court is therefore: remove the father. So long as fathers remain with their families, the divorce practitioners earn nothing. This is why the first thing a family court does when it summons a father on a divorce petition - even if he has done nothing wrong and not agreed to the divorce - is to strip him of custody of his children. While mothers also fall afoul of divorce courts, fathers are their principal rivals.
Once the father is eliminated, the state functionally replaces him as protector and provider. By removing the father, the state also creates a host of problems for itself to solve: child poverty, child abuse, juvenile crime, and other problems associated with single-parent homes. In this way, the divorce machinery is self-perpetuating and self-expanding. Involuntary divorce is a marvelous tool that allows for the infinite expansion of government power.
Once the father loses custody, he becomes in many ways an outlaw and subject to plunder by a variety of officials. His contact with his own children becomes criminalised in that he can be arrested if he tries to see them outside of authorised times and places. Unlike anyone else, he can be arrested for running into his children in a public place such as the zoo or church. In the United States fathers are arrested for telephoning their children when they are not authorised or for sending them birthday cards. Fathers are routinely summoned to court and subjected to questioning about their private lives. Their personal papers, bank accounts, and homes must be opened and surrendered to government officials. Anything a father has said to his spouse or children can be used against him in court. His personal habits, movements, conversations, purchases, and his relationship with his own children are all subject to inquiry and control by the court.
Despite prohibitions on incarceration for debt, a father can be jailed without trial for failure to pay not only child support but the fees of lawyers and psychotherapists he has not hired. A judge can summon a legally unimpeachable citizen who is minding his own business and order him to turn over his earnings or go to jail.
Fathers are further criminalised through child-support burdens, which constitute the financial fuel of the divorce machinery, underwriting unilateral divorce and giving everyone involved further incentives to remove children from their fathers. Government claims of unpaid child support constitute one of the most dishonest and destructive hoaxes ever foisted on the public.
Involuntary divorce is the instrument not simply of tyrannical judges, unscrupulous lawyers, and doctrinaire feminists, but of a new political class whose interest is to subject the private corners of life to state control.
What then can check the march of the unilateral divorce machine?
One theme of intellectuals who dissented from the ideological-bureaucratic dictatorships of eastern Europe was 'nonpolitical politics': to oppose ideology not with contrary ideology but with non-ideology, to resist politicisation by re-creating the ordinary business of 'civil society' and private life. If any group should adopt this philosophy today, it is fathers. For all the effort to 'restore fatherhood' through programs like Fathers Direct, ultimately the only ones who can restore fatherhood are, of course, fathers themselves. Almost by definition, fathers alone can truly 'save the children' by re-creating the family with themselves in it.
In so doing, fathers may also hold the potential to start redeeming a political culture that for thirty years has been sinking into the mire of permanent rebellion.
For more than 30 articles from over 4 years by Professor Stephen Baskerville go to:
www.members.cox.net/sbaskerville/index.htm
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