"I don't like Mummy"

The papers in the UK are full of the news of the guilty verdict against a mother and her boyfriend in the death of 4 year old Leticia Wright. Everyone's shocked and appalled that a mother can murder her own child, as if this never, ever happens. The usual pathetic media circus and wails of "how could this happen?" without actually offering any good reason, nor really caring to find one because it's altogether more fun to run around tearing your hair out than do something constructive.

Well, I found one excellent reason, and I'd like to tear someone's hair out.

I went looking, metaphorically, for the father, Zaheer Hussain -- none of today's reports carried much about him except that everyone felt terribly sorry for him, which I am sure he finds immensely comforting. Digging through Google news reports, I had to go back to Jul 19th, during the trial, and found this:

"[He] told Bradford Crown Court he had last been with his daughter about two months before she died. He told the jury that the girl's mother, Sharon Wright, 23, had then stopped contact between him and his little girl."

And I am not the tiniest bit surprised.

“We were in a shopping mall and I told her it was time to go. She wasn’t having it and crying and she didn’t want to go and said she wanted to stay with me. I couldn’t do anything to keep her because Sharon would have argued and I don’t know what I could have done about it.’’ He added: “It was difficult to take."

“I have never seen her like that. She proper kicked me, smacked me, punched me, screaming and crying ‘no, no, I don’t want to go’.“I just had to pick her up the best I could with her still hitting me and took her back.’’

Mr Hussain told the court that to try and cheer Leticia up he had taken her to a park in Wakefield because she was “really depressed and crying’’ before dropping her off with Wright at the home she shared with her co-accused, Peter Seaton, 22, on Almondbury Bank, Moldgreen. “She was still crying,’’ Mr Hussain told the jury. “I still remember that face. Just sad, just not wanting to go.’’ He added that after that incident whenever he phoned up and asked to have Leticia Wright told him she was busy. The court was told that two months later Leticia was dead.

The child was killed by more than 100 injuries inflicted over a period of four weeks. Did you get that? That's 100 detectable injuries known to be inflicted over 28 days, on a four year old child. There were cigarette burns, bruises and bite marks all over her body. How do you feel about that? What if it were your child?

The father could do nothing because 1) he didn't know and 2) he couldn't find out because the mother was blocking contact, a maneuver so common and so accepted today that he would take the heat for trying to do anything about it.

It wasn't even the first time: the mother had also made off with the daughter before, not telling the father where they'd gone for eight months. This ought to have been central to the whole case: how did she keep the father and his family out? Why is this allowed? Why do we live in this state of denial, wringing our hands about bad mothers, drug addict boyfriends, the awful injuries, the sustained torture of a poor little girl and not ask the obvious question? Why was she allowed to keep dad out?

What are the child services saying?

"Certain aspects could have been handled differently"

I bet they could. Like actually doing something about mothers who stand between children and their fathers, like calling this despicable behavior the abuse that it is instead of waiting for it to be way the *&%6 too late. The hypocrisy nauseates me.

Godammit, what is the matter with these people?

Bob Geldof and the rapists' apologists

Complain as much as you like about his flaws, but Bob Geldof is that rarest of things: a true world celebratory who has not sold out. Not one jot. He has achieved more in his life than many so-called saints, and so earns an almost sarcastic "Saint Bob" epithet in many newspaper columns. That said, I note that the tone is becoming less sarcastic recently. "Sir Bob Geldof" is also rolling off the tongue more easily in the "polite" society more inclined to sneer at it, ragged-looking bog-boy that he is.

So why do I sing the praises of the bloke who doesn't like Mondays? It's taken ten days for this to come up on my radar, but it seems that he's given an interview (with Daphne Barak) discussing the heartbreak of being kept from his kids and the custody laws which caused it. He's talking about British laws, but it could be just about anywhere in the western world. That world being the way it is, Google finds the interview reported in only four places (1, 2, 3 & 4 - I found it second-hand through Glenn Sacks). Perhaps we'll do better when the interview is broadcast - none of those sources say where, and when is hidden behind "the day before the G8 summit". To save you the effort, that would be 5 June. Anyone know where it'll be broadcast?

Geldof is particularly good at describing the pain and humiliation that are attendant with the ejection of a man from his children's home:

"I went to the door, and I was too humiliated to knock on my own front door. That's my house, my home, my children. I could hear them laughing in there. I was too scared of (knocking) and one of my kids opening the door and saying 'Hi Dad' and not being allowed to let me in. I didn't want to impose that on them. I didn't want it to happen to me. I didn't want her to come to the door and say, 'What are you doing here? You're not allowed to come here.'

"So, I went back out, and I sat in the car and I just cried. I just stayed and watched their bedroom lights go off, and I went home. That shouldn't happen to anyone. If you put impediments in the way of men seeing their children - making them jump through all sorts of humiliating hoops - the kids become a weapon, a sword and a shield simultaneously. You're suffering so much. Eventually, no person can take that and the kids lose a father. It is hurtful."

It was Geldof who, on being warned that he should not tell the judge that he loves his children, because that will be taken as weird, who purloined the phrase "the love that dare not speak its name" for the cause of fathers' rights. Is it not strange, even perverted, that a phrase that was used to express the oppression of homosexuals in Victorian England is now used to described a fathers' love for their children? Which idea provokes your outrage more?

The Daily Mail includes a number of reader comments after it's reportage. They are instructive. Follow the link and you'll find that the first is from a French woman, of all people, who feels the need to attack him through his children, isn't that a novelty? " Great job Bob," she says, "Underage drinking, dating men old enough to be their fathers, accusations of shop lifting, need I go on?".

No, Sarah, you need not go on. First, these points are not relevant to the issue at hand, and may well be a result, at least in part, of the circumstances which he protests and which were completely out of his control. The same goes for you Alison of Perth, Western Australia. If taking the children from a good parent is a form of emotional rape (and it is, oh yes it is), then you are the rapists' apologists, concerned more with the clothes the victim is wearing than with the crime committed against them. Shame on you. Shut your callous, poisonous traps.

Smileyrose of the UK, on the other hand, protests that her ex husband stole her family. That may be so, but she makes the mistake of assuming that the specific problem is that the law is prejudiced against fathers. It is, to be sure, but it would be more precise, in this context, to say that it is prejudiced against noncustodial parents. As long as the law reifies one parent over another, then the outrage and tragedy expressed by Smileyrose and all the several other Daily Mail commenters, and many, many others, will continue.

We're with you Bob, keep on soldiering.

Tags: Fathers Rights

We live in an age like no other

Never has it been possible to divorce a woman, take her children, not let her see them, make her pay you to look after them for her, then, if she isn't able to, complain that she must not love her children and throw her in jail. The mere idea is transparently unjust. Yet, today that is exactly what custodial parents can do to non-custodial parents, under the full protection of the law. That almost always means what mothers can do to fathers. No one even seems to notice unless the mother doing it is a lesbian.

Today, a high court has to be called on to point out that accusations of rape ought to carry a bit more of a basis than "I was drunk, so I couldn't give proper consent". Meanwhile the media parrot out the line that only one in 20 accusations of rape result in a conviction without ever considering the possibility that there might be something wrong with our definition of rape. The real tragedy, of course, is that those who truly have been raped face an ever mounting pile of controversy at the mere idea of reporting their pain.

Then there's the study which concluded that one in five people are stalked in a two year period. Buried in the study itself (pdf), you'll find that the definition of stalking is so broad that one might wonder they didn't find the fraction to be larger, including, as it does, irate phone calls and email flames and possibly finding yourself on the same street as someone you don't much like. One wonders if a better conclusion is that one in five people experience significant episodes of paranoia over a two year period. But that wouldn't suit the victim culture we live in, where we must extend the definition of victim as far as possible and then expect "the police and prosecutors to identify these cases before they take a deadly turn". Before you know it, a pointed finger is enough to have you tarred for stalking and carted off to jail as a potential murderer. Thoughtcrime, guys.

It gets to the point that either you're a victim or a perpetrator, which would you rather be?

(The same report, by the way, expresses surprise that half of the stalkers reported by "male victims" are also men, but makes no comment that the numbers clearly indicate that half of all stalkers are women!)

Under such a climate, we can no longer see who the victims really are. Then we can have willfully ignorant journalists getting their knickers in a twist at some of the appropriately hurt and angry language they find on the intertubes from men who have been falsely accused, thrown out of their homes, kept from their children, and beggared with child support dues. With feigned fear and astonishment, they wonder at what they call aggressive words directed at the feminists who support the policies that have done these things, salting their pretend horror with claims of misogyny, suggestions that the men are barely evolved offspring of a thuggish boogie-man patriarchy who know only "hate speech", form "hate groups", "mimic the micro-practices of offenders" (whatever the hell that means), and whose "havoc" must be "dealt with".

To answer their "fears" they turn to "experts" who trot out carefully approved, politically correct doublespeak to reinforce the paranoia. A father desperate in his inability to do anything for his children besides pay for them is regarded as the cause of the problem because can't he see that "conflict is harmful to children, conflict between parents may cancel, or even reverse, any benefits associated with frequent visitation"? Never once do they consider that this means conflict generated by the custodial parent is an unassailable argument for the exclusion of the non-custodial parent from the children's lives and renders him helpless to do anything about it. Again, this nearly always means what the mother can do to the father. He is supposed to just swallow it whole and if he can't choke it down, he's the problem. The man's anger is the problem, not whatever caused it. An unbearable provocation is nothing, only the reaction has significance. Anything less than putting his tail between his legs and slinking off into the night is completely unacceptable.

Thus they pathologize outrage and turn victims into perpetrators. Appropriate, justifiable outrage and true, helpless victims ready for the administration of a coup de grâce.

Men are beginning to notice. The problem is worldwide. The news and opinions cited here come from the UK, the USA, South Korea, Canada and Australia. It's not a backlash against feminism, that is a red-herring distracting us from the reality of an underhanded and oppressive cultural regime rooted in all of us. There is no conspiracy, a conspiracy has to hide, this is our own foolishness in plain sight. But in our blindness it is nearly invisible. It has torn many lives apart, but in so doing, it must show itself, eventually. Let's hope that even if we and our children must pay the price, their children might not.

Dying every day, the lost daughter and a brother in arms.

I apologize for the break after my last post. I found my inspiration a little lacking, and, well, the nights have been a little dark.

I was pleased to get several comments, including one from a man much further down this horrible road than am I. "When did I last see my kids? Eight and a half years ago, and I die a little every day." That is an excellent way of putting it, to die a little every day; not because it is a pleasing analogy, but because that is exactly what it feels like. Death seems that much closer when you can't see your children.

Also, I got a comment from the child of a disenfranchised dad and by her own account, although she doesn't call it that, an alienated child. She encourages us to keep fighting, to "take the emotional punches and never back down". If only she knew how exhausting it is to keep up that fight, to look for the next possible battle front after losing yet another legal round, how few weapons dad might wield and how many from which mom may pick and choose. Just recently, a friend of mine mused how poorly suited a man is to such a battle - evolved for solving one problem and moving on to the next, he is tormented by a problem he is not permitted to solve, nor to walk away from.

She says "Your children - at least the grown female ones - want huge, magnanimous gestures." clearly not realizing how expensive and dangerous such gestures can be. In fact, I might hazard a guess that she's taken mom's lesson to heart, that dad was never good enough, dad never did enough, even as she bewails not having done something herself. "But he was careful, and respected and space and waited some more. He was wrong to do that."

What sort of "magnanimous gesture" might he have made? You wanted him to "have made me see how much he loved me - even if he had to embarrass himself (and me!)". You do know what stalking is, don't you? Did you want to see your sad old dad dragged away by the cops? You do realize that many of the things he might have done without the court's approval would have landed him in jail, or his rights further curtailed?

It is not your fault, lost daughter, but it is not his either. Respect his memory, such as it is, and help us fight, don't just goad from the sidelines.

My post was also reposted, without asking my permission, claims to the contrary notwithstanding (but it's OK demonspawn, you were right, I don't have a problem with it) on an MSN message board. One comment in response (from fusebox) read:

While reading the Blog I found myself in a state that I have never been in. It was like I was reading what I have been feeling and saying for a long time. I have the anger problems and am truly fed up with the system and I had the exact argument with GAl in my case and she had the satisfied look that he is referring to. I see that look in my sleep. I have never been under this kind of scrutiny let alone interrogated from different angles and then of course there are the loaded questions that I would have had to have been leader of the political debate team at Harvard to answer without putting myself into some corner.

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt, cried the blood, written the blog post. The writer goes on to reflect on the effect his own trials, literal and figurative, have on the new woman in his life. I am pleased that I have been able to write something to touch him, and others. But I am also distressed. No-one should have to go through this sort of thing to remain, and even fail to remain, a parent.

I leave you with an item I found on poking around this message board. Of all the malignant visitation rulings, consider the gut-wrenching humiliation of having to travel across country to have visitation with your daughter under the supervision of your deserting wife's new boyfriend. That's a judge who just loves to torment. Don't anyone dare comment that it's better than nothing.

Tags: Fathers Rights

Denial - am I a nutcase?

I have been reading a few of the blog posts on MensNewsDaily, and particularly a recent piece by the incomparable Teri Stoddard. Time and again, she posts in support of fathers and their continuing mistreatment by the courts and time and again she comes under attack by even men's rights activists as if she were some sort of fifth columnist. Or something. I wouldn't blame her for throwing up her hands and walking out. I hope she doesn't.

Not all of her commenters are agin' her. GladMadSadDad certainly seems to be in agreement with her, and apparently among the fathers she would champion. Tucked into one of his comments, he said "in my dealings with newly divorced Fathers reeling from what has happened to them and their children, the overwhelming sentiment is they can’t believe the system functions as it does. [...] if [my brother] didn’t know me better, he would think I was a radical nutcase. He simply couldn’t believe what I was telling him. In some ways, I think he couldn’t bear to hear the truth." Which summarizes my experience beautifully.

Which raises a question.

Am I a radical nutcase?

I have a couple of feeds set up with Google news, particularly one keyed to "Fathers' rights". Most days there's at least one new item in there from which a new horror story emerges. (Some of them get discussed here, some I just link to via the del.icio.us feed at left). In each one of them, I see something to link it to my case. Every story of another disposable father I take personally, every tiny step towards recognition of what is going on gives me another reason to crawl forward myself.

Every day, I wake up thinking about what has happened to me and my child, drag myself out of bed and try to wash it away in the shower. I am aware that many fathers in my position simply implode. They drown out the howling noise in their heads with alcohol or drugs, they drop out of life and disappear while still occupying the same physical space. They try to build another life, if they're allowed to escape, or hobble on with what is left of the old one as well as they can, if they're not. But no matter what they do, they end up less than what they were, struggling to make the payments they've been ordered, trying to look forward to every minute they might spend with their children (if they get any at all), knowing that they are no longer, in any meaningful sense, their father.

Standing in the shower, I try to wash away some of the dreams of the night before. The night before last, I dreamed I was sorting through some of my child's books. Books I bought him but haven't seen since I was ejected from my home under false pretenses. I was talking to someone, off camera as it were; I think it was my mother. I held a book to my forehead and I asked: "What if I lose? What if I never see him again?" In my dream, I started crying, tears wetting the books, and I woke up.

I stood in the shower exhausted, first thing in the morning, feeling like I had been crying my eyes out. I have stood in that shower trying to wash off the filth. The process of divorce and disenfranchisement is dirty. Pushed in, you get carried along a man-made canal of muck. You get splashed with people's ill will, dark prejudices drip from a clear sky, you get complained about and sometimes shouted at by powerful people who don't know you, you become an embarrassment to many friends, acquaintances ignore you in the corridor. This sticks. You can't wash it off, but you still try.

I keep this blog as a small way of maintaining some sanity. (I have other ways. I haven't tried to dissolve myself in a bottle. Not Yet.) And yet in doing so, I wonder if it is, instead, an expression of my insanity. Sometimes, I get upset, and rail against fatuous politicians and moronic journalists, then I get accused of "insulting all women". Did I? I can't see it. Even Hawa, who's been around for a while, worries that at any moment I may tip over the edge into misogyny. Am I that close?

I get the guys at MensNewsDaily, I really do. You get to the point that everyone makes you angry, even your allies. Because you can't beat you enemies, you end up fighting your friends. It takes a real effort of will, sometimes, not to do that. Do that, and I'd say you become a nutcase.

You, dear reader, can't answer the question. You don't know who I am, and I can't tell you. I just want you to see what I see and agree, it isn't right. If I'm a nutcase, I can still have moments of clarity. Some of them end up here, don't they?

Technorati Tags: fathers' rights

Everybody Panic!

Barry Lovell has had a spat with the missus and gone out with his kid! Call out the cops! Maybe the SWAT team! Tell the BBC! Make sure the whole world knows because Barry's obviously off his rocker and can't be trusted!

What is it with the world today? Fathers just can't be trusted, not so far as you can throw us. We're dangerous, we're evil, who knows what we'll get up to next. The slightest toe over a line and we're to be hounded into the ground. And just exactly who is defining where that line is anyway and why does it keep moving closer to our toes?

The cops want us to know that Barry isn't in trouble and his actions aren't "calculated", but the BBC want us to know that the missus, Emma, says her "heart is being ripped out". Drama! Tragedy! The world ends at teatime!

What if she'd buggered off with the kid? Would we be putting out all-points alerts, hearing about it on the national news? Like hell we would. Well, unless she were a drug addict who left hospital with her premature baby presumably in search of a hit, and even then, once found, we'd just usher her back into hospital, the poor dear. Would we be hearing about the father and how his heart was torn out? In my dreams.

What do we suppose will happen to Barry once he comes home? A pat on the back and all is forgiven? Yeah, sure.

Why all the fuss? Because we all know what happens when fathers leave with the kid after a fight with the missus. The media have made sure that we all know for sure that it inevitably ends in tragedy. That is the unstated expectation, the media can almost be seen salivating, the cops go loopy. It's a guilty pleasure, we all know what's going on. Barry's chances of having a normal relationship with his kid are almost negligible if Emma decides he shouldn't, especially now. He's handed her his balls, no matter what he does. It doesn't take much to imagine what he might be going through, and it takes even less to imagine how he might react, especially if he's pressured hard enough. Let's all watch as closely as we can and see if he does.

If he does, he's easy to condemn, and if he doesn't he'll be easy to forget, meantime it's fun to join in the torment.

The cops say "The response from the public has been fantastic". I bet it has, everyone wants to be a knight in shining amour saving a child in obvious mortal danger from nasty, evil dad for the poor defenseless, weeping mom. (She's notably pretty, I wonder if the public would be so "fantastic" if she had a face like the back end of a horse?)

In case you think anything gruesome might have happened already, Barry and his kid have been spotted three times since they took off, only two days ago.

Why are they even considered to be missing yet?

Everyone's all worried because he didn't take nappies or baby food. This isn't the bloody arctic folks! England has actual shops that sell things like baby food and nappies! They have cash machines (he's used one) and credit cards and all kinds of modern, trendy things.

What did they argue about? Money. Now that's downright scary, don't you think? Who knows what that might mean? Let's all imagine the worst.

Good grief, calm down everyone. Give Barry a chance to call home without having to face down a perfect media storm. Apply some basic psychology, and I don't mean trying to pull on his heartstrings with a hysterical mom giving a press conference which is only going to scare him all the more, knowing that the public is now squarely on her side and will be completely deaf to his.

Update: you can all stop panicking now. They found them. Safe and well. Of course, they arrested Barry, "on suspicion of child neglect" whatever the hell that means. "On suspicion of not actually having done anything illegal, you, you father, you!" more like. Morons.

Oh, sorry, you like panicking. Sorry. Go right ahead then. Don't mind me.

Morons.


Technorati Tags: fathers' rights, child abduction

What can you do?

In a comment to my last post, Myra relates her experience being raised by her father after a civilized divorce and her husband's experience with a savage one and asks a series of questions. She says that they are rhetorical, but they desperately need answers:

How do we make a balanced equation in custody battles?

The courts are designed to assign blame, and family courts, denied a criminal charge, sublimate this by assigning custody. They might as well assign "blame" to the non-custodial parent, make him or her the bad guy, and hand the custodial parent a rod to beat him with. The children would be better off for their exclusion from the warfare. But then, of course, you've got to do something about the kids. My answer to Myra would be that we need to assert basic parental rights equally to each parent from the get-go, to be lifted only when either parent is proven inadequate by sufficient evidence (the word of the other parent being considered the epitome of insufficient). We need to make it a crime to obstruct contact of the children with their other parent in the absence of a court order to the contrary. Some would say that this provides an additional weapon to the abusive ex-spouse. But what if that abusive ex-spouse is the mother? She already has that weapon by default and the abused spouse is completely disarmed. Oh, but that's a really good alternative, isn't it?

How do we find compromise?

Compromise is something the parents have to find. The court only lays down the rules. But if the court is set up as an arena, arms the combatants unequally, and declares "let the battle commence", then it becomes a modern spectacle where profit for the venue, the handlers and the hangers-on is the only result, not compromise, peace and safety for the combatants. The family courts need to develop a new philosophy, one which gives highest priority to avoiding conflict, not fostering it.

How do I get up on my soapbox and tell the matriarchal family courts that I am all the better for being raised by my dad?

Getting up on a soapbox these days is a easy as starting a blog. More pro-actively, you might contact your local fathers' rights group; be careful, many of them are deeply wounded and might come across as somewhat angrier than you're really happy with. Some of them deserve forgiveness and understanding, and they are why the group exists. (Some of them really are pretty nasty and these should be identified and neutralized as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, too cautious a group cuts out the very activist element that they need.)

What expert do I tell my story to?

Try writing to some of the local services, telling them your story. The worst that can happen is that they throw the letter away, but someone has to read it first.

Write to some of the "experts" you find on the web.

Write comments on the patriphobic blogs pointing out the inevitable holes in their reasoning. Be prepared to be flamed and banned - they're closed minded, they won't like you, and they will spit on you, then slam the door. What that achieves is to show the world their hypocrisy; a negative step for them, a success for reason.

And on the other hand, who does my husband tell his story to?

The same people. To be silent in this game is to be complicit. Most of the general public haven't a clue how unpleasant family court can be. They think divorces should be amicable and if they aren't then it's the fault of both parties. They don't see how this attitude gives an advantage to the more combative party. They don't see how one side, the one with the kids, has a powerful advantage over the other. Mostly they objectify the money, assuming that's the whole story. They simplify the thing into soap opera terms with a very limited set of default assumptions. Question the assumption that the more hostile parent is right, question the assumption that either side has a default right to deny access of the other to the children, that either side has a monopoly on what's best for the children.

Who's to answer for the unconscionable behavior he witnessed from his father?

The easy answer is "his father". But that's too pat, isn't it? All too often the ugliest behavior by either side is gotten away with, even encouraged. Sometimes it can even be hard to see who is the "bad guy" especially if there isn't one, just two angry, frightened people shouting at each other. But there are others who should be answerable also - inadequate judges don't help, lawyers who build up the conflict to a level sufficient to maximize profit, but not enough to completely scare them off. Court officials who react from prejudice and sabotage one side or the other just because they don't like his face or she's the half-sister of that boy who got into trouble once at school. Mediators who don't. Politicians who distort the data to get votes which are all too often working from even baser prejudice. Social and behavioral researchers who want to find a specific result and therefore do. All these are answerable for the bad behavior we see in the courtroom.

Would the gladiators fight if they were not forced into the arena with an audience baying for blood? In those circumstances, it can feel like self defense to strike the first blow.

Technorati Tags: fathers' rights, divorce