INSIGHT MAGAZINE
May 2,
2000
Symposium
Q:
Are fathers getting a fair shake from the child-support system?
No:
The system is criminalizing honest fathers and demoralizing their
children.
By Stephen Baskerville
A 41-year-old welder from Milford, N.H., recently received what some are calling
a death sentence for losing his job. That is not how the charges against him
read of course, nor could they, because he was never charged with or tried for
any crime.
Brian Armstrong was a father who lost his job and allegedly fell behind on child
support. Though actively looking for work, he was jailed Jan. 11. One week later
he was dead, apparently the victim of a beating by correctional officers. No one
alleges Armstrong did anything to provoke the beating. Another inmate saw him
taken to a room with a "restraining chair" and then heard screaming for 15
minutes before seeing Armstrong dragged away. Medical workers told his mother
that his body was covered with bruises and that he died of a massive head
injury, though more than two months later she is unable to get a death
certificate with an official cause of death. "I feel there is something very
remiss," Armstrong's mother told me.
How typical was Armstrong's punishment? We do not know. Some fathers' groups
have alleged police beatings in the past but have been unable to document their
claims. Other allegations of prisoner mistreatment have been directed at the
Hillsborough County, N.H., facility, where Armstrong was being held, and it is
under investigation. But the victim of the worst brutality appears to be
Armstrong - a father convicted of nothing. Was he beaten up because he was a
"deadbeat dad," a member of a class of officially designated villains? No other
group can have their constitutional rights simply set aside. No other group can
be demonized in the mass media by their own government and their highest leaders
with no right to reply in their own defense.
Fatal beatings of fathers are probably not widespread in U.S. jails, but the
Armstrong case illustrates that something is seriously wrong with the punitive
measures taken against parents who have fallen victim to the divorce machinery.
Another fatality that recently has come to light exemplifies a much more common
form of "death sentence" routinely meted out to fathers. In March, Darrin White
of Prince George, British Columbia, was denied all contact with three of his
children, evicted from his home and ordered to pay $2,071 a month out of his
$2,200 monthly salary for child and spousal support. White also was required to
pay double court costs for a divorce that, according to his family, he never
sought or agreed to. In fact, the judgment was even more severe, since White
paid an additional $439 to support a fourth child from a previous marriage.
According to sources close to White's family, the stress of losing his children
rendered him medically unfit for his job as a locomotive engineer, leaving him
$950 a month in disability pay. In March, White hanged himself from a tree near
his home. No evidence of any wrongdoing was ever presented against him.
The fate of White is increasingly common. "There is nothing unusual about this
judgment," the Vancouver Sun quotes former British Columbia Supreme Court Judge
Lloyd McKenzie, who pointed out that the judge in White's case applied
standardized guidelines for spousal and child support. Essentially the same
guidelines are used in the United States and many other countries, with similar
consequences. In Britain a group called the National Association for Child
Support Action has published a "Book of the Dead" chronicling 55 cases where the
official court coroner concluded fathers were driven to suicide because of
judgments from divorce courts and hounding by child-support agencies. According
to Health Canada statistics, suicide among younger men has risen dramatically
along with the divorce rate and about 80 percent of suicides in Canada are male.
The courts that issue these draconian sentences are not criminal courts. They
are "family courts," infamous bureaucratic tribunals once characterized by
Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas as "kangaroo" courts. They largely are immune
from constitutional protections of due process and have almost unlimited powers
to destroy families and lives, usually of citizens who have done nothing legally
wrong.
Armstrong did not "abandon" his children, as President Clinton likes to say of
the deadbeat-dad class. He merely lost his job. "That didn't mean he didn't love
his son. He saw his son. He called him every week," according to Armstrong's
former wife. "I'm having a hard time. My son's having a hard time because
there's just too many unanswered questions," she told the Manchester
Union-Leader.
How is it possible in the United States for a citizen to be jailed without trial
and beaten to death? How can citizens charged with no wrongdoing lose their
children and be forced to pay charges that are clearly beyond their means and
then punished as criminals when they inevitably fall short?
The dirty secret of the divorce industry is that child support has little to do
with supporting children and everything to do with increasing the power of
adults: judges, lawyers, district attorneys, social workers, bureaucratic police
and many others who have a vested interest in separating as many children as
possible from their fathers. By then setting child support, alimony,
court-ordered attorneys' fees and other arbitrary charges at levels that are
impossible to pay, and bringing the full force of the state to bear on those who
fail to pay them, the divorce industry has created a perpetual-motion machine
that thrives and grows by destroying fathers and families. Here we have a
textbook example of bureaucratic aggrandizement: With each plundered father
comes the demand for more courts, more lawyers, more bureaucracy, more
plainclothes police and private collection agencies to "pursue" him and to
plunder more fathers and turn them also into impecunious deadbeats.
Like so much political chicanery today, all this is conducted in the name of
children. Yet they are in fact its greatest victims, cynically exploited in a
game of power played by grown-ups.
"My dad was abused by the justice system," writes White's eldest daughter, who
is 14. "My dad was a very good father and wanted the best for all four of his
children. All of us children were his life. He wanted everything he could
possibly give to his children and what he couldn't. The most important thing he
gave his children were his love, and being there for them. He loved all of his
kids equally, and with all his heart. He was a kind man who fought a good fight
but no matter what he did or said he could never win with this system. Things
need to change for all fathers going through this same thing. We need to help;
too many kids go without a father because of this; too many kids are hurt."
The story of White's suicide has been carried on the front pages of several
Canadian dailies, and two members of of Canada's Parliament have issued urgent
calls for changes in the law. Similar cases here in the United States receive no
attention from the national press or politicians, and Armstrong's death hardly
has been noticed outside New Hampshire. Had he died at the hands of jailers in
China or Turkey or Iran, or had he been jailed for any other cause, we would
have expected protests from civil-liberties and human-rights organizations. But
because he was a father who was alleged (but never proved) to be behind on his
child support, he likely will be forgotten as one more deadbeat.
We should not be entirely surprised that a system of involuntary divorce and
forced separation of parents from their children has led us down the path of
government-sponsored death. When we grant people the power to commandeer the
coercive apparatus of the state - courts, police and jails - to punish family
members for hurt feelings or ordinary family differences, we are engaged in a
very deadly business indeed. We have constructed a highly invasive government
machinery to administer a punitive regime against forcibly divorced parents:
Their movements are controlled; their private lives are monitored; they are
interrogated behind closed doors; their homes are entered; their personal papers
are examined; they are placed under restraining orders; their children are used
as informers against them; their savings are confiscated and their wages
attached; and their names are entered on various government registers - all
before they have been charged with any crime. The government knows that by
taking a man's children it has created an outlaw.
What we are seeing today is nothing less than the criminalization of fatherhood:
Fathers turned into criminals not by anything they have done but by the power of
the state to seize control of their children and use them as tools and weapons
to further increase government power. Alarmingly, this presumption of guilt is
rapidly being extended to the rest of us.
The child-support enforcement office of the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services is compiling information not only on fathers who owe child support but
on all citizens. The rationale is that the child-support system renders us all
potential criminals against whom preemptive enforcement measures must be
initiated now in anticipation of our likely future criminality. "Some people
have argued that the state should only collect the names of child-support
obligors, not the general population," notes Teresa A. Myers of the National
Council of State Legislatures. "But this argument ignores the primary reason for
collecting the names," she explains with chilling directness: "At one point or
another, many people will either be obligated to pay or eligible to receive
child support."
Some see the government's destruction of the family as the logical culmination
of the "nanny state" - the state that attends to all our wants and protects us
from ourselves and so gradually makes families and parents seem unnecessary. But
a more accurate designation right now may be the "paternal state," the state as
surrogate father that provides and protects, and sets out to eliminate its
rivals. The divorce industry is the most dangerous violator of constitutional
rights in America today and the most destructive institution of our families and
social order. It is time for a congressional investigation.
Baskerville is a professor of political science at Howard University in
Washington and serves as spokesman for Men, Fathers and Children
International.
Yes: Fathers, as part of the family, are being treated more fairly now
than ever before.
By Dianna Durham-McLoud
As a child-support veteran, I can well remember the time when fathers of
children who lived in single-parent households routinely were referred to as
"absent parents." Many believed that the only objective of child support was to
get the money - as much as you could, any way you could - and that nothing else
mattered. Our customers were children and their mothers, period. Today, we
understand that child support is about putting children first and supporting
families. Family has been redefined to include fathers, and fathers are getting
a fairer shake than ever before by our nation's child-support system.
In the mid-1990s Elaine Sorensen and Mark Turner of the Urban Institute
conducted an extensive literature review in the area of child-support policy.
Five barriers within the child-support system that discouraged noncustodial
fathers' involvement in the lives of their children were identified.
The first barrier identified was a very slow, excessively bureaucratized
paternity-establishment process enmeshed in the court system and viewed by
unmarried fathers as punitive. As a result of federal initiatives,
paternity-establishment practices have changed dramatically. Today, the process
is a civil, rather than a criminal, matter. States have created voluntary,
hospital-based paternity-acknowledgment programs in which unmarried parents are
exposed to the importance of establishing paternity, the legal rights of both
parties are explained and interested parents can be assisted in taking the steps
to establish paternity at the time of the baby's birth if they wish to do so.
Paternity-establishment rates have soared - 1.5 million established and
acknowledged in fiscal 1998 - providing more children with access to Social
Security, pension and retirement benefits, health insurance and child support.
The second barrier identified in the study was retention by the state of all but
$50 per month of any child-support payments made to families receiving public
assistance in order to offset welfare costs. This served as a disincentive for
fathers to pay child support through official channels since they perceived that
very little of it actually benefited their children. The Clinton/Gore
administration's fiscal 2001 budget proposal contains a new fatherhood
initiative that will enable states to simplify distribution rules and provide
incentives to states that pass through more child-support payments directly to
families. Under the administration's budget proposal, families that have left
welfare will be able to keep all the child support paid by the noncustodial
parent; families still working their way off welfare will be able to keep up to
$100 a month more than the state's current pass-through. These proposals will
create a clear connection between what a father pays and what his family gets,
giving fathers more reason to cooperate with the child-support system.
A third barrier is that child-support policies were not designed to accommodate
noncustodial fathers who had a limited ability to pay child support. Let me
state clearly that noncustodial parents are a diverse group of individuals. One
segment is comprised of those who are able to pay child support and do so. Then,
there are those fathers who can afford to pay but choose not to, and the full
array of enforcement tools should be aggressively used against them. The last
segment of the noncustodial-parent population is the fathers who are too poor to
pay child support. They have been deemed "dead-broke dads." Recognizing the
reality of the dead-broke dad has important policy implications for the
child-support community. There is a growing movement toward establishing
partnerships to address the needs of this population. Lawmakers are considering
flexible support orders that both reflect dead-broke dads' current economic
circumstances and provide employment and training assistance to enable them to
meet their child-support obligations.
A 1999 study by policy specialist Dana Reichert of the National Conference of
State Legislatures highlights collaborative relationships formed between
community-based organizations that operate father-focused programs,
child-support agencies and the court system. Involvement with the courts and
child-support agencies assists these programs in bargaining modifications,
reductions in arrearages and payment plans. By forming partnerships, programs
are able to deal with all aspects of a father's situation, such as employment,
answering to arrearages, modifying support payments and helping fathers learn
parenting skills.
In Illinois, for example, unemployed fathers who come before the courts can be
directly referred to child-support enforcement agency officials who work with
the court to modify or "stay" court orders while a father is in a work or
training program so that additional arrearages do not accumulate. The court also
has the authority to forgive a portion of past arrearages if a father
successfully completes a training program. The Illinois child-support agency has
partnerships with a variety of community organizations to administer training,
résumé-writing, life skills and linkages to agencies handling substance abuse
and mental-health issues.
There are success stories! An Illinois child-support agency worked with one
father who was more than $40,000 in arrears with his child support. After months
of failed efforts to locate him, he was found in a homeless shelter out of state
where he had been receiving food stamps. After he moved back to Illinois, the
agency was able to connect him with some basic employment services and a
substance-abuse program. The father was able to secure a job with a local
drug-store chain, where he was promoted to a managerial position six months
later. When he appeared in court, the judge reduced his arrearages by $30,000
due to his diligence and progress in employment. He continues to pay regular
child support and plays an active role in the life of his children.
Another success is the innovative partnership program in Marion County, Ind. The
county prosecutor's office there has set up a program for fathers who are more
than $500 behind in their child-support obligations. Fathers who appear
unemployed before the court receive an assessment to determine what type of
services will help get them jobs. Deputy prosecutors can recommend to the court
that fathers be ordered to participate in one of the program's three components:
direct job referral, indirect job referrals or community service.
The fourth barrier identified in the Urban Institute's study was that child
support and welfare policies were not designed to assist noncustodial fathers in
their efforts to find work in order to pay child support. The Clinton/Gore
administration's fiscal 2001 budget also proposes $255 million for the first
year of a new "Fathers Work/Families Win" initiative to help low-income,
noncustodial parents and low-income working families work and support their
children. The administration's proposal includes $125 million to help some
40,000 low-income noncustodial parents work, pay child support and reconnect
with their children. Another $130 million would go for grants to help
hard-pressed working families retain jobs and upgrade skills and get connected
to critical work supports, such as child care, child support, health care, food
stamps, housing and transportation.
Lastly, the fifth barrier identified within the child-support system that
discouraged father involvement was the finding that child-support programs
tended to be silent regarding noncustodial father involvement beyond financial
obligations, ignoring such issues as visitation and custody. I would point out
that under welfare reform, Congress has authorized $10 million in access and
visitation grants to state child-support programs so that they could augment or
introduce programs that make it easier for noncustodial parents to see their
children. Every state applied for and received these grants. In fiscal 1999, the
minimum allotment per state was $100,000. Each state has flexibility in how it
designs and operates these programs and can use these funds to provide such
services as voluntary or mandatory mediation, counseling, education, development
of parenting plans, visitation enforcement (including monitoring, supervision
and neutral drop-off and pick-up) and development of guidelines for visitation
and alternative-custody arrangement. There is a definite linkage between access
to one's child and payment of child support. A report produced by the Census
Bureau in 1995 revealed that child-support compliance was 85 percent in
joint-custody cases, 79 percent where access to the child was protected by a
visitation order and only 56 percent where neither joint custody nor visitation
was protected.
After examining these barriers can we claim perfection in terms of fathers
getting a fair shake in the child-support system? No, not entirely. Progress?
Definitely yes, and getting fairer!
As president of the National Child Support Enforcement Association, the
nonprofit, professional organization representing the child-support community, I
have traveled across the country this year and visited many child-support
programs in many states. It has been my pleasure to witness, support and
advocate in favor of the growing movement toward establishing partnerships
between child-support enforcement agencies and community-based organizations to
address the needs of fathers. Wherever I am, I continue to make the case that
working with fathers, particularly low-income fathers, should be an ongoing part
of child support's core mission. My best argument for the child-support system's
commitment to working with fathers is that it's a win-win situation for the
children and both parents. Children need two parents whether or not those
parents live together! Our first guiding principle is that children deserve and
need emotional and financial support from both mother and father. Another is
that fathers have value to children that goes beyond a dollar amount. Above all,
I believe that the child-support program must incorporate what I call the four
F's: firmness, fairness, father-friendliness and family focus.
Durham-McLoud is the president of the National Child Support Enforcement
Association in Washington and has directed a state-run child-support
program.
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