From Insight Magazine
Vol. 15, No. 28 -- August 2, 1999
Copyright © 1999 News World Communications, Inc.
Published Date July 9, 1999, in Washington, D.C.
http://www.insightmag.com/
http://www.insightmag.com/articles/story5.html

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Note from the author:
Friends,

This magazine is sent to all US congressional offices and is apparently
influential among Washington policymakers.  You may wish to write your
members of Congress to alert them that they should be getting it on
Monday. Also try to send it to your state legislatures and parliaments as
well.  It may also be a good idea to thank the editors of Insight.  They
have been very sympathetic.

Insight is available from Borders books from Monday in the Washington area
and from about July 26 in the rest of the US.

I want to thank everyone who helped in the preparation of this.

Stephen Baskerville

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Q: Is court-ordered child support doing more
     harm than good?

Yes: This engine of the divorce industry is destroying
     families and the Constitution.

By Stephen Baskerville

Geoff came home one day to find a note on the kitchen table saying his
wife had taken their two children to live with their grandparents. He quit
his job as head of his department in a university and followed. He was
summoned to court on eight-hours' notice and, without a lawyer and without
being permitted to speak, was stripped of custody rights and ordered to
stay away from his wife and children most of the time. Because he had no
job, no car and no place to live, his mother cancelled a pending sale of
her house, and he moved in with her.
 
Geoff and his mother now pay about $1,200 a month to his wife and her
wealthy parents, and he is left to live and care for his two children on
about $700 a month. A judge also threatened him with jail if he did not pay
a lawyer he had not hired. When his temporary job ends, the payments
must continue, and he is not permitted to care for the children while
unemployed. He also expects to be coerced into paying more legal fees.
He has never been charged with any wrongdoing, either criminal or civil.

Geoff's experience increasingly is common. In fact, it is epidemic.
Massive numbers of fathers who are accused of no wrongdoing now are
separated from their children, plundered for everything they have,
publicly vilified and incarcerated without trial.

About 24 million American children live in homes where the father is not
present, with devastating consequences for both the children and society.
Crime, drug and alcohol abuse, truancy, teenage pregnancy, suicide and
psychological disorders are a few of the tragic consequences. Conventional
wisdom assumes that the fathers of these children have abandoned them. In
this case the conventional wisdom is dangerously wrong. It is far more
likely that an "absent" father is forced away rather than leaving
voluntarily.

Very few "deadbeat dads"

In his new study, Divorced Dads: Shattering the Myths, Sanford Braver of
Arizona State University has shown conclusively that the so-called
"deadbeat dad," one who deserts his children and evades child support,
"does not exist in significant numbers." Braver confirms that, contrary to
popular belief, at least two-thirds of divorces are filed by mothers, who
have virtual certainty of getting the children and a huge portion of the
fathers' income, regardless of any fault on their part. The title of
Ashton Applewhite's 1997 book says it succinctly: Cutting Loose: Why
Women Who End Their Marriages Do So Well.

Other studies have found even higher percentages of divorces filed by
mothers, and lawyers report that, when children are involved, divorce is
the initiative of the mother in virtually all instances. Moreover, few of
these divorces involve grounds such as desertion, adultery or violence.
The most frequent reasons given are "growing apart" or "not feeling loved
or appreciated." (Surveys consistently show that fathers are much more
likely than mothers to believe parents should remain married.) Yet, as
Braver reports, despite this involuntary loss of their children, 90
percent of these deserted fathers regularly pay court-ordered child
support (unemployment being the main reason for nonpayment), often at
exorbitant levels and many without any rights to see their children. Most
make heroic efforts to stay in contact with the children from whom they
are forcibly separated.

The plight of unmarried inner-city fathers is harder to quantify, but
there is no reason to assume they love their children any less. A recent
study conducted in Washington with low-income fathers ages 16 to 25 found
that 63 percent had only one child; 82 percent had children by only one
mother; 50 percent had been in a serious relationship with the mother at
the time of pregnancy; only 3 percent knew the mother of their child only
a little; 75 percent visited their child in the hospital; 70 percent saw
their children at least once a week; 50 percent took their child to the
doctor; large percentages reported bathing, feeding, dressing and playing
with their children; and 85 percent provided informal child support in the
form of cash or purchased goods such as diapers, clothing and toys.
 
University of Texas anthropologist Laura Lein and Rutgers University
professor Kathryn Edin recently found that low-income fathers often are
far worse off than their government-assisted families, "but economically
and emotionally marginal as many of these fathers are, they still
represent a large proportion of low-income fathers who continue to make
contributions to their children's households and to maintain at least some
level of relationship with those children."

A government witch-hunt

Yet the voices of these fathers rarely are heard in the public arena.
Instead we hear the imprecations of a government conducting what may be
the most massive witch-hunt in this country's history. Never before have
we seen the spectacle of the highest officials in the land -- including
the president, the attorney general and other Cabinet secretaries, and
leading members of Congress from both parties -- using their offices as
platforms from which publicly to vilify private citizens who have been
convicted of nothing and who have no opportunity to reply.

Under the guise of pursuing deadbeat dads, we now are seeing mass
incarcerations without trial, without charge and without counsel, while
the media and civil libertarians look the other way. We also have
government officials freely entering the homes and raiding the bank
accounts of citizens who are accused of nothing and simply helping
themselves to whatever they want -- including their children, their life
savings and their private papers and effects, all with hardly a word of
protest noted.

And these are fathers who are accused of nothing. Those who face
trumped-up accusations of child abuse also must prove their innocence
before they can hope to see their children. Yet now it is well established
that most child abuse takes place in the homes of single mothers. A recent
study from the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, found
that "almost two-thirds [of child abusers] were females." Given that male
perpetrators are not necessarily fathers but much more likely to be
boyfriends and stepfathers, fathers emerge as the least likely child abusers.
A British study by Robert Whelan in 1993 titled Broken Homes and
Battered Children concluded that a child living with a single mother
is up to 33 times more likely to be abused than a child living in an intact
family. The argument of many men legally separated from their families
is that the real abusers have thrown the father out of the family so they
can abuse his children with impunity.

In Virginia alone the state Division of Child Support Enforcement now is
"pursuing" 428,000 parents for up to $1.6 billion, according to its
director, Nick Young. In a state of fewer than 7 million people, the
parents of 552,000 children are being "pursued." That is the parents of
roughly half the state's minor dependent children. HHS claims that almost
20 million fathers in the nation are being pursued for something close to
$50 billion. We are being asked to believe that half the fathers in
America have abandoned their children willfully.

These figures essentially are meaningless. If they indicate anything it is
the scale on which families are being taken over by a destructive and
dangerous machine consisting of judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, social
workers, bureaucrats and women's groups -- all of whom have a direct
financial interest in separating as many children from their fathers as
possible, vilifying and plundering the fathers and turning them into
criminals. The machine is so riddled with conflicts of interest that it is
little less than a system of organized crime.

The Child Support Industry is organized crime
 
Here is how it works: Judges are appointed and promoted by the lawyers
and "custody evaluators," into whose pockets they funnel fees; the judges
also are influenced with payments of federal funds from child-support
enforcement bureaucracies that depend on a constant supply of ejected
fathers; child-support guidelines are written by the bureaucracies that
enforce them and by private collection companies that have a financial
stake in creating as many arrearages and "deadbeat dads" as possible.
These guidelines are then enacted by legislators, some of whom divert
the enforcement contracts to their own firms, sometimes even taking
personal kickbacks (as charged in a recent federal indictment in Arkansas).
 
Legislators who control judicial appointments also get contracts (and
kickbacks, again the case in Arkansas) for providing legal services at
government expense in the courts of their appointees. And, of course,
custody decisions and child-support awards must be generous enough
to entice more mothers to take the children and run, thus bringing a fresh
supply of fathers into the system. In short, child support is the financial
fuel of the divorce industry. It has very little to do with the needs of
children and everything to do with the power and profit of large numbers
of adults.

For their part, politicians can register their concern for fatherless
children relatively cheaply by endlessly (and futilely) stepping up
"child-support" collection while creating programs ostensibly designed to
"reunite" fathers with their children. Even some fatherhood advocates jump
on the bandwagon, attacking "absent" fathers while holding their tongues
about the judicial kidnapping of their children. Though almost everyone
now acknowledges the importance of fathers, for too many there are more
political and financial rewards in targeting them as scapegoats than in
the more costly task of upholding the constitutional rights of fathers and
their children not to be ripped apart.

Crackdowns enrich the Child Support Industry

There is no evidence that endless "crackdowns" on evicted fathers serve
any purpose other than enriching those in the cracking-down business. With
child-support enforcement now a $3 billion national industry, the pursuit
of the elusive deadbeat yields substantial profits, mostly at public
expense. "In Florida last year," writes Kathleen Parker in the Orlando
Sentinel, "taxpayers paid $4.5 million for the state to collect $162,000
from fathers"; and the story is the same elsewhere.

Instead of the easy fiction that massive numbers of fathers are suddenly
and inexplicably abandoning their children, perhaps what we should believe
instead is that a lucrative racket now is cynically using our children as
weapons and tools to enrich lawyers and provide employment for judges and
bureaucrats. Rather than pursuing ever greater numbers of fathers with
ever more Draconian punishments, the Justice Department should be
investigating the kind of crimes it was created to pursue -- such as
kidnapping, extortion and racketeering -- in the nation's family courts.

Stephen Baskerville teaches political science at Howard University
in Washington, D.C.