Family courts and the exploitation of the legal system,".
Posted by Family Justice & Child Protection Worldwide Reform Committee on Wednesday, August 5, 2015
The New Civil Rights Movement - Same sex marriages have the potential to challenge laws and customs surrounding marriage, divorce, child custody and domestic violence that currently discriminate against men on the basis of gender. Straight men have much to gain from these relationships, which may provide a legal foundation to challenge laws that unfairly target and punish men, and their children.
Same sex marriages also provide an opportunity to examine domestic violence laws that legally discriminate against men by assuming they are perpetrators on the basis of their gender alone. Same sex partnerships are more violent in general than heterosexual relationships, with lesbians reporting the highest rates of intimate violence. When violent spouses are both women, or both men, it becomes necessary to examine evidence to determine which spouse is legally responsible for the violence, and may increasingly lead to domestic violence being understood as a problem that is perpetrated and experienced by both spouses equally.
Courts are slowly evolving to enforce child custody arrangements and punish parents who refuse to abide by court orders, although it is not unusual for men to go years never seeing their children, while paying court mandated child support. Parental alienation has received attention in the press recently after Bill Hudson disowned his children with actress Goldie Hawn, whom he accuses of deliberately ‘poisoning’ his children against him. Parental alienation is made easier when mothers engage damaging and false stereotypes about fathers, a situation that will not exist for same sex parents. Courts may treat parental alienation more seriously when there are no sexist stereotypes to engage, and instead see alienation as the controlling and abusive behavior it is.
