The best interests of the child from the perspective of the child,

My simple but constant plea to divorce practitioners and policymakers, a mantra, is that we adopt a new standard in the legal determination of parenting after divorce: the “best interests of the child from the perspective of the child,” to replace the current discretionary approach based on speculation and interpretation; and a “responsibility to needs-based” orientation, to replace the dominant “rights-based” approach. A paradigm shift is needed: the well-being of children as they define it must take precedence over judicial biases and preferences, professional self-interest, gender politics, the desire of a parent to remove the other from the child’s life, and the wishes of a parent who is found to be a danger to the child.

What this implies is that first of all we adopt an evidence-based approach derived from research asking children themselves about their needs in the divorce transition, and then taking responsibility to reform our laws and public policies to address those needs. By “we” I refer mainly to those of us in the human services field working within social institutions that are meant to serve children and parents, but also to the community at large. Most simply stated, it is the responsibility of social institutions to support parents in the fulfillment of their parenting responsibilities to their children’s needs.

It has been only during the past decade that researchers have made beginning efforts to listen directly to the voices of children of divorce (and also parents) about their physical, psychological, social, emotional and spiritual needs. The picture that has emerged is dramatically different to previous studies based on “expert” interpretations.  

I will not enumerate these needs, as it is the focus of my book, along with a proposal for a new “equal parenting” approach to parenting after divorce based on what children themselves have identified as their core needs. Instead I would like to provide a platform for the voice of one child of divorce, Aimee Nicholls from England. She writes about her forced estrangement from her father, but might just as easily have been referring to her mother, as judicial gender stereotypes also devalue mothers who do not conform to judges’ views of “appropriate” parental behavior. Here are selected excerpts from her message to parliamentarians, and the public, about the effects of divorce on children, and particularly the damaging effects of misguided child and family policies and practices: 

“Hi there, my name is Aimee Nicholls, I’m 16 years old, and 11 years ago, my parents divorced. It doesn’t matter why right now, that’s history… It’s certainly not something that I wanted, but I also had no say... I do love my mom and dad both the same… My dad shared my care before my parents split.

Despite what people want you to think, I’ve learned that family law… works exactly how it was designed to work... It makes more money for everyone working in family law, and my situation is only partly resolved after 11 years of fighting... The system doesn’t like giving up, unless you’re one of the few families it allows to be different to “prove” that it’s fair. It clearly isn’t fair.

When I voted with my feet at age 15 to go live with my dad again, a family court judge, like all of the other ones before tried to force me to go back to my mum. And he told me I was too young to express my views to him… He said he needed social services to tell him what my views were. Think about that. I was sat in a court room at the age of almost 16, in front of him, and he effectively stuck his fingers in his ears and sang la la la. He ignored that I said that I felt at risk, probably because risk never really comes into it, unless it can be pointed at a dad to split him and his child up. More delay, more work for the system, more income, more funding. That’s what it’s all about. If you need a good reason to open up the secret family courts to the public, this is one. I bet the judge would not have dared say any of that to me if there were people watching. I was almost an adult, and I understood exactly what he was doing. His game of pretending to not be able to hear my voice was really disheartening.

It was horrible. Why would I want to go back to social services who had always misled the court about my views? They make it their job to lie, and to twist things, and this judge was just giving them another chance to do that. After 11 years of being involved, I would say it’s worse than it’s ever been at this point, right now, for kids... Ever since I started speaking out, I’ve heard from hundreds of families, and it’s always the same thing. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. For the politicians watching, the ones that want to believe all the lies; wake up. It’s worse than it’s ever been, and it’s happening on your watch. For example, the courts are still trying to ruin things for me and my dad. They stripped him of all his income, so that he can’t care for me. If they can’t force me to live with my mum, they’re just going to ruin it for me and my dad. That’s fine now, it’s fine for me, I go out and work, I’m 16. But why should we not just be left to live peacefully after all of this... Not every other kid my age is like me. They don’t speak out. More should, but they don’t. And that’s why the system can carry on…

The problem is, you can’t keep my generation quiet, and we will remember you... And those people will have to answer to us. And on that topic, I’d like to mention a few special people, who deserve to be remembered for making my life hell.

First of all, judges. I say judges (plural), not just one, because my family has been through a lot of different courts and different judges, and they all say the same thing. That’s not a coincidence. The only way that could happen is if the system is set up that way, and it’s set up wrong. I saw it myself when I made my own application at 15. The application doesn’t even cater for someone like a child… the judge just slapped me down and ignored everything I said... The judge just couldn’t care less, because it’s not what he’s used to doing, and he’s not meant to do that (i.e., he is meant to put me, the child, first).

Next, there’s teachers and school counsellors that I talked to numerous times when I was in school... Later they told social workers that I had never indicated a problem, or expressed my views. They are probably all still in their jobs abusing kids just like me.

Next, there’s the (family court) expert witness that made my dad sound like he was some kind of psychopath. Clearly he isn’t, but that doesn’t matter. This guy took a huge fee and wrote some rubbish to ensure that my sister and I would be kept from seeing my dad. And he’s still out there as well, destroying families, taking his large fees. I hope he’s enjoying the money that he got from destroying my life, and my sister’s life. She’s seven...

And, lastly, a very special mention for the (child welfare officer) who did everything in her power to keep me from my dad. From lying in the reports, to “losing” my wishes and feelings report… Also, repeated interviews which were not meant to happen. With increasing pressure until I told her that I wanted to live with my mum. I guess she’s still out there as well, destroying other children’s lives.

The system is completely broken. Almost everyone working in the system has some vested interest in what’s going on, and they’re making it worse. If it’s not money and work, it’s politics... The whole secrecy thing, it just makes it a 100 times worse. I personally think that would be one of the main things that would resolve this. Family law, and the courts, and social services and (child welfare officers) all just have too much money, and they use it to put pressure on the government to continue doing what they do. Nobody else’s voice gets heard. Politicians just need to stop this, and not in a few months, or two years, or a few weeks even. They need to do it now…

I want us all to be together, why can’t that happen? There’s no reason for that not to happen. You should explain it to me and my sister in a way that makes sense to us, because all we know is that we love each other, and we love our dad, and some pensioner in buckle shoes and a wig keeps telling us that it’s not in our best interest. I think family law is not in my best interest. And I think it’s time for it to go.

I’m Aimee Nicholls. Thank you for listening. Now go out and do something about it.”

Kruk, E. (2013). The Equal Parent Presumption: Social Justice in the Legal Determination of Parenting After Divorce. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Post by Leading Women For Shared Parenting.

Separation and Divorce Related Malicious Parent Syndrome

Wake Up to Parental Alienation

Mike Jeffries, author of A Family’s Heartbreak: 

A Parent’s Introduction to Parental Alienation, discusses the cost of parental alienation with host Melody Brooke on her womensradio.com program, Wake Up Call. Brooke, a licensed marriage and family therapist, devoted the entire 30-minute progam to helping her listeners understand what drives one parent to damage, and sometimes destroy, a normal, healthy, loving relationship between a child and the child’s other parent. “Melody sees parental alienation in her practice so she knows how parental alienation, if not addressed quickly and effectively, can have a life-long effect on everyone involved. Devoting her entire 30-minute program to the topic will hopefully help her listeners avoid these devastating consequences,” Jeffries said.

A FAMILY'S HEARTBREAK is an excellent book for any parent or targeted party in a parental alienation circumstance. Accompanying song licensed by publishing companies, "Video Wizards Music" and "Colorado Music" for use with SyndicatedNews.NET and SyndicatedNews.COM on an unlimited non-exclusive basis in exchange for promotional consideration. Owner / Administrator Video Wizards Music / BMI Colorado Music / ASCAP.

Parental Alienation and the DSM-5

The DSM-5 Task Force will publish the next edition of the mental health profession’s Bible in 2013 and Task Force members are still considering whether or not to include parental alienation somewhere in the book.

Family Courts are nearly all-powerful, unaccountable star chambers that openly reject due process, traditional legal rights and the Constitution itself

Dr. Baskerville presents a compelling argument for a paradigm shift globally to recognize the role of both fit parents in childrens lives and a departure from the current trajectory toward the growing welfare state in western civilization.

Yet what most do not know, even if they follow family issues, is that our family courts are nearly all-powerful, unaccountable star chambers that openly reject due process, traditional legal rights and the Constitution itself.

Family courts are civil courts or courts of equity, not criminal courts, so most constitutional protections and procedures do not apply, even though these courts have been given tremendous power.

They routinely take couples’ children away from them without trial on the flimsiest accusation of abuse from a teacher or neighbor, limit or eliminate one or both parents’ contact with their own children after divorce without any evidence of wrongdoing on the parents’ part, order parents to pay the fees of lawyers and psychotherapists they did not hire, and send parents to jail without a hearing.

"The family crisis is caused by a government assault on the family"

Baskerville, whose articles have frequently appeared in HUMAN EVENTS, specializes in research on and activism in how public policy affects fathers and families. He believes that the government began the disintegration of the American family. “The family crisis is caused by a government assault on the family,” he said. “The position of the father has been weakened. The two big things that have weakened fathers have come from the government. One is the welfare state, which replaces the father’s income….The other, which grew out of that, is the change in divorce laws–no-fault divorce since about 1970.” He noted that divorce law is the province of state governments, not the federal government. “If you go back and look at it, it’s amazing how much culture follows law,” he said.

Trojan Horse in Family Law?

Barbara Kay: The awkward truth about spousal abuse

One of first-wave feminism’s great achievements in the 1970s was to end the denial surrounding wife abuse in even the “best” homes. Resources for abused women proliferated. Traditional social, judicial and political attitudes toward violence against women were cleansed and reconstructed along feminist-designed lines.

But then a funny thing happened. The closet from which abuse victims were emerging had, everyone assumed, been filled with women. But honest researchers were surprised by the results of their own objective inquiries. They were all finding, independently, that intimate partner violence (IPV) is mostly bidirectional.

But by then the IPV domain was awash in heavily politicized stakeholders. Even peer-reviewed community-based studies providing politically incorrect conclusions were cut off at the pass, their researchers’ names passed over for task force appointments and the writing of training manuals for the judiciary. Neither were internal whistle-blowers suffered gladly. Erin Pizzey, who opened the first refuge for battered women in England in 1971, was “disappeared” from the feminist movement when she revealed what she learned in her own shelter: She committed a heresy by asking women about their own violence, and they told her.

The most extreme IPV is certainly male-on-female, but hard-core batterers and outright killers are rare. In violence of the mild to moderately severe variety that constitutes most of IPV — shoving, slapping, hitting, punching, throwing objects, even stabbing and burning — both genders initiate and cause harm in equal measure.

Every major survey has borne out this truth. In fact, the most reliable, like Canada’s 1999 General Social Survey, found not only that most male and female violence is reciprocal, but also that the younger the sample, the more violent the women relative to men. A meta-analysis of mor than 80 large-scale surveys notes a widening, and concerning, spread — less male and more female IPV — in the dating cohort.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has just published its National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey to great fanfare. The survey’s central finding is — yep — that men and women inflict and suffer equal rates of IPV, with 6.5% of men and 6.3% of women experiencing partner aggression in the past year. More men (18%) suffer psychological aggression (humiliation, threats of violence, controllingness) than women (14%). Feminists often define IPV as a “pattern of power and control,” but the survey finds that men were 50% more likely to have experienced coercive control than women (15.2% vs 10.7%).

(While the CDC survey does not reference Canadian data, our IPV statistics vary significantly from the U.S.’s in certain respects. “Minor” wife assault rates as measured on the commonly employed Conflict Tactics Scale are identical, but “severe violence” rates in Canada fall as the violence ratchets up. For “kicking” and “hitting,” Canadian rates were 80% of the American rate; for “beat up,” they were 25%; and for “threatened with or used a gun/knife,” they were only 17%.)

By now there is no excuse for the failure of governments at all levels to follow through on — or at least acknowledge — the settled science of bilateral violence. Yet just last week the Justice Institute of British Columbia issued a lengthy report on “Domestic Violence Prevention and Reduction,” and sure enough, it defines domestic violence as “intimate partner violence against women,” recommending only that government work “to bridge gaps in the services and systems designed to protect women and children.”

In Rethinking Domestic Violence (2006), his third in a series of comprehensive interdisciplinary reviews of IPV and related criminal justice research, University of British Columbia psychology professor Don Dutton cuts through the politicized clutter in this domain. Dutton concludes that personality disorder, culture and a background of family dysfunction, not gender, are the best predictors of partner violence. To further IPV harm reduction, Dutton recommends individual psychological treatment or couples therapy to replace the ideology-inspired thought-reform model, imposed only on male abusers, that has been common (and largely ineffective) practice for many years.

Ironically, and unjustly, abused men today are where women were 60 years ago: their ill-treatment is ignored, trivialized or mocked; there are virtually no funded resources for them; and they are expected to suffer partner violence in silence. Which most of them do.

Who will have the courage to bell this politically correct cat? When will revenge end and fairness begin?

National Post -- Barbara Kay Dec 21, 2011 – 7:30 AM ET | Last Updated: Dec 20, 2011 5:35 PM ET

Post by Children's Rights.

Website http://erinpizzey.com

IT IS THE CHILD'S HUMAN RIGHT TO ACCESS BOTH PARENTS.

Please view this video it exposes the abuse of both women and men by the family law system. Global action for equal parenting. Take action to expose the trojan horse hidden by the corrupt who seek to abuse the

Child and Family for profit and funding.

Children's Rights Florida

www.mediaradar.org

WHY IS THIS A CRITICAL ISSUE?

Post by Childrens Rights Florida.

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Partner Abuse State Of Knowledge Project

DVI- The Inside Story from Tom Lemons on Vimeo.

Finally I am releasing my documentary DVI The Inside Story for public viewing. I hope all of you enjoy the film. I will begin production of my next film (untitled) in September, which will contain shocking footage from inside a County Clerk's Office and Batterer's Intervention Programs. I'll keep you posted.

Partner Abuse State Of Knowledge Project from Childrens Rights Florida

VAWA is unconstitutional - VAWA is in violation of human rights - VAWA is destructive to families

VAWA puts government funds and other (dangerous) resources in the hands of private (non-profit) organizations staffed with very sick individuals.

VAWA does not address the issue it was meant to address, i.e. to reduce domestic violence, it does not offer a solution, it does not resolve or improve anything and it only aggravates the problem (e.g. after visiting a shelter and accusing her husband, the woman must hide for the rest of her life).

VAWA causes innocent citizens to lose respect for the federal government and the legal system. 1. The law (VAWA), the courts and police in domestic situations only help women and assume that men are always the perpetrators. 2. The government is funding the propaganda that women are victims and men are perpetrators, as well as false accusations against men and prosecutions (persecution) of innocent men. 3. In no time is there an investigation, an interrogation or diagnosis to determine who the real victim is and who the abuser is.

 The woman gets a shelter, pro-bono legal help to get her a protective order and to accuse (falsely in many cases) the man, and if she is an immigrant also legal help to file a VAWA self-petition for a Green-Card. 4. The man is removed from his home, gets arrested, accused (falsely), prosecuted, jailed and as a consequence he loses his job, becomes unemployable and his life is totally ruined. All the above happens without any legal due process, without investigation, interrogation, questioning or verification.

Can you imagine anything more destructive to society than the Government funding false accusations and incrimination of innocent citizens!

FLORIDA FAMILIES UNITED - CHILDREN'S RIGHTS FLORIDA - 2017 from Childrens Rights Florida

Dad Resources

Family First Celebrates 25 Years from Family First on Vimeo.
This year, Family First turns 25 years old! To celebrate all the families, marriages, and children that have been impacted by our work over the past 2 and a half decades, we are launching our 25th anniversary campaign: #CelebrateFamily. Family First has always been about helping families love well. We are now reaching 10 million users online, and millions more on land and on the air with truth that will help them love well. Stay tuned over the next few months as we hope to inspire more people to join us in celebrating family. www.FamilyFirst.net/anniversary

Free Resources

Story Behind All Pro Dad and Family First from Family First on Vimeo.
All Pro Dad is the fatherhood program of Family First, a national nonprofit that is impacting millions of families worldwide.

"Dad, be passionate about the one who provided you the opportunity to be a father in the first place"

 National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse

The President's Fatherhood Pledge

Fatherlessness is a growing crisis in America, one that underlies many of the challenges that families are facing. When dads aren't around, young people are more likely to drop out of school, use drugs, be involved in the criminal justice system, and become young parents themselves.

President Obama grew up without his dad, and has said that being a father is the most important job he has. That's why the President is joining dads from across the nation in a fatherhood pledge — a pledge that we'll do everything we can to be there for our children and for young people whose fathers are not around.

Published on Jul 28, 2015

A teenager tells his dad, “You don’t do anything for me.” As a father of four, Carey Casey, author and CEO of the National Center for Fathering, knows that's just not true. Here he is on Today's Father.

Visit http://www.fathers.com for ideas, advice and inspiration for being the best dad you can be to your children.