Stop The Responsible Fatherhood Bill

"All I ever wanted was supervised" a repeated phrase amongst family violence survivors.  The Family Court has come under recent scrutiny over unsafe contact and the controversial use of Parental Alienation Syndrome a diagnosis that has not been accepted by any scientific organization globally.  The bottom line is that children are ordered by the court to attend access visits where the parents are abusive.  If the mother objects, she risks losing the children altogether.  That is the state of not only the Family Court in Australia, it is an international problem.  

Until recently, there were few groups that were advocating for children and far too many groups advocating for such forced contact.  "Pro Contact" culture is really just being polite.  "Contact No Matter what" Cult, is more appropriate considering the facts that there is no limit as to who they wish children to have contact with.  

Cult definitions coined from 1920 onward^[1] refer to a cohesive social group and their devotional beliefs or practices, which the surrounding population considers to be outside of mainstream cultures. The surrounding population may be as small as a neighborhood, or as large as the community of nations. They gratify curiosity about, take action against, or ignore a group, depending on its reputed similarity to cults previously reported by mass media. -Wikipedia

Bizarre punishments against mothers are initiated by the courts if they do not comply without consideration for the impact that the children suffer.  

Some of these punishments include:

"Isolating The Child From The Protective Parent"

"Orders inhibiting the Child From access to Counseling"

"Removal of The Mothers Passport'

In cases where the parent has a mental health condition that is one of the leading causes of homicide, the protective action is often minimal.  Some orders are for the parent to take their medication and see their doctor, but left entirely to the device of the patient and the potential victims are left restricted by the court order and helpless to what might come about.  The Court evaluators who make the decisions that the judges often solely rely on are often untrained for these cases, but overtrained in the area of "pro - contact' and too well understand the terms of "maternal gatekeeping" "Alienation" and "False Memory Syndrome".  They believe that the child is not unsafe in relationships with sex offenders if they "just accept it" without the interference from mothers.  

This is due to the fact that in the early 80s, Dr Richard Gardner coined the term, "Parent Alienation Syndrome" and travelled the world with the help of Association of Family and Conciliation Courts(AFCC).  Many conferences were held indoctrinating lawyers, psychologists and judges into the belief that children are better off with abusive parents.  This belief was also supported by the international Child Emancipation, a lobby group for pedophiles.  

Cases where there is not enough evidence to support Family Violence are often referred to as, "False Allegations" and in most cases the victim is required to pay costs to the alleged perpetrator. This goes against studies that support the notion that in 95% of child abuse cases are true.  Clearly it is the interference that the victims receive during the court processes that leads to the lack of evidence that is able to be provided.  

Like the German Lebensborn organization, they said, "Best Interests" but the intention was to reintroduce laws that tie women to men and diminish any concerns regarding child abuse and violence against women.  The current family law regime reduces the value of children and mothers compared to men and promotes the cycle of violence continuing through to another generation.  Like a genetic disease, our children have been infected with family violence.  

The German Lebensborn organization was similarly cruel in its time.  In the context of the German welfare system, it was considered that it was the "best interests" of the child to be German.  By abducting babies of other origins for German families, "Best Interests of the child" was created to serve the purposes of racial intolerance.  Today in the context of Family Law, "best interests of the child" refers to the amount of time spent with a parent no matter how abusive they may be. 

Although there have been more efforts to protect mothers and children affected by family violence with the Violence Against Women Act and the introduction of the Protective Parent Bill, PAS is still alive in the US court system and have progressed to a point where they are supporting it through the "Responsible Fatherhood Bill".  Like best Interests, it is aimed at enforcing contact with fathers regardless of the rise to epidemic proportions of murder suicides.  In sect 2, "Findings" it states that the reason to provide fathers with billions of dollars in funding is due to:

6) Children who live without contact with their biological father are, in comparison to children who have such contact--

(A) 5 times more likely to live in poverty;

(B) more likely to bring weapons and drugs into the classroom;

(C) twice as likely to commit crime;

(D) twice as likely to drop out of school;

(E) more likely to commit suicide;

(F) more than twice as likely to abuse alcohol or drugs; and

(G) more likely to become pregnant as teenagers.

(7) Violent criminals are overwhelmingly males who grew up without fathers.

  

The findings stated here is derived from a confirmitory bias. If you look deeper into the research, it becomes obvious that:

Children were economically abused by the fathers and the state for withdrawal of financial support of children.  It is in fact written in the convention on The Rights Of The Child:

 

Article 26

1. States Parties shall recognize for every child the right to benefit from social security, including social insurance, and shall take the necessary measures to achieve the full realization of this right in accordance with their national law.

2. The benefits should, where appropriate, be granted, taking into account the resources and the circumstances of the child and persons having responsibility for the maintenance of the child, as well as any other consideration relevant to an application for benefits made by or on behalf of the child.

 

The "Violent males who grew up without fathers", were in fact infected prior to the separation by witnessing the actual violence.  According to Amy Coha:

• Boys who witness domestic violence are more likely to batter their female partners as adults than boys raised in nonviolent homes. Of the children who witness domestic abuse, 60% of the boys eventually become batterers.
• Sixty-three percent of boys age 11-20 who commit homicide, murder the man who was abusing their mother. In 50% of the time, if the wife (mother) is being physically abused, so are the children.

Teenage pregnancy is an old sexist phrase that draws the need to look at the pregnant women as the problem.  Contraceptives apart from the condom are directed at her as entirely responsible for the pregnancy.  According to Rape Abuse and Incest Network(RAIN):

Girls ages 16-19 are 4 times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault.

 

Victims of sexual assault are:⁷

3 times more likely to suffer from depression.

6 times more likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

13 times more likely to abuse alcohol.

26 times more likely to abuse drugs.

4 times more likely to contemplate suicide.

The fact that in some states, the perpetrator can apply to the Family Court to stop the abortion and continue these attacks on her suggests that women and girls are considered by the state as objects rather than human beings.  If such a bill were to pass, it would be a greater violation to the already eroded human rights of women and children.  

Rational: CJ Diana Bryant Acknowledges the injustice to victims

Push is on to review family law

• Selma Milovanovic
• May 4, 2009

A NATIONAL campaign against family violence has called for urgent changes to the Family Law Act to protect children from violence by fathers during court-imposed access visits.

In 2006, to emphasise shared parenting, the act was amended to balance the need to protect a child from violence with the child's benefit of having a meaningful relationship with both parents.

But some experts say the two principles are contradictory in cases of family violence.

At a Melbourne rally of Mayday! Safer Family Law Campaign yesterday, family lawyer Sarah Vessali said court practitioners who were out of touch with issues of family violence needed to be better educated in protecting children from harm.

She called for more legal aid funding, saying many women faced court unrepresented as funding had been cut. She said contact centres, which helped domestic violence victims, and crisis accommodation also needed better funding.

Family Court Chief Justice Diana Bryant said some changes were needed, but in a speech last week she lashed out at campaign organisers, calling them "the loudest and most shrill of voices" who "succeed in attributing blame of the murder of a child to, and only to, the Family Court or family courts".

Chief Justice Bryant has written to federal Attorney-General Robert McClelland suggesting part of the act be repealed, as the wrong interpretation of the law meant some women in custody hearings were less likely to report violence to the court.

She said yesterday she was "hearing a persistent view that the existing legislation gives mixed messages and should have a more obvious protective focus".

The act obliges family courts to take undefined "prompt action" in cases where violence or risk of violence is raised.

In a speech at Queensland University of Technology last week, Chief Justice Bryant said she was concerned about a section of the act that orders the awarding of costs against the party that maliciously makes false allegations of violence.

She said it was commonly misunderstood by families and lawyers to mean costs would be awarded against the complainant if they could not prove the violent act occurred.

She is also urging a review of a part of the act that could be interpreted as unfavourably considering a parent who alleges violence.

Court statistics for 2007-08 show that in litigated cases, 50-50 custody was awarded in only 15 per cent of cases. In 6 per cent of cases the father was banned from contacting the children because of abuse and family violence.

Ms Vessali said she was frustrated by the Family Court which, in most cases, awarded access to children for violent fathers despite the intervention orders her clients held against them.

Suffer the little children

• Jen Jewel Brown
• May 2, 2009

IT WAS 3am on Anzac Day when Dionne Fehring woke in fear. She was in her mother and stepfather's Tallebudgera house on the Gold Coast, the house she'd fled to after her marriage turned irrevocably violent. "I felt that there was something wrong. Just had that natural mother's instinct," she says now.

There's a quiet dignity holding the tremor in Fehring's voice these days.

"I just had a feeling from the moment that I woke up that something wasn't right. Everyone around me was very excited about the kids coming," she says.

"There was something inside me that would not let me get my hopes up. I had a feeling that he wouldn't make it that easy. But I never thought that he'd actually kill them … I thought he might kill me, but never them."

Fehring, whose surname was Dalton back in 2004, was right to be afraid. At 3am precisely, her two children, 17-month-old daughter Jessie and baby Patrick, 12 weeks, were being murdered by their father, Jayson Dalton.

"They know when it happened," says Fehring, "because when the police broke in, they broke in to find the kids lying dead on the bed, and he's actually put down the time that he had killed them and written it above their heads.

He had suffocated them with plastic bags. Then he killed himself the same way.

Moving to Seymour in country Victoria, Fehring has mercifully had two more young children she rejoices in. She now works as a patron with the Gold Coast Domestic Violence Prevention Centre.

She sees herself as a survivor rather than a victim. Yet a growing sense of frustration and bafflement has led her to speak out publicly for the first time since 2004.

"In five years, I have seen no changes in the way we deal with the deaths of women and children who come through the Family Court," she says. "We continue to lose these beautiful little children. It rocks me to the core. I have waves of sadness, then anger, that the deaths of my children were in vain."

The story of the Dalton family is just one of many domestic tragedies that have played out in Australia over recent years.

According to Australian Institute of Criminology research, an average of 25 children were killed by their parents each year between July 1989 and June 2002. Beyond this worst-case scenario is a hidden epidemic of child harm that the welfare system struggles to control.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reports that there were 317,526 reports of suspected child abuse and neglect made to state and territory authorities in 2007-08, continuing a trend of increased notifications — up more than 250 per cent on a decade ago.

Children at risk of such harm are likely to end up being processed by a family law system that critics, including Fehring, believe is not well-designed to protect them.

In 2006, the Family Law Act was substantially amended to reflect a greater emphasis on shared parental responsibility. One of the changes required the court to look at two primary considerations when deciding what is in the child's best interests. The first is the desire for children to have a meaningful relationship with both parents; the second the need to protect them.

But some experts believe that in cases of family violence, the principles conflict with one another.

Sarah Vessali, principal lawyer at the Women's Legal Service Victoria for almost eight years and now in private practice, deals daily with family law matters. "There is a contradiction between the two fundamental principles — they cannot work together where there is family violence," she says.

THE Dalton marriage had bloomed gently at first from an internet romance. "He had moments when he was loving and tender," recalls Fehring. But a punch that cracked their car windscreen also produced the first cracks in the marriage.

Dalton became verbally abusive. He insisted his wife go back to work three days after giving birth to Jessie, their firstborn. Then the beatings began.

In the 2½ years of their marriage, Dalton threw a microwave at his heavily pregnant wife and toddler, shattered French doors and bashed Fehring repeatedly. Multiple assaults were on police record. In fact, police were so concerned for her safety, they applied for (and were granted) a domestic violence order on her behalf, as she was too frightened to take one out herself.

By March 10, 2004, the marriage was in a state of collapse. Dalton, so much bigger than his wife, told her: "Tonight's the night. It's on. It's going to happen tonight."

Fehring was left in a state of intense fear. As she drove to her mother's with the kids, Dalton gave chase. He rang her mobile 76 times in that 90-minute drive.

When he hit her mother on arrival, he broke his latest domestic violence order for the second time. Arrested and jailed overnight, and released at midday the next day, Dalton was in a savage mental state.

Fehring began to panic. She had given birth to Patrick (who, although much loved, was conceived, she says, when Dalton raped her), only about six weeks earlier. She didn't last the five-hour drive with her mother and the kids to a relative's home. Exhausted and at breaking point, she was hospitalised in the acute mental health unit at Toowoomba Hospital for 10 days. That was Dalton's chance.

On March 17, 2004, in a 14-minute hearing, the Brisbane Family Court gave interim custody of the infant Patrick and his sister Jessie to Jayson Dalton, former One Nation candidate and long-term batterer.

Fehring's solicitor, Ros Byrne, had less than 24 hours warning of Dalton's bid for custody. She told the judge: "There are domestic violence issues." That was it.

Fehring, ill, could not be there. "I have no idea why they gave him custody," she says. "And I don't think I'll ever understand it. They were in no danger, they'd been with mum, she was taking care of them with my sister.

"My solicitor knew I was petrified. She told the court there were domestic violence issues and yet the children were handed over to a violent man."

In the weeks that followed, Dalton's dad helped his son care for the children. By April 23, Fehring was well enough to go back to court and be awarded custody, with Jayson to have the children every second weekend. On Anzac Day, Dalton was supposed to hand the children back.

Asked to turn her mind back to that Anzac Day afternoon, and the mad dash she made from the Gold Coast when Dalton did not arrive at the Southport police station with the children as arranged, Fehring clears her throat. Although she didn't know it then, her mother had already found Dalton's emailed suicide note.

"My mobile had gone dead and so no one could call and tell us what had happened, and by the time we got up there, just to the rise of where the actual house was at the bottom of the hill, um, we could see all the flashing lights, fire brigade and the ambulance and newsmen and everything else, and I just raced across the road," she says.

"The police stopped me from going up the stairs into the house and I just said to them, 'Cover me, I don't want anyone to see me', and I just collapsed in a heap. My stepfather nearly had a breakdown. He tried to climb the stairs and they pulled him back."

She continues after a deep sigh. "We didn't get to say goodbye to my babies until early the next morning. I had to go to the morgue and identify them. Their little bodies covered with a sheet.

"I just want something changed so that we can protect women and children so that these cases don't continue to happen. No mother should ever be put through that experience."

Child abuse expert emeritus professor Freda Briggs, of the education, arts and social sciences division of the University of South Australia, has firm views about changes needed to family law.

"The level of ignorance by judges and (Family Court) staff about child development, domestic violence and sexual abuse is inexcusable," she says.

"Judges ignore DV (domestic violence) because (a) some psychologists tell them that men who bash their wives don't necessarily bash their children and (b) they don't seem to know that witnessing violence is as damaging to children as being a victim of it. Education is so badly needed."

Sarah Vessali agrees that change is necessary. She suggests that Australia look to the New Zealand model, where the prima facie stance is that where allegations of abuse are raised, contact is disallowed until they are disproved.

In Australia, the legal system demands that the accusing parents prove such allegations, which can be difficult.

"If (the allegations) cannot satisfactorily be proven to the court … then (the accuser) runs the risk of having the court order costs against them," Vessali says.

A petition calling for change has gathered close to 3000 signatures from affected families and professionals, women and men. One anonymous signatory summed up the concerns of many who work in the system: "As a community worker providing support to women and children escaping domestic violence, we have significant contact with the Family Court and access orders.

"It has been our organisational experience that the family orders often place the children at risk of emotional, if not physical, abuse.

"It is of upmost priority, for the children involved, to have a closer look at issues of domestic violence when deciding on residency issues."

In Fehring's view, the system is going backwards not forwards. "Why do women and children continue to lose their lives?" she asks. "What I want is a more in-depth look into the Family Court. We need to get to the root of a problem and not just make a snap decision based on two minutes worth of information.

"I want us as a society to be able to see this openly." The media, she says, should not be prevented from reporting important cases. "If we are not made aware of these problems, then we blindly go about our day totally unaware of what is going on behind closed doors.

"The women who might be sitting at home contemplating leaving a domestic violence situation may get the strength to leave her relationship. We need to become proactive before any more of these problems occur and we lose more of our precious children."

As part of a campaign by concerned Australians to improve the way the Family Court system deals with cases such as Fehring's, national rallies, run by the Safer Family Law Campaign, are planned for this morning.

At the Mayday! rallies, affected parents wearing red scarves and masks to hide their identities (family law curtails free speech) will speak alongside child rights representatives, academics, lawyers and members of various groups.

Clotheslines strung with children's red clothes will be raised at rallies in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth.

Jen Jewel Brown is a Melbourne writer and Victorian co-ordinator of the Mayday! Safer Family Law Campaign rally, which will be held in Carlton Gardens, Rathdowne Street, 11am-12.15pm.