MENZ Issues: news and discussion about New Zealand men, fathers, family law, divorce, courts, protests, gender politics, and male health.

Will someone pleeeease provide the goss for what happened on Sunday. I heard on the news today that the hose-lady was to be charged with assault with a weapon of Mass Watering.:–)) I have to assume that you guys are way above pressing charges.

Surely, in doing so, you all just join the ranks of the rabid PC brigade.

Cheers
David.

One man I know was held by the Family Court to be violent, because he threw cold water (a bucket full) over his (then) wife (in their bed, committing adultary).
He was charged with assault. He had to leave his family home. He was subject to a protection order. He had to attend a femi-nazi programme learning not to be violent.

On TV tonight, I witnessed a woman throwing cold water (via a hose) over two of the fathers protesting in Auckland. I didn’t catch who she is, or her profession.

Will she be charged with assault? If she is a family court lawyer, will she be ordered to undertake a ‘living without violence’ programme? Has she any children? Will she be restricted to supervised contact only with them? Will she be required to leave her home where the assault occurred? Will the assaulted men be awarded protection orders against her?

If not, why not?

Why Labour despises the family
Daily Mail, 27 July 2006

When New Labour came to power in 1997, a battle royal took place within its ranks over the issue of the family.

In one camp was Tony Blair, who understood that family breakdown was the hole at the heart of British society and who wanted to strengthen the two-parent family. Ranged against him was just about everyone else, all of whom thought that every form of relationship should be afforded equal status. The Prime Minister lost this argument hands-down.

The result was the lame formula subsequently adopted by his Government that it supported marriage and every other type of ‘family’, too — a transparently verbal camouflage for a relationship free-for-all.
(more…)

CSA: goodbye – and good riddance?

Parents who don’t pay up could get electronic tags
After thirteen troubled years, the Child Support Agency is to be scrapped in its current form.
Ministers are expected to set out plans later today to dismantle the CSA. Its replacement will be a slimmed down agency which will concentrate on those absent parents who refuse to pay up.

LINK ->

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/breakfast/5208976.stm

Dateline: US
Author: Pit Bull
From: The Honor Network

Houston Mother Who Systematically Drowned her Five Children in the Family Bathtub Found not Guilty by Reason of Insanity

Well here we have another example for two justice systems (one for men and one for women). “Equality” where are you now! Mrs. Yates benefit from the old ways for women yet again in our modern times, and you won’t hear anyone crying out for equality in the mainstream press.

“If this were a man” kinda seems tiring to shout out, for it has gotten so common with no one seeming to care about how unjust it all is. Yet stick it in your cap and use it to modivate yourself is your activsim.

Mrs. Yates will be committed to a state mental hospital, with periodic hearings before a judge to determine whether she should be released on th public. She could have lived a life in prison if convicted, but I guess she is only a woman.

Her lawyers never disputed that Mrs. Yates killed her five children — 6-month-old Mary, 2-year-old Luke, 3-year-old Paul, 5-year-old John and 7-year-old Noah — by drowning them over serveral hours in a bathtub of their suburban Houston home in June 2001.

The shear terror of the children awaiting their turn in the tub, must have been set aside out of the women’s superior motherly love trumping any brutal male backward form of revenge justice. How’s that slogan for the feminists!

In 2002 another jury found Yates guilty of murder in the deaths of three of her children. Due to erroneous testimony she will be out and about before long, and count on someone blaming a man or the church for her badness.

The old ways or the new ways seem to be used whenever a woman need them, while men get a mix of their own old and new, but always to their lose.

The current focus of the Family Court is on ‘best interest of the child’. This, I would say, is something that is very difficult to determine. Also it ignores the presence of the parents, both mother and father and since the mother invariably ends up with the child, this makes the Family Court appear to be anti-father.

One possible remedy for this is to have the Family Court focus on the parent-child relationship. For every child in question there would be two parent-child relationships, one with the mother and one with the father. At the start of family court proceedings, if mediation fails, and it looks like the court will have to make a decision, these relationships would be assessed by a psychologist. The aim of the family court then would be to preserve parent-child relationships, while at the same time attempt to resolve disputes. Lawyers would be instructed to remove all references in affidavits that attack the spouses parent-child relationship. Parents would be given firmer instructions than at present about denigrating the other parent in front of the children. It is inevitable in most family court disputes that there are feelings surrounding marital separation to deal with and these often overflow into the area of parent-child relationships. The family court should emphasize and educate about the need to keep these separate, maybe providing parents with workshops run by organizations such as ParentLine.

Benefits of the parent-child focus:

The court would be required to recognize the importance of the parent. This is especially beneficial to fathers, who, with the current focus on the child, tend to miss out, and feel that the court is anti-father. Getting on side with the father means that, the chances of material and emotional support from both parents and not just the ‘custodial’ parent is more likely. It also makes the chances of shared parenting work better. Ultimately it has got to be better for the child if both parent-child relationships are preserved, not to mention being better for the father and mother.

Features:

The parent-child focus would require the parents to work on having the (negative) marital issues that separate them be countered by the (positive) parent-child relationships that draw them together (or at least draw them to their children). Parents have to learn to separate their relationship with the ex-spouse from that which they have with their children. The family court is a large enough institution to create the culture for this to happen.

The parent-child focus would require some complex assessments and psychological involvement in order to guide the court. It would be hoped that time currently spent on time-wasting adversarial contests could instead be used for this task and that parents would learn to be better parents as a result of the process.

DATELINE: US (Grand Ledge) & IRAQ
Author: Scott Rees
From : F4J (US)
Via: The Honor Network

By SCOTT REES Staff Writer

GRAND LEDGE – For the past week, Joe McNeilly’s phone has been ringing off the hook. He’s been contacted by newspapers, radio shows, and even the major television networks.

That’s the way he wants it.

McNeilly, a Grand Ledge resident and specialist with the Army National Guard, said he believes he lost custody of his 10-year-old son, Joey, because he was in Iraq for 15 months.

“This is the awareness we’ve needed. It’s great,” he said. He said he’s already been approached by other soldiers in the similar predicament.

However, the boy’s mother and his ex-girlfriend – Holly Erb, of Mason, her lawyer, and the Friend of the Court, say McNeilly lost custody because of his parenting skills.

The court referee’s report found that Erb had established a custodial environment for the child while McNeilly was deployed.

A hearing set for Wednesday, Aug. 24, before Ingham County Family Judge Janelle Lawless was postponed. A new date has not been set.

The custody battle has spurred a media blitz locally and nationally and attracted the attention of local politicians. State Rep. Rick Jones, introduced legislation this past week barring courts from using soldiers’ absence for active duty against them in custody hearings.

Jones said t 15 to 20 similar custody issues state-wide have arisen in the past three years.

“Do I expect this legislation to help me? No … but somebody needs to do this. This will help our fellow soldiers who are coming back,” McNeilly said.

Before his deployment in January, 2004, McNeilly and Erb shared joint custody. The child spent one week with his dad and one week with his mother, who also lived in Grand Ledge at the time.

Erb had petitioned for full custody of the child seven months after McNeilly joined the National Guard in 2003.

McNeilly said he agreed to temporarily give the mother full custody of their son and was told the issue would be revisited upon his return. Instead, the court referee recommended against restoring the original agreement and instead gave McNeilly visitation rights for every other weekend and on holidays.

In a recommendation, court referee Louis Belzer expressed concern over e-mail correspondences between the McNeilly and his son during his time in Iraq.

Belzer said the e-mails display a much different relationship than a typical parent-child relationship, and more as a “counterpart to share his military adventure.”

Belzer wrote, “I also question the nature of some of the correspondence relating to how to kill people in multiple ways and then indicating that ‘next time someone touches you and leaves bruises on you, I’ll be ready.’ ”

Belzer said McNeilly seemed more of the disposition to be a friend and buddy rather than a parent.

McNeilly said his statements were taken out of context and he was merely telling his son that if anyone hurt him, he should come to his father.

As for sharing his life in the military, what young boy hasn’t played with G.I. Joes, he asked.

Belzer’s report stated McNeilly was married in January, 2004, while in the military and on active status, residing with his wife and three step-children in Grand Ledge.

The referee’s report said McNeilly made a general reference to spending part of the time with his wife, and also time at his parents house and his sister’s house. He denied marital difficulties.

The referee, in his recommendation to the judge, determined that Erb would provide Joey with a more stable environment as she now resides with her husband, a step-child, and a new child by her husband.

“Them pulling him out of a consistent environment (in Grand Ledge) of six years. That doesn’t make sense,” McNeilly said.

McNeilly filed an objection to the recommendations claiming incorrect procedural information regarding the temporary order, the referee stated information incorrectly, and biased direction of the friend of the court against men.

McNeilly also stated the referee failed to mention and take into account Erb’s negative actions. She was the defendant in the case.

He claims Erb intentionally made it difficult for him to keep in consistent contact with his son, not responding to e-mails and phone calls inquiring about grades and his son’s well-being.

“Why do I have to go through this? Why does anybody have to go through this? I mean, we’re parents,” McNeilly said.

“Give me time with my son, I’ve earned it,” he added.

21st Century Dear Joe Letter Might go like this:

Dear Joe,
I’ve found another bloke and I’m taking your kid. Dad stepping on an IUD isn’t good for a child. I’m really concerned about the child.

You can now get a paternity test at 5 weeks into a pregnancy:

www.australianpaternityfraud.org

The best way to secure yourself against paternity fraud is to either get the test done or to get a written statement from the mother that she has absolutely no doubts about the paternity of the child. In other words only she knows for certain whether or not she has slept around, been raped or visited a sperm bank during the possible conception time. Those who rile at what Meredith did to Liam may find it worthwhile putting energy into getting this test made available to men free of charge. That would be a good and positive cause.

You cannot change the past. DNA testing is new technology and what we know today we didn’t know ten years ago. All historical cases of so called paternity fraud are likely to be treated with caution and probably a certain amount of clumsiness and with mixed results by the courts. Only when DNA testing is a day to day reality will the issue ever be clarified.

The Magill case failed partly because it opened up a Pandora’s box of endless possibility with regards to litigation against private deceit. The tort of deceit is supposed to apply to commercial relationships. Because a marriage certificate is a legal document it could be used to bring a tort of deceit against a man who commits adultery and this is far more frequent than misattributed paternity. That is the kind of precedent that the original decision would have set. The only winners here are the lawyers. What is needed is new legislation to apply to private matters such as paternity fraud and the latter can only apply when it is beyond doubt that paternity has been misattributed and the only surefire way of achieving that is through a DNA test. Again, championing such a cause would be a positive step to take.

The existence of the DPB means that women have the choice of keeping a child if it was not fathered by their partner and he chooses not to formally adopt the child as his own. Until all men stop committing adultery, women cannot be expected to stop having children out of wedlock (which is not likely to happen anyway).

All in all, this focus on paternity fraud and biological fatherhood is only going help to reduce birth rates further below the less than replacement level that they are now.

Prior to DNA testing there was no way of knowing for sure that you weren’t the biological father of your children.� DNA testing has opened up a whole can of worms that society has yet to learn how to deal with.�

The term paternity fraud is� incorrect since 9 times out of 10 the woman cannot know for sure that a child is not the supposed father.� This reflects the judgment made� in the Australian High Court when Meredith Magill made her successful appeal against the previous $70,000 litigation.� To assume that all cases of misappropriated fatherhood are fraud� and that the mother is at fault completely lets off the hook the male who is invariably involved in all these cases.�

Actual statistics of misappropriated paternity are hard to quantify.� The link at http://www.australianpaternityfraud.org/statistics.htm� might give some idea.� Basically for most of humankind men have been bringing up children for whom they are not the biological father.� They have not been experiencing any devastation or stress because they haven’t known.� What they didn’t know didn’t hurt them.� Now that we have DNA testing we suddenly have this male insistence that the only true father is a biological one.

The existence of DNA testing changes everything.

We have to approach child birth from a completely new angle.� Some ideas can be found here

http://www.canadiancrc.com/articles/The_Age_Secrets_Lies_26NOV05.htm

What all this should make clear is that the current child-support payment system, which assigns payment obligations on the basis of biological paternity, not parenting commitment, is tragically flawed. Regardless of whether the father suspected, knew or had no idea that the child he was parenting was genetically unrelated, and notwithstanding however culpable his female partner’s behaviour was in creating that situation, the law needs to recognise and affirm men’s value to children as parents – and people – not sperm donors. Playing the biological card not only undercuts research findings that affirm the importance to children of having an active male parent in their lives, but lends support to the insulting claim made by a sperm donor interviewed on Four Corners last month that he, not the man who invested 20 years of time and love, was his daughter’s “real” father.

After the Magill case, this is where the law is quite likely to go.

And this too:

Of course, rejecting mandatory paternity testing at birth does not mean that men should not be assisted to accept the obligations of fatherhood in a more informed way. Upon the birth of a child, men ought to be given the opportunity to give one-time-only non-rescindable consent to their acceptance of the rights and responsibilities of fatherhood. If they feel unable to sign on the dotted line without conclusive proof that they are the biological progenitor, they should be offered a DNA test free of charge.

However, once a man does formally accept social and legal responsibility for a child – either with knowledge of their genetic paternity or in the face of a fully informed waiver of that knowledge – their status as the child’s legal father should rightly be set in stone. No DNA skeletons rattling out of the cupboards at a later date should affect what they legally owe their child or, hopefully, how they feel about the kid who calls him dad.

This site is supposed to be supportive of the need for� children to have a father� present in their lives.� I would expect nothing less than a positive response to these ideas from fellow posters.

�

�

By: CARLY CRAWFORD

“It’s probably a scare tactic — someone trying to scare me out of defending the appeal,” he said.

I guess they will now emotionally rationalize this into the Mr. Liam’s fault with some mental gymanstics of some sort! Oppressed minorites are always blamed for those who abuse them. If you get angry your an angry white male, if you take it on the chin again and again you deserve it. This is a no win game preached by those who want us to fail. We need to ignore them and unite the moderates and radicals and call out the pretenders (Kent).