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

Last week Scrap made a post about the recent Families Commission funded study on non-resident fathers.

If you missed it, here is the Media Release from Families Commission

You can download the report Pathways through Parental Separation here [PDF, 557K]

Since then, there have been a couple of mentions in the media, and author Phil Chapman has been interviewed twice on Radio NZ.

Separation Painful for Fathers
Tuesday, 21 July 2009, 2:01 pm
Press Release: Relationship Services

“We agree that there is a need for support or coaching for parents who are going through a separation. It can make a big difference to their lives, and to their children,” said [Cary Hayward, National Practice Manager of Relationship Services].

The fathers in the report also believed that the counselling process seemed to suit women more. “This is something which, as counsellors, we need to be aware of.”

“It’s important that men find a counsellor they are comfortable with, that they can talk with”, said Mr Hayward. “Often men will find it easier to talk to a male counsellor.” A quarter of Relationship Services counsellors are men.

(more…)

I was interested to come across the minutes of a meeting of staff at the North Shore Family Court on 07 April 2009 [67KB PDF].

The minutes are posted in the form of a newsletter on the Auckland District Law Society website and give some insight into the mindset and thinking of those who control our lives once we get thrown into the Family Court system. (more…)

Good morning judge green, now known as judge clarkson.

I met you at a familycaught hearing at 10 am on 6th October 1992. I had applied for this hearing 10 months earlier, after my children were abducted from my settled care and then re-enrolled into schools in the mother’s area. Although I applied to the familycaught in good faith, you used every available delaying tactic, so that it could be said that the children were now in the mother’s settled care. Essentially, you manufactured evidence, to support the child abducting mother.

As I walked into the hearing, I had known for 9 months that the hearing would be a charade, could only be a charade, just a dishonest window dressing amateur theatre. The fact that you had left the children in her care and delayed access to a hearing for 11 months, made it clear that your decision about whether to return the children after abduction, had actually been taken when the familycaught received the papers, that is before the evidence had been heard.

The only information that your decision was based on – was that the abductor was the mother.
(more…)

Whose Finger Pulled the Suicide Trigger?

The TVNZ website, source NZPA had the following report:

Bevin said the Father’s Coalition had wanted to raise with the commission a range of issues, particularly the likelihood that family break-ups, and events such as separations and divorces, were key factors in a high incidence of suicide among middle-aged men.
This “man-toll” comprised many of the 300 men among the 500 annual suicides, he said.
But curry said the coalition’s concerns about Family Court proceeds potentially being a trigger for suicide had been confirmed by the court’s principal judge, Peter Boshier.

Mr. Kerry Bevin’s speech didn’t narrow down the culpable parties. I have tried to point the finger in what I believe is the largest single culpable direction – “judges”.

My interest in parental suicide, on forced separation from children, was triggered by listening to a speech given by Dr. Vivian Roberts, a Hastings GP.

My initial reaction was of total disbelief. Something wasn’t lying right, but it took me a few weeks to put my finger on it.
(more…)

The Families Commission cancelled a meeting with a group of loudmouthed, somewhat poor, self-opinionated fathers.

Having taken the decision about one week prior, they notified these fathers, as they tried to walk into the Families Commission building in Wellington.

If we look at the constructiveness of the Families Commission action, we can see that if they had given earlier notice of their desire to stand up, they would have saved these somewhat poor fathers the costs of travel and taking time off work.

A different word from constructiveness is courtesy!
(more…)

Living comfortably with our human reality – we are animals
Putting responsibility where it is due – on the original decision-maker.

A recent incest case in Auckland District Caught brings home how some of our legislation is quite out of touch with our human reality.

When children are separated from siblings or a parent at an early age and they meet as adults, they are at very high risk of developing a sexual attachment. (For this reason, organisations who assist adoptees remaking contact with family, usually supervise first introductions, to protect them from overreacting to the intense emotions that may occur from the initial introduction.)
(more…)

The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison
AVON BOOKS, INC.
1350 Avenue of the Americas New York, New York 10019
In this extraordinary memoir, one of today’s best young American writers transforms into a work of art the darkest passage imaginable in a young woman’s life: an obsessive love affair between father and daughter that began when the author, then twenty years old, was reunited with the father whose absence had haunted her youth. Exquisitely and hypnotically written, like a bold and terrifying dream, The Kiss is breathtaking in its honesty, power, and beauty. It is a story about taboo, about family complicity in breaking taboo, and about the most primal of love triangles: the one that ensnares a child between mother and father
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
We meet at airports. We meet in cities where we’ve never been before. We meet where no one will recognize us.
One of us flies, the other brings a car, and in it we set out for some destination. Increasingly, the places we go are unreal places: the Petrified Forest, Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon-places as stark and beautiful and deadly as those revealed in satellite photographs of distant planets. Airless, burning, in-human.
Against such backdrops, my father takes my face in his hands. He tips it up and kisses my closed eyes, my throat. I feel his fingers in the hair at the nape of my neck. I feel his hot breath on my eyelids.
(more…)

Hans writes..

The Families Commission had made a commitment to meet next week with a small group of fathers who have been active in the men’s movement, mainly professional people myself included. A main theme for discussion was to be the high male suicide rate and its relationship to social policy and family law. However, following Jim Bagnall’s campaign in an Auckland school that was publicized in last weekend’s Sunday News, the Families Commission decided to back out of the meeting.

In response protests were organised for Wellington and Auckland.

A men’s lobby on Wednesday staged a protest outside the Families Commission in Wellington after the commission cancelled a scheduled meeting with its representatives.
(more…)

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/2664749/New-rules-to-help-rape-victims

There you have it, gentlemen.
If this all comes to pass, you will need to ascertain a definitive ‘yes’ to each and every act of intimacy; where Ms. HLF only has to say after the event “I didn’t actually say ‘yes’”, in order for you to be guilty of a crime.

How will you establish after the event, maybe days, weeks, even years after the event, that she gave informed consent to any particular act?
“No” is no longer declinature of consent; no explicit “Yes” will be effectively “No”
Will you have proof that she positively consented?
(more…)

Media release – Familes Commission

Non-resident fathers study suggests more support needed

21 July 2009

A group of separated fathers who experienced enormous grief and frustration when they were no longer able to live with their children have told researchers that community services do not provide the help they needed.

The study Pathways through Parental Separation [PDF, 557K], funded by the Families Commission Innovative Practice Fund, analysed discussions with 20 non-resident fathers to find strategies for supporting fathers through the process of separation.