Who really murdered the “angel”?
Cold case: Death of ‘angel’ devastates dad – National – NZ Herald News
The biggest crooks here are the IRD and everyone involved with the Child Support system.
The father in all faith would have complained to the Police, should he have had the slightest inkling of his daughter missing. But the Child Support system kept on claiming money. Coupled with the fact that the wife’s disappearance was nothing out of ordinary, there were no warning triggers that something was amiss. The father has to be applauded for taking the initiative to hire a private investigator despite being leeched by Child Support system.
The Police are quick to acknowledge the fact that a late complaint made the investigations late. They should be taking this time to review their policies of treating males as criminals, and making modifications to the system such that the Family Law is not looked upon as a threat and something to stay away from.
A woman separating from her husband and disappearing does NOT always mean that she has been abused or the man has been violent or abusive.
There are other factors that also happen, such as, the woman getting into extra-marital affairs, or the woman’s family inciting her to live less like a couple and treat the family unit more like a matriarchy. Yes, in-law influence is an unfortunate fact in many cases also.
And the biggest botch-up has been made by the previous leftist Government. Having made the solo-mum-by-choice lifestyle so lucrative through WINZ and other benefits, they have created heaps of solo mums by choice and investment children.
My thoughts are with the father. Poor guy, caught up in a culture clash from a conservative developing country and a “all rights and no responsibility” Western country. Having lost an “angel” through the crooked system at such a tender age.
There are a lot of male suicides that have happened by evil feminist-run Family Courts and Child Support system. This is not so much an issue as men usually have lived most of their lives, but the loss of a daughter at this tender age, having caught up in this mess, is too tragic.
This murder’s blood had not only tainted the hands of the two accused, but has also tainted EVERYONE that supports this messed up system setup by the feminist liberals to oppress ALL males regardless of whether they are guilty or not.
There are a lot of questions to ask in this case.
Why is a child support parent not immediately, able to be provided with the address of the child he is paying for?
What was IRD doing? Taking his money but not ensuring it went to the parent collecting the money. They somehow kept collecting it for themselves, even though sadly (but technically) he should not have been paying.
What was the school system doing? A child who should have turned up in the school system did not turn up at the age of 5. Clearly there are no checks and balances taking place in the school system.
Comment by DJ Ward — Tue 21st October 2014 @ 10:25 am
Sincere condolences to the DAD, Kalim Faziel – HandsOnEqualParenting from conception deep within GLOBAL Family Law would make life a lot safer for ALL kids, give them the support of their **WHOLE Biological Family** and take the filthy lucre OUT of the system we currently have which usually destroys a Child’s relationships with at least one side of their Family and all to often ALL Family – MSD-CYFS-&-WINZ, the so called Family Court, so called Child Support, its Legislators (MP’s) and Purveyors have MUCH to Answer4 – BEST Invoke 2Chronicles 7:14, be Onward Together in Christ and FOLLOW His lead OUT of the MESS we have made of His Creation
Comment by Jim Bailey — Tue 21st October 2014 @ 4:30 pm
The mother didn’t want the child’s father to know where she was. If the father had tried to find his daughter, he would have been labelled a stalker and this would have been more than adequate grounds for a protection order. This is the reality of our feminist culture. In fact, the father hired a private investigator to find his wife and child. Therefore he is clearly a male abuser trying to exert power and control, and should be locked up.
The fact remains that children on average are many times safer in a household with their biological father than in any other arrangement. Measures to keep families together would do much more to stem child abuse than all the hot air and recommendations in the official reports to date, because it is misandrist feminists who are employed to write those reports. Fathers’ protectiveness towards their children should be appreciated and legally supported, not demonized and restricted at mother’s whim as the feminists have now brought about.
Comment by Man X Norton — Tue 21st October 2014 @ 5:57 pm
I think sometimes people bite themselves.
For instance, this post looks at first judgement to be about a child but then it goes onto, “Solo mother by choice” and “Winz”.
I don’t need to defend single parents (mums and dads) who choose to be single parents. Babies have always been big business especially in poorer countries. What goes on is people with money can afford to buy babies, very simple. We have a lot of single men and women who have adopted babies from Asia, India, Russia, plus, plus. We have support groups just for this niche.
Then there’s 2 free IVF treatments professional women under 40 can access and then there’s a lot of sperm being passed around in NZ. I have a single mother friend who just had a surrogate baby for another couple struggling to have their 5th child. I must congratulate all 3, lol.
The single parent by choice is not a teenage problem or a poor people’s problem but a professional issue. Professionals are the one’s choosing to be single parents by choice. I don’t think many of them could cope living on minimum wage let alone a WINZ benefit.hehehe
The number of young people having babies continues to go down and with National’s reestablishment of ‘Poor Houses’ and business of stealing young single mothers babies, there’s little chance of a ‘benefit life style choice’. And you don’t want to get me started on the “Home for life’ system. That’s illegal under every human right law, IMO.
Sooooo, back to what this post is meant to be about….. what’s it about? Oh yes, a child.
Comment by julie — Wed 22nd October 2014 @ 7:43 am
Jim is dead right, in my opinion.
But such a safe and sensible idea doesn’t help to automatically unload money off parents onto parasites!
The whole debacle does highlight the total lack of accountability to the child support payer and the non-symmetry of payer and recipient status.
This accountability is what gives strong parental relationships a huge edge of parenting capability, over the non-accountable familycaught$ or sole mother.
The flip side is children unable to perform well in school, unable to behave satisfactorily and eunuch men standing by, wanting to help and disabled by creative inertia in the corrupt greedy familycaught$.
Anyone who cares for children would be screaming to support such accountability to child support payers (whether the mother or the father).
And those who are silent on this issue – are enemies of vulnerable children…. such as familycaught$ and most solo mothers….
Jim has been right for a long time now…..
MurrayBacon – honest axe murderer.
Comment by MurrayBacon — Wed 22nd October 2014 @ 1:09 pm
http://www.fathermag.com/9607/father-custody/
Comment by MurrayBacon — Wed 22nd October 2014 @ 1:25 pm
” Jojo’s father and Pakeeza’s former partner has said he didn’t contact police until 2013, because he believed the pair were in Australia.
Now, Police have revealed his lawyer may have asked Police for an address for her in 2008 or 2009.”
Nothing surprising here.
For all those who were questioning the delay in reporting the matter, the answer is obvious there.
And Police have revealed about the Laywer probably asking for an address, despite previously denying the claims.
What a crock.
A man with a runaway wife, and a protection order, and with all the shrouds of privacy law around everything in this country.
Even if the father had laid a complaint early (apparently he did as it seems to be the case here), NONE (and I emphasize NOT A SINGLE) institution dealing with the Family Law in NZ would taken an ounce of notice to what the father had to say… All because he does not have the correct genitalia between his legs.
http://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/auckland/news/nbcri/648809400-more-details-emerge-over-cold-case-murder
Comment by ashish — Wed 22nd October 2014 @ 1:45 pm
Lets be thankful that the police may have caught the people responsible.
Many things cause fathers to be estranged from their children. For short periods of time, for different reasons it has happened to me. I feel for the father. Nobody, especially a child, should be treated in the way they have. I hope the father gets lots of love and support.
Comment by The man in Absentia — Wed 22nd October 2014 @ 3:16 pm
It would be soooo cool if crime, especially the bullying in schools for boys, was discussed on menz or anywhere for that matter.
It has escalated a lot and it’s no longer the 13-17 year olds who are affected badly. The boys aged 10-12 have knives, bits of glass, and other instruments to protect themselves in their school bags.
……….
I don’t think many people will take anyone serious who says this is a single mother issue. I think most people know what’s going on, but political correctness stops them from saying what needs to be said.
Comment by julie — Wed 22nd October 2014 @ 8:10 pm
Oh by the way, I’d like to add that I am reading all the comments with interest and learning from them. Your efforts are appreciated by me.
I expect the government wants to privitise child support and the media, as usual, will make the people think what the government wants is in the best interest of ‘the people’.
I wonder what father’s groups will say? I wonder what I will think, lol.
I imagine nationality groups will be bought $$$ by having the opportunity to run programs for their people. Like usual, rightwing will pay until we forget about it, and then a new media campaign will show stopping programs is in the best interest of the people, lol.
The UK now charges the receiving parent to have child support collected while many groups petitioned against privitisation. They are happy with trusts making money and profit going into bureaucracy and trust’s growth, lol.
America, well, ….. lots going on there and it’s well loved.
Anyways, keep going. I am wrapped to have the opportunity to learn. 🙂
Comment by julie — Wed 22nd October 2014 @ 8:45 pm
i bet the courts will find some way to link jojos father to the crime…
Comment by kirann jiharr — Wed 22nd October 2014 @ 9:04 pm
kirann jiharr (11): Yes, quite possibly. He didn’t do enough. But if he had, then he would have been a stalker and harasser trying to abuse male power and control. Take your pick.
Comment by Ministry of Men's Affairs — Wed 22nd October 2014 @ 10:01 pm
You who made the post is talking absolute rubbish. You have no clue in the world to what was happening on the inside of it all. And I can tell you that yes I do. So yes the money was still being used which is how they found the accused. And why the father wasn’t aloud to know the address of the pair even though he was paying child support was because he was a violent man!!!!!!Hence why she left to go far away and out of control as she was so afraid of this man! Now you all stop talk shit when none of you know what goes on on the insides until it actually happens to you. That is all.
Comment by realtalk — Wed 22nd October 2014 @ 10:09 pm
And it was NOT the father that made the missing person report in 2013 it was victims mother! Know your stuff before talking rubbish
Comment by realtalk — Wed 22nd October 2014 @ 10:12 pm
I think we are all talking about this incident because the reporting has been terrible. There are a lot of questions.
Comment by Too Tired — Wed 22nd October 2014 @ 10:33 pm
realtalk: Oh, so the biological father was a violent man? Good thing then that his daughter was kept safely away from him, huh?
Of course we don’t know exactly what was happening because we only know what has been published in news media. But we know that the NZ government was extorting so-called ‘child support’ from a father but not ensuring this was being used to benefit the child. Business as usual, but this was simply an extreme example.
We don’t know however what violence you allege this father committed or what was proven against him. If he had been convicted of violence I think news media would have ensured we knew about it. We do know that men are often accused of being violent when they were not significantly so and/or when both the male and female partner used violence, as has been shown to be usually the case in relationship conflict.
We also do know that the mother took this father’s daughter into an unsafe situation. More unsafe is not possible.
And we do know that, even when a father sometimes becomes angry and even if he sometimes reacts with low-level violence, he will in most cases still be the best protector any child could have. It’s time that our government recognized this.
This child’s murder was facilitated by NZ family law. That’s something else we can know.
Comment by Man X Norton — Wed 22nd October 2014 @ 10:38 pm
Real talk / real quick to label father a monster !
The facts are a child and mother have been murdered and it wasn’t the father.
I love how easy it is to label the father as a violent man but there is that little thing called proof, everyone knows you don’t need any to get one in Nz? Just a few tears and a simple statement I am scared and you get one.
Anyone can make a guy look like a violent person for thier own reason what’s yours ?
Ask any guy and he would protect his daughter and one day people will get that but not if he is excluded like he was.
There’s still 2 bodies and that’s a fact.
Comment by Dominic da Silva — Thu 23rd October 2014 @ 6:29 am
So the mother has been involved in two (or at least two) violent situations.
The latter, she and her daughter were murdered and buried illegally.
The earlier( if it existed at all) was with Jojo’s father.
The existence of a DV PO doesn’t prove that much or any violence was actually involved. Quantitative data, from familycaught$ published statistics and hospitals ICD-10 data (from the days when they used to collect DV statistics) suggest that about 10% of DV PO situations involve sufficient violence, to require at least 2 hours treatment in hospital.
So far, no one has commented that Mr. Faizal Kalim (Jojo’s father), has any history of violence. This suggests that he may have less propensity for violence than the average NZ man?
So, we know that Mr. Faizal Kalim was not involved in any way in the latter violent incident, as he was denied any knowledge of where Mubarek Yusef lived.
So, what is the common thread in these violent situations?
Am I am blaming the victim? If a common, causative element can be found, this may lead to identifying issues which could be addressed, to reduce violence and hopefully save children’s and adult’s lives. (Am I questioning a sacred cow? However, even sacred cows should be held accountable, to the extent that they may have partly contributed to two deaths.)
The only significant common element that I can see, is the involvement of the mother, Mubarek Yusef, known as Pakeeza Faizal.
Whether she contributed in triggering her own murder, may become known when her murderer’s trial proceeds.
In any case, if she had allowed Mr. Faizal Kalim to maintain his parenting relationship with Jojo, it is likely that he would have drawn police attention, if he was concerned about the possibility of violence. This might have been able to save her life and Jojo’s too. So her decision to put her desire for privacy and image of normalcy ahead of Jojo’s parenting relationships, possibly cost her life.
Her decision appears to have been in breach of NZ law (if such a thing exists at all?). Even if there was justification for her decision, it is hard to believe any justification remained six years after separation?
She didn’t destroy Jojo’s parenting relationship with Mr. Faizal Kalim by process of law**, but by the manipulation of denying him information about where Jojo lived.
** I am certainly not meaning to infer that familycaught$ works by process of law!
Manipulation is a means of getting your own wishes, by artificially or deceitfully manipulating another person’s options. She certainly did that to Jojo and to Mr. Faizal Kalim. Could her manipulative behaviours have been the triggering element in her own murder?
Of course murder is a serious form of manipulation too.
Using the familycaught$ as a form of abuse is also a dangerous manipulation and she used the DV PO to continue to deny Mr. Faizal Kalim and Jojo their parenting relationship.
I hope that the lessons from this situation can be made publicly visible. All of these issues were discussed in Parliament, before the act was passed.
Without the truth becoming publicly known, we can be confident that the familycaught$ will carry on with business as usual and there would then be continuing further deaths.
My guess about 20 years x 250 deaths per year. In one place, it would make a large, sad pile of wrongfully rotting bodies.
I would like to see the familycaught$ judge involved demonstrate that their performance met minimum professional standards. I suspect that an independent investigation would show that insufficient real and relevant evidence was supplied to justify the DV PO. (This is true in 90% or more cases.)
Although ird-cs hide behind an often repeated mantra that they are limited in what they can do by legislation, their performance needs serious examination. They have failed to act in the child’s or father’s interests. Old excuses quickly wear out with time. The values that they act under, unnecessarily reflect murder. The values they live by, were roundly criticised in the Nuremberg Trials.
Does anyone want to tell Mubarek Yusef that honesty pays?
I am sure that her parents told her, but perhaps she wasn’t listening? Certainly, honesty is an important part of good parenting, even if the familycaught$ doesn’t know!
I am not trying to say that she got just deserts for her behaviours, just to observe that a good parenting, honest approach would likely have allowed her to still be alive. Isn’t this a point worth observing?
It is also a harsh example that fathers should fight to maintain contact with their children, despite the expensive, illegal bureaucratic barriers laid in their path by the familycaught$.
When the DV Act was passed by Parliament, a high degree of trust was placed in familycaught$ judges. They have failed to live up to Parliament’s expectations. Careful analysis of perverse effects would show that they haven’t come anywhere near to Parliament’s expectations and have simply taken advantage of the lack of professional oversight that they enjoy.
It is well past time to change to DV legislation that is workable and will deliver positive value to the community. The analysis must be realistic and include proportionate consideration of weighing of evidence, children’s developmental interests, possibilities for manipulation, perjury and perverse incentives . I don’t believe that there would be any role for secret caught$ judges in new good quality legislation.
MurrayBacon
Comment by MurrayBacon — Sat 25th October 2014 @ 9:51 am
In the post above, I suggested that accountability between parents is the strongest force for maximising children’s welfare. Almost all married (or together) parents do this without being told to, as it is in their interests, as well as the children’s.
Parents who desire to prove their children don’t need the other parent, defy their children’s interests, to make a point that no good parent would even think about trying to make.
https://nationalparentsorganization.org/blog/21987-australia-labor-mp-proposes-custodial-parents-account-for-child-support-expenditures
Australia: Labor MP Proposes Custodial Parents Account for Child Support Expenditures
October 19, 2014 by Robert Franklin. Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization
A Labor member of the Australian Parliament has asked the government to look into the possibility of limiting child support expenditures by custodial parents to items for children. Many non-custodial parents express the concern that they’re funding the custodial parent’s lifestyle that may include illicit drugs, large quantities of alcohol, lavish vacations and the like. They report making their payments but then seeing their children dressed shabbily or there being no food in the custodial parent’s house.
But neither laws nor regulations anywhere require custodial parents to make any form of accounting of the use of the funds they receive.
Here’s one article on the request by Labor MP Michelle Rowland (News.com.au, 10/4/14). And here’s an article relating one father’s tribulations regarding the child support system in the UK (Telegraph, 10/15/14).
“Many parents feel as though their child support is going toward items which provide no direct benefit to their children rather towards expenses which help maintain their former partner’s lifestyle,” Ms Rowland said.
The MP told News Corp Australia that one of her constituents had raised the controversial issue with her, complaining he was at a loss to understand where the child support he paid was going, because his child was dressed shabbily and needed serious dental work.
“Whilst I can understand that this may be challenging from an administrative perspective, many of these parents believe that there should be some accountability whereby parents receiving child support are required to provide evidence of the way in which the funds are being expended,” she said.
“This would help to allay these concerns that their children are being neglected or not properly provided for, despite the child support that they are providing,” Ms Rowland said.
Two important points. First, establishing such a regime would not, if done correctly, “be challenging from an administrative perspective.” It would be a terrible mistake to require government bureaucrats to review all purchases by custodial parents with an eye to whether they were spending child support money wisely. That would be hugely expensive, impossible to do well and mostly pointless.
A sensible system would see non-custodial parents paying into a particular account for the child. The only way to access that account would be by a debit card issued to the custodial parent. The account could not be used for cash transactions. The account would issue statements to both parents, and vendors who received disbursements from the account would create itemized lists of purchases. Those would appear on the statements issued to both parents. That way, those statements wouldn’t consist of simply $200 – Nordstrom’s, but would say, for example, either $200 – Nordstrom’s, women’s shoes, or $200 – Nordstrom’s, boys’ clothing.
If questionable expenditures appeared on the statements, it would be up to the non-custodial parent to raise the issue with a special arbiter in the appropriate bureaucracy. That person could issue a finding that the expenditure was either appropriate or not and that finding could be appealed by either party to the court.
In short, the onus would be on the non-custodial parent to object, so the great majority of expenditures would never be questioned. No bureaucracy would be saddled with examining countless receipts for socks, school supplies and the like. More importantly, custodial parents would be on notice that their use of child support funds could be scrutinized and would therefore be more likely to use the money for its intended purpose.
That’s point number one. Point two is that, by helping to ensure that the child support paid was truly being used to support the child and not the custodial parent’s drinking habit, the non-custodial parent would be more likely to pay what’s owed. That is, such a system of accountability would mean more of what’s owed would be collected.
One of Sanford Braver’s key findings back in the 90s was that non-custodial fathers’ hesitation to pay child support comes from their feeling of disenfranchisement. Take a normal loving father and consign him to the status of visitor in his child’s life and then refuse to enforce his visitation rights. Then enforce his obligation to pay in the most draconian and unforgiving way and you communicate loudly and clearly that the system of custody and support considers him nothing but a source of funds. Then further add that Mom may be using the money for any number of things that have nothing to do with the child, and you have a situation that’s bound to discourage him from paying.
A system in which custodial parents have to be accountable for how they use the money is one that respects the payer. It says to him “We’re serious about your child’s welfare.” It gives him a measure of power in a system in which he currently has little-to-none.
Here’s how one British dad describes it:
“That was exactly my position for years when I was paying hundreds of pounds a month to my ex-wife to support our teenage son; and, though she was a chronic alcoholic spending much of the money on drink, I couldn‘t get any support or interest from Britain’s shambolic and woman-centred family law system.
When my wife and I separated, she immediately went to lawyers and portrayed herself as a helpless little woman in need of protection from a wicked, powerful man. Behind that tearful, vulnerable front, however, she was resolutely determined to use the legal system to punish me and to extract from me every penny she could get. None of my requests for conciliation was allowed. I had always been devoted to our son and actively wanted to support him. I didn’t need judges and the Child Support Agency to tell me my duties towards my child; but the legal system does not recognise a loving father any more than it admits the possibility that a mother might be deceitful and manipulative”¦
My ex-wife also appropriated our son’s emotional commitment, making him her chief supporter and aide. In that tortuous position, he found it impossible to reconcile the love that had always been strong between us and he cut off all connection between us. From the age of 12 until he was almost 15, I never saw his face or heard his voice.
Apart from being an indescribably painful ordeal, that estrangement also meant that I had no way of knowing whether he was actually receiving any benefit from the money I was paying for his support. I was simply lobbing bundles of cash over the battlements behind which he was cut off from me. I strongly suspected she would be spending the money on drink, but nobody would listen.
When my son eventually ran away from his mother, just after his 15th birthday, all my most terrible fears were confirmed.
I then discovered that his mother had been spending so much on drink that, very often, there had actually been nothing at all in the house for my son to eat. At 6’3″, he weighed little more than 10 stones and was visibly underfed, with a vitamin deficiency showing in white spots on his fingernails. He had no winter coat, one pair of torn pyjamas and one pair of shoes with holes in the soles.”
Further details of the miseries and tortures this boy had suffered in that period are too painful to lay out here.
The key point to stress is that, after she had been awarded sole custody and the financial orders were in place, nobody in the legal or social services system exerted any control or scrutiny over this woman’s conduct. They simply trusted in her good faith and intentions and left her to get on with it.In the U.S. billions of dollars are spent on child support every year, and yet no one anywhere demands any form of accounting. We claim we want to make sure children are adequately taken care of, but when it comes to ensuring that they are, we do nothing, literally nothing. As the Telegraph writer says, “They simply trusted in her good faith and intentions and left her to get on with it.” That may be good enough in many cases, but in many it’s not. And in every case, a system of accountability would do much to relieve the legitimate concerns of all non-custodial parents.
With a suggestion this sensible, there are of course those who disagree. In this case, that falls to Australian academic Bruce Smyth. Of course it does. He, after all, is one of the ones who’s intellectually compromised enough to defend Jennifer McIntosh and her thoroughly discredited desire to keep fathers from having overnight visits with their young children. As I said here, his defense of McIntosh was utterly without merit and disingenuous to boot.
So it’s no surprise that Smyth (a) opposes non-custodial fathers’ being able to know how their money is being spent and (b) that his reasons don’t bear even casual scrutiny.
Social policy expert Bruce Smyth, an Associate Professor at the Australian National University, also warned against the move.
He said attempts to police how child support payments were spent could end up becoming yet another lightning rod for tensions between former partners.
“This approach runs the risk of turning parents into petty accountants,” Professor Smyth said.
“You need to be careful in giving parents more ammunition against each other because conflict gets in the way of parents getting on with the job of being a good parent and raising and enjoying their children.”
It’s the standard dodge. Smyth wants us to believe that the current system causes no problems, to change it would create problems, ergo, that’s to be avoided.
But of course the major premise is false. The system now has very grave shortcomings of the kind the Telegraph writer illustrated and that Sanford Braver wrote about exhaustively in his excellent book Divorced Dads. Smyth opposes this idea because it gives power to non-custodial parents, most of whom are fathers. So what if Dad wants to become a “petty accountant?” If examining his ex’s expenditures satisfies him that his money is going to his child and not down her throat or up her nose, what’s the problem? More importantly, if his access to her records encourages him to pay what he owes, isn’t that worth accomplishing?
https://nationalparentsorganization.org/blog/21798-in-australia-more-of-the-same-on-children-rsquo-s-overnights-from-the-anti-dad-crowd
In Australia, More of the Same on Children’s Overnights from the Anti-Dad Crowd
July 6, 2014 by Robert Franklin
National Parents Organisation
One way or another, Jennifer McIntosh and her colleagues who oppose fathers having overnight care of their children before they reach age five just never quite seem to go away. And when they poke their heads up, they always seem to be saying the same things and those things always seem to be at odds with the truth. Indeed, the more they attempt to “correct the record,” the more the record stays the same.
McIntosh herself seems to have vanished into the mist. My emails to her are either answered by an associate or not at all. So, for example, when I asked her to comment on Penelope Leach’s flagrantly untrue remarks to the effect that overnight contact with fathers “damaged the brains” of young children, McIntosh replied by way of an intermediary who said she couldn’t comment. Just why it took a third party to say that remains a mystery.
But then reliable sources inform me that McIntosh is behaving in ways that are far more alarming than that. For example, at one conference this past May in Toronto, she informed attendees that she’d had to hire bodyguards to protect her (from whom?) and at another in Chicago, she refused to tell people where she was staying or interact with attendees, apparently due to fear of unspecified and seemingly unverified threats against her. Fortunately, nothing has come to pass that would bear out her concerns.
Then there’s the little matter of her status at LaTrobe University. Prior to the ABC program that’s the subject of this post, listeners were informed that McIntosh is now “on leave” from her position there. But that itself raises questions. For one thing, McIntosh was never more than an adjunct professor at LaTrobe. Now, she was always happy for those who were unaware to take her title, “Professor,” to mean she held a full-time and perhaps tenured position. That is now and has always been false. She’s an adjunct, which bears roughly the same relationship to “full professor” that a month-to-month lessee bears to a homeowner, i.e. not much. Essentially McIntosh, like every other adjunct professor, is paid to teach a class or two each semester with the understanding that, next semester, she may not be asked back.
So how is it that a person who has no long-term contract of employment and who, at any time, can simply be dropped by the university like a hot rock be “on leave?” It looks to me like an intellectual impossibility, but of course McIntosh is no stranger to intellectual legerdemain. Has LaTrobe informed McIntosh that she won’t have even an adjunct position there? No one seems to know, but my inquiries to LaTrobe produced a response by a person who told me he has no idea of who McIntosh is but that their records indicate she’s still on their list of adjuncts.
Whatever the case, Australia’s ABC did an interview with several of the players in the field of overnights for kids, the transcript of which can be seen here (ABC, 7/1/14). They invited academics Patrick Parkinson and Judy Cashmore, attorney Tom Reeve, Penelope Leach (of whom they asked but a single question) and apparently Jennifer McIntosh, prompting her claim to be “on leave.” (Exactly why that would prevent her from involving herself by telephone is anyone’s guess.) It fell to the co-author of McIntosh’s scurrilous 2010 paper that started this controversy, Bruce Smyth, to carry on the tradition of utterly misrepresenting both their and other people’s research. Birds of a feather.
Parkinson and Cashmore, being legitimate academic researchers, tended to keep their criticisms of McIntosh’s work low-keyed, but, to his credit, interviewer Damien Carrick, did pretty well at attempting to get Smyth to deal with some of the seamier aspects of their 2010 paper. So, Parkinson and Cashmore confined their remarks to things like this about Richard Warshak’s take-down of the McIntosh/Smyth work:
Judy Cashmore: It was written by Dr Richard Warshak, who’s a US academic at The University of Texas in the department of psychiatry. He’s a very well respected academic who’s been involved in the debates about early childhood development and particularly the debate about overnight stays with fathers since the early 2000s. Why was it written? Because there has been a great deal of concern, I think, about the way in which the research has been misinterpreted and used to support suggestions that it’s dangerous or harmful for children to stay overnights with their father before the age of three. And that conclusion is not well substantiated; it’s not supported by the research evidence.
Keep in mind that Cashmore is allowing McIntosh’s claim that their work was misinterpreted to stand. That’s generous of her to say the least. As I’ve reported before, McIntosh, et al are scrambling to save their professional reputations. That’s because their 2010 paper was based on research that would embarrass more scrupulous scientists. Among other things, it was based on sample sizes that were as small as 14 subjects and the data they produced failed to support their thesis – that “frequent” overnights (i.e. one per week or more) were to be avoided. Perhaps worst of all, four of the six measurements they used to gauge children’s stress had never been validated, and one had been validated for children’s progress in acquiring language – hardly the same as children’s stress. If that’s not shoddy “science,” I don’t know what is.
So, with Parkinson and Cashmore being altogether too kind to McIntosh, Smyth, et al, it fell to David Carrick to show listeners just what’s been going on among the anti-dad crowd. Recall that, in order to maintain the pretense that their work has been misinterpreted, McIntosh has had to overlook the fact that, one major Australian organization and one international one have, for the last four years, relied on her paper for the proposition that children become stressed when they spend overnights away from mothers. Not only that, everywhere she’s spoken, organizations in the U.S. and the U.K. have followed suit. This has been going on for four years and only when Warshak and 110 respected scientists around the world published an analysis of existing research one of whose main points was to kill once and for all any notion that McIntosh’s paper had any validity, did she start claiming to have been misunderstood.
As I pointed out just a month ago, that’s in plain violation of the canons of ethics of the Australian Psychological Society that requires members to correct misinterpretations of their work in a timely fashion after they’ve come to their attention. Needless to say, McIntosh, Smyth, et al, did no such thing. Until caught out by Warshak, they were perfectly content to see their paper construed to severely limit fathers’ time with their kids. Unsurprisingly, that’s exactly what attorney Reeve said.
Damien Carrick: Jen McIntosh is adamant that she has never, ever said never to overnight care. But why do you think there’s a perception that this is what the research says?
Tom Reeve: Because that’s how it’s used, and if you put your name to something and know that it’s being used in that way, then perhaps you have some responsibility for it.
For his part, Smyth is every bit as disingenuous as McIntosh.
Damien Carrick: Patrick Parkinson, and before him Associate Professor Judy Cashmore. The pair also have concerns about how the McIntosh research has been adopted by bodies such as the Australian Association forInfant Mental Health, which cites the McIntosh report to support the general proposition that infants under the age of two should not be separated overnight from primary carers.
Smyth: We’re surprised by the amount of attention our study’s received, and the extent to which the findings have been mangled and misinterpreted, and I think interpreted in a very black and white manner; they’ve been boiled down to a crude, divisive gender message: any overnights damage children. The truth is, we’re puzzled by this; we’re not sure why they’ve been interpreted this way and why they’ve been boiled down that way.
That’s at best dodging the truth. They’re no more surprised than the man in the moon. They’ve known for four years what people were doing with their work and never said one word about it until Warshak, et al came along. It’s pure, Claude Rains in Casablanca, i.e. the police official who pronounced himself “shocked, shocked” that there’s gambling at the club, a fact he’s known for years.
When Carrick asks him about the Warshak analysis, Smyth actually seems to go “a little funny in the head” pretending that, in some way, those 111 eminent scientists don’t grasp the concept of the scientific method.
I guess the key question for me is, why has the scientific method seemed to have failed in this particular instance? Why, when a piece of research comes out, rather than replicate or have a discussion with the authors or go and collect some data, and see what the findings look like, do you actually write a lit review and then send it off to a of people saying, ‘Do you agree with my lit review and my conclusions?’ It’s a very unusual way; it’s not the way science normally works. A petition approach isn’t science. I’m not quite sure why Dr Warshak didn’t just publish the review and let it stand on its own two feet.
Put simply, those are the words of a man who’s caught in a trap of his own making and is desperately trying to free himself in any way he can. First, the question of the “scientific method,” is nothing but a red herring that he as much as admits by the fact that he dropped the issue entirely in the space of a sentence. He understands, as we all do, that Warshak, et al’s paper was a review of existing science. As such it joins countless others throughout the entire field of science. It’s something scientists do and it’s a valuable exercise to simply summarize what is known at a particular time.
But where Smyth’s desperation becomes clear is his claim to not know why Warshak contacted all those scientists to get their endorsements. Warshak plainly cares about the wrongheadedness of public policy on children seeing their fathers overnight. That destructive policy was based almost entirely on McIntosh’s paper. As such, he was at pains to make clear just how bad that paper was and how at odds with the real science on the issue. He knew that a single scientist doing such an analysis wouldn’t have nearly the likelihood of turning the ship of public policy around, so he hoped to give his work greater heft. My guess is that every single one of those 110 scientists wanted the same thing, which is why they signed on to the Warshak paper. They wanted the death and burial of McIntosh’s influence.
Smyth of course knows this every bit as well as I do and probably better. His claim to mystification is nonsense.
Then Carrick turns to Parkinson’s and Cashmore’s recent paper that’s equally damning of McIntosh, Smyth, et al.
Damien Carrick: It’s, and I think I’ve got the quote but I’m not exactly sure, but, ‘Poorly constructed research, research which is agenda-driven, research which is misrepresented and research that goes beyond the data fails to illuminate the pathway to a decision that will work best for the child; worse, it can lead to detrimental outcomes for children.’ Do you agree with that?
Bruce Smyth: There are several commonalities with people who’ve been critiquing the research. I’d have to say that if there’s innuendo that our research isn’t quality research we’d go back to the scientific method, which is basically why don’t people collect the data or replicate the data with the LSAC data that we used.
Look again at Parkinson’s and Cashmore’s description of McIntosh, Smyth, et al’s work. Any reputable scientist would be embarrassed into silence to have his/her work described that way. Not McIntos h, not Smyth. They’re hell-bent on deflecting attention from their own lousy work and about the only way they can think to do so is to cast aspersions on their betters. It’s sad, it’s weak, it’s entirely unconvincing, but that apparently is just how these folks roll.
But more importantly, it gives the lie (once again) to their claims to have reformed. As I’ve recently reported, McIntosh has recently teamed with two new authors to produce two new papers. The first could easily be read as a mea culpa for her many past transgressions. Now she hymns the praises of fathers and admits that children do better with a dad in their lives. Has Jen McIntosh seen the light?
Don’t bet on it. Her second paper carried a handy “how-to” chart for judges confused about whether to grant dad any time at all with his child under the age of five. As I’ve previously reported, that’s where the bad old McIntosh rears her head. The factors she cites for denying Dad contact are nowhere supported by any science and all too many of them are entirely under Mom’s control. Is there conflict between the parents? That means no overnights for Dad even though it may be entirely Mom who’s causing the conflict.
In short, McIntosh now wants it both ways. She wants to be seen as not overly anti-dad while still denying him the contact he and his child need to bond.
And if Smyth truly understood that children need their fathers, he’d admit his work with McIntosh is flawed and that other work is what we should rely on to make policy on fathers’ and children’s contact. But no, he engages in a shameful exercise in lying, denying and passing the buck. He disgraces himself in the process, but in the end does us a favor. He demonstrates beyond the shadow of a doubt that, wrong as they are, dishonest as they are, the anti-dad crowd intends to keep doing what they’ve always done – trying to convince policy-makers that children are better off without their dads.
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Comment by MurrayBacon — Sat 25th October 2014 @ 6:02 pm