Family Courts Foster Far More Harm Than Good for Parents and Families
by Shane Flait (2010)

 

The family court is where you go to sue for divorce or paternity issues. Most often the litigants (i.e. fathers and mothers) are fit parents. But the family court setup creates judgments or fosters settlements that do far more harm than good to litigants, their children, and their futures.

 

This article shows how the family court is setup, what it decides, why it does harm, and tabulates some of the harm.

 

In a divorce suit the family court dissolves the marriage while determining

• the division of assets between the husband and wife,
• which parent shall have physical and legal custody of the child(ren),
• how much alimony one parent must pay the other
• how much child support the noncustodial parent must pay to the custodial parent.

Paternity actions determine only custody and child support issues.

 

These issues that the family court decides are just those things that our constitution holds as fundamental rights. And fundamental rights – so essential to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ - are supposed to be protected by requiring constitutional due process to diminish or nullify any of them.

 

The right to parent your child is a fundamental right. To parent means the right to direct or influence your child’s upbringing, directly support him, educate him, and share companionship. It’s the critical right the family court deals with. But its abusive setup ignores this right and instigates further denials to one of the parents’ rights.

 

The constitutional ‘due process’ required for denying parental rights - referred to as physical and legal custody- requires showing that a parent is unfit under a jury trial at a standard of proof of ‘clear and convincing’ evidence. Unfitness implies a danger to the child that is serious enough to cause life-threatening consequences. This level of ‘due process’ stresses that our children are ours - and not the state’s for whatever reasons it may wish to take them.

 

Unfortunately the family court disregards constitutional due process, and by doing so abuses the rights of both fit parents and their children.

 

What characterizes the family court setup are:

·         No jury trial at all; the judge serves as both judge and jury

·         There’s no presumption of equal rights for father and mother

·         There’s no presumption of equally sharing parenting of the children

·         One parent will be the custodial parent having both legal and physical custody of the child

·         The other parent will be the noncustodial parent having no physical custody of the child and seriously diminished parenting rights if any.

·         The noncustodial parent, having been denied the right to parent and to directly support his child, will have a significant fraction of his actual income – or even an imputed (made up) income – extorted from him with the threat of jail to pay what is euphemistically called child support for up to 23 years. Child support does not have to be used to support the child.

·         The father - no matter how ‘fit’ - will overwhelmingly be targeted to be the noncustodial parent.

You can see these characteristics deny the fundamental rights of the noncustodial parent – overwhelmingly a fit father. It leaves him in a slave position to both the state and the mother. Aside from losing his child(ren), he’ll have to pay ‘child support’ at a level demanded by the court - or go to jail. He’ll go to jail even if he doesn’t earn enough to pay the order, much less withhold payments from what he’s earning.

 

The harm the family court does by financially enslaving a father, depriving him of his parenting rights to his children –and his children’s rights of being parented by their father – takes the form of destroying the well-being of both noncustodial fathers and their children.

 

It’s triggered the suicide of many fathers due to their loss. It criminalizes decent fathers for their inability to comply with court-ordered extortion payments that other ‘free’ parent are not subjected to. It promotes the loss of his family connection to his kids often by a ‘child-alienating’ mother. And it simply creates financial destruction of his life and future prospects.

 

And what of the children?

Children from fatherless homes suffer too. Statistics show that they account for:

·         63% of youth suicides

·         70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions come from fatherless homes

·         71% of pregnant teenagers

·         71% of all high school dropouts

·         75% of all adolescent patients in chemical abuse centers

·          80% of rapists motivated with displaced anger

·          85% of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders

·          85% of all youths sitting in prisons

·          90% of all homeless and runaway children

  

The Family Court Setup must be changed to afford fairness and justice to both litigants and their children.

Shane Flait is a writer and educator