New York State Senator Andrew J. Lanza, R, District 24 (Staten Island), has introduced Senate Bill S4796, which, if passed into law, would require that anyone who has had an order of protection issued against them must wear at all times a GPS monitoring/tracking device. Further, tampering with and/or disabeling the device would constitute a Class E Felony. “Justification” for the measure is the puported “need to put more teeth into orders of protection in order for them to mean more than just a piece of paper”.
New York State Assemblyman Felix Ortiz, D, District 51 (Kings County/Brooklyn) has introduced a “same as” bill in the Assemby, A5424.
Each bill proposal is currently in the Codes Committee of its respective chamber. Both are said to have broad bi-partisan support in each house of the Legislature.
This legislative insanity should send ice water surging through the veins of anyone who has ever had the dubious pleasure of having experienced the Kafkaesque world of the restraining order. Simply put, it means that anyone - whether guilty … or totally innocent - accused of domestic abuse will be put under police surveillance 24/7 via an electronic monitoring/tracking device, with no due process, no, trial, no recourse, and no remedial and/or statutory protections.
[Read more →]
Tags: Courts and Legislatures · Domestic Violence · News
ANNE ARUNDEL COUNTY, Md., April 10 /PRNewswire/ — A Maryland Court of Appeals upheld a jury’s decision on Wednesday, granting Michael Shannon over 3 million dollars in punitive and compensatory damages. The decision is stemming from visitation interference against Shannon’s ex-wife and mother-in-law, after they abducted their two sons to Egypt. This is a groundbreaking case and is the first successful case in the US filed over an international kidnapping and is precedent setting.
[Read more →]
Tags: News
A FORMER Birmingham civil servant who occupied a church roof dressed as Spider-Man has been arrested on suspicion of harassing his ex-wife (according to story in Britain).
Fathers’ rights activist Ray Barry, who worked at Jobcentre Plus, in Hagley Road, Edgbaston, was quizzed after distributing a leaflet containing details of his marriage split.
He twice scaled St Peter’s Church, Wolverhampton, in 2005, as part of the Fathers 4 Justice campaign and now plans to stand for election on a family law reform ticket.
“The leaflet details my belief that the family courts do not deliver justice and so I have to seek it differently, through the public,” Mr Barry said. “The leaflet was not much different to one I had been using for the past four or five years.
“The questions I was asked by the police seemed really rather innocuous.”
Mr Barry, of Windsor Gardens, Castlecroft, Wolverhampton, distributed the leaflet around Tettenhall in the city, near his ex-wife Liz’s home. The 58-year-old claimed not to have seen two of his three children for eight years and had only fortnightly access to the other.
He said he planned to stand in this year’s Wolverhampton City Council elections for the Equal Parenting Alliance, which campaigns to reform family law.
Mr Barry now runs an insurance and personal injury consultancy is demanding greater openness in family court proceedings.
West Midlands Police said a 58-year-old man had been arrested and bailed on suspicion of harassment.
Tags: NCP Fathers · Protests and Groups
By Stephen Baskerville
The California appeals court decision criminalizing parents who homeschool their children is only the tip of an iceberg. Nationwide, parents are already being criminalized in huge numbers, and it is not limited to homeschoolers.
During the Clinton years, the trend toward turning children into tools for expanding government power increased rapidly. Otherwise indefensible programs and regulations are now rationalized as “for the children.”
As a result, government now has so many ways to incarcerate parents that hardly a family in America has not been touched. The criminalization of parents is highly bureaucratic, effected through a bureaucratic judiciary and supported by a vast “social services” machinery that few understand until it strikes them. They then find themselves against a faceless government behemoth from which they are powerless to protect their children or defend themselves. [Read more →]
Tags: Courts and Legislatures · NCP Fathers
March 14th, 2008 · 1 Comment
Richard Warnica, Canwest News Service
Published: Friday, March 14, 2008
A B.C. fathers’ rights advocate has lost a defamation suit over a report he said portrayed him as “hate-monger.”
Ken Wiebe sued a Quebec academic, her two research assistants and the federal minister for the Status of Women after a graphic taken from his website was included as an example of hate propaganda in the government-funded publication.
While the judge in the case agreed that Wiebe had been defamed, he dismissed the suit in a ruling released Wednesday, saying the authors’ views were fair comment.
Wiebe, 52, a Victoria father of six from two marriages, said he was baffled by the ruling.
“I don’t know what to say about the judgment,” he said in an e-mail to Canwest News Service. “It confuses me. How can a supposedly ’scientific report’ be both defamatory and ‘fair comment’? I’m not a lawyer, but I don’t get it.”
Wiebe’s name, along with a link to his website www.fathers.bc.ca, appeared in a 145-page research paper titled School Success by Gender: A Catalyst for the Masculinist Discourse, Policy Research.
The report, originally printed in French in 2003 and later translated into English, was funded by Status of Women Canada, a federal agency.
In his statement of claim, Wiebe listed various examples from the report which he said identified him “as a hate-monger and a danger to women” associated him “with racists, extremists, pedophiles, pornographers and terrorists” and asserted he had “committed criminal offences.”
Wiebe also said he thinks the report likely cost him a government contract.
One of the examples Wiebe cited was a cartoon pulled from his website with a swastika with the bars altered to look like Fs atop a baby gesturing with its middle finger captioned: “We are all tired of feminaziism. So stop it, OK?”
In the report, the cartoon is called “a barely veiled threat by the authors of the site,” a statement Wiebe said that, when combined with other comments in the report, was defamatory.
While B.C. Supreme Court Justice Nathan Smith supported that view in his ruling, he wrote that the defendants’ statements represented “their honestly held opinion(s).”
A spokeswoman for Status of Women Canada wouldn’t comment on the ruling, pending appeal.
But Pierrette Bouchard, a professor at Laval University in Montreal and the report’s main author, said Thursday she was satisfied with the decision.
Tags: Courts and Legislatures · NCP Fathers · News
March 13th, 2008 · 1 Comment
Bill would criminalize false abuse charges
By MICHAEL C. LEWIS / Journal Staff Writer
POSTED: March 10, 2008
MARTINSBURG—Nine times, one aggrieved father says he fought to protect his name and his relationship with his daughters after he was accused of child abuse in a custody dispute.
The man, whose name we will not use to protect the identity of his daughters, said he is pleased that West Virginia legislators last week passed a bill that slaps criminal charges on those who falsely report child abuse or neglect in order to influence a custody case.
On Thursday, state senators passed House Bill 3065, after the measure met overwhelming approval in the House of Delegates last week. The bill charges those who makes a false abuse report with a $1,000 fine, or forces the plaintiff to pay for the defendant’s legal fees. The misdemeanor crime would also carry a punishment of up to 60 hours of community service.
[Read more →]
Tags: Courts and Legislatures · Domestic Violence
Note: Parental alienation in the news again. That anyone would seriously argue that this doesn’t happen is truly amazing. I often wonder if it will ever happen that we will apply intelligence and wisdom to our national policies with respect to bringing children into the world and nurturing them. It almost seems as if we have created a system specifically designed to place almost all of our parents and children in a living hell.
Bill addresses theory used in custody cases - Whittier Daily News
A state bill that would set guidelines for child custody cases has highlighted a nearly 20-year-old dispute over a theory used by psychological evaluators.
The bill, AB 612, which failed to pass into law in 2007, targeted the controversial theory, called Parental Alienation Syndrome. The syndrome describes behavior where one parent turns a child against the other, convincing the child the parent has treated him or her badly, even when they have not.
Dr. Philip Stahl, a California evaluator and member of the state’s Association of Family & Conciliation Courts, says evaluators are split in their beliefs about whether children can be alienated.
“You have evaluators who really don’t understand alienation, and people who want to apply it in every case,” said Stahl.
Evaluators are not the only ones with differing views on the issue: there are stalwart advocates who believe that hundreds of people have suffered because of parental alienation, and those who believe just as many have suffered from false charges of the syndrome.
Women’s group advocates say the theory has been used by courts to place children with abusive fathers, and strip mothers of their custodial rights.
“It’s junk science used to target women and take their custody rights away,” said Karen Anderson, a spokesperson for the California Protective Parent’s Association. “It’s a problem in courts all over the country.” [Read more →]
Tags: Courts and Legislatures · Custody
March 10th, 2008 · 1 Comment
New formula has bitter taste for mums | NEWS.com.au
THE biggest overhaul of the nation’s child support system in 20 years is just months away - and women’s groups are fuming.
Between now and May, the 1.5 million parents with a financial relationship through the Child Support Agency are being notified by mail of their new payment arrangements, to take effect from July 1.
According to Sole Parents Union of Australia’s Kathleen Swinbourne, most mums will be furious at the news they get in the post.
Stripped back to the basics, the reforms mean reduced payments to support children living with resident parents. And that is usually mums.
[Read more →]
Tags: Child Support
Author Lucien Khodeir Releases New Book Critical of the Canadian Child-Support Guidelines - PR.com
Read about a newly released book that reviews the state of the Canadian child-support guidelines, points out its biases, and recommends sensible remedies in the best interests of “Children with 2 homes.”
Toronto, Canada, March 07, 2008 –(PR.com)– The Canadian child-support guidelines were implemented on May 1, 1997 by well-intentioned drafters. The intent was to standardize the child-support levels across Canada in an attempt to make child support fairer and more objective. While the guidelines succeeded at standardizing the levels, the drafters forgot to make sure the those levels were fair beforehand. They weren’t then and they still aren’t today. [Read more →]
Tags: Child Support · News
Saw this from Glenn Sacks. NOW is absolutely amazing. How is it that fathers simply trying the best they can to remain a part of their children’s lives are money-grubbing, but a mother who seeks to eliminate the father is acting in a child’s best interest?
Source
Background: California Lawyer magazine covered the Fathers’ Rights Movement in the #2 story in its March issue–The Dad-Vocates by Bill Blum. The article quotes family law attorney David C. Stone, men’s advocate Warren Farrell, Craig Candelore of the Men’s Legal Center, myself, and others.
In the article, Helen Grieco, executive director of the California chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) says, “The fathers’ rights movement is both dishonest and dangerous.” According to Blum: [Read more →]
