PPOM Note: Boston's Barry Nolan summarizes the under reported problematic issues surrounding domestic violence as well as the lobbying and political efforts by groups being funded by abusers who agenda is to undermine the protections put in place for victims of abuse in Massachusetts. This is a must read article and the threats of protections to victims need to be taken seriously. These protections that threaten victims affect all of our children too.
Batterers have been gaining custody at a rate of 70-85% of the time in contested cases. The cost of society IGNORING abuse exceeds
ONE TRILLION DOLLARS a year. It is time to stop ignoring the issues victims of abuse face every day and start becoming a part of the solution. Whether we realize it or not, by ignoring the problem directly impact our children, our families, our communities and our wallets.
Published by:
Boston Magazine
Angry, radical men's groups believe males are being victimized by
out-of-control judges and politicians. They're wrong and they're
dangerous and they need to be stopped.
By Barry Nolan
September 2012 - Every Wednesday at noon, the Governor’s Council gathers at the
Massachusetts State House. The eight-member council is an elected but
little-known body that serves as the governor’s advisory board; oversees
things such as pardons; and approves or rejects appointments for state
judgeships. That means it has a lot of influence on how state laws wind
up getting interpreted and carried out.
Amid the smattering of lobbyists and state officials at council
meetings, there is always a member of the Fatherhood Coalition, a
Massachusetts-based organization that was founded in 1993 to steer state
laws in a direction more favorable to fathers. Sometimes it’s Joe
Ureneck, the group’s chairman, who attends. He’s a small-business owner
who, while going through a divorce, became concerned with the system’s
“sexist bias.” Other times it’s Patrick McCabe, a soft-spoken part-time
accountant from Hyde Park whose divorce left him similarly disturbed.
McCabe, in fact, is running for a seat on the council this November.
Ureneck and McCabe aren’t exactly shy and retiring at the meetings.
Along with the rest of the Fatherhood Coalition, they do their best to
shut down judicial nominees they view as insufficiently sympathetic to
their agenda. A nominee, for instance, like David Aptaker, who in 2010
was up for a position as a Middlesex probate judge. As a bit of
background, one thing the Fatherhood Council is particularly concerned
about is restraining orders, which it insists are used in a way that’s
biased against men. In fact, the group has been pushing legislation to
change the system. That’s why the coalition was alarmed by Aptaker’s
nomination—according to a post on its website, Aptaker’s “lack of
understanding of the restraining order laws made it clear he was not fit
for the bench.” So after discovering that the nominee had failed to
disclose donations he’d made to two disgraced politicians, the
Fatherhood Coalition showed up at a public hearing, registering
complaints that he couldn’t be trusted because of his donations. Under
pressure, Aptaker eventually withdrew his application. “Whether you
agree with them or not, their point of view has become the elephant in
the room,” says Mary-Ellen Manning, a council member from Salem.
Watertown’s Marilyn Petitto Devaney, who’s been on the council for 14
years, says the presence of the Fatherhood Coalition has “changed the
way we do business here.”
Aptaker’s story underscores a disturbing trend: Men’s rights groups,
convinced that men are the biggest victims of modern society, have been
busy attacking, defunding, and repealing laws that have been very
effective at protecting women and lowering rates of domestic violence.
And rather than just ranting and raving on the Internet, these men have
been pulling political levers to change both state and federal laws.
That they’ve done so with remarkable success ought to make everyone
very, very scared.
If your last memory of men’s groups is Robert Bly and the boys
banging on drums in the woods, you likely have no idea how the movement
has mutated. Today, men’s rights groups tend to be organized around the
belief that this country has launched a “war on fatherhood.” To them,
the rise of feminism resulted in the fall of man, with males now being
relegated to the periphery of society. In their eyes, the media portray
men as feckless buffoons, legislative bodies unfairly target them, and
biased courts blindly punish guiltless husbands. (Full disclosure: I was
a producer of the 2011 documentary
No Way Out But One, which examined the family court system.)
Nationally, groups like Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE)
and A Voice for Men have helped slow the renewal of the Violence Against
Women Act—which would provide $660 million in funding for shelters,
legal aid, and other programs to protect battered women—by convincing
conservative House Republicans that the law shouldn’t include
immigrants, Native Americans, and LGBT victims. SAVE claims the law is
biased, noting in a fact sheet titled “Seven Key Facts About Domestic
Violence” that “female initiation of partner violence is the leading
reason for the woman becoming a victim of subsequent violence.” In other
words:
She was asking for it, officer.
Locally, the Fatherhood Coalition (which has seven active chapters
and a few hundred members across the state) is joined by Fathers and
Families, a “family court reform” advocacy group founded in 1998 that
now has 50,000 e-mail newsletter subscribers. Fathers and Families
claims to have the “largest membership base, the highest media profile,
the most funding, and the most successful legislative representation of
any family court reform organization.” It’s a bold claim—and quite
accurate. In 2001, for example, the group won changes in Massachusetts
law that lowered child support by 15 percent.
Then, last year, Fathers and Families and the Fatherhood Coalition
achieved a major victory with the passage of the Alimony Reform Act of
2011, which removed the requirement that men pay alimony after
retirement. The success of that bill allowed them to fine-tune their
technique of advancing legislation: Get the governor to appoint a task
force to examine the issue, secure a seat on the task force, influence
the ultimate consensus, and then send it to the legislature.
Also last year, the men’s groups tried another approach to changing
laws: submitting a ballot initiative. They had hoped to use that
strategy to overturn 209A, a law that seeks to prevent domestic violence
by allowing judges to grant emergency protective orders to men or women
who have a reasonable fear of harm from another person, often a
partner. That law is stacked against men, according to Ureneck, who also
helms the Massachusetts Citizens for Immigration Reform, a conservative
group advocating for tougher enforcement of immigration laws. “The
fundamental idea behind 209A,” Ureneck tells me, “is that men are
inherently batterers and women are fundamentally victims.” Ultimately,
Attorney General Martha Coakley shut down the group’s attempts to
overturn the law via ballot initiative because the state constitution
doesn’t allow such initiatives to deal with the “powers of courts.”
Now, men’s rights groups are pushing another bill that would change
court guidelines in custody proceedings, moving from the standard of
doing what is in the best interest of the child to making shared custody
the default. That sounds reasonable enough—good parents should
certainly be able to play a meaningful role in their children’s lives
after a divorce—but the proposed law has no provision for judges to
determine whether one of the parents was violent in the relationship,
which is a pretty glaring hole. And studies show that shared custody is
one way that emotionally abusive spouses often seek to extend their
control after a marital breakup.
In spite of that, men’s groups have convinced more than a quarter of
Massachusetts House members to cosponsor the bill. In the face of that
pressure, Governor Patrick in July appointed 18 people to the Working
Group on Child-Centered Family Laws, which is examining current
regulations and trying to come up with a consensus on future guidelines.
Men’s rights groups, including the Fatherhood Coalition and Fathers and
Families, managed to get three of their members in the group, but there
are no representatives from mothers’ groups. (One member comes from a
domestic violence organization, however, and another from the Women’s
Bar Association.)
“They’re organized,” says a Beacon Hill insider. “They’re vocal, they
can be vociferous…and they’ve capitalized on the success they had with
the reform alimony laws.”
And men’s groups are having successes like this all over the country.
Rita Smith of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence told the
Southern Poverty Law Center’s
Intelligence Report that such
groups have “taken over the courts,” and that they have “been able to
get custody evaluators, mediators, guardians ad litem, and child
protective service workers to believe that women and children lie about
abuse.”
Let’s be clear: There is no “war on men.” It’s true that the family
courts should be better staffed, and better trained to sort out the
truth, assess the risks, and ensure that kids are kept safe, happy, and
healthy. And men’s groups certainly have every right to try to change
the law. That’s how democracy works.
But that’s all the more reason that civil rights and women’s groups
need to wake up and get involved, something they’ve been slow to do.
When I spoke to Toni Troop of Jane Doe Inc., a Massachusetts sexual
assault and domestic violence advocacy group, she assured me that
“People see through their rhetoric and their repeated attempts to
undermine safety for the real victims of domestic violence.” Really?
Then why have they been so successful at changing the law? More women’s
and mothers’ groups need to start attending these meetings and demanding
a seat at the table.
They also need to remember how bad the past was. Back in 1993, before
the passage of the Violence Against Women Act, then-Senator Joe Biden
conducted a three-year investigation into the causes and effects of
violence against women. Afterward, he issued a searing report that
helped lead to the 1994 passage of the original bill. In that report,
Biden wrote, “…violence against women reflects as much a failure of our
nation’s collective moral imagination as it does the failure of our
nation’s laws and regulations…it deserves our profound public outrage.”
Nearly 20 years later, it’s time to get outraged again.
Source URL: http://www.bostonmagazine.com/articles/2012/08/angry-men-feminist-agenda/
