I was speaking to some friends recently who told me that in the Magistrates Court in Hartford, representatives of Fatherhood Initiatives recruit clients right outside the courthouse doors.
What is the purpose of these Fatherhood Initiatives? Ostensibly, the purpose is to assist fathers in developing their job skills, to encourage them as parents and to provide them with peer support and improve their ability to meet their child support obligations.
However, advocates have discovered a more suspect motivation for these contacts.
In a recent article entitled, "A Life Sentence" independent journalist Keith Harmon Snow spoke about how Family Court systems across America are taking children away from fit mothers and handing them over to abusive fathers in record numbers.
The impetus behind this social trend arises from millions of dollars in funds handed over to the States by the Department of Health and Human Services. I have seen different figures in terms of how much money is involved here, but I would guess that the best estimate is approximately $150 million per year in HHS money that is specifically designated to support fatherhood initiatives, plus around $4 billion designated for the Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE). Particularly advantageous to those interested in taking advantage of this financial windfall, fathers in these programs are not required to adhere to TANF deadlines or work requirements that are normally a standard for accessing these funds.
Furthermore, there is very little oversight of this money, which means that such programs have gotten away with using fatherhood funds to assist abusive and violent fathers in custody battles against protective mothers. These fathers are told that they have two choices -- risk jail for failure to pay child support, or embark on a custody battle to take the children from the Protective Mother and thus eliminate child support altogether.
What would you choose?
Thus, fathers who have had little contact with their children for years, who have physically and/or sexually abused the children and their mothers, often fathers just being released from jail, end up fighting and succeeding in getting custody with the collusion of family court services and mental health professionals.
According to Anne Stevenson, a freelance journalist, since eligibility for these programs is not needs based these fatherhood funds can be distributed not only to low income fathers, but also to middle and upper middle class fathers, even billionaires.
The moment a protective mother goes to trial court in order to obtain back child support, or bring financial matters of any kind before family court, these funds get dispersed to the fathers.
High Conflict Divorces are a particularly excellent source of funds for family courts that have been corrupted by fatherhood funds. High conflict divorces release funds to a broad range of family court services, GALs, custody evaluators and mental health professionals who then get involved in the case.
As columnist Anne Stevenson describes it, the HHS policy of subsidizing the homes and legal battles of unfit, unwilling, and violent fathers has "created a new breed of dangerous Welfare Kings". In these custody cases, at the beginning "only the offender is sick, but when one violent offender gets custody, the whole family needs treatment. Consequently, it is also not uncommon for dozens of family court mental health and legal professionals to come onto such a case to sustain an abusive father's deadly custody rights through HHS programs."
The result is that everyone, sometimes even the judges, ends up getting a payoff.
The result is that everyone, sometimes even the judges, ends up getting a payoff.
I have avoided discussing this matter simply because of the enormity of this situation. How do you grapple with such a monolithic violation of the human rights of protective mothers, not only in Family Courts throughout the nation, but also here in Connecticut, in our own communities, right on our front doorsteps!
To grasp the extent of it, try typing variants of the words "Fatherhood Initiative in Connecticut" into google--you end up with hit after hit.
One of the top results I obtained when I started my investigation on google was the "John S. Martinez Fatherhood Initiative of Connecticut" which operates apparently under the auspices of the Connecticut Department of Social Services.
Under this initiative, according to information sheets the Initiative provides, funds are directed towards assisting fathers in connection to custody. For example, the sheet "Financing Fatherhood Programs" states that "Welfare funds can be used to assist never-married parents to develop joint parenting plans, develop marriage and relationship building skills, or for mediation services."
Under "Building Services to Help Fathers" the information sheet says, "TANF dollars can be used to support a variety of services for fathers--employment assistance, counseling, parenting plans, mediation, parenting education, substance abuse and domestic violence."
According to Anne Stevenson, what this amounts to is that, for the purpose of switching custody from protective mothers to abusive fathers, those fathers who agree to engage in custody battles are provided with free attorneys, free housing, free groceries, free car maintenance, gas, and other transportation costs, free healthcare and dental care, plus cash, while having all their child support obligations suspended.
This information sheet further advises "policymakers", which I assume includes legislators, to "use the budget process to direct funding for the development of fatherhood programs and services." In addition, it advises them to "Use TANF funds to make competitive grants to local programs that operate fatherhood programs." and "Direct agencies to use TANF funds to assist fathers."
With all these millions and millions of dollars directed towards supporting fathers, what chance do protective mothers have?
And these information sheets caution, "States are not spending millions of dollars in TANF resources" that are still waiting and available. Plus, not only are there millions and millions of dollars in TANF resources out there that still need to be used, States can tap into more fatherhood funding if they approach other resources like WtW and Title XX block grants.
Can you see that this is so mind boggling that I have delayed reporting on it? I just couldn't even begin to comprehend such a monstrous situation.
What this does, of course, is make me look back on my own family court case and on the many cases I have discussed on this blog and ask: Were fatherhood funds behind each of these custody battles? I have only just begun my investigation of this subject matter, and will continue to write more about it. But if anyone has a comment and/or any personal experience with this issue, I would be interested in hearing from you.
First of all thank you for taking on this beast in CT. I am horrified by what I've seen in my own and my friends cases. The stigma that CT is a pro-father state is true to the core. The discrimination against women in general is real. I really want to know how to find out if fatherhood funds are being used in my case, but how? I demand an explanation from this state why there are no such services provided to mothers and women in general. I am currently involved in an 8 year long, high-conflict custody case with a recidivistic father who successfully removed my legal rights from my son and daughter despite the many substatiated neglect findings from DCF. The father has physically and allegedly sexually abused my children, has admitted to the court that he has exposed my eight year old daughter to pornography and my older son who was eleven at the time, reported seeing infant child pornography on his fathers computer.
ReplyDeleteAll of these horrific facts are real, and somehow the court has never taken action on any of it by using my diagnosis of depression from years ago to engage in 4 family relations evaluations, psychological evaluations, MIT evaluations, and other child-torturing bully tactics to discriminate against me, as a protective mother and maintain a steady flow of funds from this case.
There is something so unjust and sickening about the stigma of a father who fights for custody, portraying himself as a victim of harassment and an all American hero, against a mother who is trying to protect her children while healing the physical and emotional wounds of her children inflicted by this father being labeled an angry, child-coacher who, because she has suffered from non-debilitating, occasional bouts of depression during this case, is looked at by family relations to be the root of all the abuse.
It is outrageous, and watching my children slowly unravel emotionally while losing any chance of leading a healthy life and future. Your blog is the only comfort Ive found in years. Thank you, and please never stop your brave undertaking of these matters. Mothers are all alone here in CT.
I am hearing you on this. Everything you are saying rings so true. Your story is typical of what goes on here in CT. Women write to me similar stories on a regular basis. What is particularly heinous is demonizing folks with invisible disabilities and discriminating against them in violation of the ADA and the ADAAA.
ReplyDeleteThank you for validating this. Truly, with the experience of this discrimination and the knowledge of the retaliatory effects a court will hold against someone if, God forbid, a person with depression reaches out to a therapist for help, no one will reach out for that help anymore.
ReplyDeleteIt's a huge hellscape of a vicious cycle. Ugh.
THIS LADY IS A SEXIST, WHO IGNORES WOMAN'S PROBLEMS AND SEEMS TO HATE MEN, SHE EDITS COMMENTS THAT ARE NOT CRUEL ONLY WELL SPOKEN AND THOUGHTFUL, BUT DO NOT AGREE WITH HER. SHE DOES NOT BELIEVE IN FREEDOM OF SPEECH, AND I'M GUESSING SHE HAS ALL THE MENTAL ISSUES THAT SHE CLAIMS ALL MEN HAVE... SHE HAS PARENTAL ALIENATION DISORDER. AND IS A SEXIST AGAINST MEN.
ReplyDeleteOK, so is there anything in the above article that is not factual, or do you have any dispute with my arguments?
ReplyDelete