Essay for APAC 2020

I was recently tapped by Sheffanessea Brown and Frances Bradshaw of APAC to produce an essay with compiled research regarding parental alienation for their upcoming conference.

A subject I’m all too familiar with myself. I’ve campaigned for many unique causes and important movements throughout the years.

And as we become more aware as a society of parental rights we realize the importance of reformed legislation and a transition to a more balanced system.

Firstly, I firmly believe if you truly believe in equality & equity — you can be pro men's rights and pro woman's rights, no one is contesting a woman's rights over her own children. This isn’t up for debate.

Cases involving mother’s losing custody over parental alienation exist, but are rare.

The term “parental alienation” comes from the work of child psychiatrist Richard Gardner in the 1980s to explain what he saw as a shocking number of child sexual abuse allegations in custody litigation. Gardner claimed that “many of these abuse allegations were fabricated by vengeful or pathological mothers.”

The current and boisterous claim involves legal responsibilities; many fathers are left wondering why financial support is compulsory but enforcement of their rights to the child are not.

This is often construed as an argument against child support; when in reality it’s an attempt to point out what to the layman is a perceived incentive to ‘keep men out of the picture’.

Whereas this is not simply a men's vs -woman's rights debate; this is a human rights debate.

Opening Statement:
Parental alienation isn’t just a Canadian issue, it’s an international crisis.

Part 1: The Changing Dynamics of the Modern Home

There is no doubt that divorce has become more common in recent years, but this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s because of ease of access to divorce.
The National Bureau of Economic Research found in (WORKING PAPER 10175/DOI 10.3386/w10175/ ISSUE DATE December 2003)
That “We analyze state panel data to estimate changes in suicide, domestic violence, and spousal murder rates arising from the change in divorce law. Suicide rates are used as a quantifiable measure of wellbeing, albeit one that focuses on the extreme lower tail of the distribution. We find a large, statistically significant, and econometrically robust decline in the number of women committing suicide following the introduction of unilateral divorce. No significant effect is found for men.”

Karen Selick, a retired lawyer who was in private practice with the Belleville, Ontario firm of Reynolds, O’Brien, Kline and Selick, spoke to the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology and said “Already I know that the strategies which I discuss with my male clients have changed. The financial stakes are now so high that it may be more worthwhile for them to take a stab at gaining custody of the children. More men are willing to consider that option than formerly. They feel there is no other way for them to have any financial comfort or rewards left for themselves after all their hard work.” in reference to Canada’s new Child Support Guidelines.

Ten divorced men commit suicide each day:
“The biggest psychological impact results from the loss of contact with a dad’s partner and kids,” Will Courtenay, psychologist and author of the book Dying To Be Men, told Fatherly. “In the absolute worst case scenario, this leads to severe depression and suicide.”

According to the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health; “After taking into account other factors that have been reported to contribute to suicide, divorced men still experienced much increased risks of suicide than divorced women. They were nearly 9.7 times more likely to kill themselves than comparable divorced women.”

According to a 2020 study by John Hopkins “Losing a parent to suicide makes children more likely to die by suicide themselves and increases their risk of developing a range of major psychiatric disorders”. the study was led by Johns Hopkins Children’s Center that is believed to be the largest one to date on the subject.

A NCHS Data Brief №241, April 2016 for the CDC “In 2014, the age-adjusted rate for (suicide in) males (20.7) was more than three times that for females (5.8).”

The University of California, Riverside in 2000 conducted a study examining marital status and suicide within the previously completed National Longitudinal Mortality Study found “the risk of suicide among divorced men was over twice as likely as that of married men, whereas in women, there was no statistical difference in married and divorced women.”

Noah Berlatsky of NBC and a critic on culture says: “..the men most harmed by the real crisis are black, brown, poor, and mentally ill, and so are easier to ignore or erase. And part of the reason is that a narrative about women and feminists oppressing men seems dramatic and counterintuitive. A narrative about powerful men oppressing less powerful men is less exciting, and requires more self-reflection.” That politicians often bolster their “..own masculine resolve by calling out and denouncing (supposedly) dangerous men. In this way men are ground up in the prison industrial complex in order to fuel the egos and the political careers of other men.”

In Australia, Steve Dickson famously asserted that 21 fathers a week kill themselves because of inaccessibility to their own children. Similar to Tracey Bell-Henselin’s statement that was fact checked and found that it ‘is only partly supported by the facts.’ saying “There has been an overall increase in the number and rate of male deaths by suicide between 2007 and 2016. The rate of male deaths by suicide increased from 16.4 in 2007 to 17.9 in 2016. In 2016, there were the equivalent of 41 male deaths by suicide per week in Australia.” Which works out to 1,699 deaths in 2007 to 2,151 in 2016.

Edward Kruk said it well: Each father’s response across the continuum is unique, but there are common threads. For the majority of noncustodial fathers, the experience of divorce eventuates a process of bereavement: an upheaval of one’s pattern of life, a searching for the lost child, anger and outbursts of rage, despair, and an overwhelming sense of loss, but the finality of death is absent. Fathers described confused and frightened reactions as characteristic of the first stages of divorce, in respect to their relationships with their children and with other people. (Kruk, 1993, p. 33).

According to PEW research on social trends; U.S. Parents today are raising their children against a backdrop of increasingly diverse and, for many, constantly evolving family forms. By contrast, in 1960, the height of the post-World War II baby boom, there was one dominant family form. At that time 73% of all children were living in a family with two married parents in their first marriage. By 1980, 61% of children were living in this type of family, and today less than half (46%) are.

According to the Department of Justice in Canada the most recent data for marriages is from 1997 saying: The marriage rate for Canada in 1997 was 526 marriages per 100,000 people

In 2004, 33 percent of Americans ages 18 to 34 were living without a romantic partner, according to the General Social Survey; by 2018, that number was up to 51 percent.

Part 2: Legal Challenges

Jane C. Murphy at the University of Baltimore Law wrote in this 2005 edition of Legal Images of Fatherhood: Welfare Reform, Child Support Enforcement, and Fatherless Children.
“For centuries the definition of fatherhood under American law was simple: the mother’s husband. A legal doctrine that originated in English law called “the marital presumption” permitted courts to assume that the mother’s husband was both the child’s functional and biological father.”
— WILLIAM BLACKSTONE, 1 COMMENTARIES *457. The only recognized exceptions were cases where a man was sterile or impotent, or outside the country.

Charter Challenge- Statement of Live Birth (Birth Registration) Info
Supreme Court of Canada Decision- June 6, 2003,
The British Columbia Vital Statistics Act, R.S.B.C. 1996, c. 479, on their own or in their effect, discriminates against biological fathers on the basis of sex, by providing biological mothers with sole discretion to include or exclude information relating to biological fathers when registering the birth of a child, contrary to s. 15(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

A simple search on Google’s Scholar engine provides 2,530 examples of case law regarding parental alienation, from the supreme court to appellate divisions.
Similarly a search of cited research articles turns over 150,000 results of well-researched and highly cited studies from all kinds of Professors to Universities and Organizations.

CanLII is a non-profit organization managed by the Federation of Law Societies of Canada. Currently over 10,800 cases and 480 legislative documents can be found in their database in relation to parental alienation.

It isn’t a matter of there not being legal precedent in these cases, it’s that these challenges has little to do with aiding to solve the problem.

Part 3: Research and Statistics

There is a fundamental shift of the idea of the modern family,
in a 2017 study about relationship dynamics from Lake Research Partners found: Marriage is not for everyone. Over half of unmarried women without children under 18 say they either don’t want to be married, don’t think they want to be married, or would like a partner but don’t feel the need to be legally married.

Research into how the narrative of poverty is disparaging to POC experiencing economic challenges was addressed in a 2017 study by Dr. Travis L. Dixon saying “The biggest challenge in social change narrative work continues to be shifting the assumptions undergirding the barriers to the solutions we aim to advance and protect. According to research from Pew, more than half the country believes that “lack of effort,” instead of circumstances beyond one’s control, is to blame for poverty”
And furthermore: “The lack of effective policies and commitments from the most privileged and wealthiest is not part of the conversation. Infected by this mindset, news media outlets participate in blaming Black and Brown people — the very people harmed most by poverty — for the deeply flawed decision making and structures that cause it. All while those truly responsible for poverty remain invisible.”
In other words, the narratives held by major media outlets towards the most vulnerable populations are disparaging and have helped build a culture of social stigma towards POC and in turn, those on welfare.

‘Welfare Queen’ was a term coined in 1974, by George Bliss about Linda Taylor and a trope of Reagan’s 1976 presidential bid. It was basically a slogan that rallied support of welfare reform in the united states. And by others toting welfare fraud and system abuse.

Megan Thompson said to PBS about Josh Levin’s book “The Queen”;
The stereotype of the so-called ‘welfare queen’ has been used to demonize those on public assistance for decades. It’s a politically potent image, depicting an undeserving aid recipient getting rich on the backs of taxpayers.

Zach Parolin is a Post-doctoral researcher at Columbia’s Center on Poverty & Social Policy and says that In the United States, the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program — often known simply as “welfare” — is administered by the 50 states, which have considerable leeway in how to spend the money. The choices states make are unmistakably correlated with race. The higher the proportion of African Americans in a state, the more likely officials are to try to change the way poor families run their lives, rather than simply help them with basic expenses.

“Blacks in Canada: A long history” in the Spring 2004 edition of Canadian Social Trends reported that “About 46% of Black children aged 14 and under lived with only one parent, compared with just 18% of other children. Canadian-born Black children were also more likely to live with a single parent than were their foreign-born counterparts.”

Robert Rector a leading authority on poverty, welfare programs and immigration in America says “When compared with children in intact married homes, children raised by single parents are more likely to have emotional and behavioral problems; be physically abused; smoke, drink, and use drugs; be aggressive; engage in violent, delinquent, and criminal behavior; have poor school performance; be expelled from school; and drop out of high school. Many of these negative outcomes are associated with the higher poverty rates of single mothers. In many cases, however, the improvements in child well-being that are associated with marriage persist even after adjusting for differences in family income. This indicates that the father brings more to his home than just a paycheck.”

Nina Bernstein noted in this piece from the New York times from 2002 that more than 200,000 new Black families were single parents over previous studies.

But what are the incentives for separating families, in the UK they have clear targets for the number of adoptions that councils could get by removing children and putting them up for adoptions without parental consent.
“South Gloucestershire’s answer, for example, stated clearly that its adoption target for 2014–15 was 12 children — up from nine the year before. Some denied using targets, but then sent — perhaps inadvertently — internal documents that demonstrated that they did.” and concluding that “local authorities influence what happens in court, and councils having targets for the number of children to be adopted is ethically repugnant.”

Robert Putnam explains what this means for children in his book Our Kids, as summarized by David Brooks: “Roughly 10 percent of the children born to college grads grow up in single-parent households. Nearly 70 percent of children born to high school grads do”

Willis Krumholz at the Institute for families wrote in 2019 saying “because family structure influences the choices that children will make: controlling for race and parental income, boys raised without their father are much more likely to use drugs, engage in violent or criminal behavior, go to jail, and drop out of school; girls, meanwhile, are more likely to engage in early sexual activity or have a child out of wedlock. Children without a father in the home are even more likely to suffer from mental health problems as adults.”
He also mentions Roy Baumeister and John Tierney’s book, Willpower, details a psychology test, where children can either receive a small prize right away, or receive a larger, more valuable prize 10 days later — if they forgo the smaller prize. En mass, children without a father in the home settled for the initial prize, while children with a father in the home were more willing to wait for the larger prize.

The abuse of the welfare system and also proportionately paternity fraud are at the center of these arguments, the ease of access of these systems and the enforcement all without regard to any of the human rights of the husband, child or biological father being considered.

Equality Canada used data from the Canlii and the Canadian CRC and said that According to Attorney Gene C. Coleman, paternity fraud is fairly common. Coleman claims that such fraud occurs in up to 15 percent of cases in Canada.
Prof. Dickens at U of T said (in a 2014) ruling suggests that Canadian courts would discount DNA evidence over the best interests of the child.

Joseph E. Cordell a huffpost contributor noted “In fact, studies have found as many as 30 percent of fathers paying child support are not the biological father of the children they are supporting.”

The organization women against paternity fraud calculated “approximately 44,000 false paternity establishments in California from default judgments every year. In eighteen years, that would almost be 800,000 false paternity establishments in California alone.”

Deona Cureton a PhD in Public Administration & Policy with a concentration in Law & Public Policy has some excellent case study on paternity fraud in this criminal justice overview

One such study published in the Guardian said that “review of estimates of so-called paternal discrepancy over more than 50 years suggests the father was not the natural parent in between 1% and 30% of cases.” equaling as many as 1 in 25 fathers in the UK.

Part 4: Financial incentive

Canada penalizes low income men who are proportionately POC.

The NATIONAL COUNCIL OF WELFARE REPORTS of Canada said in this special edition “In two of Canada’s largest cities, more than half of all persons living in poverty were from racialized groups: • 58% in Vancouver; and • 62% in Toronto.”

ocasi said in a 2019 media release:

• The 2016 Census showed that 20.8% of peoples of colour in Canada are low-income compared to 12.2% of non-racialized people.

Statistics Canada reported that “there has been a notable increase in the number of lone-parent families with children — from 289,000 in 1976 to 698,000 in 2014.”

Figures from the Justice Institute seem to denote a trend saying “in 1996 women headed 83 percent of all lone-parent families, while men headed only 17 percent of lone-parent families. Although the number of lone-parent families has been increasing, the proportion of female to male lone parents has remained relatively stable over the past decade.”

Figures in a January 2004 Canadian journal of public health entry by Enza Gucciardi of Ryerson University found “38% of single mothers with children under age three were employed compared to 63.1% of married mothers with children under age three… Moreover, the part-time employment rate for single mothers (26%) was also lower than that for married mothers (45%).”

In a report from 2018 the star noted some research released by Public Interest Alberta, Edmonton Social Planning Council and the Alberta College of Social Workers revealed “that more than one third of single mothers were living in poverty — 34.5 per cent compared to only 13.7 per cent of single fathers, according to 2016 Statistics Canada numbers.” Sandra Ngo, a member of Edmonton Social Planning Council who helped prepare the report said “There are suggestions that number is going to go up. So it’s very, very concerning,”

The Canadian Council on Social Development found that the percentage of welfare offered to single parents is sometimes 10–20% higher than any other eligible recipient if reference to ‘Total Welfare Income as % of Poverty Line’.

It’s been reported that there are more people using the Canadian Child Benefit’s than ever before “including more than 1.3 million families in Ontario who received nearly $9 billion from the CCB in the 2018–19 benefit year.
A single mother in Markham with two children under the age of six and an income of $30,000 will receive an additional $286 tax-free this benefit year. That’s up to $13,278 in support every year.”

The CCB provides $6,765 per year for children under 6, and $5,708 per year for children aged 6 to 17.

Canada Without Poverty released it’s report about the current state of poverty in Canada saying:

• 1 in 7 (or 4.9 million) people in Canada live in poverty.
• In Edmonton, 1 in 8 individuals is currently living in poverty.
• Poverty costs Canada billions of dollars annually.
• Precarious employment has increased by nearly 50% over the past two decades.
• Between 1980 and 2005, the average earnings among the least wealthy Canadians fell by 20%.
• Over the past 25 years, Canada’s population has increased by 30% and yet annual national investment in housing has decreased by 46%.

The INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH ON PUBLIC POLICY highlighted three possible avenues for reform of government policy to take:
SHERRI TORJMAN > SOCIAL SAFETY NET REFORM
Maytree Foundation: Redesigning income & security programs
ALAIN NOËL > INCOME PROTECTION
Université de Montréal: Investing in a more generous welfare state
RON KNEEBONE > HOUSING CONSIDERATIONS
University of Calgary: Tying benefit increases to rent changes

In summary the disparages of fatherless households are being felt around the country, and in the other G7 nations (to as far as even Australia) these issues have simple solutions.

Father’s are less likely to fall into poverty if they remain in their children’s lives; Which means children are also less likely to grow up in poverty with a father in their home. Changing this means simple policy reform for automatic shared custody.

Barring from sounding like the title of a pragerU video; Black Fathers Matter
These policies are destroying single parent minority homes in Canada and abroad.

We need policy reform before more families are ripped apart because of the archaic policy of single-parent custody and visitation.

We need policies that keep families from becoming statistics and keep the status-quo of having the father play an active role in the raising of his own children.

Children have a fundamental human right to have equal access to both parents; This has shown by countless studies to increase the overall quality of life for the children, the mother and the father.

This also has massive mental health benefits for all parties involved.

The refusal to reform this policy will continue to damage society, as the fracture of families into the system, create the disparages we are now reveling with in our modern society.

The final part of this essay focuses on the single-parent and the effects of the opioid epidemic affecting the western world, specifically families.

Dr. Will Flanders is the Research Director at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty in a study reported that “Counties with more single-parent households are more likely to have higher rates of opioid hospitalizations.”

Even the New York Times ran an article about single-mothers struggling with opioid addictions and the fall-out of children born into crisis.

Youth residing in homes with parental OUD are at risk of exhibiting elevated levels of externalizing behaviors (e.g., aggression, delinquency, hyperactivity) and internalizing behaviors (e.g., inward distress, anxiety,, depression) risky sexual practices, impaired social functioning, substance misuse.

According to a study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine “average mortality rates were significantly higher in counties with greater economic and family distress.”

A report in 2019 by Ginevra Liptan, MD in the Nation Pain Report cited; a powerful editorial in Pain Medicine News by Dr. James Choo, a Tennessee pain physician and according to Dr. Choo; the better question is “why do addicts seek any drug? The answer is likely trauma, a societal affliction that most policymakers and the media are uncomfortable addressing. A study in the 1990s by the CDC and Kaiser Permanente found that; the amount of trauma experienced in childhood was directly related to the risk of developing addictions. Some addiction experts now think that substance abuse may be a normal learned response to trauma, a form of compulsive comfort-seeking or self-soothing. Dr. Choo advocates changing the narrative from an “opioid-crisis” to a “trauma crisis.”

A paper from the Swiss Journal of Psychology says “adolescents from single-parent families showed a higher level of substance use compared to those living with both parents.”

Bella DePaulo Ph.D. said in a piece for Psychology Today “I wasn’t surprised when the results of a national substance abuse survey, based on 22,000 adolescents, found more substance abuse among the children of single mothers than among the children of two biological parents.”

Suzanne C. Brundage Director, United Hospital Fund Children’s Health Initiative and Carol Levine Director, United Hospital Fund Families and Health Care Project along with other PHD’s, MD’s and Scholars completed ‘the ripple effect’ report outlining “actions that can be taken by government, the private sector, researchers, health care and social service professionals, teachers, first responders, law enforcement agencies, and all people who interact with children and families — that means each of us in our professional capacities. But we all must also act in another capacity: as caring human beings. A big, collaborative, successful effort to reach children in the crosshairs of the opioid crisis will require as much compassion as coordination.”

AMY WRIGHT GLENN a PhillyVoice Contributor wrote “children of divorce — and later, remarriage — are twice as likely to academically, behaviorally and socially struggle as children of first-marriage families: About 20 to 25 percent struggle, compared with 10 percent, a range of research finds.”

In their article “Child Abuse and Other Risks of Not Living with both Parents,” published in Ethology and Sociobiology, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson note: “If their parents find new partners, children are 40 times more likely than those who live with biological parents to be sexually or physically abused.”

Sometimes referred to as the “abusive boyfriend syndrome,” scholars note there is “a statistically greater potential for instability” in homes where adults and children, who have no biological connection, reside.”

In conclusion, keeping fathers relegated to the status of a ‘visitor’ in a child’s life rather than an equal under the law, relegates the importance of the role of the ‘father’ to society.

We see irreparable damage to the fabric of society in regards to abuse, neglect, poverty and substance abuse in single-parent homes and especially when fathers are completely cut-out of the picture.

The societal effects and potential impact for the over-all improvement of the mental health of the parents and child(ren), not to mention the potentiality and causality to having more fathers involved with respect to the crime, and substance abuse of their children being greatly reduced by their mere presence alone, according to the research.

In fact no research I’ve found suggests any single parent is better off than a two-parent family, even if those people don’t necessarily cohabitate.

Could automatic shared-custody really be worse than the constant onslaught of these disparaging statistics of rising crime and dragging wealth rates globally.

We see the correlation, we know the effects, we need to curb this great familial divide in our culture and systemically root-out the causes without stigma.

And that includes the fragmented view of the role of a father in society.