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Archive for the 'in Studies' Category
"Parental Alienation" is Sign Language….Like "Domestic Violence"
Don't ask me why I decided to post this draft, revealing my thoughts the other day. I don't feel like telling. Hope never dies that exposing verbal idiocy might result in a net reduction of it.
At least on the part of the consumers — the marketers, well, this language use is wise.
The words "Parental Alienation" signify that somewhere on this earth, a certain business sector, playing on human emotions, is prospering. As does "domestic violence" "child abuse" "Children and Families" and "Fatherhood" (enough syllables, seems to roll well off the tongue), and "false allegations," "resource center" and "batterers' intervention," "supervised visitation," and the like. These noun phrases are now just part of the landscape, and have developed their own specialized biosphere, with flora and fauna.
If you were a fine-feathered, raptor, and could soar with piercing vision, specialized hearing (and feathers) and incredible adaptations for dive-bombing your prey from on high in spirals, like the peregrin falcon, or hearing it underneath the snow, like certain owls (obviously I've been watching PBS here), and your prey were compromised populations, you JUST might be an initiative, a conference, a collaboration, a task force, a commission, or a nonprofit organization part of one of the above.
RAPTOR FORCE: Eagles, Falcons, Hawks, and Owls
NATURE takes flight on an exhilarating ride with elite winged predators in Raptor Force.
Humans have had a unique relationship with raptors, nature's aerial killing machines, for more than four thousand years, first through the ancient sport of falconry, and, more recently, as scientists and engineers have turned to these mighty birds — from golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, and turkey vultures, to great gray owls and the peregrine falcon — as the inspiration for the latest in aircraft design. Using the tricks and tactics of raptors as their model, engineers have devised fighter jets with unprecedented maneuverability and stealth.
In Raptor Force, you'll learn the secrets of these astonishing aerialists, and how they've mastered, more than any other type of bird, the art of soaring. And with the help of engineer and falconer Rob MacIntyre's ingenious miniature television station — a camera, transmitter, and battery small enough to be harnessed onto the backs of raptors — you'll see for yourself what it's like to fly with these deadly aces
I already brought up the concept of the Family Law System as a Giant Squid, fearsome tentacles lurking in the dar, able to tear apart ships, the stuff of mythology. Now it's time to get the view from on high, the "Task Force" viewpoint, the elite, all-seeing, dive-bombing, never-see-it-coming social policy collaboratives (etc.).
Well, like raptors, they come in different flavors, and target different prey. But they're all aerial artists. Some are solo, some fly in woods, some even work in teams, I learned through this show.
The owl uses sound — its ears are uneven. Its specialized facial feathers help with that.
The peregrin falcon is a dive-bomber. Specialized eye covering deflects flying sand particles, which at high speed, could sure hurt.
With birds, you can see this by their shapes, although closer look gets a finer appreciation. With humans, one has to be more sensitive to language and behaviors to figure out whether they are distressed prey, congregants meeting to figure out what to do about distressed prey, or raptors coming in for those lower on the food chain.
Some go for distressed Dads. Some go for distressed Moms. So long as the conciliation code (at least in my state) rules that ANY couple having a squabble about custody, that squabble per se gives jurisdiction of their young to the raptors. Excuse me, Conciliation Courts, a.k.a., later, Family Courts. Now, what typically distresses said Dads, or Moms, is generally the other Parent. Which brings us to "Parental Alienation."
"Parental:"
Define "Parental." Go ahead — I dare you.
For that matter, define "Parent." Go ahead. I dare you, find an all-purpose word that fits all definitions, starting with the noun, before it became verbified (to parent) and adjectified ("Parental"), specified as to who has the kids (Custodial/noncustodial — a term also associated with prison, i.e., "taken into custody" as well as with winning a court debate, i.e., "custody granted."), and finally market-niched ("Parenting classes").
The word is already de-gendered, as if the world were not, or any of its 3 Abrahamic world religions were not.
(meaning includes "obeying." This can get complicated in practice, as in:
Prosecutor proposes jail time for parents who miss teacher conferences
 – 4 hours ago
Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy introduced a proposal Tuesday at a Detroit City Council meeting that would require a parent to attend at least one .
In this case, the parent is childified…. and the prosecutor, in behalf of the education establishment, is parentified. Ironically, the word "educare" has a root meaning of Lead Out, not Box In (or, Stuff in, as in knowledge into people's heads).
Now, like they say Eskimos have different words for snow, we have diversified words for "parent" — step-, bio-, surrogate- foster- adoptive- in addition to the older "grand-" (indicating biological). Whoever the kids in custody are living with at the time, they had better obey the Residential Parent, or the court may just switch them to the other one, or to another type of breeding ground called Juvenile Hall.
Such a diversity of language indicates a thriving business, and that obviously some parents are absent, or incompetent, or need supervision, etc. Which just goes to show who the "real" parent is as to assigning custody, but the real "parents" are as to assigning responsibility for any screwups.
Occasionally the word "father" or "mother" will show up in a new sarticle, or in a grants application, but generally, to say it's neutral, it's about custody rights, which means "PARENTAL." Glad I established that. This word does NOT stand on its own when challenged — by anyone, almost — but it does mean, someone is open for business.
Alien-ation
Alien-Nation, etc.
Let's keep this one short. I keep thinking about Arizona, where "aliens" are bad and you can be arrested for being alien improperly. So, I'd have to say that "alien" is bad in connotation, even though much business is done by resident "illegal aliens," and in fact, some business would close were it not. Now, apart from UFO space-ship variety (promoting a different set of businesses, much of it digital, but also involving conferences…)
"Parental Alienation" is bad if a parent does it, but good if you're in the business of protesting it, or running seminars for judges about it. The call "Parental Alienation" indicates a resonance to the AFCCNET.org philosophy that the goal is to reconcile marriages for the good of the nation. So the net value is neutral (one group of parents and affiliated associations use this term, an opposing group opposes the use of this term. This extends up into the stratosphere, where raptors flying around the Federal Aeyrie (?) can snag some grants to handle the problem, and plummet to street level with demonstration projects and initiatives. So, it's good for them. Bad for taxpayers, I'd have to say.
WHO SETS THE DEBATE? The debate is not "PARENTAL ALIENATION" v . "CHILD ABUSE" any more than it is, categorically, Fathers v. Mothers, or Conservatives v. Liberals.
I see it as "teachers" vs. "taught." My point in that last post is that I am no longer interested in the verbiage (pro/con) surrounding "alienation." I am more interested in dishonest usage of the word "Parent" to obscure gender bias, but beyond that, I think it's time to figure out the profit motive, and think seriously about the role of wealth (as opposed to jobs) in the larger picture. Then the networks become a little more plain to understand, beyond the rhetoric. ALthough I may not communicate it too well, an attempt is at the bottom of today's post.
Meanwhile . . . .
Words are understood in their usage and in context, including who is speaking.
Parental Alienation is essentially a term coined to get certain things done, including therapists into the legal process, and conferences training judges (etc.) about it, into certain people's resumes. Perfectly reasonable and pre-existing terms to describe the same thing aren't as good a market niche. For one, "Stockholm Syndrome" or "traumatic bonding" or "custodial interference" in context might do as well. Or "brainwashing" or "child abuse."
The debate about "Parental Alienation" is at a stalemate, but the field is full-throttle ahead, regardless of what any organization pronounces about it. It's derailing the more important questions, and the distraction is intentional, I"m sure of it.
Domestic Violence Industry Awareness Month – My Comments on this site, responding to another Press Article, by DV Nonprofit responding to a family (he killed his kids) fatality surrounding Battered Shelter & "Unsupervised Visitation" and judge "just not understanding."
After writing that comment (post-length, actually), I went back to TAGGS.hhs.gov and looked at how many (millions$) were going to Family Violence Prevention and Marriage/Fatherhood Promotion — in the same state. What a shocker. The real question is who is tracking BOTH sets of funding, and why not shut BOTH of them off, leaving some more funds at the local level, and perhaps some marriages might be less economically stressed, which might save lives (though poverty is no excuse for murder, nor is family "honor" !)
This blogger "gets" the grants racket. Needless to say, this POV is not circulated prominently by the DV experts.
Suggest just read the page. In case anyone wonders, I have never spoken to that blog author, I just happen to share many of the Points of View she reports (not all — for example, I'm not in favor of GPS ankle bracelets…). I suspect this will make sense to someone who has experienced some of the types of events she reports on.
It's a long page, worth scrolling all the way through (and reading).
"Www.FamilyLawCourts.com/Domestic."
Media rarely reports why these murders keep continuing. However, the reality is they're profitable for the domestic violence businesses and police agencies seeking Grants.
And so, rather than divorce or break up; we are treated to headlines, like Postal worker charged with murdering pregnant girlfriend but never a real, substantive investigation.
So stories of failed mediation, follow. Murder – Suicide. Again.
As opposed to just killing the "disgrunted" wife. A more common solution. Hans Reiser finally confesses he murdered Nina Reiser after proclaiming his innocence for so long; because of a remark she made.
Kids willing and do, testify, but still these cases are kept in Family Court.
Not only do Family Court judges continually protect the economically superior, the Executive Branch of government rather than enforce existing laws, under the guise of helping women through the Office of Violence Against Women, fund police departments, who are not legally required to respond to calls for enforcement of restraining orders, instead. {{in which we see another blogger utilizes incomplete sentences...the "But also" is missing. Actually, it's in the next sentence. Perhaps this writer's sentence ligaments got torn in the process of a custody battle, like mine.pieces drop off in the execution of a thought. Pun not intended...}}
Worse, rather than use funds from their own budget, police departments request funds From DOJ for bullet-proof vests;so officers will be safer when answering calls; which may or may not include responding to calls from desperate women.
See: "LAW ENFORCEMENT" or "ARREST." Recent news:
…and when might reporters out "Anger Management Classes" run by non-profits serve to buy a paycheck for the top management running them?
San Francisco Anger Management Programs Don't Work. However, there is no shortage of these "non-profits" meaning the individual doesn't profit from their services, in any city and backed by any politician.
Man on the way to Anger Management Class Attacks Woman
Wouldn't it be nice if women could get This kind of security?
So domestic violence programs continue for the funding source they are, mostly without family court litigants being aware, how vested state and city officials are in micro-managing lives, . . . . .
To Discipline an Unethical Judge, Just Establish a Commission to Consider Whether To..
Since 1960, with complaints about judges now totaling nearly a thousand per year, but only Sixteen judges have been removed from the State of California.
Because the Commission on Judicial Performance, seldom performs, LA County, by necessity, instituted a separate body, to investigate,
LA County Judges.
Unfortunately, it was the non performance of the Commission on Judicial Performance, specifically the Commission's private "reprimand" of two San Diego judges, now both, convicted felons to highlight public awareness to a body that will not act to protect the public from felons posing as judges.
What began as a voter referendum forty years ago, has outlived its usefulness.
Lack of judicial accountability in California is its own scandal, separate from the child abuse and gender bias perpetuated by judges running amok within the system.
The budget for the Commission on Judicial Performance, is $3,704,000, distributed as follows.
16 attorneys or counsel, and 10 support staff
Total salaries & wages plus benefits paid $2,629,000
Total support/operating costs $1,075,000
Total Budget $3,704,000
The major task of the Commission of Judicial Performance is to investigate complaints about judges.
[From Sidebar:]
Thirty-five percent of its roughly the four million dollar a year budget, is devoted to not opening an investigation after receiving complaints.
This explains why, after receiving Nine Hundred complaints one year, the total number of judges who were "admonished" numbered, six.
Six.
Four million dollars, almost a thousand complaints, and six,
"Don't do that." from the CJP
As the numbers confirm, absolutely the Safest occupation in all California is being a bad judge.
"Parental Alienation" & "Domestic Violence"
Street Level — this shows which infantry you are in.
Strategic Level – either way, it's profit, but this is how task forces are delegate to one area or the other.
Another blogger gets this — same as above, on the business of DV — now she weighs in on "Parental Alienation" (although, the Lauren & Ted case, last 2 posts, she took the opposite side I did), it just might be worth a read.
A Nation of Stockholm Children (Aug. 2009, on Open Salon):
In the continued coverage of the Jaycee Lee Dugard case, not likely to be reported is the larger issue of a nation roiling in an epidemic of Stockholm Syndrome kids.
Media's near total black-out of our nation's busiest court, dooms our children while ensuring the decades long epidemic of Stockholm children will continue for generations.The most extreme form of parental alienation I've seen recently involved a custody dispute in Lawrence, Kansas with the children of Arthur Davis seemingly part of a plan to beat their mother to death with a baseball bat. During a 9-1-1 call, Arthur can be heard screaming in the background to his son, "Hit her harder."
From failing to educate the public to the profits of those who work in the divorce industry, or family court judges inappropriately adjudicating cases which should rightly be in criminal court;lack of media exposure ensures a nation of damaged children will become damaged adults.
Who profits? Therapists.
. . .(KEEP READING . .. . )
I'm not sure media blackout is the issue, but media spin, and a public so overwhelmed with info, they cannot process it. We do not know how the critical "operating systems" of the country actually work, including courts, law enforcement, government, and the role of religion in all this, child support systems, and the increasingly tightening of networks through the Internet.
Note: I cannot continue "teaching" (publicizing) through posts until my Internet access is up to speed (i.e., MHz very slow!). Just continue to keep in mind: The U.S.A. is the world's largest per capita jailor, and captive audiences are captive for demonstrations of the latest theories, behavioral management techniques, or justification for (yet more) grants.
I saw a poster on a blog that says what to do, well enough:
It's time to remember what this man did, and how he did it.
Also, to understand the INNATE characteristics of money — which is to congregate at centers of wealth, and drain from the extremities. That's the kind of money the U.S. (at least) has, i.e., that which we BUY at interest, which will never be paid off, from the Federal Reserve. There are reasons we "have" to become a nation of consumers, and that failing to consume enough of what we really don't need (and makes us sick, in some cases) has become an indication of "treason." In examining the courts from the roots up, it does go to Washington, D.C., and to understand the monetary setting of policy by super-wealthy foundations and families (through government, through universities, etc.), it's also necessary to grasp, even if dimly, that the North/South (?) division of the globe into countries forced to become export economies, rather than self-sufficient, to pay off THEIR debt — means that those products have to come back to the more industrialized countries. Yeah, I"m an armchair economist, but search "Susan George" on this blog (or just get the book) for a clue.
The Internet flattens, but access (or restricted access) to it also further segments society. The section in Maroon in yesterday's post bears follow-up (if you can).
Here, is a description of what centrally based (and non-bona fide) money does to communities:
THE PROBLEM WITH CONVENTIONAL MONEY:
It is partisan
Money as we know it is not a neutral service provided by the government. Our money supply is created by private financial institutions on a for-profit basis. This money system is designed to benefit those who provide it, not those who use it.
It is based on debt
Money is created when banks grant loans. Thus for every unit created there is one unit of debt.
We are encouraged to think of it as a 'thing'
Money is essentially information and has no physical existence yet banks encourage us to think of it as a 'thing' so that they can 'lend' it to us and thereby make a profit by charging interest. 'Thing' money also has to be created, distributed and controlled so that there is not too much of it. It can also be stolen, lost, bought, sold and counterfeited, with serious consequences for everyone.
It is permanently scarce
The money to pay the interest on debt-money is never created. There is therefore a permanent shortfall of money to pay back both the principal and the interest.
It causes cancerous growth
Banks continuously need to create more money than is required to pay back their loans so that borrowers can pay back the interest on those loans. This is the source of the growth imperative of our economies. There must be a continual expansion of bank credit or else the economy goes into recession. Systemic growth leads to the environmental problems we now all face.
Its value is based on its shortage
The shortfall of money keeps it valuable. There only needs to be enough of it to buy back the goods and services available. This has nothing to do with the monetary requirements of people. Those who have none are not seen by the market and so are marginalised.
Every unit of conventional money is based on a unit of debt. This debt has to be paid back with interest, and the interest on the interest is compounding. Interest is built into the prices of everything we buy, resulting in higher consumer prices.
It redistributes wealth from the poor to the wealthy
Usury is the tool used by the wealthy to suck wealth from the poor and middle classes to the moneyed class. Parasitism and class antagonisms are the result of this.
It promotes dishonesty and corruption
You can get it without delivering anything of value (e.g. speculation, interest, gambling etc.) so people concentrate on 'making money' rather than producing/delivering anything of real value. It is usually far easier to get money through dishonest means than by honest work. When you have no money you have no choice but to try and get it dishonestly
It leaks away from where it is created
Conventional money knows no bounds and loyalty. It always leaks away to the 'money centres' (financial centres, big businesses, etc.)
It destroys local economies
Goods produced cheaper elsewhere replace locally produced goods. This creates a local shortage of money and reduces the market for local sellers. This also results in the irrational transportation of goods all over the world, consuming precious fossil fuels and creating pollution.
It destroys community
Dependence on money means we no longer need our neighbours. We can get everything from anonymous strangers in return for money. We have no obligation to anyone when the bills are paid. Every trade is a complete and closed action: you provide me with something and I give you money. End of story. No one does us any favours and we need do no favours for anyone.
It fosters competitiveness
The shortage of money means we all have to fight for a share of an amount that is too small to go around. The need to repay interest means that we have to eat others to prevent ourselves from going under.
It creates poverty
While it makes some super rich, it makes most people poor. Poverty is caused by a lack of money (not by a lack of jobs). Usury and the need to keep money scarce ensure that money constantly moves to those who already have money.
It causes social and cultural degradation
The elimination of local opportunities to exchange and relate to one another focuses attention on ways of getting money outside the community. Communities fall apart as they become indebted to entities outside their communities.
And so many more …!
Now let's think a little bit about TIME. If a person is earning an hourly wage, then TIME in court is wages lost, to say the least. What about their "psychic" emotional and other energy. including creative and thought energies, which would otherwise be put into taking care of their own basic needs, and their family's (such as it may be, if in a divorce or custody situation). It's GONE from the mix. In waltzes in (federally, state, then "local" meaning, a child support agency at the county level) – and says we are going to transfer income from A to B. Consider the bureaurcarcy in that, and the antagonism it creates. Families have died over this. Let me repeat. I have yet to hear of a mother murdering over child support, but their is no lack of newsprint on fathers, in this context. His basic authority and social credibility — income producing — has been challenged by the government. Meanwhile, this same Child Support agency waltzes into the newly single mother's life, perhaps (and if abuse was involved, likely newly poor single) and says, we will interface for you. And yet, this entire system, it later develops, has been co-opted as a custody-switching agency. A federalization of basic life processes. So I say, boycott it. It's got the power to incarcerate — or not. At will, if a mother has signed over her rights as a result off initially going on welfare. (A fact not typically made much of — but in years to come, will figure highly in any contested case…).
So, here are all these taxes going to socially engineer the country, and causing a lot of strife, and competition for working in the fields supported by this social engineering. How many of the services provided are the most basic ones that we couldn't do without, and how many of the infrastructures and institutions created are transparent enough for the average participant to actually comprehend
I am certainly not a go-back-to-the-farm proponent, but the codependency here is too much, upon JOBS. The key difference between "job" and "business" is who keeps the profits, and who gets to deduct expenses before taxes.
People who were raised to just love what they do, and specialize in it, are called "professionals," often, which brings up — who is going to pay for them to do what they love doing, and market it, contract it, do administration, etc. (unless people wish to "do it all" and "keep it small"?) One of the safest places to be a professional in a field that will rarely go away, is to do it for the US Government (I think). And in the courts, too.
Well, there's a lot more to all this, but the key in the courts is where is the money moving around to, whether through professional referrals, trainings, or simply directly from litigants to fees. Multiply that to all contested custody cases involving children, per state, be aware there are 50 states (and US territories), and think about it.
There is, FYI, a two-tier court track:
1. Can afford fees. They will be "soaked;" one party may be bankrupted later, or up front, to inspire more fights.
1a. Then the therapists can come in and counsel how to reduce conflicts.
2. Can't afford fees. These will be the revolving door cases, but because there's such an easy way to get INTO court again, any old OSC almost will do it, and most litigant's aren't smart enough to move to dismiss up front (on any of a variety of grounds), these will repeatedly be brought back to court — and possibly produce a candidate for food stamps, SSI, or some other part of the welfare system to continue justifying its existence. Their data will be mined for further studies by social scientists (etc.) in remote locations.
2a. Occasionally a 1a or a 2a may result in someone going off the deep end, with a weapon. However, as this eventually causes social and economic deterioration, over a period of decades, no lack of new, fresh faces for the family law system (and associated professions).
Just a little more on "interest":
The first source of plunder upon your wealth is the concept of compound interest. Have you heard that the best thing you can do with your money is to let it compound? Such statements are everywhere. "Compound interest is the next best thing since sliced bread." Do not let these statements fool you. Compound interest is a wealth erosion strategy that has cost the American people billions of dollars.
Why is compounding interest one of the most devastating wealth-eroding techniques? How could having your money grow and compound be bad for anyone? Those who plunder your wealth want you to believe that earning a high rate of interest, and leaving it to compound over a long period is to your financial advantage. Billions of advertiser dollars are spent on promoting this technique to many unwary consumers.
We will present the facts about compound interest. Make sure that you read this material slowly. Use a calculator or computer as you read to verify the accuracy of our numbers and findings. This lesson could save you millions of dollars over your lifetime.
Basically this site is reminding us that, compounding interest or not, what about taxes?
(co. 2004-2008, Evans Financial Group)
My point being, OK, OK,
be aware of the rhetoric,
but pay attention to common "cents" on where the "dollars" are going.
In some respects, could any ex be worse than this system long-term? The answer in many cases is, yes. But, maybe a civic duty is to get the field reports out, for posterity.
What are ALL the relevant elements of any situation — as best you can ascertain them.
Which of those are actionable — now, and in the long run.
What can you do not to overwhelm your personal comprehension system into "Paralysis"?
The human psyche can absorb a LOT of information (varies with individuals), but to act on it is natural. I think that overload jsut builds up tension and frustration, and a sense of powerlessness. To know what to act on, with purpose towards a certain goal, is critical to humanity. Being in systems of such chaos (and corruption) as these family law systems, is dangerous to the health. It tests character to handle it.
To give this post a semblance of structure, I'd like to conclude the way I started:
"Don't ask me why I decided to post this draft, revealing my thoughts the other day. I don't feel like telling. "
Posted in AFCC, Biosphere, Business Enterprise, Cast, Script, Characters, Scenery, Stage Directions, Context of Custody Switch, Designer Families, Domestic Violence vs Family Law, etc., Giant Squid, in Studies, Metaphors for Family Law, My Takes, and Favorite Takes, Organizations, Foundations, Associations NGO Hybrids, Raptors, Vocabulary Lessons
Tagged with "Parent" explained- perhaps, AFCC, Alienation, Education, Jaycee Dugard, Linguistic Dissonance, obfuscation, social commentary, Studying Humans, U.S. Govt $$ hard @ work..
Domestic Violence INDUSTRY Awareness Month — let's boycott!
I'm short of time. Let's keep this simple: STOP, LOOK, and LISTEN….
"Ye shall know them by their fruits. "
(notably absent — stoppING domestic violence.)
Excuse me, scratch that —
Ye shall know them by their "-INGS",
WritINGS often have titles end in -ING and are (thus) UnendING, which tells you the process (and deaths/destructions from this) never stop…
One prime indicator you are in this industry is any word ending in "-ing" in the title. Last post, I gave you the newest, latest, "Defending Childhood" initiative. Other times, it's Explicating Domestic Violence, and of course the latest is along the lines of "Rethinking Domestic Violence." Even if ALl these systems fail, or if people die as a result, it's still possible to write on
"UnderstandING System Failure" (see my post).
Apologies in advance to any expert, and diligent writer/researcher, possibly very nice individual I will insult in this post. I do mean this. Your writings are interesting, and some of them hold some water.
Please bear in mind, I looked for help the past 10 years, which was unwise. In that time, I could've passed the Bar, earned another degree, or probably passed three self-defense courses, which might have been a better use of my time than attending conferences on DV or reading the literature, or expecting anything funded by U.S. or (my state) taxpayer dollars — extracted on the premise that these taxes are for helping people to handle certain social ills, so the taxpayers wouldn't have to, personally — and could continue working and paying more taxes…while organizations that DON'T (or, are funded by foundations that don't) transform society and policy….
Here's a sample of the "-INGS" that indicate participation in the Domestic Violence INDUSTRY, or in the backlash to it, the Fatherhood (i.e., "ParentING" literature, by its real name) Industry.
(I obviously don't mean "parenting" literature by married or cohabiting parents, but in the context of family law — see blog title…)
My sarcasm about the industry (well-merited) doesn't mean I don't appreciate the points raised by people in it (well, many of the points raised by people in it). What I protest is the SILENCE on the points rarely raised — which are the crux of the matter, and we poor slobs stuck in the system deserved to know earlier. Serves us right for following industry leaders before doing a background checks, or having ever become distressed — at all — in life… or having been raised in trusting nonviolent family environments, which fail to tell us how the world works, or at least the economy and the government. To this day, a real good (if uncomfortable) life consists of straining out myths. I hope my blog helps with some of the worst..
Redefining Harm, Reimagining Remedies and Reclaiming Domestic Violence Law
Margaret Ellen Johnson
University of Baltimore – School of Law
UC Davis Law Review, Vol. 42, 2009
University of Baltimore School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2009-4
Civil domestic violence laws do not effectively address and redress the harms suffered by women subjected to domestic violence. The Civil Protective Order ("CPO") laws should offer a remedy for all domestic abuse with an understanding that domestic violence subordinates women.
{{WE WANT LAWS TO UNDERSTAND SOMETHING? OR TO OFFER A REMEDY BASED ON SOMETHING?}}
{{Rather, I suggest we start with an acknowledgment that they aren't enforceable, anyhow, at leat not for long……As such, and per se, they endanger women unles respected by the person who got the civil PO. See Castle Rock v. Gonzales — isn't this a lawyer or law prof. writing??}}
These laws should not remedy only physical violence or criminal acts.
{{Well, as practiced now — they often don't remedy anything, though initially they do save lives (case in point). They are also considered less severe than criminal when kids get involved, though family law judges are notrious for ignoring criminal pasts in custody cases anyhow…Lord help the [yeah, woman , and especially any mother,] who didn't know this, and press charges from day 1….}}
All forms of abuse — psychological, emotional, economic, and physical — are interrelated. Not only do these abuses cause severe emotional distress, physical harm, isolation, sustained fear, intimidation, poverty, degradation, humiliation, and coerced loss of autonomy, {{TRUE — in fact sounds like a good description of slavery, which supposedly was outlawed...}} but, as researchers have demonstrated, [***] most domestic violence is the fundamental operation of systemic oppression through the exertion of power and control. Because CPOs are effective in rebalancing the power in a relationship and decreasing abuse, this remedy should be available to all women subjected to all forms of domestic violence. This Article proposes recrafting the civil law to provide a remedy for all harms of domestic violence and its operation of systemic power and control over women. Re-centering the narrative of domestic violence on this oppression rather than merely physical violence and criminal acts underscores the critical role of women's agency and autonomy in legally remedying domestic violence. Too often, outside actors choose to save women's lives to the exclusion of effectuating women's choices about their abusive relationships.
Keywords: Domestic Violence, Civil Protective Order, Civil Law, Women and the Law, Feminist Legal Theory, Gender and the Law
JEL Classifications: K19, K39, K40
Accepted Paper Series
Date posted: November 19, 2008 ; Last revised: August 16, 2010
I'm not going to fully engage with this article sounds interesting, eh? See my What Decade Were These Stories post, though — civil or criminal, the duty to enforce does NOT create a right for the protected party to demand enforcement. Bet they didn't tell you that one at the local Family Justice Center.
Speaking of which, for CreatING Family Justice Centers — see my post "District Attorney Dubious Doings"
Speaking of which — and this is timely — see JUSTICE WOMEN.ORG (N. CA. based — same as Dr. Kelly, below — although I doubt the nonprofit organization founders can afford to fly around the country conducting trainings, like those in the industry can. And do….
Research can "demonstrate" anything, which I'm about to demonstrate.
To make my point, I'll source another nice seminar held at this same Univ. of Baltimore School of Law, recently ….
ParentING Coordination:
HelpING High Conflict Parents Resolve Disputes**
{a word about those phrases, below….}
>December 7th – December 10th, 2009 – The University of Baltimore School of Law Center for Families, Children and the Courts, in partnership with the Association of Family Conciliation Courts, sponsored two two-day workshops. Dr. Joan Kelly presented Parenting Coordination: Helping High Conflict Parents Resolve Disputes and Ms. Mindy Mitnick presented Advanced Issues in Child Custody: The Child's Perspective.
Key phrase: high-conflict (reframes DV/CA issues), "parenting Coordinatrion" and "HELPING parents." Yeah, right…
<a href="http://law.ubalt.edu/template.cfm?page=1408" rel="nofollow">SOURCE: University of Baltimore Law School.</a>
That this is a marketING phrase can be seen by searching on the title — it shows up as a TrainING seminar out of — "suprise!" – afccnet.org, which I don't feel like downloading here: (note: try search yourself, in quotes, if my link doesn't work)
"Parenting Coordination: Helping High Conflict Parents Resolve Disputes"
Or, I could search this by the Presenter, following the same Title, and trace it back to Northern California..She happened to also teach this at Baltimore School of Law.
FEE: $495 (Early Registration: $435 if paid by 10/21/10; $465 if paid by 11/4/10).
CE CREDITS:
MCLE & BBS (12 hrs.); MCEP (13 hrs – to be submitted for review to MCEPAA for approval, Provider #NOR045).
Parents with continuing disputes and litigation about their children following divorce present a difficult problem for courts, lawyers and mental health professionals, and increase their children's risk of adjustment problems. For parenting coordinators, Special Masters, mediators, custody evaluators, lawyers, divorce counselors, therapists and other professionals who work with high-conflict families.
Participants in this two-day workshop will:
Understand the most recent empirical and clinical research on high conflict parents and their children and what makes these parents so difficult;
Understand the hybrid nature of the parenting coordinator (Special Master) role that includes parent education, mediation, and where authorized, arbitration, and how the parenting coordinator process helps reduce parent conflict and address children's needs;
THESE NEEDS WILL MOST DEFINITELY INCLUDE A NEED FOR TWO PARENTS — MOM AND DAD — IN THEIR LIVES, EVEN IF DAD WAS A BATTERER AND HAS A CHILD MOLESTATION RECORD. IF IT'S TOO OVERT, THEN THE SUPERVISED VISITATION PEOPLE CAN BE BROUGHT IN…
Understand the distinctions between serving as a Special Master and therapy, custody evaluation, child representation or representing parents;
Learn about parenting coordinator objectives, types of disputes settled, best practices, models, and critical elements in court orders or parent consent agreements;
Understand the technical, ethical, clinical, and personal issues in serving as a parenting coordinator (Special Master);
Learn from case examples, group exercises, and practice dispute analysis and decision-making.
Dr. Joan B. Kelly, a research, forensic, and clinical psychologist, was Director of the Northern California Mediation Center for 19 years. Her research, writing, and practice have focused on children's adjustment to divorce, custody and access issues, using child development research in parenting plans, divorce mediation, and Parenting Coordination. She has more than 85 publications, and a classic book, Surviving the Breakup: How Children and Parents Cope with Divorce. Joan is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, was recently appointed to an APA ask Force to develop guidelines for Parenting Coordinator practice, and previously served on a similar AFCC task force. She is a frequent presenter and speaker in the United States, Canada, and abroad.
Co-presenter (at Baltimore School of Law training, anyhow)
Ms. Mindy Mitnick
Besides having a very unique name, especially preceded by "Ms." —
which may (or may not) explain why she present with Ph.D. (just kids — but seriously, in the INDUSTRY, Ph.D.'s count. Being a street-savvy litigant, even with a Ph.D. in something else does NOT — as Dr. Amy Cabrillo (pediatrician) learned the hard way when she begged a judge to listen to her high-conflict, uncoordinated parent self in NOT letting her suicidal and already troubled "ex" take three children on a weekend visitation. As we know (and wasn't THIS in maryland also??) her plea was ignored, and her three children were drowned in a bathtub. Apparently their father was indeed coordinated in some matters, such as drownING his kids. This FYI, is called a "dispute" and "high conflict," squarely blaming Dr. Castillo 50% for not holdING her marriage together, although certainly she was complyING with court orders… …Street savvy, educated, observant, alert, honest, etc. or not — you will be cut down to size by these professionals….
(is on the Board of Directors of AFCC, who helps sponsor these trainINGs.)
Mindy F. Mitnick Ed.M.
Edina, Minnesota
Mindy Mitnick is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in Minneapolis. She received a Master of Education from Harvard University and a Master of Arts from the University of Minnesota. She specializes in complex custody cases, working as an evaluator, therapist and parenting consultant. Ms. Mitnick has trained professionals throughout the country about developmental issues in parenting schedules, effective interventions in high-conflict divorce, assessing allegations of sexual abuse during divorce disputes, and the use of expert witnesses in divorce cases. She has been a speaker for the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts, National Association of Counsel for Children, the National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse, the Ontario Office of the Children's Lawyer, and numerous statewide training conferences. Ms. Mitnick served on the Minnesota Supreme Court Task Force on Parental Cooperation and the American Bar Association working group to update guidelines for child witnesses in criminal cases. She currently serves on the AFCC Task Force on Court-Involved Therapy and is a board member of the Minnesota Chapter of AFCC.
In the training phrase above, from Univ of Baltimore School of Law:
December 7th – December 10th, 2009 – The University of Baltimore School of Law Center for Families, Children and the Courts, in partnership with the Association of Family Conciliation Courts, sponsored two two-day workshops. Dr. Joan Kelly presented Parenting Coordination: Helping High Conflict Parents Resolve Disputes and Ms. Mindy Mitnick presented Advanced Issues in Child Custody: The Child's Perspective.
These are the key concepts to understande, as well as how the title itself is REPACKAGING and MARKETING CRIMINAL MATTERS {typically child molestation or battering, domestic violence, and/ or in some cases stalking, kidnapping, false imprisonment and in general other pretty nasty stuff that society doesn't like — or at least says it doesn't} AS PARENTAL" DISPUTES"
We have here a prominent psychologist and educationist trainING a host of others how to view parents with a dispute. Keep in mind that some of the leading bleeding headlines you see also characterize the problem as a "dispute." Some dispute!
The chief thing to understand about BOTH parents in any of these matters is that they can't walk and chew gum unless a psychologist and/or divorce expert tells them how to, for a fee (see above…). Pretty soon, from what I can tell, that definition is going to expand beyond the about 50% of couples that divorce, to most of the population — except thsoe in the business of supervising them, and training others how to do so, whether this supervision is at the K-12 level, pre-school, prison, batterers intervention, supervised vsitation, fatherhood practicing, marriage-promoting, ABSTINENCE-promoting or Restraining Order Issuing level — or simply being a working PERSON FUNDING THESE EFFORTS. ….
I know we can't "walk and chew gum" without help (although some of us were formerly surgeons, teachers, factory workers, business owners, stay-at-home Moms, working Moms, or functional in many, many other areas of society outside this world of family law…….) – because we need COORDINATION — right?
THAT link is at the CFCC level. I keep tellING people, including women in my situation, that this is the key to the puzzle, at least a major key. ….
Take a look at the -INGS in this California Courtinfo site — linking to the CFCC
Their program page includes this:
The Center for Families, Children & the Courts is involved with many projects related to family, juvenile, child support, custody, visitation, and domestic violence law and procedure. Click on the title below to find out about a particular program.
Access to Visitation Grant Program
The Access to Visitation Grant Program — I think it dates as far back as 1995 or 1996 at least — is a function of PWORA welfare reform, fatherhood promotion, and forced shared parenting concepts. It's one of the best kept secrets around. I you read about it, you will see why there is an ongoING need for thes eprofessionals in the courts, and how YOU are (probably) paying for this, to the tune of (at one time) $10/million per YEAR, nationwide.
OK, OK, I'll spell this out, right here now:
The Judicial Council is charged with administering and distributing California's share of the federal Child Access and Visitation Grant funds from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Child Support Enforcement. These grants, established under section 391 of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (Pub.L. 104–193, 110 Stat. 2258)—title III, section 469B of the Social Security Act—enable states to establish and administer programs that support and facilitate noncustodial parents' access to and visitation with their children.
The congressional goal of the Child Access and Visitation Grant Program is to "remove barriers and increase opportunities for biological parents who are not living in the same household as their children to become more involved in their children lives." Under the federal statute, Child Access and Visitation Grant funds may be used to support and facilitate noncustodial parents' access to and visitation [with] their children by means of activities including mediation (both voluntary and mandatory), counseling, education, development of parenting plans, visitation enforcement (including monitoring, supervision and neutral drop-off and pick-up), and development of guidelines for visitation and alternative custody arrangements.
The use of the funds in California, however, is limited by state statute to three types of programs:
Supervised visitation and exchange services;
Education about protecting children during family disruption; and
Group counseling services for parents and children.
The primary goals of California's Access to Visitation Grant Program are to enable parents and children to participate in supervised visitation, education, and group counseling programs—irrespective of marital status and of whether the parties are currently living separately permanently or temporarily—and to promote and encourage healthy relationships between noncustodial or joint custodial parents and their children while ensuring the children's health, safety, and welfare. The overarching goal of the grant program is to increase noncustodial parents' access to and visitation with their children through accessible and available services statewide for low-income families who are now or have been in family courts.
Aimed at low-income families, ostensibly, it affects ALL families. particularly ones where some wealth exists are going to get soaked.
This is the best kept secret around and should be "outed" during Domestic Violence INDUSTRY Month — because the domestic violence INDUSTRY leaderes never talk about this, or a whole damn lot of other key factors at play in the c ourts.
Why should they — and ahve to go find another job? ?? What, you got to be KIDDING!
Yesterday's post cited an article in a Northern California area (Marin County) that is getting high press, and some organizations around it (one called "Center for Judicial Excellence.") and an upcoming audit of the family court system, supposedly. Who's kidding whom? The eXISTENCE of this CFCC and its role in the courts, and the Access Visitation funding is not even mentioned (by name) in ALL of the comments below, which span many categories. Moreover, the ONLY reference to AFCC (and some indications a woman had actually read Marv Bryer,Idele Clark – one of the cases involved, I believe — and others) — she reads like a madwoman.
HEY — when you type on a computer, are you constantly aware if it's DOS or WINDOWS or Apple based? (obviously that's not my field of expertise)? Are you translating binary code? Probably not –right? But how would it work if someone hadn't designed that to start with?
Now let's talk about the INDUSTRY. It's SELF-REPLICATING THROUGH UNENDING TRAINING, enabled in great part by this wonderful INTERNET.
Them that can, DO. Them that can't, teach it's said. Well, there's SOME truth to that ..
Trust me (or don't) — it's important to understand this system — and it's a model for other similar ones.
Remind me, some day, to publish my English to ING-lish guide to these marketING systems posing as "help" to uncoordinated parents in a dispute, or the restrainING order mills.
Don't get me wrong — I wouldn't be alive today without one. But it most certainly upset a LOT of people, and (except that I'm still alive typing) they have more than gotten even for the indignity…
EVERY balance sheet has a + and a -. But a business sense says, that in relationships, your – may very well be my (or my cronies') +. Failure to realize this is setting onesself up. When it comes to altruism, it may be a factor, but I'd bet it's generally not the primary one in most ongoing relationships. Self-interest is part of human nature. Most people, nowadays, in the US (probably safe to say) do not raise their own food or defend themselves. So, what fields is everyone going to?
And where are the intellectuals going to make an honest — scratch that — make A living?
We don't have royalty over here, so one has to go somewhere… Social Sciences, Psychology, TeachING . . . .CoordinatING, managING, etc. Where is the endless supply of customers coming from?
What better database than people who get into troubled relationships (domestic violence) and try to get out (divorce) but have children before they do (parenting). It takes a global village, right?? ThinkING — now that's got to be taught also…
Did I mention PublishING? that's a prerequisite for Ph.D.s, isn't it? At least to get started, and retain a reputation.
The question with any policy ending with the word ING is — who is between and among?
Uniformly, almost, I find it is between or among professionals in one field (or another) getting their act together about how to describe and deal with People who are Not Present. In otherwords, the US'es in any field discuss the THEMs. In this way, groups that were formerly an Us/Them dichotomy (the most obvious being the Fatherhood/Domestic Violence groupings) pat themselves on the back for collaborating — on how to scam the new "THEMS," which is, as I again say, the poor slobs who still think that law means law, and not psychological therapeutic jurisprudence for fun (theirs) and profit.
And we indeed are a consumer society — or else the sky will fall. How can and who can be forced into consuming psychological, parenting, and other counseling they neither need, want, nor are going to follow? Only someone in severely compromised situations. Voila, Family Law System. ….
HENCE, the FINANCIAL balance sheet often reveals much more than any custody evaluation. I'm all in favor of it, when it comes to reform. Personally, though I'd favor boycott where possible, and watch out, where not. Women's groups should learn from men (but not forget that gender issues remain, and always have been there) and men should learn from women when we've had enough; you are going to be out on your ass, and if these policies keep up, up until the invention of the artificial womb or human clone, we are going to recommend our daughters stop giving birth; except that we love them, some of us sometimes regret that we did, to spend an entire childhood like many of them have had to — half in abuse, and half (possibly still in abuse) in the income-draining court system.
(I love you, girls… . . . Love, your real Mom…and you are why I ever bothered with this blog. I wanted you to know what was, and what wasn't certain people's fault — and NONE of it was yours, ever. I also want to warn you what's ahead if you don't gain your own wisdom about your own past someday, I hope soon — or when you're ready to. Sorry I can't mention you by name, but I bet you'll recognize my writing style….)
Lies are always wrong, and intentional deceit. The largest lies were not from either parent (though I DID NOT!) but from the policymakers in washington, D.c., and others who framed legislation to make a joke out of the court process, and for their own pocketbooks…If I had left earlier, given these policies, I likely would not have even seen you grow half up…
Make SURE you know your travelling companions in life, and choose the best ones you can in any situation. Never take things for granted, and try to study the wider systems you are in. Specializing is rewarding (and builds good discipline and attentiont o detail), but professions change rapidly. As women, you need to know some feminist roots, and where feminists have forgotten the "fundies," and both, fighting, have forgotten the history of this country and the world.
ALWAYS, always, the love of money is the root of evil, and generally speaking, highest emotions in life are about that, and possibly social status and access to sex (which money, plenty of it represents). Remember that the net time some legislator or anyone else (such as a preacher) tries to lecture you about your personal habits. . .. Don't go into marriage if you do, defanged. it's just not wise! That man needs to know he respects you or you're gone, kids or no kids. Respect comes first, and equal access to finances to take off if you need to (that was my mistake, daughters).
Posted in AFCC, Cast, Script, Characters, Scenery, Stage Directions, Designer Families, Domestic Violence vs Family Law, History of Family Court, in Studies, Mandatory Mediation, Metaphors for Family Law, OCSE - Child Support, Organizations, Foundations, Associations NGO Hybrids, Who's Who (bio snapshots)
Tagged with AFCC CFCC AOC Judicial Council, Best Kept Secrets in Family Law system, Domestic Violence INDUSTRY Awareness Month, How we got parenting coordinators, Joan B Kelly PhD, Justicewomen~org, Margaret Ellen Johnson, Mindy Mitnick, Parenting Coordination, Rethinking Redefining Reframing Reimagining Repackaging, supervised visitation centers and parenting education providers, University of Baltimore School of Law, What is Access Visitation?, Who is the CFCC?
Who Submitted Statements re H.R. 2979 Fatherhood Funding?
(Continuing on the Julia Carson Responsible Fatherhood Funding, from testimony at the HOUSE.GOV site. (searching "Julia Carson")
WHO ELSE GOT THEIR COMMENTS IN, THEN?
The FOLLOWING individuals, some on behalf of their organizations, made "statements of record" between the time of the June 17, 2010 hearing and the cutoff for submitting statements on-line, which I believe was July 1, 2010.
American Humane Association
Illinois Council on Responsible Fatherhood
PAIRS Foundation
American Mothers Political Party
AngelFury.org
Anita Barnes
Dr. Alan Hawkins, Brigham Young University
California Healthy Marriages Coalition 1 ("CHMC" for this post)
California Healthy Marriages Coalition 2
Center for Family Policy & Practice (Search — I have posted before).
Center for Urban Families
Child Find of America Inc.
Community Endeavors Foundation
COPES, Inc.
Families in Crisis, Inc.
Fatherhood and Marriage Leadership Institute
Gail Lakritz
Goodwill – Easter Seals Minnesota
Greg Eckenrode
Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies Health Policy Institute
Linder Battershall
Male Empowerment Network Inc.
Mariz Zwiefka
Mothers of Lost Children – Indianapolis
National African American Drug Policy Coalition I
National Alliance for Family Court Justice
National Center for Fathering
Nurturing Father's Program
Nurturing Father's Program, Study 1
Ohio Practitioners Network for Fathers and Families
Dr. Philip Cowan, Supporting Father Involvement Project
Relationship Research Foundation, Inc.
Renovando Familias
Rights for Mothers Group
Ruth Whipple
Sacramento Healthy Marriages Project
Technical College System of Georgia-Fatherhood Program
Teen-Aid, Inc.
Texas Coalition for Healthy Families
Dr. Jennifer Baker, The School of Professional Psychology at Forest Institute
VA EQUAL Parents
VOW Family Champions
Warren County Center for the Family
YouandMe.We
Northwest Family Services
The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy
Patty Howell, California Healthy Marriages Coalition
It should be immediately obvious that some of them have a vested interest in continuing their own programs. We all have a "vested interest" in knowing more than anecdotal evidence whether its purpose (reducing welfare, helping kids) was accomplished
CHMC is one of the largest, I already blogged them.
https://familycourtmatters.wordpress.com/?s=California+Healthy+Marriages+Coalition
Any of these can be blogged, and their statements read (My electronics won't, for some reason…
REP. DANNY K. DAVIS' STATEMENT:
Here's the statement from the Committee on Ways and Means' Blog, from Danny K. Davis, sponsoring it (I gather):
Rep. Danny Davis Discusses Responsible Fatherhood Programs
June 17, 2010 12:47 PM |
-by Rep. Danny K. Davis (D-IL)
There is broad agreement that fathers matter in the upbringing of children. Studies show that children raised in the absence of a father are more likely to live in poverty. Children whose fathers interact with them on a regular basis in such daily activities as helping with homework, enjoying recreational opportunities and sharing meals have higher self-esteem and are better learners.
{{cites, please? Who funded the studies {{see earlier posts…}}? Are mothers simply incompetent? This is now the common rhetoric breathed in these economically cloistered circles.}}
Children raised in the absence of a father are more likely to engage in risky behaviors such as early sexual activity, as well as drug and alcohol abuse.
Statistics demonstrate that boys raised in fatherless homes are more likely to become violent. Fathers' positive involvement in their children's lives and men's positive involvement in their communities are irreplaceable contributions to the strength of our nation.
No one argues that there is any one model of family structure
Since 1996, actually that argument has been made, and millions of $$ poured into it. Probably the committee already knows this. I figure this is a pro forma statement.
but the elimination of government barriers to healthy relationships and healthy marriages,
The Government taketh away (taxes), the government giveth back (welfare to single mothers who left violent relationships, or didn't marry, or couldn't eke out a living in this culture while also getting their kids educated); oops the government didn't realize this policy of going after child support might [piss off or alienate or further impoverish] the fathers, so without admitting its oversight aloud, the government giveth back in the form of matchmaking services and relationship counseling, using our money, of course ??
Blessed be the name of the Government.
Am I the only one who thinks this isn't really funny ? What is this, thought-conditioning?
the promotion of cooperative parenting skills and the fostering of economic stability and the provision of incentives to non-custodial parents to fulfill financial and emotional support responsibilities are clearly in the interests of millions of children.
(By THE WAY, "noncustodial parents" in effect means fathers. adding the word "parent" in there is a deliberate distraction. Custody itself is an interesting term, and comes from the realm of jail…)
(The Government, having gotten so inbetween employer and employee, between parents and children (Dept. of Educ.), and between husband and wife, or father and mother, has so demotivated MOST of us to act intelligently or sometimes even THINK without prior permission from the Government, now is seeking to drum up some activity (legal) and replace [previously reduced by the government] INCENTIVES for — one half the parent population, only, the father side. This is being done for the good of "our" children." )
AND SO THE PENDULUM SWINGS: MOM / DAD / MOM / DAD,
fotosearch.com
SETTING THE TEMPO:
critical-gaming.squarespace.com…
Or it could also be called:
"PROGRESSIVE / CONSERVATIVE / PROGRESSIVE / CONSERVATIVE"
"FATHERHOOD / FEMINISTS / FATHERHOOD / FEMINISTS."
MY POINT IS, SO STOP SWINGING TO THAT TUNE AND LOOK UP AT WHO'S CALLING OUT THE COUNTS AND NAMING THE ISSUES. and Men, who are good at segmenting the issues (supposedly), and separating consciousness into different parts, need to consult with women (and progressives with conservatives, etc.) when it comes to noticing that the level of open, sensible, LOGI AL debate has gone through the basement while the debt has gone through the ceiling.
Soon, it may not matter who was right, if there's more social scientists than farmers, and some other country calls in the debt and we are no longer the breadbasket to the world…. However, men (and Congress IS still mainly men) need to listen when MOM — that mythical being whose archetype doesn't even make it, almost, onto the white house's ISSUES page by name, says . . . .
. . . Boys, the clock is ticking on this kind of thinking, kind of like the national debt. See (2006 date) stuffworks/money.":
and the Economy
STAN HONDA/AFP/Getty Images
The National Debt Clock at 1133 Avenue of the Americas and 44th Street, March 26, 2006, in Manhattan.
The public debt is the same as the national debt and the deficit. All of these terms calculate the difference between the amount of money the government takes in each year in taxes and investments and the amount the government spends. The United States public debt is currently well over $9 trillion. (You can look up the exact public debt at the U.S. Bureau of Public Debt.) In 2006, the interest alone on the national debt cost U.S. taxpayers $405 billion
Who Owns the National Debt?
The top foreign purchasers of U.S. debt are:
UK
Oil exporting countries
(now let's review: WHOSE kids are these Responsible Fatherhood is rescuing? "Ours"? I guess the Congressmen must be independently wealthy, unlike the rest of "U.S." because at this rate, their asse(t)s appear to be in hock to other nations. (See my blog on Independence, Fatherhood and Debt — they ARE related topics…))
COPYEDITING and PROOFREADING NOTES, plus commentary:
I am technically challenged because of financial challenges, ongoing, through year after year of custody issues — to get to functional internet. This one saves slowly (sometimes it takes 30 seconds for a save) and today, I lost a whole segment from another cite showing Rep. Davis, in 2002, (photograph, too), participated in a CORONATION CEREMONY for Rev. Sun Myung Moon in a U.S. Senate Building. When confronted on this, he was unapologetic. We are not a monarchy here, yet, and we had best, as CITIZENS, stop acting like SUBJECTS, and let our REPRESENTATIVES know that talking about us behind our backs as if we were a SUBSTANCE to be manipulated (which is exactly how social scientists talk) is UNACCEPTABLE.
JUST ANOTHER HOMECOMING KING?
DIGRESSION to cover the 2004 CORONATION of The Parent to the World, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, as reported by Chicago Tribune Op Ed Columnist, Eric Zorn.
I already like this guy Zorn; he admits up front his blog is "observations reports, tips, referrals and tirades, though not necessarily in that order." (my kinda writing. You have to love what you do . . . . )
The problem is when the tirades, or rhetoric, IS taken seriously by those dispensing it. This one dates from Nov. 2008 and context is, whether Mr. Davis was going to replace Senator Obama:
The flippant response when confronted on this regal behavior is disturbing. It's disturbingly similar to the marriage rhetoric, and we might want to explore whether the Messianic thinking has gone a little too far in in Federal Circles. . . . . . the U.S. is NOT a monarchy; the Constitution doesn't allow our leaders to receive titles of nobility or dispense them either. (See "Obama Obeisance link," if it's still active, to the right.
This is so "beyond" the faith-based cooperation that's disturbing a lot of us — take a look at this:
"Can Danny Davis' Star rise with a Moon in the Way?"
In promoting himself as a candidate to succeed Barack Obama in the U.S. Senate, U.S. Rep. Danny Davis (D-Chicago) seems to be hoping the public has forgotten his participation in a very creepy 2004 "coronation" ceremony in Washington for the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his wife.
As I wrote at the time, Davis was an active assistant (see this photo via Rich Miller) in pageantry designed to burnish and inflate the reputation of a man who, divine or not, wants to abolish Western-style democracy, compares gay people to dung-eating dogs, and in exhorting Jews to convert and follow him, told them: "You have to repent. Jesus was the King of Israel. Through the principle of indemnity, Hitler killed 6 million Jews."
From the archives, here's my column on that event and the Tribune editorial that followed:
Lawmaker's take on Moon fete is crowning oddity
The most disturbing thing is not that U.S. Rep. Danny Davis (D.-Ill.) attended an elaborate coronation ceremony in Washington for the controversial Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his wife.
And it's not that Davis took an active role in the ceremony, carrying to the dais on a velvet pillow one of the jeweled crowns that were placed upon the heads of the robed Moons.
[Photo from a blog, not the news article:
By David Neiwert Saturday Nov 29, 2008 5:00pm ]
{{Back to the Washington Post Article:}}
More than half a dozen other congressmen and senators also were in attendance, according to several reports, including one in the Washington Times, a newspaper Moon owns.
The event took place March 23 in the Dirksen Senate Office Building under the banner of the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace, a Moon-led organization.
"People crown kings and queens at homecoming parades all the time," Davis said when I called him Friday to ask for his thoughts now that the story, which had been incubating for months in Web logs, has gathered momentum. "We do a lot of things in our society that are simply symbolic."
Davis said it was his understanding that the crowns represented the Moons' achievements as "true parents, both to their own children and I guess to lots of children and other people. I think they were being feted for their promotion of parenthood, of family values and family traditions."
That's quite a thought. In its heyday, Moon's cultlike Unification Church was famous for separating adherents from their families and promoting mass arranged marriages that violated American family traditions.
Be afraid. Be VERY afraid. Where are Lily Tomlin, Chris Rock, Roseanne, Robin Williams, George Carlin, ANY comedians, when you need them? Rep. Davis doesn't seem to "get" the message that this message is marching to an entirely different beat than our Constitution.
And the "Crown of Peace" honor that Moon in effect bestowed upon himself that day in the federal office building was no mere Good Daddy prize.
As he made clear toward the end of his speech to the gathering, Moon believes himself to be "God's ambassador, sent to Earth with his full authority."
He said, "I am sent to accomplish his command to save the world's 6 billion people, restoring them to heaven with the original goodness in which they were created."
Moon went on to tell the gathering in simultaneously translated Korean that he's been in communication with the spirits of Hitler, Stalin, Marx, Lenin and "the founders of five great religions," and that these men and other notables have unanimously "declared to all heaven and Earth that Rev. Sun Myung Moon is none other than humanity's savior, messiah, returning lord and true parent."
Rep. Davis said: "I think he was simply saying that he's a promoter of a message and that he thinks his message of peace and world peace make sense, not that he's a messiah in the traditional sense."
It's disturbing that Davis, who has spoken and appeared at numerous other Moon-sponsored gatherings in his seven years in Washington, would have missed the plain assertion in Moon's speech, an assertion Moon has made frequently and that Davis says conflicts with his own Christian beliefs. But it's not the most disturbing thing.
No, the most disturbing thing is that, to this day, Davis expresses no regret about assisting in the pageantry designed to burnish and inflate the reputation of a man who, divine or not, wants to abolish Western-style democracy, compares gay people to dung-eating dogs, and in exhorting Jews to convert and follow him, told them: "You have to repent. Jesus was the King of Israel. Through the principle of indemnity, Hitler killed 6 million Jews."
WOW. Some of the fast backpedaling over this event (which I missed. I was dealing locally with issues regarding child support, child visitation, and in general increasing job losses from a very poorly written (and unenforced) custody order at the time . . . . ) is phenomenal. Appa-rently even some of Washington's finest felt they had to explain their endorsement by attendance in this event . . . .
The Rev. Moon Honored at Hill Reception
Lawmakers Say They Were Misled
By Charles Babington and Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, June 23, 2004; Page A01
More than a dozen lawmakers attended a congressional reception this year honoring the Rev. Sun Myung Moon in which Moon declared himself the Messiah and said his teachings have helped Hitler and Stalin be "reborn as new persons."
The event's organizers flew in nearly 100 honorees from all 50 states to receive state and national peace awards. The only "international crown of peace awards" went to Moon and his wife.
Some Republicans who attended the event, including Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett (Md.), said they did so mainly to salute the Washington Times, a conservative-leaning newspaper owned by Moon's organization. "I had no idea what would happen" regarding Moon's coronation and speech, Bartlett said yesterday.
But a key organizer — Archbishop George A. Stallings Jr., pastor of the Imani Temple, an independent African American Catholic congregation in Northeast Washington — said Moon's prominent role should have surprised no one. He said a March 8 invitation faxed to all lawmakers stated that the "primary program sponsor" would be the "Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace (IIFWP), founded by Rev. Dr. and Mrs. Sun Myung Moon, who will also be recognized that evening for their lifelong work to promote interfaith cooperation and reconciliation." The invitation was signed by Davis and the Rev. Michael Jenkins, as co-chairmen of the IIFWP (USA).
The event's co-sponsors were the Washington Times Foundation, the United Press International Foundation, the American Family Coalition, the American Clergy Leadership Conference and the Women's Federation for World Peace, according to the invitation. Stallings, a former Roman Catholic priest who was married in Moon's church, said Moon's association with those organizations is well known.
"You'd have to be deaf, dumb and blind to not know that any event that is sponsored by the Washington Times . . . could involve the influence, or the potential presence, of the Reverend Moon," he said.
Use of the Dirksen building requires a senator's approval. Dayton said he gave no such permission, and Stallings said the question of who did so is "shrouded in mystery."
Moon has claimed to have spoken in "the spirit world" with all deceased U.S. presidents, Jesus, Moses, Mohammed and others. At the March 23 event, he said: "The founders of five great religions and many other leaders in the spirit world, including even Communist leaders such as Marx and Lenin . . . and dictators such as Hitler and Stalin, have found strength in my teachings, mended their ways and been reborn as new persons."
Back to MY Digression:
We cannot stop the multiple foundations funding the government, which I have a come to realize probably own most of the figureheads in Washington more than we want to accept. I certainly think President Obama is plenty intelligent, and I notice, being lean, he's probably at least as healthy as any preceding president, particularly former President Clinton. However, it's also known that prior to election, the Obamas were the 10th richest congressmen around. These Congresspeople's wealth includes wealth and/or assets from spouses as well. Given that, being raised by a single parent or not, there are certain differences from "the rest of us" which skin color doesn't compensate for. The Healthy marriage Fatherhood Movement was supported by Bush AND Clinton AND even moreso, Obama. What this movement really represents, as far as I can tell, is a centralized government under the pretense of a more Healthy Nation.
Everyone (but "everyone") knows of the Health Care debate. Too few of those not involved in it know about the extent and far-reaching consequences of the Healthy MARRIAGE debate. It doesn't make headlines (family wipeouts DO, but they are not generally traced to this doctrine).
Nor do newspapers, also owned by SOMEONE, necessarily point the finger at the hands that feed them, and say, this waste is KILLING us financially, as well as physically.
While my blogs don't read so smooth, or look so neat, I still will continue keeping the debate going, among fellow-bloggers and on-line, while I can spare the time to do so. The trail tells us a whole lot we didn't learn in school, often, and what was "going down" while some of us were minding our own business, meaning, "families" and "jobs."
I could've picked on another representative. However, Rep. Davis DID lead out on this bill. It's not about individuals, but the whole language of this movement DOES smack of government playing parent to the nation, paternalistic talk, and in circles far removed from the situation.
WHEN WE FILE IN COURT, WE ARE NOT TEMPTED TO THINK OF COLUMBIA, PRINCETON, HARVARD, CORNELL, UNIV. OF PA, UNIV. OF MICHIGAN, AND THINK TANKS, PLUS JOSHUA DuBOIS ADVISING PRES. OBAMA (see top pdf, the Kirk Harris download shows a US map of all the fatherhood programs, and the title of the map refers to a webinar run by J. DuBois, i.e., faith-based initiative.
BUT DECISIONS MADE THERE AFFECT WHERE KIDS WHO MAY HAVE BEEN PRIMARILY RAISED BY A MOM FINISH GROWING UP. ALL TOO OFTEN, THEY ARE TRANSFERRED TO DAD, AND THEN HER WAGES GARNISHED, IF SOME REMAIN. T HIS IS COUNTERPRODUCTIVE BECAUSE IT'S 'SOCIAL-OUTCOME-BASED" THINKING, WHICH HAS NO PLACE IN THE COURTS. And although "low-income" may have been the initial target (supposedly), and particularly low-income Black, it certainly hasn't remained there.
Unlike many programs that are being cut back substantially, THESE are not, it seems. They've been going on undercover (not in the press) for over a decade, so that when a person hits the court (she) takes a hit in the gut, the emotional/financial, etc. gut. WHY? Because of the involvement through the child support agencies.
The extra "Pow!" of the punch comes from the involvement of socialistic social service programs' intent to put Dads back in the hoome. Well, how can this be done? By tipping the balance, working behind the scenes, pushing mediation (I'll review in another post soon) and talking in comes of OUTCOMES, not PROCESS. Information is withheld that this is going on.
RE: OTHER PEOPLE WHO SPOKE:
I think I may set up some pages for the individual players. Although you can download it here, The first page will be Kirk Harris MPA, JD, a 14 -pager showing how the fatherhood programs nation wide grew out of the "maternal and child" care programs (no they didn't actually). I think that innocent and naive viewers (as well as any Dad visitors) whould know what is being said about this fantastic noun, "fatherhood," and how the thing is to really help the Dads.
Harris, MPA, JD – Testimony for Ways and Means, Subcommittee on …
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat – View as HTML
Jun 17, 2010 … The Julia Carson Responsible. Fatherhood and Healthy Families Act (HR2979) championed by Congressman Danny Davis …
waysandmeans.house.gov/media/pdf/…/2010Jun17_Harris_Testimony.pdf
Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Human Resources …
PANEL: The Honorable Evan Bayh, U.S.S., Indiana. The Honorable E. Clay Shaw, Jr., M.C., Florida. The Honorable Julia Carson, M.C., Indiana …
waysandmeans.house.gov/legacy/humres/106cong/hr-11wit.htm
(1999 testimony — the link leads to individual's statements . . . . )
ASIDE- COMMENTARY:
The larger question, really is, do we want to become socialist (or have we already); it is a question of finances, and use of them. These finances, many, come from private citizens who submit tax returns. Others are heavily pumped in with help by major foundations.
As an individual leaving a certain bad relationship, I knew that the MOST important thing to me was to regain the infrastructure of my own life and being to make choices how to run it. There were mistakes, but the most overt ones had been made over my objections during the marriage. How to correct this was problematic, but not WHAT to correct.
By contrast, some outsiders (primarily family) saw the breakup of the marriage as a failure. I saw it as a positive step, an improvement, and not a failure. The failure probably was marrying this guy to start with, but I was a different person then, not so confident.
Generally back seat drivers are not GOOD drivers. To just exist, and not have much control over the primary decisions of one's life, or what one does with it, isn't good. No, where freedom to choosee remains, it should be exercised and safeguarded. The OTHER reason it's important is that one can adjust course faster, when a choice doesn't work so well, and the learning curve accelerates.
When the government, or any major, large institution gets into doing things behind closed doors, then those 'done to" miss that learning curve, and either have an illusion of choice in action (hence, don't know their landscape well), or know they don't and are less motivated to make something MEANINGFUL out of time on earth, as opposed to merely eating, breathing, surviving. And many are at that level already.
The concern about the role that private wealth plays in running government isn't new, but people who don't look, just aren't aware.
These programs have been going on for so LONG: here's from 2000, 106th Congress: The Child Support act was approved "BY VOICE VOTE."
FROM THE COMMITTEE ON WAYS AND MEANS
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, Contact: (202) 225-3625
No. FC 31-A
Archer Announces Committee Action on H.R. 4868, the "Miscellaneous Trade and Technical Corrections Act of 2000," H.R. 4678, the "Child Support Distribution Act of 2000," and H.R. 4865, the "Social Security Benefits Tax Relief Act"
Congressman Bill Archer (R-TX), Chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means, today announced that on Wednesday, July 19, 2000, the Committee ordered favorably reported, as amended, H.R. 4868, the "Miscellaneous Trade and Technical Corrections Act of 2000," by voice vote. The Committee also ordered favorably reported the following two bills, as amended: H.R. 4678, the "Child Support Distribution Act of 2000," by voice vote
Title V – Fatherhood Programs
For the fatherhood grant program for fiscal years 2001 through 2007, $140 million would be appropriated. The charitable choice provision of the welfare reform law of 1996 (P.L. 104-193) would apply to these fatherhood grants; this provision would allow States to contract with charitable, religious, or private organizations to deliver services. In addition, a national clearinghouse of information about fatherhood programs and a multi-city fatherhood demonstration project would be established.
Non-profit fatherhood organizations eligible to apply for one of the two $5 million multi-city fatherhood project grants would be required to have several years of experience in designing and conducting fatherhood programs; experience in conducting fatherhood projects in more than one major city, and experience in coordinating programs with local government agencies and private, nonprofit agencies. One of the fatherhood organizations would be required to have extensive experience in using married couples to deliver their program in the inner-city. Several provisions designed which would deal with domestic violence are included in the bill. Funds would not be able to be used for court proceeding on matters of child visitation or child custody or for legislative advocacy.
TITLE VI: Miscellaneous
The time that funds can be spent on the evaluation of the Abstinence Education Program would be extended through 2005.
Posted in compulsory schooling, Designer Families, Funding Fathers - literally, History of Family Court, in Studies, OCSE - Child Support, Organizations, Foundations, Associations NGO Hybrids, Where's Mom?
Monkeying with Mothers, Lovely (but motherless) Russian Orphans, and "Child Care Research Scholars"
Mothers Day, the Day After:
Articles that make you go "Hmm….."
Let's connect a few dots here. . . . .
Article One:
The Pit of Despair (posted May 1st, 2010)
We are going to look at Harry Harlowe, the man that made Monkey Mothers "noncustodial" and how & why he did this…. back in the 1970s….
I remember seeing photographs about this Maternal Deprivation study in (as I recall) a glossy publication called "The Family of Man." I looked at this book a lot growing up. It emphasized the HUMAN aspect, including emotions…
The Steichen exhibit described in Wikipedia:
The Family of Man was a photography exhibition curated by Edward Steichen first shown in 1955 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
According to Steichen, the exhibition represented the 'culmination of his career'. The 503 photos by 273 photographers in 68 countries were selected from almost 2 million pictures submitted by famous and unknown photographers.[1] These photos offer a striking snapshot of the human experience which lingers on birth, love, and joy, but also touches war, privation, illness and death. His intention was to prove visually the universality of human experience and photography's role in its documentation.
The exhibit was turned into a book of the same name, containing an introduction by Carl Sandburg who was Steichen's brother-in-law. The book was reproduced in a variety of formats (most popularly a pocket-sized volume) in the 1950s, and reprinted in large format for its 40th anniversary. It has sold more than 4 million copies.
The exhibition later travelled in several versions to 38 countries. More than 9 million people viewed the exhibit. The only surviving edition was presented to Luxembourg, the country of Steichen's birth, and is on permanent display in Clervaux ( 50°03′15″N 6°01′49″E / 50.054246°N 6.03025°E / 50.054246; 6.03025Coordinates: 50°03′15″N 6°01′49″E / 50.054246°N 6.03025°E / 50.054246; 6.03025). In 2003 the Family of Man photographic collection was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in recognition of its historical value. [2]
The exhibit elicits, among other things, compassion, empathy, and perhaps some understanding that we don't all live the same, but we share common human emotions and challenges across the cultures.
BY CONTRAST, let's take a closer look at what the U.S. (and other countries) have become, in their quest for categorizing, studying, and producing (on demand) these same human emotions. First, let's start with the primates, it's a little more politically acceptable, at first….
(I cited "The Family of Man" for the opposite of this:)
Someone forwarded the article to me. One has to ask, why wasn't the man who would do this to monkeys being psychoanalyzed, rather than the monkeys. Talk about "detachment" — on the part of the researcher.
The question I also ask is: Who would FUND this kind of a study? I mean, what is the profit of knowing how to scientifically CAUSE trauma, anti-social behaviors, and depression on the part of the experimented-upon population (here, primates).
And from under which rock did this type of (male) researcher crawl? Because it makes my skin crawl….
Think about it. . . . .
A rhesus monkey infant in one of Harlow's isolation chambers. The photograph was taken when the chamber door was raised for the first time after six months of total isolation.
Much of Harlow's scientific career was spent studying maternal bonding, what he described as the "nature of love".
Read on, and you might conclude, like me, that Harlow's own childhood might have been a little maternal love deficient.. Did he have kids, and did he watch those kids with their mother???
These experiments involved rearing newborn monkeys with surrogate mothers, ranging from toweling covered cones to a machine that modeled abusive mothers by assaulting the baby monkeys with cold air or spikes. The point of the experiments was to pinpoint the basis of the mother-child relationship, namely whether the infant primarily sought food or affection. Harlow concluded it was the latter.
Note: Why not give the infant both, and be done with it?
In 1971, Harlow's wife died of cancer and he began to suffer from depression. He submitted to electro-shock treatment and returned to work but, as Lauren Slater writes, his colleagues noticed a difference in his demeanor. He abandoned his research into maternal attachment and developed an interest in isolation and depression.
Harlow's first experiments involved isolating a monkey in a cage surrounded by steel walls with a small one-way mirror, so the experimenters could look in, but the monkey could not look out.
FYI, a good deal of the current family law system is designed in this manner. It's not transparent. You have to go looking to see what's the gas in its tank, and it takes some time. Just show up to be "demonstrated" upon, and you're in for a rude awakening. After a while, it's damn hard to get all the way out.
The only connection the monkey had with the world was when the experimenters' hands changed his bedding or delivered fresh water and food. Baby monkeys were placed in these boxes soon after birth; four were left for 30 days, four for six months, and four for a year.
After 30 days, the "total isolates," as they were called, were found to be "enormously disturbed." After being isolated for a year, they barely moved, did not explore or play, and were incapable of having sexual relations.
When placed with other monkeys for a daily play session, they were badly bullied. Two of them refused to eat and starved themselves to death.
Wow, that's starting to sound like some of our current public school systems: bullying, anorexia, and other behavioral problems….
Harlow also wanted to test how isolation would affect parenting skills, but the isolates were unable to mate. Artificial insemination had not then been developed; instead, Harlow devised what he called a "rape rack," to which the female isolates were tied in normal monkey mating posture.
A rape rack??? At about this point, perhaps the doctoral students should have suggested he try it first….
He found that, just as they were incapable of having sexual relations, they were also unable to parent their offspring, either abusing or neglecting them.
"Not even in our most devious dreams could we have designed a surrogate as evil as these real monkey mothers were," he wrote.
With typical detachment. The evil originated in him, and was forced onto the moneky mothers by repeated trauma, (including rape), torture and systematic intentional behavioral modification. Yet in his reports, he describes the monkeys, not himself, as if there was no correspondence between his treatment of them and their behavior.
Today, as it pertains to human beings, we call this "domestic violence" (or should I say, "USED to call that").
Having no social experience themselves, they were incapable of appropriate social interaction. One mother held her baby's face to the floor and chewed off his feet and fingers. Another crushed her baby's head. Most of them simply ignored their offspring.
These experiments showed Harlow what total and partial isolation did to developing monkeys, but he felt he had not captured the essence of depression, which he believed was characterized by feelings of loneliness, helplessness, and a sense of being trapped, or being "sunk in a well of despair," he said.
He was PAID for this???
(This web page lists a lot of subtitles, and below the next excerpt, references).
The technical name for the new depression chamber was "vertical chamber apparatus," though Harlow himself insisted on calling it the "pit of despair." He had at first wanted to call it the "dungeon of despair," and also used terms like "well of despair," and "well of loneliness." Blum writes that his colleagues tried to persuade him to not to use such descriptive terms, that a less visual name would be easier politically. Gene Sackett of the University of Washington in Seattle, one of Harlow's doctoral students who went on to conduct additional deprivation studies, said, "He first wanted to call it a dungeon of despair. Can you imagine the reaction to that?"
Note, the doctoral student, here, was more concerned, apparently, about the REACTION to calling it what it was, than the actual doing of this.
Again, think about it.
Most of the monkeys placed inside it were at least three months old and had already bonded with others. The point of the experiment was to break those bonds in order to create the symptoms of depression. The chamber was a small, metal, inverted pyramid, with slippery sides, slanting down to a point. The monkey was placed in the point. The opening was covered with mesh. The monkeys would spend the first day or two trying to climb up the slippery sides. After a few days, they gave up. Harlow wrote, "most subjects typically assume a hunched position in a corner of the bottom of the apparatus. One might presume at this point that they find their situation to be hopeless."
Stephen J. Suomi, another of Harlow's doctoral students, placed some monkeys in the chamber in 1970 for his PhD.
He wrote that he could find no monkey who had any defense against it. Even the happiest monkeys came out damaged. He concluded that even a happy, normal childhood was no defense against depression.
The experiments delivered what science writer Deborah Blum has called "common sense results": that monkeys, very social animals in nature, when placed in isolation, emerge badly damaged, and that some recover and some do not.
The experiments were condemned, both at the time and later, from within the scientific community and elsewhere in academia. In 1974, American literary critic Wayne C. Booth wrote that, "Harry Harlow and his colleagues go on torturing their nonhuman primates decade after decade, invariably proving what we all knew in advance that social creatures can be destroyed by destroying their social ties." He writes that Harlow made no mention of the criticism of the morality of his work.
Charles Snowdon, a junior member of the faculty at the time, who became head of psychology at Wisconsin, said that Harlow had himself been very depressed by his wife's cancer. Snowdon was appalled by the design of the vertical chambers. He asked Suomi why they were using them, and Harlow replied, "Because that's how it feels when you're depressed."
Harlow's colleagues and doctoral students also expressed concern. Sackett told Blum that, in his view, the animal liberation movement in the U.S. was born as a result of Harlow's experiments.
Thereby revealing his motivation. He was working out his own (severe, I'd have to guess) psychological issues on helpless subjects.
MY point is, he was also paid for doing this, and he had Ph.D's working under him, too. They were getting their doctorate degrees and learning how to abuse animals. Tranferable later (if the outcry over animals got too loud) to the human behavioral sciences spheres…. Business is business….
Another of Harlow's students, William Mason, who also conducted deprivation experiments elsewhere, said that Harlow "kept this going to the point where it was clear to many people that the work was really violating ordinary sensibilities, that anybody with respect for life or people would find this offensive. It's as if he sat down and said, 'I'm only going to be around another ten years. What I'd like to do, then, is leave a great big mess behind.' If that was his aim, he did a perfect job."
Leonard Rosenblum, who studied under Harlow, told Lauren Slater that Harlow enjoyed using shocking terms for his apparatus because "he always wanted to get a rise out of people."
POINT. … This study, years later, provokes indignation & outrage. BUT, after that, it reminds me of where we are, these days, only using human subjects more and more overtly. Think about it: What was the funding behind those Harlowe experiments? The federal income tax as distributed by which departments? Or was it private money?
Article Two:
Russia's 700,000 Orphans
Russian Orphanage Offers Love, but Not Families (The New York Times: posted & printed May 4th, 2010 )
MOSCOW — There is nothing dreary about Orphanage No. 11. It has rooms filled with enough dolls and trains and stuffed animals to make any child giggly. It has speech therapists and round-the-clock nurses and cooks who delight in covertly slipping a treat into a tiny hand. It has the feel of a place where love abounds.
What it does not have are many visits from potential parents.
Few of its children will ever be adopted — by Russians or foreigners. When they reach age 7 and are too old for this institution they will be shuttled to the next one, reflecting an entrenched system that is much better at warehousing children — and profiting from them — than finding them families.
The case of a Russian boy who returned alone to Moscow, sent back by his American adoptive mother, has focused intense attention on the pitfalls of international adoption.
But the outcry has obscured fundamental questions about why Russia has so many orphans and orphanages in the first place.
In recent days, senior Russian officials have begun to acknowledge how troubled their system is.
The chairwoman of the parliamentary committee on family and children, Yelena B. Mizulina, spotlighted what she said was a shocking statistic: Russia has more orphans now, 700,000, than at the end of World War II, when an estimated 25 million Soviet citizens were killed.
Ms. Mizulina noted that for all the complaints about the return of the boy, Artyom Savelyev, by his adoptive mother in Tennessee, Russia itself has plenty of experience with failed placements. She said 30,000 children in the last three years inside Russia were sent back to institutions by their adoptive, foster or guardianship families.
"Specialists call such a boom in returns a humanitarian catastrophe," she said.
She reeled off more figures. The percentage of children who are designated orphans is four to five times higher in Russia than in Europe or the United States. Of those, 30 percent live in orphanages. Most of them are children who have been either given up by their parents or removed from dysfunctional homes by the authorities.
Now let's review again: What constitutes a "dysfunctional" home, and who decides what is dysfunctional? Of those "dysfunctional home," how did they get that label dysfunctional, and what, if any, role did the same government play in that "dysfunction."
This is the land (isn't it?) of "The Gulag Archipelago…" You are either functional or you ain't.
It's a SYSTEM. What caught my attention — the NYT is reporting on this "humanitarian catastrophe" as it occurs in Russia, not the ongoing one in the United States ….
Article Three:
"Grant Opportunity: Child Care Research Scholars:"
I believe I posted this around April 15th, also, so we know what noble causes those taxes are going towards. Some doctoral students (who are obviously more important than mothers in the lives of little kids) can get from $30,000 — $50,000 to STUDY child care situations. (Why else do you think there is the huge push for "supervised visitation" in the family law system? To help families somehow? ???)
Child Care Research
Child Care Research Scholars, 2007-2010
Funds for Child Care Research Scholars grants are available to support dissertation research on child care policy issues in partnership with State Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) lead agencies.
Since 2000, Congress has appropriated about $10 million per year of CCDF discretionary funds to be used for child care research and evaluation. These funds have supported projects that add to our knowledge about the efficacy of child care subsidy policies and programs in supporting employment and self-sufficiency outcomes for parents, and providing positive learning and school readiness outcomes for children. Previously funded Child Care Research Scholars have made significant contributions to the child care policy research field.
To ensure that research is responsive to the changing needs of low-income families, partnerships between the graduate student, their mentor and the State CCDF lead agency are essential. This partnership ensures the research will be policy-relevant and is the foundation that fosters skills necessary to build the graduate student's career trajectory of successful partnership-building and contributions to the policy and scientific communities.
The specific goals of the Child Care Research Scholars grants are:
1. To directly support graduate students as a way of encouraging the conduct of child care policy research
(and so forth…..)
I'm so glad that federal funding is going to support graduate students and encourage them to enter the arena of "child care policy research," rather than, say the mother-daughter (or -son) bond such that we might have fewer maternal deprivation, trauma, depression, and other symptomology as created by other institutions which BREAK Up the family at will, and for ulterior motives, usually the old one, the profit motive.
NB: Wasn't that a feature of slavery? The disintegration of the family, at will, by the masters, and farming out the kids to work, for no or low pay in unknown conditions, for the profit of — THE KIDS? of SOCIETY? ?? of the PARENTS???
I don't THINK so..
This google search shows that where these are being advertised are sites ending, primarily, in *.edu or *.gov, and some *.org.
Posted on April 15, 2010 by Nancy Cruz
The Early Ed Watch blog posted information on a new grant opportunity for graduate students focusing on child care policy issues. According to the post,
Federal grants are now available as part of the Child Care Research Scholars program. Letters of intent are due April 19; applications are due May 3. The program is funded through the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) in the Administration for Children and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services. The grants are designed to support dissertation research on child care policy issues and are available for 12 and 24-month projects, with awards of up to $30,000 for the first 12 months of a project and a maximum of $50,000 for a two-year project. Grants are open to doctoral level graduate students who, according to the funding announcement, are "enrolled in accredited public, state-controlled, and private institutions of higher education."
Also advertised on this site, the "New America Foundation,"
http://earlyed.newamerica.net/node/30591
Click on link to see the cute puzzle graphic. The "New America Foundation," has many "initiatives." I blogged earlier on the Conflict between (and among) Christians & Muslims in Nigeria, from this same foundation.
Here's the foundation of the "OLD" America:
HERE, by the way, is the purpose of Government as defined in the U.S. Declaration of Independence:
"We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among men."
The forces, and deeds, that changed the U.S.A. from a government BY PERMISSION of the people to a People ENSLAVED by the Government has a lot to do with the tax system, which is providing endless grants to study human subjects at will, and often enough without their informed consent. And to separate mothers (and fathers) & children and raise up a generation to usher in the new utopia by forgetting the original foundations.
The philosophical question of USA is NOT whether or not the Constitution was a "good idea" but to stop redefining who was, and who was not "Men." As a member of the gender that got the vote 2nd, I STILL prefer the usage "Men" to "Human," which is a different point of view. Wake up folks, unless you want the fringe groups who do NOT acknowledge non-WASPS and non-MALES, and whose specialty is distrust of the "other" (when it comes to religion, too) to co-opt the original principles.
here, by contrast, is the Greek mythological version of "equality":
Procrustes (proh-KRUS-teez)
Procrustes was a host who adjusted his guests to their bed. Procrustes, whose name means "he who stretches", was arguably the most interesting of Theseus's challenges on the way to becoming a hero. He kept a house by the side of the road where he offered hospitality to passing strangers, who were invited in for a pleasant meal and a night's rest in his very special bed. Procrustes described it as having the unique property that its length exactly matched whomsoever lay down upon it. What Procrustes didn't volunteer was the method by which this "one-size-fits-all" was achieved, namely as soon as the guest lay down Procrustes went to work upon him, stretching him on the rack if he was too short for the bed and chopping off his legs if he was too long. Theseus turned the tables on Procrustes, fatally adjusting him to fit his own bed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes
[edit] Procrustes in Greek Mythology
In the Greek myth, Procrustes was a son of Poseidon with a stronghold on Mount Korydallos, on the sacred way between Athens and Eleusis. There, he had an iron bed in which he invited every passer-by to spend the night, and where he set to work on them with his smith's hammer, to stretch them to fit. In later tellings, if the guest proved too tall, Procrustes would amputate the excess length; nobody ever fit the bed exactly because secretly Procrustes had two beds.[1] Procrustes continued his reign of terror until he was captured by Theseus, travelling to Athens along the sacred way, who "fitted" Procrustes to his own bed:
"He killed Damastes, surnamed Procrustes, by compelling him to make his own body fit his bed, as he had been wont to do with those of strangers. And he did this in imitation of Heracles. For that hero punished those who offered him violence in the manner in which they had plotted to serve him."[2]
A Procrustean bed is an arbitrary standard to which exact conformity is forced.
A Procrustean solution is the undesirable practice of tailoring data to fit its container or some other preconceived stricture. A common example from the business world is embodied in the notion that no résumé should exceed one page in length.
A Procrustean solution in statistics, instead of finding the best fit line to a scatter plot of data, one first chooses the line one wants, then selects only the data that fits it, disregarding data that does not, so to "prove" some point. It is a form of rhetorical deception made to forward one set of interests at the expense of others. The unique goal of the Procrustean solution is not win-win, but rather that Procrustes wins and the other loses. In this case, the defeat of the opponent justifies the deceptive means.
GET IT? This is the Family Law System. It ain't what it pretends to be.
Nor, any more is this country.
I recommend we start looking at what those taxes are going for, as well as the tax structure itself.
Start here: It took me less than one day to (re) read this 1970 publication:
Money, Bona Fide or Non-Bona Fide
by Dr. Edward E Popp, D.D.S.Wisconsin Education Fund
P.O. Box 321 • Port Washington
Wisconsin 53074To my EdithCopyright © 1970 by Edward E. PoppMANUFACTURED IN
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Preface 7
1. Some Useful Definitions 9
2. Media Of Exchange 17
3. Money Is A Document 31
4. Media Of Exchange Used In The United States 42
5. Borrowed Money As A Medium Of Exchange 52
6. Value Of Money Or Purchasing Power Of Money 59
7. How To Introduce Coins In A Country, Where No Money Exists 68
8. Who, With Justice, Has The Right To Issue The Medium Of Exchange? 72
9. How Much Media Of Exchange Should Be Issued? Who Should Determine The Amount? 78
10. How To Make A Bona Fide Medium Of Exchange Acceptable 80
11. Foreign Trade 90
12. Inflation And Deflation 95
13. Interest, Just And Unjust 104
14. Conclusion 118
May your Mothers and Fathers & Sons & Daughters prosper.
And may you stop leaving your legacy to mediators, custody evaluators, litigators, and those who don't teach this stuff to your kids.
Posted in Cast, Script, Characters, Scenery, Stage Directions, Designer Families, in Studies, Where's Mom?
New America Foundation on "God's Country" tribalization
Blessed be the hands that feed us social services, and report on them too:
Max Escher hands
APRIL 15th in U.S.A., land of the Federal Reserve Currency System and the bottomless hole of debt in the name of every good cause under the sun.
Land of Big Brother and the crisis in Fatherlessness.
Land where THINKING is relegate to THINK TANKS, and information gathering is via media owned by some of the same people funding the think tanks, and where experts are paid for.
LAND where good luck if you as an individual, or family, want to get the services promised for (luck will be necessary, or a loud squeak in the system…..)
With a land like this religion will be necessary for revival — either faith ("take it on faith") in this big brother, or in the collective consciences of the voters (and the honesty of the ballot processes) — or faith in God, Allah, Buddha, or the innate goodness of the human condition, when given proper environment, and watering.. This last will require also the fantasy-version of human history.
So I thought on Tax Day I'd write you about two things: New America Foundation (you DO know we are already forming a "new America" right? — or didn't you catch that on the evening news? The Constitution is evolving and the Bill of Rights (etc.) are anachronistic in the global economy….) AND an article by one of its authors, under one of the MULTIPLE "INITIATIVES" in this think tank, foundation, or whatever it is. One thing I bet — IT'S not filing taxes and paying them today….
The New America Foundation
1899 L Street, N.W., Suite 400, Washington, DC 20036
921 11th Street, Suite 901, Sacramento, CA 95814
The RELIGIOUS INITIATIVE (I clicked actually under Family & Workforce) is only one of many initiatives for this megalith (presumably). You should know who's running this part of it:
Director, Workforce and Family Program; Senior Advisor, Education Policy Program; Coordinator, Religious Center Initiative
gray@newamerica.net
Rev. Dr. David E. Gray directs the New America Foundation's Workforce and Family Program, which researches and develops solutions to social, economic and family policy issues. He also serves as a senior advisor to New America's Education Policy Program and the coordination for the Religious Center Initiative
In case you wondered, he's also a Presbyterian Pastor….and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and your academic pedigree, probably, can't hold a candle to his. How DARE You make decisions for your own family contrary to some of these foundation-funded, policy-studied, pronouncements? Especially if you are a WOMAN– Look at this:
David is the Senior Pastor of Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church, a chaplain at American University, and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a graduate of Yale, Harvard, Northwestern University School of Law and Wesley Theological Seminary
While I doubt he'd subscribe, even (I hope) in his private thoughts, to the "Christian Domestic Discipline.com", I wonder if he subscribes as well to the concepts embodied in the Constitution, Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, and other concepts that do not treat people as policy subjects…. I wonder if he cares that our country has become a child-trafficker through its own courts, and that some of the policies promising "help" have redefined the Constitution, and help, and are themselves a problem, if not THE problem, nationwide? It's an "attitude" thing…..
SO, I"m going to post about "God's Country" faith struggles which are actually economic struggles, and how it plays out. The article is written by another, I'd bet highly-credentialed writer, whose work is I presume sponsored by this same foundation. I think it's a well-written article.
How I found this article: Watching TV, and in particular a MSM (MainstreamMedia) protest that the federal government, really, really is doing great stuff for us, and should not be criticized — especially in Florida — look at the school system, look at this nearly blind woman whose Alzheimer husband has home help, look at the military installation — why aren't we grateful for the hand that feeds us, etc. — as I recall a spokesperson from New America Foundation was shown.
(As usual with my posts, the intros can be long, personal and pedantic. For the body of the post, scroll down to the article quote…. As it's also MY post, I feel free to stray off topic and cast a wider context than the title. The persistent, fast readers, or those with time to spare will get to the juicy center of it eventually, the faint of heart (or attention) need not apply. Welcome to what's on my mind today…)
I may be wrong about the context where I heard this name, but I doubt I'm wrong about the heavy hand that foundations play in our daily lives, and government.
Foundations (tax-free, and typically from wealthy capitalist families, some of whose ancestors helped install the IRS, and progressive income tax, Federal Reserve Board, and other marketed viewpoints that help keep this U.S.A in permanent debt crisis) — have got my attention. Previously, as this blog states, my attention was merely on getting free from domestic violence and back to a "normal" lifestyle which by my definition means (without abuse in the home) the freedom to:
1. Earn money where, how, and when I choose, within limits of demand for services I'm qualified to give and contacts I have made. To someone leaving a battering relationship, that alone is like heaven. It breeds HOPE and CONFIDENCE.
2. Spending that money with wisdom according to our particular needs and staying off the receiving end of social services once I'd gotten there.
4. Not subjecting my offspring to the bottom of the barrel educational model, which (as to our options) the public schools in this state ARE. And are not about to change in the near future — at least for the better….They are war grounds for competing ideologies and breeding grounds for gangs and civil rights violations, through trauma and in general chaotic philosophies.
They are also — and I believe intentionally so — class sorters. And they feed social scientists (and pharmaceutical companies) with nonstop substance in the form of young humanity, for projects of all kinds and with all kinds of motives. Again, I came to this jaundiced view (after decades of working with multi-talented and smart kids of all kinds in and out of the schools) after my bout with the family law system in this century.
GOD'S COUNTRY, @ 2008…..
(In the land of the brave and home of the free, this is when I first hit 100% unemployment through family court escalations and insanity, and my own "insane" and apparently religious faith, that there was some due process somewhere around…Instead, I found the alternate religion of therapeutic jurisprudence and courts as psychology. It's really all a matter of how you view the issues, and what language is used to describe them).
NOW FOR TODAY'S ARTICLE — many parallels with USA.
God's Country
By Eliza Griswold, New America Foundation
Ms. Griswold bio:
Eliza Griswold is a writer who focuses on conflict, human rights, and religion. Her reportage and analyses have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's Magazine, and The New Republic, among other publications. She was a 2007 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and is the recipient of the first Robert I. Friedman Award for international investigative reporting. Her first book of poems, Wideawake Field, was recently published by Farrar Straus and Giroux.
As a Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation, Ms. Griswold will continue to pursue her interest in conflict, human rights, and religion. She is at work on her first nonfiction book, The Tenth Parallel, an examination of the meeting place between the Christian and Muslim worlds, which will also be published by Farrar Straus and Giroux.
If I have enough more decades of life left, I could get into this type of writing. Hope you read the whole thing….
March 2008 |
It was an ordinary soccer pitch: sparse tufts of grass and reddish soil surrounded by cinder-block homes. The two candidates stood on opposite sides of the field as the people of Yelwa, a town of 30,000 in central Nigeria, lined up behind them one May morning in 2002 to vote. Whoever had more supporters would lead the town's council. And whoever led the council would control the certificates of indigeneship: the papers certifying that Yelwa was their home, and that they had a right there to land, jobs, and scholarships. Between the iron goalposts milled ethnic Jarawa, principally Muslim merchants and herders; next to them were the Tarok and Goemai, predominantly farmers and Christians. For several years, their hereditary tribal chief, a Christian, had refused certificates of indigeneship to Muslims no matter how long they'd lived in Yelwa. Without the certificates, the Muslims were second-class citizens.
As the two groups waited in the heat to be counted, the meeting's tone soured. "You could feel the tension in the air," Abdullahi Abdullahi, a 55-year-old Muslim lawyer and community leader, said later. A tall, thin man with a space between his two front teeth and shoulders hunched around his ears in perpetual apology, he was helping to direct the crowd that day. No one knows what happened first. Someone shouted arna — "infidel" — at the Christians. Someone spat the word jihadi at the Muslims. Someone picked up a stone. "That was the day ethnicity disappeared entirely, and the conflict became just about religion," Abdullahi said. Chaos broke out, as young people on each side began to throw rocks. The candidates ran for their lives, and mobs set fire to the surrounding houses.
After that episode, the Christians issued an edict that no Christian girl could be seen with a Muslim boy. "We had a problem of intermarriage," Pastor Sunday Wuyep, a church leader in Yelwa, told me on the first of two visits I made in 2006 and 2007. "Just because our ladies are stupid and attracted to money," he sighed.
Economics lay at the heart of the enmity between the two groups: as merchants and herders, the Muslim Jarawa were much wealthier than the Christian Tarok and Goemai. But Pastor Sunday, like many others of his faith, felt that Muslims were trying to wipe out Christians by converting them through marriage.
{{A book Now They Call Me Infidel talks about this}}
"It's scriptural, this fight," he said. So he and the other elders decided to punish the women. "If a woman gets caught with a Muslim man," Sunday said, "she must be forcibly brought back." The decree turned out to be a call to vigilante violence as patrols of young men, both Christian and Muslim, took to the streets. What eventually transpired, in the name of religion, was a kind of Clockwork Orange.
Nigeria is Africa's most populous country, with 140 million people (one-seventh of all Africans), and it's one of the few nations divided almost evenly between Christians and Muslims. Blessed with the world's 10th-largest oil reserves, it is also one of the continent's richest and most influential powers — as well as one of its most corrupt democracies. Last year's presidential election in particular — in which President Olusegun Obasanjo, an evangelical Christian, handed power to a northern Muslim, President Umaru Yar'Adua — was a farce. Ballot boxes were stuffed by thugs or carted off empty by armed heavies in the pay of political candidates. Across the country, political power is a passport to wealth: according to Human Rights Watch, anywhere from $4 billion to $8 billion in government money has been embezzled annually for the last eight years. The state has all but abdicated its responsibility for the welfare of its people, roughly half of whom live on less than $1 a day.
In this vacuum, religion has become a powerful source of identity. Northern Nigeria has one of Africa's oldest and most devout Islamic communities, which was galvanized, like many others, in the 1980s by the global Islamic reawakening that followed the Iranian revolution. For Christians, too, in Nigeria, there's been a revolution: high birthrates and aggressive evangelization over the past century have increased the number of believers from 176,000, or 1.1 percent of the early-20th-century population, to more than 51 million, or more than a third now. Thanks to this explosive growth, the demographic and geographic center of global Christianity will have moved, by 2050, to northern Nigeria, within the Muslim world.
No one knows what this shift will yield, in part because neither faith is a monolith. Indeed, the most overlooked aspect of this global religious encounter may be that the competition within the faiths — between Pentecostals and orthodox Christians, or between Islamic groups that want to engage with or reject the modern world** — is just as important as the competition between the faiths. But it's also true that the fastest-growing forms of faith on both sides tend to be the most effervescent and absolute. They promote a system of living in this world that promises heaven in the next, they see salvation in stark binary terms, and they believe they have a global mandate to spread their exclusive brand of faith.
{{** In my last post about "christian domestic discipline" — a euphemism — is an example of the latter, who want to reject the modern world, and go back to wife-beating. }}
While religion became a source of friction in Nigeria during the Biafran civil war in the late 1960s, the trouble between Christians and Muslims intensified in the 1980s, when the first oil boom fizzled and the ensuing economic downturn led to violence. Since then, thousands have been killed in riots between the two groups sparked by various events: aggressive campaigns by foreign evangelists; the implementation in 1999 and 2000 of sharia, or Islamic law, in 12 of Nigeria's 36 states; the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan in 2001; and the 2002 Miss World pageant, when a local Christian reporter, Isioma Daniel, outraged Muslims by writing in one of Nigeria's national papers, This Day, that the Prophet Muhammad would have chosen a wife from among the contestants. Most recently, in 2006, riots triggered by Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad left more people dead in Nigeria than anywhere else in the world.
"These conflicts are a result of secular processes," said Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, one of Nigeria's leading intellectuals and a top executive of one of the country's oldest banks, FirstBank. "It's about bad government, economic inequality, and poverty — a struggle for resources." When a government fails its people, they turn elsewhere to safeguard themselves and their futures, and in Nigeria at the beginning of the 21st century, they have turned first to religion. Here, then, is the truth behind what Samuel Huntington famously calls religion's "bloody" geographic borders: outbreaks of violence result not simply from a clash between two powerful religious monoliths, but from tensions at the most vulnerable edges where they meet — zones of desperation and official neglect where faith becomes a rallying cry in the struggle for land, water, and work.
In Nigeria, the two faiths meet along a band of terrain roughly 200 miles wide called the Middle Belt. This swath of land, for the most part (an exception being Nigeria's southwest), marks the fault line between Christianity and Islam not only in Nigeria, but across the entire continent. A satellite image from Google Earth shows the Middle Belt as a gray-green strip between the equator and the 10th parallel, dividing the fawn-colored dry land from the vibrant sub-Saharan jungle canopy. It also separates most of the continent's 367 million Muslims to the north from 417 million Christians to the south. Plagued by bad government, a shortage of water and arable land, and rising birthrates, the Middle Belt is also the victim of environmental change: growing aridity in the north (the desert creeps forward at slightly less than half a mile a year) and flooding in the south. Shifting weather patterns have made planting and grazing seasons unpredictable and allowed insect-borne diseases, such as malaria, to run rampant.
Islam all but stopped its southward spread here in the late 1800s, because the traders, missionaries, and Sufi jihadists who had carried Islam south couldn't handle the jungle terrain or the tsetse flies that plagued their horses and camels with sleeping sickness. Abdullahi's people, the Jarawa, claim that their rights to the land go back to the days of Usman Dan Fodio, a Sufi teacher and ethnic Fulani herder who launched a 19th-century jihad to purify the faith, promote the education of women, and outlaw the enslavement of his fellow Muslims. Some of his jihadists, called his flag bearers, rode south over vast reaches of dry land until they reached the southern edge of the Sahel, roughly where the town of Yelwa is today.
The high, dry ridges and rocky escarpments of the Middle Belt also provided an ideal defense against Muslim slave raiders for non-Muslim hill people like the Goemai. When Christian missionaries arrived 100 years ago, many targeted these "pagan" hill people. For some, the mission was to create a buffer against the southern "spread of Mohammedanism," as Karl Kumm, one of the more uncompromising missionaries, put it. But many of his coreligionists had little interest in combating Islam. Instead, armed with the two B's of Bible and bicycle, as well as with the imperative of self-reliance, they dispensed practical advice on health, agriculture, and eventually education, providing a form of "emancipation" for the historically disenfranchised hill people, who also gained a powerful collective identity in Christianity.
The British colonial administration was ambivalent about missionaries, fearing that their efforts to convert Muslims would destabilize Britain's plans for empire-building — as they had elsewhere in Africa. When the British overthrew the caliphate, then unified North and South Nigeria in 1914, the new colonial administration forbade missionaries to enter Muslim lands. Under the British policy of Indirect Rule, which was modeled on the Raj in India, Dan Fodio's emirs were largely left in place. Many came to be seen as colonial agents, losing their religious legitimacy even as they amassed power and wealth. This colonial policy of favoring Muslims over minority Christians left a legacy of mistrust between the two groups.
{{Doesn't this sound like some of the forerunners of the Rwandan genocide, with Belgian basis? In the bottom line, it's about empire-building. Americans, beware…}}
"Every crisis is automatically interpreted as a religious crisis," said Archbishop Josiah Idowu-Fearon, the Anglican bishop of Kaduna. "But we all know that, scratch the surface and it's got nothing to do with religion. It's power."
One Tuesday at 7 a.m. in Yelwa, about 70 people were praying their morning devotions at the Church of Christ in Nigeria (founded by none other than the fiery Kumm himself). It was in February 2004, about a year after the elders had issued their edict that no Christian woman was to be seen with a Muslim man. As the worshippers finished their prayers, they heard gunshots and a call from the loudspeakers of the mosque next door: "Allahu Akhbar, let us go for jihad." "We were terrified," recalled Pastor Sunday, who had been standing outside the gate as the churchyard swarmed with strangers. He stayed near the church gate, but many other people fled toward the road behind the church. There, men dressed in military fatigues reassured them that they were safe and herded them back to the church. Then the men opened fire.
Pastor Sunday fled; that's why he survived. The attackers — who were not, in fact, Nigerian soldiers — set the church on fire and killed everyone who tried to escape. They chased the head of the church, Pastor Sampson Bukar, to his house next door and ran him through with cutlasses. They set fire to the nursery school and the pastor's house. During my first visit to Yelwa in the summer of 2006, his burned Peugeot was still outside. The church had been rebuilt and painted salmon pink. Boys were playing soccer, each wearing only one shoe so that everyone could kick the ball. "Seven in my family were killed," said Sunday as we sat in the churchyard. "We call them martyrs." He pointed to a mound of earth not far from where we were sitting. On top was a small wooden cross: it marked the mass grave for the 78 people killed that day.
"This is about religious intolerance," he went on. "Our God is different than the Muslim God… If he were the same God, we wouldn't fight." For Pastor Sunday, the clash was millenarian and grounded in the literal words of Christian scripture. "The Bible says in Matthew 24, the time will come when they will pursue us in our churches," he said. Matthew 24 foretells the Tribulation: the war that will precede Armageddon and the final coming of Jesus.
A few hundred yards down the road from the church, there's a cornfield. In it, a row of mounds: more mass graves. White signs tally the dead below in green paint: 110, 50, 65, 100, 55, 25, 60, 20, 40, 105. Two months after the church was razed, Christian men and boys surrounded Yelwa. Many were bare-chested; others wore shirts on which they'd reportedly pinned white name tags identifying them as members of the Christian Association of Nigeria, an umbrella organization founded in the 1970s to give Christians a collective and unified voice as strong as that of Muslims. Each tag had a number instead of a name: a code, it seemed, for identification. They attacked the town. According to Human Rights Watch, 660 Muslims were massacred over the course of the next two days, including the patients in the Al-Amin clinic. Twelve mosques and 300 houses went up in flames. Young girls were marched to a nearby Christian town and forced to eat pork and drink alcohol. Many were raped, and 50 were killed.
Yelwa was still a ghost town of sorts in August 2006. In block after burned-out block, people camped in what used to be their homes. The road was lined with more than a dozen ruined mosques and churches, but the rubble was hidden in hip-high elephant grass; canary-yellow morning glories climbed the old foundations. When I arrived at the home of Abdullahi, the Muslim human-rights lawyer, his street was mostly deserted. He stooped on his way out of a low-ceilinged hut. Behind him, I could see the sour faces of a man and woman sitting on the floor by his desk. "Marital dispute," he explained.
It was the rainy season, so I waited out the noon deluge in another small hut on his compound. Finally, Abdullahi ducked inside, a worn accordion file under his arm. His wife followed, carrying a pot of hot spaghetti. In the beginning, he explained, the conflict in Nigeria had nothing whatsoever to do with religion. "Let me give myself as a case study," Abdullahi said. He went to Christian mission schools and federal college, and never, as a Muslim, had any problem. "Throughout this period, I'd never seen religious segregation, because at that time the societal value system was intact. We were taught to respect each other's beliefs and customs." But as the population grew and resources shrank, people began to fight over who had the right to the land and its resources — who belonged as an indigene, and who didn't.
{{THINK ABOUT< NOW< THE TAX BURDEN IN USA, AND HOW THE FACTIONALISM BEGINS TO TAKE ON RELIGIOUS TONES, THROUGH THE GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS (FATHERHOOD, HEALTHY MARRIAGE, VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN, EDUCATION, HEALTHCARE, YOU NAME IT…) IN THE BOTTOM LINE, DOES MONEY HAVE COLOR? OR RELIGION? OR NATIONALITY? WHO IS FUNDING THE POLICIES, AND THE POLICY STUDIES? }}
Abdullahi has attempted to bring several cases of ethnic abuse to the government's attention, but as with the church massacre, the government has done little to investigate or to try those involved. He handed me a folder with depositions from one such case. As I read them, Abdullahi returned with two young women, Hamamatu Danladi and Yasira Ibrahim, who had survived the incident detailed in the files. Danladi met my eye as she stood in the doorway; Ibrahim, with long upturned lashes and a moon face, didn't. Abdullahi invited the women in, lowered his head, and left.
During the Christian attack, the two young women took shelter in an elder's guarded home. On the second day, the Christian militia arrived at the house. They were covered in red and blue paint and were wearing those numbered white name tags. The Christians first killed the guards, then chose among the women. With others, the two young women were marched toward the Christian village. "They were killing children on the road," Danladi said. Outside the elementary school, her abductor grabbed hold of two Muslim boys she knew, 9 and 10 years old. Along with other men, he took a machete to them until they were in pieces, then wrapped the pieces in a rubber tire and set it on fire.
When Danladi and Ibrahim reached their captors' village, they were forced to drink alcohol and to eat pork and dog meat. Although she was obviously pregnant, Danladi's abductor repeatedly raped her during the next four days. After a month, the police fetched Danladi and Ibrahim from the Christian village and took them to the camp where most of the town's Muslim residents had fled. There, the two young women were reunited with their husbands. They never discussed what happened in the bush.
"The Christians don't want us here because they don't like our religion," Danladi said. "Do you really think they took you because of your religion?" I asked. The women looked at each other. "In Islamic history, there are times when believers and nonbelievers have fought," Danladi said. "We think what happened here is part of the clash that will come. After the clash, people will see poverty and suffering and that's what's happening now. According to our ulamas [teachers], there is no way that the whole world will not be Muslim."
Later, I looked up Matthew 24, the verses that Pastor Sunday had cited. In many versions of the Bible, Jesus' words are inked in red to show that these are the exact and inerrant words of the Lord. Down the rice-paper page, one red verse (Matthew 24:19) caught my eye: "But woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing babies in those days!" I thought of Hamamatu Danladi. After her rape, she told me, she didn't give birth for four more months, which meant she carried that child for more than a year. Maybe I didn't understand her. When I returned to visit her a year later, I asked again if I'd misunderstood. No, she said, she'd carried the baby for more than a year. Maybe, she thought, he simply refused to come into this world during the conflagration.
At the time of the massacre, Archbishop Peter Akinola was the president of the Christian Association of Nigeria, whose membership was implicated in the killings. He has since lost his bid for another term but, as primate of the Anglican Church of Nigeria, he is still the leader of 18 million Anglicans. He is a colleague of my father, who was the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in America from 1997 to 2006. But the American Episcopals' election of an openly homosexual bishop in 2003, which Archbishop Akinola denounced as "satanic," created distance between them. When I arrived in 2006 in the capital of Abuja to see the archbishop, his office door was locked. Its complicated buzzing-in system was malfunctioning, and he was trapped inside. Finally, after several minutes, the angry buzzes stopped and I could hear a man behind the door rise and come across the floor. The archbishop, in a pale-blue pantsuit and a darker-blue crushed-velvet hat, opened the door.
"My views on Islam are well known: I have nothing more to say," he said, as we sat down. Archbishop Akinola has repeatedly spoken critically about Islam and liberal Western Protestants, and he was understandably wary of my motives for asking his thoughts. For Akinola, the relationship between liberal Protestants and Islam is straightforward: if Western Christians abandon conservative morals, then the global Church will be weakened in its struggle against Islam. "When you have this attack on Christians in Yelwa, and there are no arrests, Christians become dhimmi, the vocabulary within Islam that allows Christians and Jews to be seen as second-class citizens. You are subject to the Muslims. You have no rights."
When asked if those wearing name tags that read "Christian Association of Nigeria" had been sent to the Muslim part of Yelwa, the archbishop grinned. "No comment," he said. "No Christian would pray for violence, but it would be utterly naive to sweep this issue of Islam under the carpet." He went on, "I'm not out to combat anybody. I'm only doing what the Holy Spirit tells me to do. I'm living my faith, practicing and preaching that Jesus Christ is the one and only way to God, and they respect me for it. They know where we stand. I've said before: let no Muslim think they have the monopoly on violence."
Archbishop Akinola, 63, is a Yoruba, a member of an ethnic group from southwestern Nigeria, where Christians and Muslims coexist peacefully. But the archbishop's understanding of Islam was forged by his experience in the north, where he watched the persecution of a Christian minority. He was more interested during our interview, though, in talking about the West than about Nigeria.
"People are thinking that Islam is an issue in Africa and Asia, but you in the West are sitting on explosives." What people in the West don't understand, he said, "is that what Islam failed to accomplish by the sword in the eighth century, it's trying to do by immigration so that Muslims become citizens and demand their rights. A Muslim man has four wives; the wives have four or five children each. This is how they turned Christians into a minority in North Africa."
He went on, "The West has thrown God out, and Islam is filling that vacuum for you, and now your Christian heritage is being destroyed… You people are so afraid of being accused of being Islam-phobic. Consequently everyone recedes and says nothing… Over the years, Christians have been so naive — avoiding politics, economics, and the military because they're dirty business. The missionaries taught that. Dress in tatters. Wear your bedroom slippers. Be poor. But Christians are beginning to wake up to the fact that money isn't evil, the love of money is, and it isn't wrong to have some of it. Neither is politics."
Democracy, Nigerians told me repeatedly, is a numbers game. That's why whoever has more believers is on top. In that competition, Christianity has a recruiting tool beyond the frontline gospel preached by those such as Archbishop Akinola: Pentecostalism, one of the world's most diverse and fastest-growing religious movements. In Nigeria, the oil boom of the 1970s brought a massive movement of people into cities looking for work. That boom's collapse spurred the growth of the Pentecostal Gospel of Prosperity, with its emphasis on good health and getting rich; and of the African Initiated Churches, or AICs, which began about 100 years ago, when several charismatic African prophets successfully converted millions to Christianity. Today, AIC members account for one-quarter of Africa's 417 million Christians.
One bustling Pentecostal hub, Canaanland, the 565-acre headquarters of the Living Faith Church, has three banks, a bakery, and its own university, Covenant, which is the sister school of Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Canaanland is about an hour and a half north of Lagos, which has an estimated population of 12 million and is projected to become the world's 12th-largest city by 2020. With 300,000 people worshipping at a single service at the Canaanland headquarters alone and 300 branches across the country, Living Faith is one of Nigeria's megachurches, and the dapper Bishop David Oyedepo is its prophet. The bishop, whose bald pate glistens above deep-set eyes and dazzling teeth, never wanted to be pastor: he had no interest in being poor, he told me. "When God made me a pastor, I wept. I hated poverty in the Church — how can the children of God live as rats?"
Bishop Oyedepo built Canaanland to preach the Gospel of Prosperity. As he said, "If God is truly a father, there is no father that wants his children to be beggars. He wants them to prosper." In the parking lot at Canaanland, beyond the massive complex of unusually clean toilets, flapping banners promise: WHATSOEVER YOU ASK IN MY NAME, HE SHALL GIVE YOU, and BY HIS STRIPES HE GIVES US BLESSINGS.
The Pentecostal movement is so vast and varied, it's a mistake to generalize about its unifying principles. But Pentecostals do tend to share an experience of the Holy Spirit, or the numinous, that offers the gift of salvation and success in everyday life — particularly in the realms of personal health and finance. Archbishop Akinola, whose own Anglican Church is more threatened in some ways by the rise of Pentecostalism than by the rise of Islam, finds these teachings suspect: "When you preach prosperity and not suffering, any Christianity devoid of the cross is a pseudo-religion."
But Bishop Oyedepo's followers say that those who criticize don't understand what's happening in Africa. "There's a kind of revolution going on in Africa," one of the bishop's employees, Professor Prince Famous Izedonmi, said. "America tolerates God. Africa celebrates God. We're called 'the continent of darkness,' but that's when you appreciate the light. Jesus is the light." The professor, a Muslim prince who converted to Christianity as a child to cure himself of migraine headaches, was the head of Covenant University's accounting department and director of its Centre for Entrepreneurial Development Studies.
++++++++++++++
COMMENT: I am beginning to think it is not possible to separate religion from government, because my understanding of "religion" is a vocabulary, an assignment of meaning to life (and who wants a government to do that?) and a set of priests, prophets, sacred tabus (thinks we can't talk about) and of course the caste system. The history of humanity is basically a history of human sacrifice, that is hard put to treat women & children kindly across the board, and is offended when some intend to do so. The history of humanity IS a power struggle…
So I think the thing is, to limit it.
An article today in the newspaper tells how an ex-homeless man is being kept in debt and penalized for his industry (I'll try to put it up next). But if you want to become an early child-care researcher, the heavens (grants) will open up for sure.. See next post.
HAPPY APRIL 15th….. And many more.
United States House Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations
This article is about the 1952-1954 investigation into non-profits. For the 80s and 90s report on the People's Republic of China's covert operations within the United States, see Cox Report.
The Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives between 1952 and 1954.[1] The committee was originally created by House Resolution 561 during the 82nd Congress. The committee investigated the use of funds by tax-exempt organizations (non-profit organizations) to see if they were being used to support communism.[2][3] The committee was alternatively known as the Cox Committee and the Reece Committee after its two chairmen, Edward E. Cox and B. Carroll Reece.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/3768227/Dodd-Report-to-the-Reece-Committee-on-Foundations-1954
All I know, is I wanted ANSWERS why the courts have become a farce. I have a logical mind, in my own way, and like to look things up. The more I looked the more foundations I saw behind policies that hurt my family. These are identifiable traces, and I know the average person doesn't have time (or sometimes the will) to find this out. The average person, in short, is being lied to in regards MANY of the institutions that affect his or her daily lives.
I couldn't have been battered at home for so many years without scores of "enablers" who just didn't have the vocabulary to address this, or the commitment, risking THEIR times, livelihood (and at some level, when it escalates) possibly lives — and certainly, money — which seems to have been key — in failing to speak about it.
Speaking out can mean "ex-communication" from one's supportive spheres, but shutting up does violence to the spirit of a person. And if there's one thing we need to sustain us in troubles, it's that spirit.
I believe that the "thing" is to understand what's going on in the very TOP (behind the media curtain and even behind the government curtains) and the very BOTTOM of society. This will better explain the middle.
Currently, the very TOP does not really want to hear from the very BOTTOM.
This is going to fall harder and harder on those in the middle who just don't want to talk about it. Particularly REALLY hard topics like, murder, and child molestation, government-sanctioned and promoted. In the U.S.A.
Sooner or later there may be no "middle," so I suggest more of the "middle" folk start listening to the Bottom folk with their HEARTS, and EYES open, and without that patronizing, us/them, condescension, let us fix you mentality. Get over yourself! Get quiet, and start observing.
(if that shoe fits, please wear it. If not, ignore it). Some burdens we have to bear alone, others we cannot. Stop being a spectator and start thinking — for real!
Posted in in Studies, Lethality Indicators - in News, My Takes, and Favorite Takes, Organizations, Foundations, Associations NGO Hybrids
Warning: ALL of you just got Outsourced!
Apologies in advance if this post is a little ill-tempered. So was I, at the time.
The need for the most human of functions in life is rapidly becoming obsolescent. We are becoming, I fear, a patriarchal society modeled on the Queen Bee and hive mentality. Assets are collected centrally, larvae (adjust term for biological precision) nursed, and workers sent out to collect more, for more of the same.
Those with too much drive, individuality, and just dang eccentricity will be dumped, and not allowed to breed. Or if they do, not keep their own. Or, if they do manage to keep their own for a few years, they will be forced to break that "unnatural" parental bond and be coached on REAL parenting from, I suspect, people who haven't gone through the most challenging aspects of it — like: poverty, exposure to racism, sexism, and the familycourtism(s).
This is only half in jest. And in order to express this, I may have to incorporate some scatalogical terminology. Otherwise, it just doesn't make sense…
I am trying to think of some sphere of human activity — character-formation that has NOT become a market niche. That I could engage in, PRIVATELY, without being told by some expert how to do it better.
Certainly no one could state that the basic human functions of eating, copulating, and (sometimes, sometimes not) a product of the second, parenting are not now major market niches. Similarly, communicating, and making basic decisions relating to, say, their own lives….
Decisionmaking has been outsourced in the courts, obviously, to those more expert in (well, the facts and the law) than the general peasantry.
Face it, you're either expert, or you're not. The key to determining whether a person is a true expert, or not, is language.
If they use simple, declarative prose with concrete active verbs and nouns, they don't know what they are talking about, obviously.
If they use passive tense, and speak in terms so ridiculously vague no one could prove or disprove a single fact regarding (whatever the subject matter is), t hey are "one of us" and should be given more power over more people (and said people's money, children, and futures).
If they behave in a generally moral fashion without being educated, forced, bribed or threatened in order to do so, they are living in an alternate economic system, and should be quarantined, or otherwise silenced, and prevented from propagating more of their kind.
If they show signs of independent THINKING, ditto.
How did I come to this jaundiced opinion? Well, on my way to this particular internet access, I am confronted coming and going with signs encouraging the (unwary) to open a child support case. A beautiful photo of a young, light-skinned black girl tenderly holding a growing plant claims that it's quick, easy, and free to open a child support case. Please do so.
NOTHING, friends, in life is truly free except life itself from (so far) sperm & egg when it comes to humans. You may squeak out a little privacy between him and her (initially), but institutionally, there are sperm banks and egg donors, too. THOSE are not free.
TurboCourt has fostered a collaboration between the California courts and the Department of Child Support Services
07/01/2008TurboCourt has also fostered a collaboration between the California courts and the Department of Child Support Services where Domestic Relations court filers are directly linked to the Child Support application allowing them to immediately request IV-D services. And the data from TurboCourt's Family Law application is transferred to the Child Support application, speeding up the process.
Not in the fine print: http://fatherhood.gov/
Now, the logo changes to a profile of one adult male holding a child (boy's?) hand, and the motto to "Take Time to Be A Dad today!" (I couldn't copy it, but you can go look….).
The National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse (NRFC) is funded by the Administration for Children and Families' Office of Family Assistance's (OFA) and supports efforts to assist States and communities to promote and support Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Marriage.
Primarily a tool for professionals operating Responsible Fatherhood programs, the NRFC provides access to print and electronic publications, timely information on fatherhood issues, and targeted resources that support OFA-funded Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Marriage grantees. The NRFC Web site also provides essential information for other audiences interested in fatherhood issues.
http://fatherhood.gov/documents/promisingpracticesreport.pdf
If you THINK you understand government, read this and think again. . . . . There is NOTHING that can't be sold, taught, marketed, and summarized in a slick brochure paid for by (your donations and/or taxes).
Target population? Anyone that has a problem with practically anything relating to human life (raising children, personal relations) or supporting it (low-income families especially welcome for subject matter, or those in prison, or under other distresses — possibly from the same institutional sources that are now going to illuminate and fix the problems that "emerged" during the passage through some other institution(s).
Seriously now, I printed this one out and read it….
INITIAL SALES PITCH: We love your CHILDREN and we want to make sure they are SUPPORTED. (aren't we nice?).
ACTUAL INTENT: We need CHILDREN to participate in RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD PROGRAMS as run (substantially) through the OCSE (Office of Child Support Enforcement):
http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cse/
On the bar to left of this page is one called "Access Visitation." Click on it:
The motto on THIS page is "Giving Hope and Support to America's Children."
[[Doesn't that sound noble enough? It had BETTER, when it involves wage garnishment, possible incarceration for contempt of orders (but never mind, Big Brother will contact you in prison to teach you how to be a better man, or woman, and give you FREE legal help to get back with your children, possibly even job training… and that child support payment which –in typical 'rational' system manner, continues to accumulate while you're IN prison — reduced, therefore helping you, if not the kids, experience "success" and "support."]]
Whoever wrote this cannot have been on the requesting help in the form of CHILD SUPPORT end of a custody battle, and attempting to get a consistently straight, honest response out of this agency.
If I had ONE piece of valuable advice for women leaving a battering relationship, which I well know usually includes economic abuse as well (else we'd LEAVE, right?) it is — Do NOT, I repeat, do NOT entangle yourself in this system. Figure out SOME other way.
Here's from that Access/Visitation page:
With an annual appropriation of $10 million, 54 States (*including the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Virgin Islands) have been able to provide access and visitation services to over a half million non-custodial parents (NCPs) and their families since the program became operational in 1997! In FY 2006, States contracted with over 300 court and/or community- and faith-based, non-profit service providers for the delivery of access and visitation services to NCPs and their families.
I. Enabling Legislation
The "Grants to States for Access and Visitation" Program (42 U.S.C. 669b) was authorized by Congress through passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.
Goal: "..to enable States to establish and administer programs to support and facilitate non-custodial parents' access to and visitation of their children…"
II. Allowable Services
According to the statute, States are permitted to use grant funds to develop programs and provide services such as:
Development of parenting plans
Visitation enforcement (including monitored and supervised visitation, and neutral drop-off and pick-up)
Development of guidelines for visitation and alternative custody arrangements.
Mothers attempting to leave abusive relationships with kids intact, FORGET THIS ROUTE! Do anything (legal) to avoid the emotional and fiscal prostitution of Y OUR soul, time, and potential loss of your children (and money) in the long run anyway. Put extraordinary and superhuman effort in UP Front.
Think about it: If he was going to pay willingly because of the goodness in his heart and concern for the kids, he would, without being forced, or bribed to with more time with the kids.
How hypocritcal — the same theory that is to teach "morality" (relationship counseling) and so forth, is doing it in the form of a bribe, and not because it's just the right thing to do. Go figure.
MEANWHILE, on the outside (for the custodial parent, often a MOM), SHE is repeatedly told, there is NO connection between payments and visitation, and if she withholds visitation on teh basis of the person simply won't pay support (No, I do NOT recommend this either), SHE could be jailed for custodial interference. But on the INSIDE (and out of her hearing) he gets free legal help and reduced support assignments for moving a few steps in the direction of payment, i.e., we got here a serious double standard, and dishonesty.
And this is who is telling us how to raise kids and be better parents?
Caveat Emptor and Beware unsolicited helpers bearing ridiculous, vague, and ( unenforceable) promises. Get enough help to get out and then develop good boundaries and if possible a cash flow system.
Keep your self away from that agency. Think about it: Why are they soliciting parents with cute fuzzy pictures in high commute areas?
Why don't they instead go to the soup lines and ask the mamas and papas what's up? That's where to find at least SOME people that truly need some help (if divorced) with child support payments. . . . .
Add this to the Moral Reconation Therapy — which was first tested on female inmates, then males, then I guess trademarked, bundled, and marketed. Beginning with a truly "captive" audience.
To "get" this first read the history of it, and then the variations. A sense of humor will be required.
Posted in Cast, Script, Characters, Scenery, Stage Directions, Designer Families, Funding Fathers - literally, in Studies, Organizations, Foundations, Associations NGO Hybrids
Tagged with Access-Visitation, Fatherhood.gov, Moral Reconation Therapy
Stocking Stuffers: 2009-2010 Status of Women, if Jesus had been born in CPS era, and Jurisdictionary plea.
California Commission on the Status of Women 2009
http://women.ca.gov/images/pdf/issues/1073.2009.2010publicpolicyagenda.pdf
and Proposals
Governor and State
2009 – 2010 Session
HERE is the list Family Law is 9th.
2009-2010 Priorities • 1
Child Care • 2
Civil Rights • 3
Economic Security • 4
CalWORKS • 5
Education • 6
Employment • 8
Family Law • 9
Health • 10
Substance Abuse and Mental Health • 13
Long Term Care & Aging • 14
Reproductive Health • 15
Crisis Pregnancy Centers • 16
Teen Pregnancy and Parenting • 17
Violence • 17
Sexually Exploited Minors • 19
Teen Dating Violence • 20
Women and Girls in the CriminalJustice System • 20
Women and Corrections • 20
Girls in the Juvenile Justice System • 22
Women Veterans • 23
This would be good reading, for sure…..
California is failing to protect its most
vulnerable children.
[[Not that this is exactly breaking news…]]
Whether it is child support enforcement, the foster care system, or the family courts, the rights and safety of many women and
children are at risk.
[[In a masterful understatement, not mentioned here — many have also died, probably needlessly… Others remain in the custody of their abusers…In truth "at risk" is a diversionary phrase. They have died. What about THOSE? So, as to the living ones, then…]]
Courts are overburdened and
court personnel often lack knowledge and
resources needed to address the complex issues
of domestic violence and child abuse. [*] Women
often suffer financially and emotionally as a result
of unjust rulings. In order to improve outcomes for
children and families, the Commission supports
the following agenda:
Legislative Proposals
1. Establish an independent state-level oversight
committee/commission to review child custody
proceedings to better inform public policy, with a
particular focus on cases with allegations of
child abuse or domestic violence (Priority)
2. Establish a multidisciplinary team of professionals
with expertise in assessing child abuse
and domestic violence to evaluate cases when
child custody is in dispute and such allegations
are made against one of the parties
3. Strengthen the right of custodial parents to
relocate without the risk of losing custody of
4.Support a State General Fund appropriation to
backfill lost federal matching incentive funds for
administrative costs in the child support program**
5. Require judges, mediators, custody evaluators,
law enforcement officers and social workers to
receive education on how to coordinate and
interface with all appropriate agencies in child
custody cases as a means of preventing
systems from failing to meet the needs of
If you know my blog, you know I'm not into this solution, because I don't think that's the problem. I think that if these personnel receive MOTIVATION (not "education") to do the right thing, when evidence is on the record, that would be a nice gift for this season….
6. Allow children the opportunity to speak directly to the judge regarding their custody and visitation wishes and needs
And just hope that no undue influence has been applied outside the court…. (??? in a DV case??)
Administrative Proposals
7. Require judicial education regarding
• the dynamic of domestic violence and child
abuse, including the invalidity of the
"Parental Alienation Syndrome" (Priority)
• transgender individuals to prevent
discrimination in child custody matters due
to a parent's transgender status
8. Support a request for a Joint Legislative Audit
Committee to audit child custody cases involving
allegations of child abuse or domestic violence
9. Establish a judicial performance evaluation
system for appellate and trial court judges and
commissioners using American Bar Association
Study Proposals
10. An update of the 1987 "Senate Task Force On
Family Equity" report on family law
11. A study of gender fairness in the California
family courts
[added in 2011 commentary:]
[*]Viewing this post, over a year later, again (as then) phrases pop out, that somehow we, the public, are to understand ( believe) that Judges DON'T understand what we do — behaving like an out of control kindergartner in a marriage (or after sex has produced a child, producing whats' called a mother, and a father, if not a family) and asserting dominance over pregnant, nursing, or mothers of young children — is wrong and dangerous to others than just the pregnant, nursing or mother of young children. Or, to fail to understand that real adult men, really do (and sometimes women, I fear & hear) molest children, and that's a euphemism. IN such case, to continue this, they have to get rid of any parent who would stop this. The venue where this happens is "family" court.
All these people wanting to reform family court, and keep the professionals, while tossing off lives left and right (and some of the damage hit sthe community) and failing to account for usage of grants to the California Judicial Council/Administrative Office of the Courts / Center for Families & Children in the Courts (CFCC, or whatever the acronym) and from there, at a minimum, the "access/visitation" grants system spinning off of welfare reform, which criticizes women of color (primarily) for being poor, and determines to help men of color that have been made poor by the same type of mentality — and this system to supposedly reform welfare and help poor people, is being exploited by very RICH people, and a lot of powerful, white males, to keep their kids. See Nassau County, (NY). wife jailed for 'alienating" her children. Nassau County, people….Different coast, same mentality.
Also (I learned in this 2010) the "fatherhood commissions" are legislated into various states. Now it's time for "You, the people" to figure that out.
Or, keep paying taxes without expecting ANY, and I mean ANY accountability in a timely fashion to what the hell they are being used for. YOU take one day a week out of spa, or whatever (or something — like church, if it applies? — and get on-line and fact-check organizations like "Kids' Turn" or others that are being marketed worldwide (now, in other countries) and funded by U.S. Federal $$, then having parents ordered into counseling, education, and in essence becoming the permanent "infants" (no matter their ages) to the everpresent BigBrother/"fatherland."
[end of, added in 2011 commentary]
Ah, well.
No, This is closer to my legislative proposal, taken from an email from the author of "Jurisdictionary [TR]". He waxes eloquent, but he talks about loving JUSTICE in addition to the natural human love we have for each other. He is talking about getting ourselves educated on how the justice system works. Not paying taxes to hire experts to talk to experts about how it SHOULD work and why it doesn't (only). There is something individuals can do; teach themselves how it works! (Should be required with the marriage certificate, probably).
Love is manifested in many strange and wonderful forms.
There is the unmistakable, mystical love of a mother for her offspring, incomparable, impossible for us men to ever comprehend.
There is the love of a soldier for his comrades at arms, a power deep within the heart that motivates the impossible and sometimes galantly gives the soldier's final gift.
And, there are other forms of love too many to list here.
Yet, in that mix of many forms of love there is an adoration that dwells deep in the breast of every one of us: the love of honor, the love of peace, and the love of justice that has rules by which our peace and shared prosperity can be fashioned and preserved both for ourselves and those who follow after, justice that is not perverted by the persuasion of power nor undermined by the influence of base motives.
Justice is, perhaps, the greatest of our American ideals.
We must immediately decide for justice that has rules.
We must unquestioningly decide and seek every practical mechanism we can find to promote the ideal of justice that has rules … not for one or a few but for everyone.
The American Dream is an Holy Experiment, a Republic under law and not an oligarchy of powerful men free to do as they choose and justice be damned.
The American Dream is a Wise People.
A People who care for those who are unjustly treated.
A People United.
A People united by a vision that puts honor first, with love, mercy, kindness, courage, and justice constrained by rules.
Whatever your faith this Season, whatever your political persuasion, whatever notions you've picked up from others about the horrors we are threatened with at the hands of those who hold ideas contrary to our own, remember this:
We are One People United by Our Ideals!
We are one precisely because we share ideals, of which the chiefest is that justice must have rules, and those who judge must obey those rules to-the-letter!
Cling to those ideals as dearly as you embrace your own children, for they preserve your children more than anything that you alone can do, more than any army, more than any doctor, more than anything you can imagine … for those ideals we share as Americans are the very hope of the world!
Tell everyone about us, please, and do what you can to help us promote your ideals!
… Dr. Frederick D. Graves, JD
www.Jurisdictionary.com
www.AmericanJusticeFoundation.com
Yeah, it's an item for sale. But it's designed for the general public, not the experts, and it teaches principles. I don't have to share his faith to share the concept that there are rules we ALL should know and hold our appointed officials to by any means possible, and send a strong message that we are NOT their property, they are our paid servants, by law.
to do this, more people need to actually understand the financial systems also..
And a final thought for the evening — suppose Jesus had been born in a manger, and CPS had caught wind of it? Oh my God, Mary would never see him again.
Plus, part of his childhood, it appears he went to sleep in a fatherless home. Well, at least somewhere in there Joseph disappeared.
I think Jesus did all right, don't you? He had a Father figure, at least….
More irreverence later….
THESE are a START in understanding WHASSUP with "women and Children" — learn the origins of this CFDA, the promoters, what else they promoted, and how they have changed the face of litigation throughout this country. Here's TAGGS.hhs.gov, ALL I did was sort on "CFDA 93.597." I learned this at NAFCJ.net, talked to the site author, and fact-checked Wake up!
tate = CALIFORNIA
CFDA Number = 93597
Recipient: CA ST DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SERVICES
Recipient ZIP Code: 95814
FY Award Number Budget Year
of Support Agency Award Code Action
Issue Date Amount
This Action
1998 9701CASAVP 1 ACF 2 05-31-1998 $1,113,750.00
1999 9901CASAVP 1 ACF 2 08-16-1999 $987,501.00
2003 9801CASAVP 1 ACF 7 02-24-2003 ($250,805.00)
2009 9901CASAVP 1 ACF 8 09-14-2009 ($38,917.00)
Award Subtotal: $2,785,467.00
Recipient: CA ST DEPT OF CHILD SUPPORT SERVICES
Award Subtotal: $0.00
Recipient: CA ST JUDICIAL COUNCIL
Award Subtotal: $11,469,202.00
Total of all awards: $14,254,669.00
Address: 303 SECOND STREET, SOUTH TOWER
County Name: SAN FRANCISCO
DHHS Region: 9
Type: Other Social Services Organization
Class: State Government
of Support Award Code Agency Action Issue
Date Amount This
2011 1101CASCIP 1 1 ACF 12-10-2010 $ 799,429
2011 1110CASAVP 1 1 ACF 10-08-2010 $ 928,087
Fiscal Year 2011 Total: $ 1,727,516
WONDER WHAT 1101CASCIP (court Improvement Program) is? Well, so do I.
THIS SITE CONTINUES TO EXPAND, AND PEDDLE THE "YOU MUST GET ALONG WITH YOUR PERP" MENTALITY; "HE WAS YOUR PURP, NOT YOUR CHILDREN'S, RIGHT?"
http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/programs/cfcc/
HOW COME THE STATUS ON WOMEN DOESN'T REPORT ON THIS?
This is the "official" view:
Click to access Snapshot2008SummaryFindings.pdf
 The majority of mediation sessions involve clients who are self-represented. The proportion of cases involving at least one self-represented party has increased steadily over time, from 52 percent of cases in 1991 to 75 percent of cases in 2008.
 The population of mediation clients is ethnically diverse, the majority being non-White. The proportion of Hispanic/Latino clients has increased since the 1991 survey.
 The mediation population includes many non-English speaking clients who may be in need of special language services. Mediators reported that special language services were used in 10 percent of mediation sessions. Approximately one out of ten clients indicated that they would have benefitted from, but did not receive, this sort of language assistance—including more bilingual staff, and bilingual interpreters or mediators.
 Many families have been seen multiple times by family court services and are in mediation to try to reach agreement on more than one type of order and to discuss a wide range of concerns. The most frequent issues cited by mediation clients are problems with visitation arrangements not working, the other parent not following the order, and child emotional adjustment and behavioral concerns.
Not cited– threats to kidnap, actual kidnappings, and child abuse, stalking, or death threats from the other parent, which we are told happen, after a case becomes a "statistic." This report dates to 2008. In 2008, in Contra Costa County, there was a triple-homicide/femicide, DV-& divorce-related. In 2007 in Oakland, there was a church-parking lot gunning down of a woman who was trying to stay alive, on a mid-week morning with lots of witnesses. In 2006, there was a woman who disappeared (mother of two young kids) on a routine exchange, when her ex was thousands behind on child support (Reiser). In 2005, there was (I believe in SF), a man who'd been stalking just a temporary GIRLFRIEND (not even a parental situation) who was 'diverted into" domestic violence counseling, like many fathers are. Days after he got an A+ from that sesssion, her body shows up in a trunk. (McAlpin). We have had little girls show up in suitcases in ponds (Sandra Cantu), young women kept captive in back yards, giving birth to and raising children by their captor/rapists (Garrido) and all kinds of horrible events happen. The treatment of women throughout this Bay Area has been horrific. Meanwhile, many of the justice NONprofits (vs. "agencies") are in it for themselves (see my "Dubious Doings by District Attorneys" post. The CEO is a plum position, and the women needing the protection are at the bottom of the barrel.
These reports here are meaningless to many women in my situation. We personally know mediators that regularly lie, fail to do intake forms, and break rules of court designed to protect children, in particular, when writing orders. This creates chaos in their lives, and chaos in the community, and increases poverty — of the affected parites, and those helping them. It creates "business as usual" for the court. Look here — they say it, right up front:
 Family violence is a common issue among mediation clients. More than half of the families reported a history of physical violence between the parents.
THE FAMILY COURT paradigm is "Families" and "between the parents." When one is assaulting another, the only thing "between them" is not enough airspace, and not enough distance. The blows are typically going ONE way, not both ways. The word "family violence" is to replace the term "domestic violence" which is a misdemeanor, or felony, in this state. It is no accident. MORE THAN HALF the FAMILIES reported — means typically ONE parent reported first, and possibly obtained a civil, or criminal, order — at which time the other would be foolish to fail to acknowledge it. That's how the term "families …. reported… a history of physical violence." Moreover, if the children were not interviewed by this mediator, then it's only adults reporting. This phrase is a coverup of an ugly reality.
Approximately 15 percent of both mothers and fathers indicated that there was a current restraining order in place. Concern for future violence with the other parent was common, as was the concern for possible child abuse by the other parent.
Let's see how oblique and indirect a "report" can get. What does the phrase of both mothers and fathers need to come in here for? The very grants system that ensures lots and lots of mediation happens (see this same site, Access/Visitation programs) does NOT say "mother and fathers" much at all — but "parents" or "Noncustodial" etc. Why stick it in here, haphazardly? To show that Dads get restraining orders too now? Well, they do, but why mention it here, and retain the same consistency of saying the word "mother" throughout, then?
 The length of the mediation session and time spent preparing for mediation varied. The median face-to-face service time was 90 minutes and the median preparation time was 15 minutes.
The words "physical violence, history of" equates to "domestic violence." There are lethality risks involved here, and there typically has been some serious physical injury, though not also. MOreover, physical violence indicates other forms of intimidation and coercion, generally speaking. And to resolve this potentially life-threatening (and childhood stultifying lifestyle of WHICH parent, primarily, against the other — or is fighting back to protect oneself also "mutual violence"? — the litigants get a whopping 90 minutes (we didn't — the one joint sessions, more like half that, and subsequent separate sessions I swear it was a half hour, at most, and a farce at that). There are two ways to do this: Jointly, in which case a woman sits with her batterer or abuser that she just confronted by filing a DV order, in the same room, and attempts to "negotiate" with the mediator, which I did. Never again! NO way can you keep those thoughts on target that early in the game after separation. the other way — (all subsequent mediations), separate. In which case, there is NO real recourse for a party whose mediation report has factual errors, material ones, or was out of compliance. Why? Because if that family court judge bases an order on that mediator's report (which they will, typically), then the life goes through another immediate upheaval. She (or he) has to deal with that upheaval FIRST, and appeal, if possible — second.
OK, stop, look, and listen. HALF had domestic violence (excuse me, "a history of physical violence" .. "family violence.") Don't think it's an accident that the word "domestic violence" (which might point one to somewhere in the family, or criminal code, with defining terms…) is NOT used here. But MORE than 50% had a history of physical violence, and of those, only 15% had a CURRENT restraining order. So, who didn't get restraining orders, or who took them off?
Family court judges, after these cases went through mediation, right? . . . . . Get it??…..
 Overall, parents reached agreement in slightly less than half of cases. Agreement rates were higher for parties who were working on initial orders than for those who were working on modified orders.
OK — over 50% had a history of physical violence "between" (i.e., two sets of attacks met mid-air, collided, and none hit another body?? That's "between" — or, blows were equally exchanged, like in the movie Crouching Tiger, til both lay exhausted?? ??? I don't think so.) And UNDER 50% ("slighty less than half") "reached agreement." In any classroom, this would be a definite fail-rate on the part of the mediator. This means that in less than half the situations, one parent took a stand on some issue.
Reading further on this pdf report, it seems that mediators spent more time on the study than they did per client (15 minutes, average).
Clients rated their experiences in mediation very positively. For example, three-quarters or more of the clients provided favorable ratings on items related to procedural fairness.
What about other items? Which 3/4 or more (which — was it? 75% or more than 75%? Is this summary typical of how accurate a mediation report is?)
This survey was completed by parents prior to their mediation session. The Parent Survey covered topics such as the purpose of the mediation session, issues to be discussed during the session, family violence history, legal representation, and parent demographics. Parent Surveys were completed by 3,176 clients representing 1,741 families. One or both parents completed a parent survey for 95 percent of sessions for which a mediator survey was completed."
One OR Both parents in a litigation proceeding, lumped together, consisted in 95% of the sessions for which a survey was completed, which resulted in 75% satisfaction.
Well, in my case, the father was satisfied (and subsequently tried to derail my fact-finding in the courtroom to "the mediator's report," which recommended an overnight custody switch despite recently felony child-stealing, reported, by me, and obvious from the facts). I was dissatisfied, obviously. This is why I think vendor payments are more relevant than any organization receiving millions of $$ to increase noncustodial parenting time THROUGH mediation, in reporting on the results of Mediation. Of course they are going to give a positive report — if not, they'll have to go find some other nipple to nurse off, than these access/visitation grants program, administered through the OCSE to the State of California Judicial Council, etc.
From this 2008 pdf, still, look at what they are attempting to discuss in the FAMILY law venue:
Table 2: What Issues Are You Here to Discuss?
Parent Issues N %
Visitation arrangements not working3 717 41%
Other parent not following order 615 35%
Other parent should be supervised during visitation 294 17%
Other parent's alcohol abuse 282 16%
Other parent's drug abuse 279 16%
One person is moving 216 12%
Child abduction/taking child without permission 197 11%
THE ABOVE ARE "PARENT ISSUES" AND NOT "CHILD ISSUES" — Except the first "visitation arrangements not working" which is too vague to mean much, and "should be supervised" which indicates (a) report of abuse of child during visitation, or threats to abduct OR (as equally possible) (b) Parental Alienation claims to counter (a)…an underlying criminal issues as to the first, and NOT as sto the second) and "is moving" (move-aways, which also will fall neatly under "parental alienation" claims) — ALL of these issues involved contempt of a court order ("not following is the degradation of the word "contempt of") substance abuse — which is bad parenting — and the last one is either (a) a crime or (b) what sure looks like one, "taking child without permission.". These are not "parent issues" as so labeled. They are contempt of court order issues.
ADD TO THIS — the court orders typically, when DV has been outed, or Child Abuse, are StiLL written so vaguely as to ensure constant negotiation needed by (when DV has occurred) a custodial parent with her (yeah, her) former abuser, which was my case. I have never seen a more vaguely written court order, I had to go to court years later to even get a location written in. Holiday exchanges had no location AND no time of exchange. Summer Vacations had no stipulation and resulted in our children not being able to attend summer workshops and events which would've helped their college vacations, in areas of already identified interests. I was able to do these while the RO was on, and had to stop once it hit family law, thanks to this mediator's version of reality. Basically, mediation is going to remove a safety boundary for the custodial parent. Add to this, joint legal with sole physical means, there is no end of argument possible. I cannot imagine any business, sports team, investment, or performance oriented group that would be able to operate under such circumstances, with no enforceable rules when a chaotic individual wants to pre-empt the field. Add to this the impact of the child SUPPORT factor — which mediation refuses to address, although it's a hot topic — and you have utter, complete, disorder — designed to bring business to the courts after one failed mediation session, to another.
Then, on the basis of "overburdened" and "overcrowded" they can ask for more grants.
Child Issues
Child emotional adjustment 513 29% Child behavior problems 355 20% School problems 331 19% Child refuses to visit 233 13% Child medical needs 213 12% Delay in child growth or development 99 6%
Violence/Abuse Issues
Domestic violence 318 18% Child neglect 306 18% My safety with other parent 304 17%
Child physical abuse Child sexual abuse. 159 9% 40 2%
Note: N = 1,741 families. Percentages sum to more than 100 because respondents were able to check more than one item.
I find that every single one of those items relates to children, and many of them are LEGAL issues and CRIMINAL issues. Mediators should not be handling such matters, but they are. These matters also should not be before family court judges, with their HUGE amount of discretion, but they are.
That said, District Attorneys have the discretion to not prosecute. All in all, it's a joke, basically.
And a "joint legislative audit" isn't going to fix that.
This is where to look, for starters:
California's Access to Visitation Grant Program (Fiscal Year 2009–2010)
REPORT TO THE CALIFORNIA LEGISLATURE MARCH 2010
Then do the follow-up, whether in your state, or if you are California, here.
[I am in a real rambling, ranting mode today. So be it! 01/2011]
Posted in "Til Death Do Us Part" (literally), AFCC, After She Speaks Up - Reporting Child Sexual Abuse, Context of Custody Switch, Designer Families, Domestic Violence vs Family Law, History of Family Court, in Studies, My Takes, and Favorite Takes, Organizations, Foundations, Associations NGO Hybrids
Tagged with Access/Visitation grants, California Status of Women, CPS, Jesus, Jurisdictionary, When are Judges going to Graduate into Wisdom?, Who can train a judge?
"Wife Abuse and Custody and Visitation by the Abuser" –A Man Speaks from the Past (1989).
This voice from the past (1989 to 2009 = 20 years!) —
is pretty well drowned out by "the Duluth Model," and the millions of $$ of grants, funds, and now even new professions springing up, all to help avoid what I'd call THIS common sense. I guess I will have to show. This will deal with the issue of Supervised Visitation: The question nowadays is how to make it safe, etc. The question of why ANY visitation with such violence, scarcely gets raised again.
Wife Abuse and Child Custody and Visitation by the Abuser
by Kendall Segel-Evans
ENDING MEN'S VIOLENCE NEWSLETTER, Fall, 1989
I recently read the National Organization for Changing Men's statement on child custody, and the position taken that, in general, sole custody by the previously most involved parent is preferable to joint custody. I would like to elaborate on this position for families where there has been violence between parents (i.e. woman-abuse). The following includes the main points of a deposition I was asked to provide to a lawyer for the mother in a child custody case. I do not believe this is the last or best word on the subject, {{now THAT's a rare humility in the field!}} but I hope that it will s(t)imulate useful dialogue** about the effects on children of wife-abuse and the treatment of wife-abusers. I also wish to further discussion on the issue of how we are going to truly end men's violence. *** Clearly, I believe that the treatment of wife-abusers should not only be held accountable to the partner victim/survivors, but also to the children, and to the next generation.
**{{WAS THAT A FREUDIAN SLIP IN THE ORIGINAL?? "simulate" for "stimulate"??}} . . .
I've noticed that the professionals are more likely to have the "social transformation" goal, while typically women leaving abuse, and specifically MOTHERS leaving abuse, have a more short-term goal, namely LEAVING abuse and providing safety and good things, including good values, safety, education and role models — for their CHILDREN. This is a significant difference, and with different goals come different means to reach that goal. Moreover, as women leaving abuse, we have a ZERO tolerance for situations that might lead to, well, death. Women have been killed around visitation centers, which is a dirty little secret. Another one is that some supervisors are themselves abusive, or "on the take" and so forth. Again, the professionals have spoken to this issue — but not changed it. (For more info see nafcj.net). Are all? No. But why even risk it?
WHY place both children and the nonabusive parent at any sort of risk whatsoever, for any reason? For one, good grief, what about PTSD? A child has witnessed abuse or been abused. Therefore, expose them to the abuser. REGULARLY, and in a performance situation. A mother has been abused or her child. Therefore, force her — and/or her children — to see their father, regularly and in front of others who will "judge." AND they do (see "Karen Oehme"). The model lacks integrity, to my mind. No matter, it has government backing, and LOTS of it.
SO this post is a "blast from the past." I've read the literature a LOT, I assure you; you don't hear this person's name a lot. Too much common sense. And yet he is in the marriage field, and attaches a Bibliography like anyone else:
Kendall Segel-Evans, M.A. Marriage, Family and Child Counselor 4/15/1989
He recommends not taking chances. Such types of recommendations are not the stuff publication, conferences, and promotions are made out of. No new building needs be built for this recommendation. It's just too dang sensible.
Reminds me of Jack Straton's similar work, a while back, here below:
What About the Kids? Custody and Visitation Decisions in Families with a History of Violence
National Training Project of the Duluth Domestic Abuse Project – Thursday, October 8, 1992, Duluth, Minnesota
from the Journal of the Task Group on Child Custody Issues*
of the National Organization for Men Against Sexism
Volume 5, Number 1, Spring1993 (Fourth Edition, 2001)
c/o University Studies, Portland State University, Portland, OR, 97207-0751
503-725-5844, 503-725-5977 (FAX) , straton@pdx.edu
What is Fair for Children of Abusive Men?
by Jack C. Straton, Ph.D.
{Let's GetHonest speaking….}} Reviewing this document years, and years after baptism by a dissolution/custody suit cold-shock immersion in to the language and lore of Family Court, resulting in a return to Food Stamps, but no return of my missing children!, but I HAVE (there's always a silver lining) perhaps returned closer to placing my hope in things eternal more than things local! (I'm talking Jesus Christ for those who don't catch the reference), I have a different opinion, not on its CONTENTS but on its CONTEXT, as follows, re::
I want to express my deep gratitude to Ellen Pence, Madeline Dupre, Jim Soderberg and the others from the Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project for giving me this opportunity to speak with you. The State of Minnesota should be proud that, quite literally, the world looks to this program for guidance on understanding and ending domestic violence. I also want to acknowledge how much I continually learn from Barbara Hart, of the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
I will first critically examine the criterion at the base of all custody laws today "What is in the best interests of the children?" I will the talk about children's choice in these matters. Then I will examine the actual effects of wife-battering on children, and develop an alternative paradigm for custody based on those effects. From this I will examine the question, "Is it ever appropriate to ever give a batterer custody of a child?" (emphasis mine…)
{{PLEASE PARDON THIS INTERJECTION! This article indeed does that, and convincingly.
LINK: DAIP Grants rec'd 2000-2009 (scroll down to bar chart)
(hint: over $4.5 million)
LINK: Grants rec'd by DAIp Parent organization, "Minnesota Program Development, Inc."
(hint: Over $25 million, and NOT including some of its sub-groups, which apparently get their own grants, too).
(the bottom half of logo proclaims" home of the duluth Model, Social Change to End violence Against Women")
Visitation Center
The Duluth Family Visitation Center opened in 1989. Our mission is to provide a safe place where children can build and maintain positive relationships with their parents. The Visitation Center offers support for victims of domestic violence and their children as well as supervised visitation, monitored visitation, and monitored exchange services to families affected by domestic violence.
(See the nice picture??)->_>_>_>_>
The Center provides a variety of children's books, games and videotapes as well as beverages and snacks for children and parents to help provide a comfortable and nurturing environment where parents can work on building and strengthening their relationship with their child which so often is damaged by violence in the home.
The Center also collaborates with many other community agencies and accepts referrals from the courts and social services. {{NOw you understand the BUSINESS model…}} Currently we serve approximately 120 families and conduct over 4000 visits and exchanges per year at minimal cost to families.
And I do mean BUSINESS model:
The database simplifies the logistical work of coordinating a Visitation Center and reduces the time to prepare quarterly reports for funders.
Download sample report here
Purchase the visitation center database ($350.00) by visiting our online catalog
Beyond the pure financial collateral, there is also the professional collateral (prestige) and of course feeding much, much much more personal data into databases for further" research and demonstration" projects on how to — end violence against women.
I question why so few have questioned this model. Probably because of the powers behind it, and because those who have been affected by it are often destitute and experiencing PTSD. BY THE WAY — I HAD HEARD OF THIS AND ASKED FOR IT IN MY CASE, AND WAS FLATLY DENIED because there was no "money" for it. In other words, I, the mother, could not pay for it (already on the record) and he the father (being so far arrears in child support) obviously could not. however, when the father asked for — by refusing to acknowledge the court had ordered something different — ZERO contact, it took less than a few months to give this to him, and only one year (as opposed to the years previous I had sought actively seeking help, as single mother, and while personally having to negotiate my own safety, on a near-weekly basis) to retroactively attribute custody and modify the arrears owed ME as the caretaker of our daughters, and which didn't come to them while living here — down to insignificant and unenforceable payments. Yet our state receives grants to facilitate access by the noncustodial parent. When I became one, I could not access them, either. go figure.
JACK didn't recommend this model, although he was apparently asked to speak here. BUT – – His voice, too, has been ignored — MOST chiefly by the Duluth "Domestic Abuse Intervention Project" itself, apparently. This paradigm, I simply didn't find it once in operation — ever — anywhere — experientially. Our society simply does not accept this yet. And, FYI, there is a LOT of money in this venue bent on "transformational language" and "therapeutic jurisprudence." Doing this is considered in many circles "good," and not surprisingly, because many of our school systems share the same premise, they are "values transformation centers" and succeeding well at this, apparently.
Nor have I found someone who accepts this No-Visitation where there's been Violence paradigm. (And I talk to Dads, not just Moms, and I research, a LOT, on–line. I have been in circles which don't believe women should speak, literally, and I have lived in which men did not confront violence towards "one of their own" by even TELLING the man to stop it! Let alone, intervening themselves in any manner to stop it. Ever since I finally took it upon myself to get someone from outside these circles to indeed stop it, I have been exposed, through the family law venue (and others) to a virtual nonstop "litany" of "just get over it" as if either the lethality risk, the economic abuse, the stalkings, and the implicit threat to escalate were somehow "over" in my case. My experience, lots of it, showed the precise opposite. Any attempt at independence was countered. this got tiring for such a person, and others were found and incited to participate in communal denial, a sort of catharctic self–cleansing ritual, I suppose.
AGAIN, I myself didn't share this paradigm initially. However, this was because I had been enduring years of this type of threat/intimidation/etc. behavior and attempting — myself — to 'reason" with this man, after it became clear — and from the OUTSET — that saying "no" or "Stop!" was likely to result in physical assault, or worse, and my friends, there IS a "worse." Now, I have some perspective: 10 years living with a batterer, 10 years of attempting to separate from one. My perspective has changed, after i watched the reactions of society to my assertion of my right to say NO! and ENOUGH! I gave ENOUGH! in the "let's negotiate" process, and shouldn't have ever entered into it or been encouraged to. These were the PRIME working years of an intelligent, responsible, and law-abiding woman and mother. Now, I would like some change to happen. i would like the truth of the situation OUT, and I am taking it (obviously) to the blogosphere, and my local Congressperson, AND up the chain, as are others. The truth of the situation is that this paradigm that Jack and Kendall discuss, was not taken seriously by their colleagues then, nor was it ever likely to be. Like him, I have immense respect for Barbara J. Hart (can anyone say "lethality risk assessment"?) But — today or tomorrow, probably — I am about to post the $$ figures of some of these "helping" groups and ask — where's the help? Moreover, show us the books! I will show the grants, at least from the sources I have. But what I want to see is expenditures, processes, and evaluation tools. I want to see DOCUMENTED fewer homicides, suicides, infanticides, child-kidnappings, and wasted years in the family law system. And if these are not being documented, then what was all the hub-bub about?
IN this "paradigm" all "fallout" from abuse either didn't exist (that's the "fantasy world" Straton refers to, I suppose) or was exclusively my responsibility to fix, as the mother. However, when I then sought to address this in my own manner, I was again given marching orders, a drumbeat of 3-word myths, and told to get in line. I didn't. Consequently, two adolescent girls were removed from my custody and replaced in the care of the man they grew up witnessing threaten, impoverish, assault, abuse animals, deprive of access to transportation and ffinances that a "normal" family would not do, even when I worked at times, and be subjected to repeated lectures on how to behave – – sometimes even on a stool!.
Therefore, as seemingly re–assuring, or validating as these talks may be, that I refer to today, they are most definitely the "minority opinion" in this field. They show me I am not alone in my perspective at what's sensible and what's not, but these premises were never moved into practice.
There's reasons they were not, and THAT should be the topic of a "responsible citizen" male or female, parent or not, in this country. WHY they were not is a public issue, not a "domestic dispute." The topic of this issues is not just "where are my children?" but "where are my taxes going? as well as "what kind of leaders is this next generation, if we get that far, going to consist of? children accustomed to trauma, abuse, and participating in the cycle themselves?
I suspect the answer, at this point, MIGHT be "YES" but I am not yet resigned to the fatalistic, fundamentalist "I'm not of this world" passivity when it comes to social justice. I must speak up!
STRATON, Ph.D., Ct'd…..
In the process, I am going to talk today about the effects of male power and control over children, not about parental power and control. I know that it is popular these days to de-gender family conflict, to talk about "spouse abuse" and "family violence" rather than "wife beating" and "rape." I know that we want a society in which men nurture children to the same extent that women do.
I know that fathers and mothers should both be capable parents. But if you ask "What about the kids?" I want to give you a serious answer. I cannot seriously entertain the myth that our society really is gender neutral, so to consider "What about the kids?" while pretending such neutrality is to engage in denial and cognitive dissonance. I cannot hope to arrive at an answer that will positively affect reality if my underlying assumptions are based on fantasy.
I would like to say more about the history of these movements (which I am still learning), but readers deserve a break:
Have a nice weekend. Again, I'd rather see a sermon than hear one any day.
While this essay is music (the voice of logic, of common sense truth) to my ears, but it's not a tune many people like these days. Because it actually addresses the impact of role-modeling and personal responsibility upon the next generation.
There are only two places to really put the responsibility: Either on the INDIVIDUAL (which is actually empowering, it acknowledges choice), or on the "THERAPIST" or "SOCIETY AS COLLECTIVE THERAPIST." Either/or, my friends.
Benefits of putting the responsibility on the INDIVIDUAL. :: If we are indeed EQUAl and ENDOWED with certain UNALIENABLE RIGHTS, then we are also ENDOWED with certain UNALIENABLE RESPONSIBILITIES as to how we exercise them. This leaves a LOT more government time and resources and study, etc., upon maintenance of DUE PROCESS.
It also removes the excuse for killing people, for assault, for rape, for destruction. There IS no excuse. The question comes of up of what about "war"? My answer is, how is what we are seeing now take place towards women attempting to leave abuse, with children, too, not a real war — not a "virtual" war. When there are casualties, that comprises a REAL war.
Moreover, most wars are about ideas to start with. Sometimes they are about basic human lusts couched in more palatable ideas.
SO, check the dogma it's vitally important, and it's vitally important also that "foreigners" — people to whom actually facing abuse, having a life on the line, having lost a child, having had to comfort an abused or traumatized child while in trauma onesself — are not to be setting policy. Moreover, those who set policy are not to do so from a particular chip they have on their shoulder, that every one should carry the burden of relieving. And this happens (You can see my chip on the shoulder" here, obviously, but I'm not recommending the undermining of due process in the courts, and re-defining criminal activity as non-criminal. THAT's Cognitive Dissonance for sure!
(Well, I'd better back out this post fast. Feedback appreciated! My exit takes place Here: XX.
Anything below was added earlier)
This was written Pre-VAWA and Pre-National Fatherhood Inititative, which one theme of this blog has been showing what these cost, and how they attempt to cancel each other out.
Yesterday, I saw a significant DV initiative that was also receiving thousands under "promoting Responsible fatherhood" as well. Same source, different themes entirely. The fatherhood movement has positioned itself as FIRMLY anti-VAWA and in its writings, and in people responding to its writings, says to clearly. Many of them also position themselves as religious, which is true in the WORST (not best) sense of the word, as I understand it. They identify a common enemy, which is feminism, and feminISTS. The prelude to identifying an enemy is attacking it, and this means people. Typically (not always) "feminists" are, my friends, women, and this is who is often getting severely attacked for separating.
The VAWA movement, it has different characteristics, but I do not believe it started out of man-hating. It started out of hating to see beaten up women, and recognizing this has a true social cost.
Both these movements have "morphed" and are now in the higher stratospheres (translation: best-funded organizations) collaborating. In these collaborations they share many things — primarily the design and structure of FAILING TO INCLUDE THOSE MOST DRASTICALLY AFFECTED IN THE COLLABORATIVE PROCESS, and "SALVATION AS A MARKET NICHE." (in essence). What else is (not) new in the world!
Perhaps THIS ESSAY, THEN (below) can be a reference point from how far off base is society (specifically, government and nonprofits addressing: Violence Against Women, Responsible Fatherhood, and Healthy Marriages — and failing abysmally in terms of the human toll — on all counts, across the nation. (And, world). Perhaps (though I doubt it) some common sense will "redeem" us from all that debt, with so little dent in the problems the debt is incurred to address….Policies get MORE and more pervasive, self-replicating and intrusive, and still we have things like an 11 year old abducted from a bus stop, held captive in a back yard by a (incidentally, MARRIED couple) – – for 18 years — and being used as a personal sex slave and baby-making machine. In a nice suburb, eh? So much for suburbia and "family-oriented" safe communities.
Police missed an opportunity to rescue Jaycee Lee when they visited her captor's house in 2006 Photo: REUTERS
Officer Ally Jacobs sat in on a meeting with Mr Garrido and his daughters after he requested permission to distribute leaflets on the Berkeley campus of the University of California.
But her suspicions were aroused by the strange behaviour of the two girls – and led to the eventual release of their mother, Jaycee Lee Dugard, after nearly two decades of captivity.
She said Mr Garrido arrived with the girls, aged 11 and 15, who stared at their father "like God" during the meeting. "They had this weird look in their eyes, like brainwashed zombies," she said.
She spoke out as police said that Mr Garrido's home has been searched for evidence of a link to the unsolved murders of several prostitutes in the early 1990s, and as Garrido, 58, and his wife, Nancy, 54, denied charges of kidnapping, rape and false imprisonment in connection with Miss Dugard's disappearance at their first court appearance.
When Officer Jacobs asked the younger girl about a bruise near her eye, the 11-year-old said it was an inoperable birth defect.
(I NOTE: THIS WAS A FEMALE POLICE OFFICER, AND HER JOB ENTAILS NOTICING THINGS THAT DEAL WITH LIFE AND DEATH, POTENTIALLY. HER JOB ENTAILS NOTICING "ANOMALIES." THERE WAS FACT-CHECKING IN THIS CASE, AND THE FACTS CHECKED RESULTED IN FREEDOM AND DELIVERANCE, THOUGH AFTER 18 YEARS, FOR 3 WOMEN, JAYCEE'S MOTHER, JAYCEE'S STEPFATHER, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, FOR HER — AND HER CHILDREN.
A NICE, MARRIED COUPLE . . . . HAD MR. GARRIDO HAD THE SAME CRIMINAL BACKGROUND, AND ACTUALLY BEEN JAYCEE'S FATHER, IN MY EXPERIENCE, HIS KIDNAPPING WOULD HAVE BEEN OVERLOOKED, AND HIS EX-WIFE SEEKING TO SEE HER DAUGHTER BEEN TOLD (as I was) TO JUST GET ALONG WITH IT, OR GIVE IT UP, NO CONTACT WITH YOUR DAUGHTER BECAUSE YOU JUST CAN'T GET ALONG WITH THIS PARENT. CASE IN POINT: WE WERE GIVEN A COURT ORDER THAT EXPOSED US TO CONTINUAL ACCESS AND ABUSE BY A MAN THAT MY DAUGHTERS HAD WITNESSED ASSAULT THEIR MOTHER. EVENTUALLY, A DRASTIC (and criminal) EVENT HAPPENED on an overnight.
TODAYS' POSTED ARTICLE, 20 YEARS OLD, QUESTIONS THE POLICY ~ ~ REALLY, THE DOGMA ~ ~ THAT WOULD EVER, EVEN ONCE! ~ ~ALLOW SUCH THINGS TO TAKE PLACE. U.S.A. . . . . .
OR – – – OR – – – – THINGS LIKE THIS ONE, A MISSING FOSTER CHILD TURNED INTO A HOMICIDE VISITATION. AGAIN, HAPPENED IN A VERY YUPPIE NEIGHBORHOOD, ALSO NEAR BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
HASSANI CAMPBELL (see my recent post on 'AMBER ALERTS' for more photos)
Foster Parents Arrested Over Missing Boy
OAKLAND, Calif. (Aug. 28) – The foster parents who held vigils pleading for the safe return of a missing 5-year-old boy with cerebral palsy have been arrested on suspicion of murder, Oakland police said Friday.
Louis Ross and Jennifer Campbell, who is the boy's aunt, were being questioned by investigators in the case of Hasanni Campbell, who disappeared on Aug. 10 after Ross said he briefly left the boy outside his car in the parking lot of an upscale Oakland neighborhood shoe store where Campbell works.
REGARDING "THERAPY" FOR BATTERERS:
I think Lundy Bancroft says it well — there are certain indicators that one is wasting one's time. I've read them, and you can too, HERE: I am not quoting Mr. Bancroft because he's an expert, but because i already experienced what he gave voice to. I had no idea who the author was in picking up the book.
While I am thankful for Mr. Bancroft's insight and observations (and have featured it elsewhere on this blog), I think that the failure to look OUTSIDE the family court system and INTO the funding behind it, which consists of a powerful government grants system, underwritten in some cases by conflicting actual laws (I refer to "supervised visitation" vs. "Access visitation" premises, which are BOTH funded — in a huge way — and which DIRECTLY oppose each other in fundamental premises, creating chaos — not just "disorder" — but literal "CHAOS" in the courts. Why? Because what's fought over is power, control, and money. I do not, therefore, agree that training to eradicate deeply held prejudices or myths — when applied to JUDICIAL professionals (court-related) any more than when applied to batterers — is a critical solution. I believe that we should pull the plug on the profit system, which it clearly (my research shows) is. That said, in about 2003, had his not book been there (and this above book) for a point of reference WRITTEN BY A MAN for me emotionally, as I exited another life-changing and mind-numbing session with a mediator, I might be a different woman today.
Women, and mothers, do indeed have instincts. I believe these are God-given, and they are protection-related. Moreover, as a DV survivor, and beyond that, professionally a teacher and musician, it has been my job to pay attention to group dynamics in relationship to a standard! The accuracy of my instincts, and speaking up about them, has been ignored in the courtroom. This told me something about family courts, when I accurately predicted a child-snatch, and was shouted down in advance AND afterwards about the same matter.
Two Female Officers (above) accurately noticed, reported — and because they were cops, apparently, and because this was NOT a family law venue, they were not a litigating parent — they were HEARD and lives were saved.
In the Jaycee Dugard case (above), I heard on TV that a woman (neighbor) HAD called 911, saying this man was psychotic, she was very disturbed. Was her call not heard because she was female? I watched Sheriff Rupf apologize on TV that their county law enforcement had "missed it" in this case.
Our current administration has a lot of TALK, but very little RESPECT for mothers in general. Our pro-active protective and active involvement in our children's lives is viewed with suspicion after separating from their father in particular after marriage. . . . The fact is, I believe, our involvement is a perceived threat to a child-care-based, employee-driven, dependent-family-substrate economy. (which is not today's topic).
These instincts are not in operation all the time, and along with Phyllis Chesler (Dr.), I acknowledge fully "Woman's Inhumanity to Woman" exists, and is horrific. And some men (I have known them) notice more than some women. This is also called "CARING." Such men are also sometimes castigated as "feminine" by fellow-men, and deal with this in whatever manner they choose to.
However, I take a look at who are some of the most vehement women I personally have had to deal with (not including certain judges, whose behavior cannot be logically accounted for somewhere other than financial reward, which I WILL be finding one of these days, and I am not the only person who has had this happen, same judges), I can see where either their childhood was severely messed up, OR, they never got to have children themselves. Some key component of the logic system (the part that doesn't acknowledge court orders!) is out of commission, and when confronted on this, reacts in a retaliatory manner as if the threat were personal, when the statement was, I want court orders respected! I have already demonstrated the ability to respect court orders I don't agree with, for years, but the double standard has been devastating to our family.
The other category which comes into play is "second wife" syndrome. While there are I'm sure (and I'd love to be one, some day!) healthy second wife scenarios, all too often a batterer will go specifically SEEK a woman in order to extract the children from the first wife, when he couldn't otherwise. That 2nd woman lends a seeming credibility, and yet, sometimes these women can be more vicious than the men they married to start with. An abusive man is not going to pick a second woman who is likely to confront him on his abuse!!
WELL, this post is now over-worked, but I wanted to include the Jaycee and Hassani case above, to make a few points. It also has helped me get past another few hours in a day in which, I have no visual contact with either daughter, as one of them is entering college and the other one is, at this point, alienated, a thing I never inflicted upon her father while they lived here. They have HAD to make some sense of their existing world. Their existing world included a sudden, and COMPLETE elimination from their mother's input and involvement, without a chance to say goodbye. They were involved in keeping secrets (and induced to) before the event, for over a year, on pretenses of the adults around them. The facts surrounding this event are still not out, and I happen to believe that my absent daughters are not yet aware of what was said on paper about them. I know that they are not exposed to the penalties my family has exacted upon me (subsequent) for continuing to speak up.
This is a HOW -TO for the intergenerational transmission of trauma and abuse. IF the goal is to do this, I am looking at the HOW of it. All that REALLY needs to be sacrificed, in the bottom line analysis, to stop it, is a LOT of pride in high places, and what I call dogma and others call social science, policy, or probability-driven practices (it's called "evidence" but the actual "evidences" considered are often summaries of "probability.")
AS TO THE 1989 ARTICLE (BELOW):
I'm not in agreement with his theme that men can be taught not to abuse. I think men mostly respond to what they're taught in this society — authority, and taking control. Women are taught to negotiate and submit, overall (I didn't realize HOW much til confronting others after leaving my own violent marriage, and then, in shock, realizing it was expected I should take orders. I said no, and took this to the institutions available (first, the courts) to set boundaries and standards. Then I was in for even a ruder awakening to the state of affairs.
So just consider the fall-out, the social fall out from these things, the canaries in the coal mine. it's also a good part of the present NATIONAL economic distress and contributing to it, do not kid yourself! Asking Big Brother to coach, teach, punish, reward, analyze, and rationalize the common ethical issues of life — BIG, mistake. This is called farming out thinking to others. In the process, we are paying people to also form our own ethics, when these were formed and stated long ago in the US Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights, PLUS the fact that these stemmed from a refusal to become the colony of a distant king.
Figure it out — the distance these days may not be so geographic as in worlds apart in perspectives. The colonization part still seems to apply. Children are the MOST attractive and fertile field for TOO many people, and they are hurt in this unnatural process, a constant interruption to their lives. I saw this happen to my own, there was a point in time (a certain season, when others saw the personal gain in our divorce and and custody issue) that –because of a badly written visitation schedule — I watched my daughter who, prior to this, had been able to adjust to separation with regular visitation, and retain their personal integrity — they became performers. It was clear that they were collateral in the fight, and I believe knew this too. They talked about it, too. It was unfair to them, and to me as their mother.
SOURCE —
http://members.shaw.ca/pdg/wife_abuse_child_custody_visitation.html
Note: "Last updated Nov. 2008"
(More of my comments below, for once!)
Stop Violence Against Women
A project by The Advocates for Human Rights
Copyright 2003 Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights.
Permission is granted to use this material for non-commercial purposes. Please use proper attribution.
(THESE documents do not appear to have stopped violence against women. I used to read and read from this International Source, but no matter — the people most directly involved with our lives chose NOT to read, or accept, some of these writings. So what good have they done, other than to increase the frustration level, the awareness of the discrepancy between reasonable, and unreasonable? Sometimes, I wonder.
<><><><><>
(Best read in the original HTML, but here:
Wife Abuse and Child Custody and Visitation by the Abuser,
Kendall Segel-Evans, 1989.
{{Let's Get Honest has decided to interrupt the article more than to put :}}
MAIN POINTs?:____________________ after each paragraph, in hopes that a thoughtful reader will think about what was just said.
Again, one of the greatest motivations for THINKING about various policies, doctrines, and dogmas, is if something valuable is at stake in the mix. Plus, if one has developed the habit of THINKING with this in mind, throughout — as if not just "someone's" life or livelihood, but as if "your own" life, or your child's, were at stake in the matter. THAT is responsible government hood (along with respecting civil rights and due process). COLLECTIVELY, what we all have at stake is to acknowledge that what we may think is "common" sense is nothing of the sort, and that the view gets foggier the less time one spends at street level — and I mean on a regular basis. Dwelling in courtrooms only is NOT "street level" in the sense of, what happens after the court order is written?)
I recently read the National Organization for Changing Men's statement on child custody, and the position taken that, in general, sole custody by the previously most involved parent is preferable to joint custody. I would like to elaborate on this position for families where there has been violence between parents (i.e. woman-abuse). The following includes the main points of a deposition I was asked to provide to a lawyer for the mother in a child custody case. I do not believe this is the last or best word on the subject, but I hope that it will simulate useful dialogue about the effects on children of wife-abuse and the treatment of wife-abusers. I also wish to further discussion on the issue of how we are going to truly end men's violence. Clearly, I believe that the treatment of wife-abusers should not only be held accountable to the partner victim/survivors, but also to the children, and to the next generation.
MAIN POINTs?:____________________
I would like to mention that I will speak of husbands and fathers abusing wives and mothers, because that is the most common situation by far, not because the reverse never happens. It also seems to be true that when there is wife to husband violence it is usually in self-defense and usually does not have the same dynamics or effects as wife abuse. I will use the words violence and abuse somewhat interchangeably, because, in my opinion, domestic violence is not just about physical violence. Domestic violence is a pattern of physical, sexual, economic, social and emotional violence, coercion, manipulation and mistreatment or abuse. Physical violence and the threat of such violence is only the part of the pattern that is most visible and makes the other parts of the pattern difficult to defend against. Once violence is used, its threat is never forgotten. Even when the violence is stopped by threat of legal action or by physical separation, the coercion, manipulation and abusiveness continue (Walker and Edwall, 1987).
Accompanying this pattern of behaviors are common styles of coping or personality characteristics – such as the tendency to blame others for ones problems and impulsiveness – that most batterers share. Almost every man I have worked with has a tendency to see his partner (or his children) as responsible for his pain when he is upset. This leads to seeing his partner (or his children) as an enemy who must be defeated before he can feel better. This is destructive to emotional health even when it does not lead to overt violence.
In my opinion, it would be better, in most cases, for the children of homes where there has been domestic violence not to be in the custody of the abusive parent at all. In many cases it is even advisable that visitation be limited to controlled situations, such as under a therapist's supervision during a therapy session, unless the batterer has been in batterer's treatment and demonstrated that he has changed significantly in specific ways. "Merely" observing ones father abuse ones mother is in itself damaging to children. My clinical experience is consistent with the research literature which shows that children who witness their father beat their mother exhibit significantly greater psychological and psychosomatic problems than children from homes without violence (Roy, 1988). Witnessing abuse is more damaging in many ways than actually being abused, and having both happen is very damaging (Goodman and Rosenberg, 1987). Studies show that a high percentage (as high as 55%) of fathers who abuse their wives also abuse their children (Walker and Edwall, 1987). In my experience, if one includes emotional abuses such as being hypercritical, yelling and being cruelly sarcastic, the percentage is much higher. The damage that children suffer is highly variable, with symptoms ranging from aggressive acting out to extreme shyness and withdrawal, or from total school failure to compulsive school performance. The best way to summarize all the symptoms despite their variety is to say that they resemble what children who suffer other trauma exhibit, and could be seen as a version of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (Walker and Edwall, 1987).
Equally serious is the long term effect of domestic violence – intergenerational transmission. Children who observe their mothers being beaten are much more likely to be violent to a partner themselves as adults. In one study, men who observed violence towards their mother were three times more likely to be abusive than men who had not observed such violence (Strauss et al., 1980). The more serious the abuse observed, the more likely the men were to repeat it. Being abused also makes children likely to grow up to be violent, and having both happen increases the probability even more.
How children learn to repeat the abuse they observe and experience includes many factors. One of the more important is modeling. When they grow up, children act like their parents did, consciously or not, willingly or not. Several of the boys I have worked with have been terribly conflicted about being like their father, of whom they were afraid and ashamed. But they clearly carried parts of their father's behavior patterns and attitudes with them. Other boys from violent homes idealized their father, and they were more likely than the others to beat their wives when they grew up (Caesar, 1988). Several of the men I have worked with in group have lamented that they told themselves that they would not beat their wives the way their mother was beaten when they were children. But when they became adults, they found themselves doing the same things their father did.
One reason for this is that even if the physical abuse stops, if the children still have contact with the batterer, they are influenced by his coping styles and personality problems. As Lenore Walker observes (Walker and Edwall, 1987, p. 138), "There is also reason for concern about children's cognitive and emotional development when raised by a batterer who has a paranoid-like pattern of projecting his own inadequacy and lack of impulse-control onto others." Dr. Pagelow agrees, "It may become desirable to avoid prolonged contact between violent fathers and their sons until the men assume control over their own behavior and the examples of 'manhood' they are showing to the boys who love them, (Pagelow, 1984, p. 256). If the abusive man has not sought out domestic violence specific treatment for his problem, there is no reason to believe that the underlying pattern of personality and attitudes that supported the abuse in the past have changed. There is every reason to believe it will impact his children.
Additionally, in a society where the majority of wife-beatings do not lead to police reports, much less to filings or convictions, it is easy for children to perceive that abusiveness has no negative consequences. (One study, by Dobash and Dobash, found that 98% of violent incidents between spouses were not reported to the police [reported in Pagelow, 1984, p. 437]). Some children, seeing who has the power and guessing what could happen to them if they opposed the power, will side with the abuser in custody situations. Often, children will deny that the abuse ever happened. Unfortunately, the children who side with the abuser, or deny the abuse, are the most likely to be abusive themselves as adults. It is very important that family court not support this by treating a wife-beating father as if he were just as likely to be a good parent as the woman he beat. As Gelles and Strauss point out in their book Intimate Violence (1988), people are violent in part because they believe they can get away with it. Public consequences are important for preventing the intergenerational transmission of violence. Boys, particularly, need to to see that their father's abusiveness leads to negative, not positive results.
Lastly, I would like to point out that joint legal custody is likely to be damaging to children when there has been spousal violence. My experience with my clients is definitely consistent with the research results reported by Judith Wallerstein to the American Orthopsychiatric Association Convention in 1988. The data clearly show that joint custody is significantly inferior to sole custody with one parent when there is parental conflict after the divorce, in terms of the children's emotional adjustment as well as the mother's safety. Most batterers continue their abusiveness after the marriage, into the divorced parent relationship, in the form of control, manipulation and harassment over support payments, visitation times, and parenting styles. The children are always aware of these tensions and battles, and sometimes blame the mother for not just giving in and keeping the peace – or for being too submissive. The batterer often puts the children right in the middle, taking advantage of his belief that she will give in to avoid hurting the children. The damage to the children in this kind of situation is worse because it is ongoing, and never is allowed to be resolved or have time to heal.
Because I work with batterers, I am sympathetic to the distress they feel at being separated from their children for long periods of time. However, the men who truly cared about their children for the children's sake, and not for what the children do for their father's ego, have been willing to do the therapeutic work necessary to change. They have been willing to accept full responsibility for their violent behavior, and however reluctantly, have accepted whatever restrictions on child visitation existed for safety reasons. They have been willing to be in therapy to deal with "their problem." They have also recognized that they were abused as children themselves, or witnessed their mother being abused, or both, and are willing to support interrupting the intergenerational transmission of violence.
Caesar, P. Lynn., "Exposure to Violence in the Families of Origin
Among Wife Abusers and Maritally Violent Men." Violence and Victims , Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring, 1988.
Davis, Liane V., and Carlson, Bonnie E., "Observation of Spouse Abuse
– What Happens to the Children?" Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Vol. 2, No. 3, September 1987, pp. 278-291, Sage Publications, 1987.
Dutton, Donald., The Domestic Assault of Women, Allyn and Bacon, 1988.
Gelles, Richard J. and Strauss, Murray A., Intimate Violence, Simon and Schuster, 1988.
Goodman, Gail S., and Rosenberg, Mindy, S., "The Child Witness to Family Violence:
Clinical and Legal Considerations. Ch. 7, pp. 47ff. in: Sonkin, Daniel. Ph.d., Domestic Violence on Trial, Springer, 1987.
Pagelow, Mildred Daley, Family Violence, Praeger Publications, 1984.
Roy, Maria., Children in the Crossfire, Health Communications, Inc. 1988.
Roy, Maria., The Abusive Partner, Van Nostrand, 1982.
Sonkin, Daniel. Phd., Domestic Violence on Trial, Springer, 1987.
Strauss, Murray A., et. al., Behind Closed Doors, Anchor Books, 1980.
Walker, Lenore E.A., and Edwall, Glenace E.
"Domestic Violence and Determination of Visitation and Custody in Divorce."
Ch. 8, pp. 127ff. Sonkin, Daniel. Phd. Domestic Violence on Trial, Springer, 1987.
Wallerstein, Judith., Report to the American Orthopsychiatric Association Convention, 1988.
Some of the above professionals listed here, from what I understand, have either changed their tune, or found more profit in conferences funded by the shared-custody, father's-rights, premises that women are equally as violent and dangerous as men in marriage. Or, that what is said above, here, about role modeling and responsibility to the NEXT generation, doesn't apply. I have seen them (I think even Dutton was seen in my last post, at such a conference.). Nevertheless, read what he wrote!
And I can show you, in approximately $millions$$ (as I have been at times in news headlines) the cost of these premises, in particular to the next generation. But what kind of generation IS it that can't see right/versus wrong, principles of values as defined by what is and is NOT criminal behavior, when they see an age gap. How does gender pre-empt behavior, or youth pre-empt age? Why must women be held to a higher standard of accountability as parents then men, and men be paid — by the U.S. Government through the states through the courts, prisons, child support systems, mediation, supervised visitation, parenting education classes — and AFTER many times a K-12 (or almost 12th in some cases) educational system that itself is a major public expenditure. . . . Moreover, WHY should programs supposedly aimed at low-income people (as if such people had fewer human rights, common sense, or were less entitled to due process and informed consent about what's happening! than others) are being utilized by sometimes some very well to do individuals in the divorce arena. For example, google the Alanna Krause case. This does not make "sense" to me.
Speaking personally, the exchanges where were the problems occurred in our case. I asked (for YEARS) for help with this, and got none. Then finally on an overnight, I stopped seeing my daughters again.
I think that had COMMON SENSE PREVAILED long ago, our own family would be much more prosperous, and I doubt life with me would've been so stressful for the girls, after all, each weekend was likely to become a scene, or not come a scene. I could scarcely relax much around that. Add into the mix child support issues, and we have a decade of devastation, at least from my point of view.
And WHY? To support some new theories and professions? How about the professions Moms were in beforehand? (Many of us were, FYI).
To support: marriage and family therapists, mediators, custody evaluators, trauma specialists?
When a society either refuses to deal with — OR cannot agree on the source and causes of the ongoing sources of trauma, SOMEONE will have to pay the cost of a traumatized populations, just as any war-torn country, or AIDS-ravaged country, there is collateral damages to go with the death, shock, poverty and collapse of infrastructure. In the United States, this plays out entirely differently, of course, because we still have a significant infrastructure, or at least many of the population believe we do, and those not so badly hurt by it as others wish to, apparently, maintain the myths that it's sustaining something valid.
And yes, I repeat, those are myths.
Where is the real moral, let alone economic, validity in paying multiple professionals to deal with one recalcitrant, overentitled, or person unwilling to seek help with his REAL problems, rather than to alleviate the symptoms of his REAL problems, such as being separated from his children. I had to face this in marriage, and now with family of origin, and again in the family law system? I find a fundamental flaw, and the truth of the matter, the difference is in worldview of (1) humanity and (2) whether or not law applies to all, or only to some. I.e., the "double-standard" mentality.
And that typically falls on the gender divide. Other times, it falls on the Economic Divide. While it's common for rich to blame poor for being poor in a matter that an abuser blames his victim, there is wiggle room in both viewpoints, and the institutions we live in and deal with ARE not formed, historically, by poor people. They aren't. Rather, they tend to impoverish. The familyy law system is GOING to do this. It is going to move wealth around, and afterwards, SOMEONE is going to be impoverished under this theme that it's not an adversarial system, its' "really" all about the children.
For child-molesters, this may be true. For those who see $$ when they see custody to one parent or the other, in a sense it might be.
But it's NOT about the children's welfare, not like this.
If the individual is unwilling to separate his behavior from himself as a person, after being offered multiple opportunities to do so, and go through equivalent shock of personal changes, as did his victim(s) and bystanders affected, then THAT is the issue.
MOREOVER, if the family system surrounding this individual is ALSO unwilling or unable to confront own criminal behavior, life-threatening and life-changing behavior, in one of its own, what's that family FOR? that is precisely the family that should be dismantled, yet a system says, no it shouldn't. (Theoretically, although I know plenty of mothers who can't see their children under this theory. When the pedal hits the metal, that's how it plays out, too often).
Voices from the even further past, still valid today:
Too bad we're more religious than actually a truly God-conscious society — because of the simplicity and beauty with which truths are stated:
"Even a child is known by his doings, whether they be good or whether they be bad."
"Ye shall know them by their fruits."
As to who to socialize with, who to take on as business partner or close friends:
"Evil communications (this just means "associations") corrupt good manner (ethos)."
The book of "Proverbs" (31 in all) was directed to young people, and talks about not associating with an angry man or a furious man "lest you learn his ways." Family law says, if it's supervised, it's OK, and a child must, because it's his father. Today's essay talks about that…. Proverbs talks about not meddling with them that are given to sudden change. That's common sense! Sudden change could be backstabbing, betrayal, turning on you. That habit, done ONCE, is cause to separate if not confronted, admitted, and changed. FAST. We have a RIGHT to be once burnt, twice shy. . . . . . Yet this family law system attracts such characters, accepting hearsay as evidence when it's not, suppressing evidence when it's found too often; it keeps the litigation going, and exposing parents and children to a series of sudden shocks, disrupting their entire lives and livelihoods, sometimes everything. We should not have to do this. And Proverbs ALSO talks about not associating with fools: "He that walketh with wise men shall be wise, but a companion of fools shall be ashamed."
When our children are forced to break these simplicities, for a different ideology, this is in effect using parents, particularly mothers, to produce children for the state. That's not what we went through nine months for, or labor! No woman goes through this in order to raise a fool, a criminal, or have her kid hurt and taught values that will lead that child to sometimes a lifetime of it. Or to have no coherent set of values but personal survival!
(Note on quoting Bible verses here: I quote them as what's in my thinking, others may (if they wish) look some of them up on-line at "http://bible.cc” (KJV) or elsewhere. My quotes may not be verbatim.)
What mother would WANT a son or daughter to join a gang of criminals? Yet they do, or sometimes they die for NOT being in a gang. It's not only the risks, but the values systems.
What about a government gang? What about a system that robs parents of years of productive work based on a theme that someone is somehow to be deciphered psychologically, apart from his or her behaviors? What about a system that would bring ongoing conflict onto growing children — and do so for financial and personal profit — based on the belief that freedom of association does NOT belong to (typically) their mother?
It's nice to have a lot of professions spring up on how to stop violence against women, I suppose, BUT how about the professions Moms were in beforehand? (Many of us were, FYI). The professionals I most needed in the early 2000 would've been a criminal (not family) defense attorney. Then again, where was the funding going to come from?
Posted in After She Speaks Up - Reporting Domestic Violence and/or Suicide Threats, Cast, Script, Characters, Scenery, Stage Directions, Context of Custody Switch, Designer Families, Domestic Violence vs Family Law, History of Family Court, in Studies, My Takes, and Favorite Takes, Organizations, Foundations, Associations NGO Hybrids, public education, Split Personality Court Orders, Vocabulary Lessons
Tagged with Accountability, Batterer's Treatment, domestic violence, Duluth model, DV, Govt Fundamentalism, Intergenerational Transmission of DV, Men on Violence Against Women, Modeling, NOMAS, religion vs humanism, social commentary, Social Issues from Religious Viewpoints, Supervised Visitation, trauma, U.S. Govt $$ hard @ work..
Who's actually TALKS with the REAL stakeholders when it comes to Stalking, Domestic Violence (not "abuse"), and Child Abuse??
I have a question, after finding an unusually honest commentary on how the model code for stalking laws was developed. I've spent some years, in the process of seeking help, becoming acquainted with the standards for what makes sense, according to LOTS of organizations. I then tried to bring this common sense into actual practice in our own case after it hit the family law venue.
Yeah, right..
I have a question. As usual, thinking aloud (and posting as I go), the introduction gets longer and the original content that inspired the post, lower and lower. Presently, scroll down to just below all the graphics (logos) and there's the question, and in primarily BLUE content, the quote that started today's post.
Eventually, over the years, I got to the point of connecting more and more dots, including why would it take this amount of diligent searching by a woman with two college degrees and highly motivated to get some answers, to come to the inclusion that the tipping point is where the intent to publish hits the point to put it into practice. This is a fulcrum.
Eventually I stopped just reading only content, and started paying more attention to in which publication things were published (most of which I couldn't afford to subscribe to). THEN I started connecting which nonprofit (or, some of these are almost exclusively the project of some government grants, and say so right on the websites) with which publication, which which professionals. This is what would in interpersonal interactions be called "body language." Only, without warm bodies and live voices and actual interaction face to face, the next best substitute, especially for those without a travel fund, is sometimes a little background check. On-line. Free.
What I post here today was written a while back by a professional now involved in addressing some family court issues, and who I hope to meet someday soon. We appear to have been circling around geographically within a few miles of each other, but consistently in different venues. In other words, she has worked for and at organizations I've sought help from and whose halls I've sat in as a "client."
It's probably time to make a phone call. Meanwhile, today's a difficult time for me, and I can't quite say why without revealing which case. Please bare with some of the over-writing here, and understand why today (and I acknowledge, yesterday), sarcasm is pretty high. Fact is, I miss my daughters, and it's the beginning of a school year. Instead, I get the back hand and the ugly side (or no side at all) of the parent and other adults in control of their lives. I can and have read law, and after looking, still don't see that I've committed a crime in these matters, and I most certainly HAVE seen and identified several ones committed since the case switched from civil to family law, which I to this day believe is where batterers go to hide, and keep up the same pattern of behavior, only with more validation.
Oops, there I go again.
ANYHOW, as to the conferences and subscriptions, I have a suggestion: Instead of a grant to explicate the context of domestic violence in custody decisions (apparently a recent one) and the "Domestic Violence Conference of the Decade," whose speakers and sponsoring organizations I did take a pretty good (on-line) look at — and got the general picture for sure — and ANOTHER one I just heard of today:
(boy, the logos, and PR, and branding, is getting more and more professional!):
(SEE: http://dvinstitute.org), which it appears just happened in Detroit. . ..
Here's another one about to happen in San Diego:
http://dvinstitute.org/announces/files/Partial%20Brochure-5-18.pdf
The logo makes me think I'm back in grade school again (check it out — I couldn't click & drag).
It has a wooden post with 3 pointers, "Future, Present, Past" all askew on a sky background.
"FUTURE" is pointing right (the only one pointing right) and UP (ditto).
Present is horizontal and point left, indicating a change of direction. From WHAT?
Past is pointing left and down. Talk about not very subtle.
I could suggest some more detailed logos. Perhaps the length of the line I stood in yesterday for $15.00 coupon to go get food, which allowed me to get some nonfoods, which Food Stamps program, onto which I've been forced back because of former failed systems, most of which interfered with My system called, working! and complying with court orders. Because we might also have a problem with drugs, alcohol or tobacco, or who knows, perhaps just for simplicity, and of course for the safety of those distributing (i.e., no cash), we could only go to ONE store (a few miles away, which is great for those without cars, with children, and poor enough to need help with food). I figure out the expense to time ratio of this, and between wait, and buses, it was approximately $4.00/food benefit per hour, four hours expended in getting coupon and food. Not including getting home with it. A far cry from a conference.
This line contained live people with real stories, and mostly people of color, different colors, sizes, and manners; most of them also, women, many with children, and each with a story, and their own method of dealing with the long wait. It was detailed and usually cheerful, this waiting is routine. I didn't see anyone I recognized although I'd been there many times before.
Perhaps I should show some children crying, with a forensic child psychologist, or CPS worker. Perhaps I should show a woman crying. Perhaps I should show General Assistance being cut (as it is) to make way for some of the grants I've been blogging on, including yesterday.
If economic distress causes violence (I don't believe it does) than perhaps this is partly why. But an inane signpost over these words? – –
A New Direction for a Safer Tomorrow: National Conference on Supervised Visitation and Safe Exchange
Yeah, that and a new specialty in the field, too. . . . . Not THAT new, but apparently . . . .
The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges and the Office on Violence Against
Women are proud to sponsor the first National Conference on Supervised Visitation and Safe
Exchange. This conference will inform professionals (WILL INFORM WHOM?? WHOM????)
about how to provide supervised visitation and safe exchange services that account for (HOW ABOUT PREVENT??) domestic violence.
THink about this: if there is a need for supervised visitation and safe exchange, that means domestic violence is already there.
nts who don't threaten to abduct, or hurt a Mom without supervision, or do this (and many do), wouldn't need this.
National experts will provide education on safety for adult victims and children; services for diverse populations; community
collaboration; and advocacy, in the context of domestic violence and supervised visitation and
safe exchange. The conference will highlight effective practice and programs, offer tips and
tools, provide an opportunity for networking, and inspire and invigorate participants.
Expert Faculty . . .
(I dare site visitors here to look up each and every expert and determine where they are coming from, and who pays their organization's bills.. . . . . . )
Would you like to see a similar brochure? OK, here. I found it (this search) at
http://parentalalienationcanada.blogspot.com/2009/02/domestic-violence-conference-of-decade.html
cafcusa.org
Please forward to colleagues and friends
favtea.com
THE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE CONFERENCE OF THE DECADE!
From Ideology to Inclusion 2009:
New Directions in Domestic Violence Research and Intervention
With Featured Presentations By:
Murray Straus, PhD *
Deborah Capaldi, PhD *
Don Duton, PhD {{NOTE: S/BE "DUTTON"}}
K. Daniel O'Leary, PhD *
Sandra Stith, PhD *
Richard Gelles, PhD
Sarah Avery-Leaf, PhD * Mohammed Boabaid, PhD * Ellen Bowen, LCSW
Jan Brown * Wendy Bunston, MFT * Michelle Carney, PhD
Ken Corvo, PhD * Carol Crabsen, LCSW * Christopher Eckhardt, PhD
Lynette Feder, PhD * Richard Felson, PhD * Kimberly Flemke, PhD
Joel Garner, PhD * Lonnie Hazelwood, MSHP, LCDC * Denise Hines, PhD
Jodi Klugman-Rabb, MFT * Christopher Maxwell, PhD * Eric McCollum, PhD
Daniel Sonkin, PhD * Arlene Vetere, PhD * Carolyn West, PhD
Friday, Saturday and Sunday, June 26-28, 2009
Los Angeles Airport Marriott Hotel
2009 Conference Flier
Most presenters serve on the editorial board of the peer-reviewed journalPartner Abuse, published quarterly by Springer publishing. For more information, go towww.springerpub.com/pa
California Alliance for Families and Children
Family Violence Treatment & Education Association
TO LEARN MORE OR SIGN UP, GO TO:
WWW.CAFCUSA.ORG
Domestic Violence Training DVDs Now Available!
See the founders, the pioneers, and today's most respected experts together at the one-of-a-kind, historic conference, "From Ideology to Inclusion:."Evidence-Based Policy and Intervention in Domestic Violence The conference was held February 15-16, 2008, in Sacramento, California.
Mail or fax in your order today!
Order form and catalog (click to order)
Summary of Speaker Bios
Online video from the conference
DID I forget, in addition to any conference fees, there's (like any good market niche) the collateral sales market too. Incidentally, downloading information is one of the lowest overhead, most profitable fields of direct selling around, once it's in place. It's a GREAT business model.
Is that enough Ph.D.'s? Surely I should just their judgments about my danger level, experience of domestic violence, and whether my kids are or are not at risk of — shall we say — parental abduction — better than my own. After all, look at the degrees!
I wonder whether it has occurred to any of these people that some women leaving abuse might prefer going for not just "job training" but more degrees themselves, rather than defending from the latest round of accusations through this system, or for that matter, the latests fads sweeping through it. . ..
Speaking for myself, I already had the degrees, I just wanted "permission to practice" what I was already trained in and couldn't, formerly, because of the domestic violence situation.
Remind me to get another Piled Higher Deeper (then I won't call it that any more…), it may pay better than blogging for nothing, if I'm in one of these fixing people fields. Which, however, I wasn't. I was in music, which helps heal people many times. It changes them. But it doesn't approach from the point of view, unilaterally: "You need fixing, and we will do it!" It's more transformative than legislative in nature. Funding for the arts is in jeopardy, but not for family-fixing.
SO, who attended THIS conference?
Who attended this one? (Sorry folks, if you just missed it, this past June): In the words of one of the groups above:
The conference quickly became an international event after its announcement. This was due to all of the internationally respected experts that presented at the conference, as well as attendees that came from all over the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia. Easily 95 percent of those who had registered and attended the conference were with state, local and U.S. government agencies, including officials and staff from the Department of Health and Human Services. It was also attended by a myriad of public health agencies, Social Services, law enforcement, treatment providers and family law practitioners. The list goes on. In addition, several states had representatives from their Judicial Branches attend, including judges.
Seems to me about the only people NOT there were: family court LITIGANTS, battered women, protective mothers, children who had aged out of the system, in the custody of an abusive parent (these young people DO exist and are now speaking out: Courageous Kids, Alanna Krause, others. I WONDER what my daughter will say, or realize, when she turns 18, soon.) I don't see the category "shelter workers" there. I don't see "domestic violence advocates" as a category, do you? Family law practitioners and treatment providers, You BETCHA!
Because of the historic nature of the conference, {{and surely not because of PR, contacts with someone at the station, or anything of a mercenary or publicity-promotion nature…}} Radio Station KFBK-AM 1530, in Sacramento interviewed Erin Pizzey, the founder of the shelter movement and one of the conference presenters (incidentally, it seems Ms. Pizzey, daughter of an ambassador, has come to the conclusion that the shelter movement is run by radical feminists and socialists, and was turned on by them for not going along.).. . Everything is always "radical" "new" "Pioneering" and "launched" (etc.) in this field.
Perhaps this next testimonial may explain why the D.A. was so resistant to allowing me to not lose, or help me regain, custody of my daughters when it was their FATHER, not their MOTHER who had taken them so long ago:
After going through the post conference surveys, we learned that most attendees gave the conference overall scores ranging in the 4 & 5's (with 5 being the highest score). We have heard directly from many attendees who are mediators and evaluators in family courts, and they called the conference the best they had ever attended on the issue. Many of them have been in the practice for 30 years. One District Attorney wrote:
"I thoroughly enjoyed the conference and felt it was one of the best I'd ever attended (I've been attending DV conferences ever since the Judicial Task Force put on a statewide conference after the OJ case!)"
(The clear and blatant theme of this one appears to be that women are equally as violent as men. Hence, the publication "Partner" abuse (and "abuse" not "Violence') Title: From "Ideology" to "Inclusion."
Oops: http://www.cafcusa.org/2008%20conference.aspx
It appears these reviews are from the 2008 conference, which was merely "historic" and not "the conference of the decade." Sorry in searching on the latter term a merely Grand conference got confused with the truly Grandiose, which is about how the language goes too. But it's not truly likely that the same organizations, in alliance are likely to change directions themselves. They exist, many of them, to change directions of OTHER venues, and other people's, well, court cases.
(Tell you what — this inclusion does not appear to work in reverse quite so well…)
But, who are the real stakeholders?
Why not instead just raise funds for subscriptions for women leaving abuse to some of the publications talking about us, and our children, and our batterers, and our stalkers, and our children's abductors, and our options, and how to intervene.
If we could have some "supervised visitation" to some of these conferences, I'm sure we would be competent to stand up and dispel some illusions circulating around these topics. I have known for a long time what would and would not take this household towards safety and self-sufficiency and been asking for it from institutions that had it to offer, they said.
This has fallen mostly on deaf ears. So now I am more interested in talking to these people's supervisors, and employers, which FYI, happens to be in many cases, the federal grants system.
(note: I talked myself into two such "Screening for Abuse (or, Domestic violence)" type conferences within recent years, AFTER I lost my kids, and while in PTSD, Poverty, dealing with stalking, and working one remaining job. I overcame the PTSD of speaking up, and was called "brave" for doing so, in front of many strangers. One was aimed at health professionals, and was nationwide. ANother was aimed at custody evaluators and was not, although I would characterize BOTH of them as having analyzed the problem of abuse pretty darn well.
It was extremely validating and didn't make a damn bit of difference in the case, and I doubt will in a whole lot of others. Why?
Because INFORMATION is not MOTIVATION.
EDUCATION doesn't produce behavior change unless the MOTIVATION to change exceeds the benefits of NOT changing.
Overcoming PTSD to speak in front of strangers, is not my definition of brave. My definition of "brave" entails facing potential death, which I have, not facing a strange audience. It entails facing down that man, with a loaded gun and crazy talk, in my own home, and not just once. The bravery THAT time related to the fact I was a mother, and young children were in the home. My definition of brave is, knowing the possible impact, telling my family to go take a hike and get a life, when they violated my boundaries post-restraining order, and made it consistently clear after this clear statement, that this was not on THEIR agenda.
Similarly SOME people need to start recognizing that surviving abuse may be luck, or it may show competence, and start getting a different attitude about who you are dealing with, when a person shows up not too coherent immediately after an incident. Or when they show up in court (repeatedly forced to, thanks to the family law venue, which specializes on hearsay vs. evidence) also not coherent enough, possibly because of who's present, and because of the authoritatarian and "it could change on a dime" nature of the interchange.
At this public speaking at a conference for PROFESSIONALS in the FIELD time, I also almost spent a night on the street, because in the process of speaking up, I mislaid car keys, took a commute back home, and found out the keys were in another city. Getting them back took half a night, and more money (of the very little I'd gotten by chance the previous day, allowing me the commute to this conference), help from two friends by phone (my own cell being off) and it was cold, too. I then imposed on someone who was actually a music client (so to speak) to stay overnight so I might not, in the fatigue and stress, oversleep work the next mornign which at this point would've resulted in being dismissed.
About a year later (this being halfway through the court cases following child-stealing) I was indeed suddenly dismissed by this same group. Possibly they had what's called "vicarious trauma" dealing year after year (and it was that) with my inability to get free from ONE abuser, and his friends, and the family law mishandling of a simple, simple restraining order renewal. Which I didn't, FYI, get.)
I want to say something:
Since then, I have looked into the financing (funding, folks) of this same organization, and at its website. See my post on "the amazing, disappearing word "Mother." (The group is not featured, but the principle applies). It is a premiere group in the war against violence, not against "women" but, well, "family violence." I have to really question why in this same state, funds to shelters have been axed, but not to this group. I have to ALSO question why I couldn't get simple help when I needed it (and that includes, to date) from any of the entities that exist to provide it, after some of the original ones made a few policy mistakes, major ones, in designing the original custody order.
So, why not just invite us to the conferences? Note: before, THAT, raise funds to make sure that their phone and internets stay on (and deal with on-line stalking as well). For example, the other year, had my phone been on, I trust I could've found a job and retained access to a moving vehicle through what's called "work" — even though, through family law inanity, I lost custody on an overnight over a year earlier, all my profession in the aftermath (and buildup), and all hope of collecting any child support arrears in the process.
You know what these conferences are to me, any more? They are like ambulance-chasers. They are carpet baggers.
They are like a person with a boat with room in it, and not too far to BOAT to shore, but too far for most people, particularly people in danger of shock, or fatigue, or not in top marathon shape — they drive by in the boat and wave. Sometimes they grab a kid in the process. They congregate in boats, and talk to each other about the shipwrecks. They even SOS — the shore — for more gas, and refreshments — and "technical support" — to converse — exclusively with each other — about "how to rescue shipwrecked sailors." SOMETIMES some of them even pull out a child or two, or three, and give the child into the care of other people making a living off the shipwrecks — OR the other parent that helped cause it. That's bright.
Then they have conferences about "shared parenting." Or, even about "the context of custody-switch." Or sometimes even about "the advisability of mediation in family law cases involving allegations of domestic violence or child abuse." I've read many of these, and they are (unlike this blog) generally copyedited, slick, and even have nice charts, sometimes color coded bar graphs, and the whole nine yards.
But what they don't have is the voices of the people in the water which might show where they missed the boat in these discussion.
NOW — do I think ALL the people in ALL the conferences have impure motives and self-interest in the forefront of their minds?
NO — I know that ALL people are imperfect and have impure motives and self-interest to some degree, including me.
That's what the Constitution is about, and why any sitting President is sworn, under oath and in public, to preserve, protect, and defend it. It's about putting some restraint on tyranny.
This includes tyranny by simple exclusion from policy-making conferences.
It should NOT be necessary for almost every mother (or father) who goes through divorce to switch professions and join one that might help him or herself defend herself in a family law custody action, and it PARTICULARLY is not fair where one partner (and it's most likely to be the female one) has a life in the balance. Not just an emotional economic life, but also a physical life to her or her kids.
TRUTH has a lot of depth and nuances, but the underlying principles are basic, and basically, SIMPLE. When we are talking about human behavior. As a teacher of many years, and I have taught, coached, directed, co-taught, co-directed and/or performed with beginners (tone-deaf) to professionals (in 3 venues: piano/vocal/choral), I know that the same basics work every time, as much as how people sing and their particular voices differ. Certain basics HAVE to be there, including: Air, vocal cords, something to sing, and to do it well — a REASON to sing.
Same for offices, lifestyles, businesses. There is income, expenses, cash flow, overhead, etc. There is some basic math involved.
What the extended decades-long (I'm approaching 10 years, I know others who have been in longer) nonending family law venue DOES is simply divert cash flow. It STOPS what existed before, and recreates a NEW version according to its paradigm. Many times, it stops the process and incentive for either parent to work.
So, IF the actual desire is to STOP VIOLENCE, or CHILD ABUSE and SAVE LIVES: I recommend starting to pay parents, particularly those who are experiencing stalking, abuse, or other threats, for some of these subscriptions, so we can keep up with what's being proclaimed about us and our kids and our lifestyles,
Or, alternately, we could stop the conferences and get back to something halfway reasonable, like our own businesses. Right now, this thing is really getting out of hand. . . . . After a few years of chasing around the experts, and being ever so happy they had "analyzed" a situation well, I began to realize this is about where it stops. With the talk. (Well, not really, the dynamic of the situation is changing, but the "you're making it up" folk are cancelling out the "you're minimizing abuse" folk. Even when they "collaborate.")
I actually DO have a life (still — not the same one, but a life) to get back to, and it's clear that this is going to go on, well, forever. I DO have some things I wish to do in life than stop people so intent on stopping domestic violence, they have kept it going a good long while, and people so intent on sharing custody that they are not about to, ever, acknowledge that this is getting too many people hurt. No, "supervised visitation" is NOT a good alternatives, that I can see. For one, I was not offered it once in many years, although it would have been very appropriate given where the problems were happening in our case. Most people I know that HAVE supervised visitation (at their own expense) are women who got it AFTER they reported abuse. They lost custody and have to pay to see their kids.
Do I want to spend the rest of my life fixing this problem? No. I don't think it's going away soon. On the other hand, do I accept what has happened and zero accountability for what was stolen from my daughters, and me, and the unnecessary destruction involved? No. Do I want to lose something more if I confront again? No. Would you?
So. why not let the real stakeholders in on the discussions with the "stakeholders" in these systems? Why should we have to run around studying the industry, and finding out about each new conference half of us can't attend anyhow? And with speakers we have already been exposed to their work, and a sometimes (I speak for myself) even know which grant or grants program is funding the thing and the policy? Have we become a nation of actually employed experts whose very jobs are robbing from the unemployed, whom they are studying?
(I do apologize for my sarcasm here. But my phone is only on today because someone had a good hair day, as opposed to a bad hair day, and another dribble of child support arrears showed up, enough for phone and not much more. In order to get some nonfoods (which is illegal on Food Stamps) rather than ask someone I know for this (again), I waited 2 hours to get a single coupon unredeemable except at one store — not nearby. I waited til the next day to redeem it. On that day, which involved approximately SIX total bus trips, none of them involving more than 10 mile radius total, and after having walked 2 of those miles without proper shoes, I took the baggage home (involving a sack of potatoes and more) and looked for work, a lead on charity cars, and more. Then my phone went off (as happens when one doesn't pay in time). THIS MORNING, I talked the bus driver into letting me on half price, because the feet wouldn't make a similar distance this time. It just so happened (couldn't have been planned around or predicted) that — just under the deadline, a deadbeat Dad paid again. I reflected at how similar this was to life when I LIVED with this man (particularly as to unpredictable access to any kind of cash, and having to dedicate half a day or more to something that would take 20 min to an hour in a car).
The primary difference being then that I had the joy of a little company with my daughters, who were growing up still. I wonder where they are and what they are thinking today.
So, let's change the dynamics:
Benefits (from OUR point of view, at least):
Liberty, hopefully
Pursuit of happiness
Decreased National Debt ($1.9 TRILLION, I just heard?)
Safer classrooms, probably
Many, many more benefits.
Detriments (possibly from publishers, conferrers, model code designers, and a WHOLE lot more):
Some professions would have to find a new market niche, because the problems their professions live off would likely abate. Like those who have lived through (see subject line) they would have to be resourceful, flexible, think on their feet, and probably no longer have a "captive" audience or a steady stream of federal grants to solve problems, but enter the free marketplace like the rest of us.
The professed Ph.D. experts would have to move over for the actual "experts." An expert is one who has experienced a thing, and has a vocabulary sufficient to communicate to communicate to others what it was. Typically, this entails knowing others involved in the same thing. OUR vocabulary, not the expert social science vocabulary.
Cash and jobs would flow in a different direction.
I think those would be the primary differences. The question is, HOW would America Survive without the economy of pathology? And the paradigm of the us/them; subject/object expertise heirarchy?
What year do you think this was written?
(Scroll to bottom for answer).
I have pasted an entire section from an article I found on-line today, as I was thinking about the mental segmentation and disconnect between different types of justice (courts), between courts & police, between police & prosecutors (from what I can tell), between "domestic violence" professionals and "child abuse professionals" (meaning, these professionals desire to STOP domestic violence and child abuse, by analyzing and, based on analyses, communicating their results and asking for policy changes. Then, if the policy changes, the matter comes up, is the PRACTICE changed. Again, the typical mentality is to "train" the professionals to practice what's right.
Very few actually deal with the realities of human nature, namely, that there is no single branch of employment, business, and no profession, where most of the employees are altruistic, and none of them are dangerously self-serving, or motivated by, for example, basic human greed, denial, or lust for power.
This excerpt is a sample of what I'd call honest writing, which shows how even a "model" practice that is published — certain perspectives were omitted. I would imagine that in this case, the voices of the people with these perspectives (the victims the model code was hoping to help) were not present for the dialogue. THAT is indeed a problem, this gap.
it's really a matter of language. You see, calling an intersection of court, law enforcement, and social services workers when discussing issues that affect people who come under the category victims (i.e., of crimes) without including the victims — IN THOSE DISCUSSIONS — is exclusionary.
It is a larger subset of a larger divide, called "service-providers" (including the "service" of JUSTICE) vs. Recipients/clients.
I've blogged on another post here about the effect of stalking on me, and including through other family members. It is a total life-changer (and illegal). I do not know how to sustain regular employment around the degree of it that has come into my life, and have totally switched goals in order to accommodate, if possible, the safety factor. I know other women who have done this. It's NOT a game, and NOT a joke, but every law enforcement officer I reported to treated it as such, and added in some verbal abuse to go along with my attempt to report. I have reported it to almost every agency or type of individual involved in my case, as I also reported the risk of child-stealing (which happened) and my concerns about the lethality factor in our case, a combo. of gut instinct, only to then find literature that shows my gut was right.
It is an odd feeling to find out how much of one's life had already been discussed and conferenced about, and how long ago, and relate this to how many women have been killed since because even this (in its own words) "flawed" model still isn't being followed.
Nevertheless, here it is. It is in off-blue (not "link" color) italics. Any bold or underlining, or variations from italic blue, are my additions,or emphases, except obviously the bolded section headings:
National Institute of Justice Project to Develop Model Anti-Stalking Code for States
Limitations of Report from Domestic Violence Perspective
In response to the great and sudden interest in state stalking codes, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) created a project to develop a model anti-stalking code for states, releasing their final report in _________. (see below) Interestingly enough, the report does not refer to the NIJ's history of involvement with this issue, which included the development of a model harassment code over 10 years ago.
Unfortunately, the resource group which developed this model code included no domestic violence advocates. (An issue which continues to this day/Let's Get Honest comments in other fields) Presumably this accounts for the fact that domestic violence, rather than being seen as a central issue in the development of the model code, is relegated to tangential status.
Domestic violence is rarely mentioned in the report, and when it is it may be in a footnote. See, e.g., footnote 83, pages 38 – 39, which touches briefly on the overlap between domestic violence and stalking, and reports without comment on law enforcement attitudes that domestic violence stalking incidents aren't worth much attention: "… While 77 percent of responding jurisdictions in Australia and Great Britain reported investigating stalking-type incidents, none considered stalking a major problem . High-profile cases were rare in the responding countries, and most agencies consider stalking primarily a domestic violence problem. Typical victims are women of any age escaping abusive relationships with dominant males , they reported… Stalker's methods did not seem to vary from those used by American stalkers, and the course of events seemed to escalate from unwanted contacts to following and face-to-face threats…" (emphasis added) The message appears to be that a crime in which the primary victims are battered women is not "a major problem."
Domestic violence is hardly mentioned again until page 92, where one paragraph acknowledges the usefulness of drawing upon criminal justice personnel's experience with domestic violence in formulating strategies against stalking. However, the report then lays out a research agenda which downplays the body of applicable domestic violence research which has already been conducted. The report calls for research on stalkers (i.e. their behaviors, motivations, demographics, histories), stalking as a crime (i.e. its prevalence and reponse by the criminaljustice system), and the usefulness of restraining orders in stopping stalking (i.e. how well the victim, defendant, and criminal justice personnel understand how to enforce them). Given that the overwhelming majority of stalking cases are domestic violence cases, we can already answer many of these questions. {{I alternate emphasis so every sentence is read in this paragraph.}}
In the discussion on sentencing, the report does not mention batterer's counseling even once in its three-page discussion of evaluation, treatment, and mental illness, {{I'm not at this point highly enamored of batterer's counseling, probably because of so many incidents I've read where counseling was ordered over incarceration; the batterer then aced the counseling, and went promptly out and murdered his former, reporting, partner. And I believe that where even a 10% outside chance of "murder" as a side-effect of ineffective counseling happens, the chance should not be taken. The concept that behavioral science, which is "prognosis" can substitute some how for safety, is not sound thinking, in my view. }}or in the principal recommendations where counseling is mentioned. This is unfortunate, since there is a growing body of literature on the efficacy of batterer's counseling which would be applicable to the 70-80% of stalking cases involving domestic violence, and since there are also studies showing that most therapists are woefully untrained and uninformed in the area of domestic violence. {{Cobblers see shoes. Lawyers see legal issues. Therapists see personality problems. I have been stalked, battered, and lost access to the children through "family court matters," so obviously this is kind of what I notice, too. So even correcting the "training" and "uninformed" factors (imagine the expense) would still be in essence asking a professional in a field to change their outlook on the field. }}
The timing of NIJ's model code report was also unfortunate. The research was done before any appellate cases on stalking had been published, before the volume of commentators in law review articles, and when very few states had amended their statutes. The model code was based on two surveys sent to police departments around the country and to four other English-speaking countries, telephone interviews with prosecutors and defense attorneys, and analyzing the various state statutes on stalking and related issues. {{THIS PATTERN IS COMMON WHEN IT COMES TO GRANT SITUATIONS FOR POLICY CHANGES. FIRST, "DEMONSTRATION," SOMETIMES (NOT ALWAYS) STARTING SMALL. THEN, "PROCLAMATION" BASED ON THE PRIOR "DEMONSTRATION" WHICH WERE NOT REPRESENTATIVE OF THE WHOLE PICTURE}}
It is unfortunate that the NIJ report was not seen as Part I of a two-part process, since it is necessary have an in-depth assessment of how the statutes are actually working in order to evaluate the NIJ's proposed model code. {{This may have been "unfortunate," negligent, or intentional. I don't know which; I wasn't there. At least this author comments on it. After a while, one begins to notice how many things termed "unfortunate" — weren't quite left up to fortune. This word cropped up in a mediator report in my case, referring to something which had happened specifically and ONLY after repeated interventions and decisions prompted by said mediator. }}
Analysis of utility of model code proposed by NIJ for battered women
Benefits of Model Code
But even with all the above limitations, the NIJ Report has a great deal of useful information and policy recommendations which could help battered women and their children.
For example, the Report's principal recommendations for a model stalking code include the following, all of which could be helpful to domestic violence victims:
a continuum of charges, including felony status
option of incarceration
orders to stay away from victim
victim notification before stalker released
systems put in place so that civil and criminal judges know what the other courts are doing with the same case
a research agenda
a multidisciplinary approach
In Chapter Two of the Report, the proposed model code is discused in detail. Probably the most beneficial statement is the following: "Of utmost importance is a state's decision to require the criminal justice system and related disciplines to take stalking incidents seriously."
{{CAN YOU NAME AT LEAT 3 RECENT INCIDENTS WHERE IT WASN'T? TOM'S RIVER, A TOLLBOOTH IN CALIFORNIA, AND A HOME (WITH TWO LITTLE GIRLS TRYING –BUT FAILING — TO SAVE MAMA'S LIFE) WHERE THESE RESTRAINING ORDER VIOLATIONS OR STALKING OR SEPARATION DANGER WAS NOT TAKEN SERIOUSLY?}}
The useful elements of the proposed code include a broad definition of prohibited acts; allowing "implied threats", as opposed to "credible threats", to be sufficient; the use of increasingly serious penalties to deal with increasingly serious acts, and encompassing misdemeanor and felony sanctions; and the broad definition of intent: "In other words, if a defendant consciously engages in conduct that he knows or should know would cause fear in the person at whom the conduct is directed, the intent element of the model code is satisfied." The drafters made a similar comment in regard to the fear element: "In some instances, a defendant may be aware, through a past relationship with the victim, of an unusual phobia of the victim's and use this knowledge to cause fear in the victim… a jury must determine that the victim's fear was reasonable under the circumstances. " (emphasis added) This language may open the door to the introduction of evidence regarding the stalker's past threats toward the same victim, and to expert testimony on stalking generally, which will probably be beneficial to victims.
Similarly, Chapter Three's sentencing provisions are also generally useful for battered women. The overall goals include protecting the victim, allowing law enforcement to intervene when appropriate, sanctions, and treatment for those defendants who can be helped.
The requirement of victim notification, and accompanying acknowledgements that some stalkers may be more dangerous when released from prison, and that stalking behavior often escalates into violence as time passes are very important for battered women. So are the enhanced penalties for restraining order violations, use of a weapon, minor victims, or prior offenses toward the same or another victim. All of these are typical of domestic violence cases. The no-contact orders upon release are likewise key for protecting battering victims. The advantages and disadvantages of requiring convicted stalkers to wear electronic bracelets are discussed sensitively.
Chapter Four, on pre-trial release, also contains recommendations which are generally good for battered women whose batterers stalk them. These include taking danger to the public into account, considering eliminating release on one's own recognizance, recommended factors for courts to consider in each case, possible conditions of release, including no-contact orders, victim's right participate in bail hearings, victim notification of pre-trial release and copies of release orders to the victim.
Chapter Five's strategies for implementation are also generally helpful for battered women. The emphasis on a multidisciplinary approach underlines the need for all societal systems to work together to end this problem. The recommendations about the response of the criminal justice system are good as well, including training, better police policies and procedures, strengthening restraining order enforcement, providing judges with full criminal and restraining order histories of the defendant at every stage of the case, and the need to keep DMV and voter records of stalking victims confidential.
The NIJ's proposed model code generally complies with the model code recommended by Susan Bernstein, which was discussed above. The NIJ code includes "threats implied by conduct", and uses the history between the parties as a context in determining the nature of the threats. While the NIJ code does not mandate using computerized informational tracking systems, the larger NIJ Report recommends these, and also recommends the imposition of increasingly stronger penalties, including felonies. Though Bernstein's recommendation that harassment include "unconsented conduct" is not addressed directly in the NIJ code, it appears that the NIJ drafters intended to encompass such conduct. Thus, the only key element listed by Bernstein which is not addressed by the NIJ Report is the reasonable woman standard.
Flaws of Model Code
On the other hand, the code has some flaws. First, threats toward the victim's family are limited to those directed at her "immediate family", which is defined very narrowly. It would be better to encompass the extended family, both because stalkers do not so limit their behavior, and because many ethnic groups in the US have a much broader definition of family than the nuclear version. Coverage should be provided if the stalker is threatening the victim's aunt, uncle, grandparents, grandchildren, cousins, godparents, godchildren, in-laws, etc.
Second, "[t]he model code language does not apply if the victim fears sexual assault but does not fear bodily injury." The drafters discuss the risk of contracting AIDS or being injured for resisting, and state that states may want to include fear of sexual assault in their statutes. However, the idea that sexual assault is not bodily injury in and of itself is ludicrous, and any historical distinction between these two types of injuries should not be maintained.
Third, the drafters propose that states allow for either restitution to the victim, or civil causes of action. It is unclear why victims should not have access to both remedies, since they are not interchangable: restitution is ordered by the criminal court, and covers only out of pocket expenses, while tort suits are under the control of the victim, and also allow for awards for pain and suffering and punitive damages in addition to compensatory damages.
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Effectiveness of anti-stalking codes in general for battered women
We last turn to the question of the effectiveness of anti-stalking codes in general for battered women. On the one hand, such codes can be useful. They serve as an acknowledgement that stalking behavior is wrong, and should be criminalized. They contribute to societal awareness that stalking is often part of the overall pattern of domestic violence. They may be an additional charge which prosecutors can use. In some cases, stalking laws can stop the cycle before more violence occurs by criminalizing behavior which otherwise would be non-actionable. On the other hand, there are many limitations to the efficacy of stalking laws in preventing abuse and violence. In some jurisdictions, stalking laws are the latest fad: they represent feathers in the caps of legislators and criminal justice system personnel, without attempting to solve the underlying problems of men's violence toward women generally and domestic violence in particular. Secondly, there appears to be a belief in some locations that stalking statutes will be a panacea, that if the legislators can merely write the magic combination of words, they will be able to stop this offense. Such viewpoints fail to take the big picture into account — i.e. without fundamental attitude changes on the parts of law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, juries, media, therapists, and the general public, the same old attitudes about domestic violence will attach to stalking cases and result in inaction, undercharging, light sentences, and ineffective orders.
In order to be effective, stalking statutes must be one piece of a much larger coordinated community response. Key pieces of such a response would include in-depth training and written policies addressing domestic violence and stalking, and would be an integral part of the criminal justice system, health care system, educational system, and other social stystems. The training and policies would state that domestic violence is wrong, criminal, and not tolerated. An additional key piece of the response would involve cooperation between all the different parts of the above systems, such as protocols for cooperation, regular interdisciplinary or inter-agency meetings, and death review teams, reflecting the reality that everyone has to work together if we will ever be able to stop domestic violence.
But even with a true coordinated community response, anti-stalking laws are still a limited tool in preventing domestic violence.Even with severe sanctions, some stalkers, like some batterers, will not stop or will repeat this behavior with other victims when released from jail. And some victims may still be reluctant to cooperate with prosecution because protections they are offered by the criminal justice system are inadequate to prevent retaliation. They may also feel sorry for the stalker, love him, want him to get counseling, etc., or they may be forced to deal with him for years to come because they have children in common. It is notable that many state stalking statutes do not cover situations where the former spouse/stalker has visitation rights. This is a major problem for battered women, whose batterers often escalate the violence after separation and transfer their attempts to control the woman to the custody/visitation arena.
In conclusion, anti-stalking laws are a step in the right direction, but in and of themselves will not solve the problems of battered women or other stalking victim.
MY SUMMARY:
(I only commented on top part of article, for a pattern of asking questions. ALL of it brings up good points, and I hope was read).
I COME BACK TO CONCEPT OF SELF-DEFENSE, AND a Survive! mentality for women. (See my Toms River, NJ post). Don't break any laws, but do like the Boy Scouts, "Be Prepared." AND, prepare to survive. I suggest that women pretty much be very pro-active in figuring this out themselves and with their own resources, until such day arrives where model codes are appropriate, or if appropriate, enforced, and if enforced, enforced seriously.
I deeply regret the years of my
(1) calling out for others to help me, while
(2) trying to maintain and help myself both, and immediately leave the situation.
I would have been BETTER engaged in time and energy not to have bothered with the first part. Unfortunately, like many women leaving abuse, economics was a huge issue, not just recovery and safety. This is why any effort to address DV issues not taking into account economic issues is simply unrealistic. At this point, i also believe that any discussion of domestic violence which does NOT discuss the negative impact that the realm of family law has had upon all the research, all the laws, and all the protective meaures in place, will not make a major difference. The efforts cancel each other out.
(Verbal Confrontation, or even taking protective action, on my part just brought greater escalations and punishments. In fact, this was typically where it got physical). I am talking about both IN the battering relationship (in my case, called "marriage, co-habiting years" AND in the afterwards years (taking a stand as a separate woman, with children in the household.). I remember one year of emotionally healthy, solvent, sanity — while a restraining order was in place. There was a storm brewing, but the majority of the situation was a sense of growing prosperity and strength, and — apart from the source of this — peace. This was BEFORE I'd had a few hearings in the family law venue.
The only benefit I can see from the whole process is that I now caution women to avoid absolutely every facet of it possible, and go about establishing their own: Safety, solvency and self-determination. It is also necessary to understand that doing so is not just a threat to one's ex, potentially, but also to the entire "SYSTEM" if you don't do it "their" way. Which means becoming dependent on aspects of this for safey, solvency, and forking over self-determination to a parenting plan (or something similar) obtained through a custody evaluator or mediator, who are influenced by forces one doesn't normally have input to deal with, in part because one doesn't know they exist to start with.
Now, as to my doing this myself, it may entail abandoning this blog, also. However, speaking out is part of a healing process also, and it's a vital part.
While advocates from more than once side of the fence now dialogue and collaborate with each other (as women and thereafter sometimes men (including men who killed them) continue to die, and children continue to suffer abuse, and some go missing — the one side of the fence that is often not heard — IN the policymaking discussions, IN print IN the publications on these matters, IN the professional organizations that make a livelihood dealing with these matters, and basically on the IN, not the OUT, in these discussions — will continue to be the people with most at stake — their lives.
It is common sometimes to list the "stakeholders" in each new conference. I have looked at many of these lists. Rarely are the actual parents, targeted child, or targeted spouse (when it comes to child abduction or domestic violence or stalking, ALL of which are related, by the way) invited to confer. And if they did, and what such people said WAS published, or broadcast, what about retaliation? Ever think about that?
WHEN WAS THE EXCERPT WRITTEN?
About 15 years after Toms River, NJ – – 1994:
Found at:
http://www.mincava.umn.edu/documents/bwjp/stalking/stalking.html#id2355674
Domestic Violence & Stalking: A Comment on the Model Anti-Stalking Code Proposed by the National Institute of Justice
Nancy K. D. Lemon
Battered Women's Justice Project
(And the blank date in the excerpt was Oct. 1993).
Posted in After HE Speaks Up - Reporting Child Sexual Abuse, After She Speaks Up - Reporting Child Sexual Abuse, After She Speaks Up - Reporting Domestic Violence and/or Suicide Threats, Cast, Script, Characters, Scenery, Stage Directions, Context of Custody Switch, Designer Families, Domestic Violence vs Family Law, Fatal Assumptions, Funding Fathers - literally, History of Family Court, in Studies, Lethality Indicators - in News, Mandatory Mediation, Organizations, Foundations, Associations NGO Hybrids, Split Personality Court Orders, Vocabulary Lessons
Tagged with BWJP, CAFC, cafcusa, domestic violence, Due process, DV, Expert-itis, FAVTEA, Intimate partner violence, mincava, Model Codes, NIJ, Policy versus Practice, social commentary, Stalking, Studying Humans
Possibly Certifiable Insanity (Stockpiling Mental Health Research Grants, "Discretionary,"nationwide).
In response to wondering how to communicate to one state's legislator that any new Fatherhood Initiative, either precisely worded or inspiringly vague, though powerfully phrased, is indeed superfluous, I simply researched (again, in this state) two known existing fatherhood programs (at least under one Federal Department) — the one with "fatherhood" in its name, "CFDA 93.086, Healthy Marriage Promotion and Responsible Fatherhood" and the ones which has the intended effect of a "required outcome" to the legal process, namely "Access Visitation" grants, CFDA 93.597, commonly known as putting more time in the hands of the noncustodial parent (a.k.a. father), through moving the decision-making process outside the courtroom, until it has been screened by mediators, custody evaluators, and parenting planners. (See my Cooks in the Court Kitchen Post). Yes, these grants were making it to Kansas as well as to the rest of the U.S. (including V.I., P.R. & Guam).
Note: in the database "usaspending.gov" and under "Grant search by program" it is impossible to search readily by 93.086, as it's not on the list of hyperlinks. I tend to feel this was not accidental.
State = KANSAS
Fiscal Year = 2008
Recipient: CATHOLIC CHARITIES
2008 90FE0112 3 ACF 0 09-14-2008 $530,368.00
Award Subtotal: $530,368.00
Recipient: KS ST DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL & REHABILITATION SERVICES
2008 0801KSSAVP 1 ACF 1 01-30-2008 $100,000.00
I noticed how MANY types of things are administered directly through the KS ST Office of the Governor, which to me seems a little over-centralized and top-heavy.
While looking, I marveled that both Abstinence Education and Community Based Abstinence-Education grants with Medical research on Male Contraception (guess which funding won out??) (Actually both types got the grants,
so I suppose the winners are, however, those grants benefitted — or will — and the losers are the taxpayers — if they didn't. For example,
based on several factors, I'd say the Abstinence Education is a bust. Not that I'm anti-Abstinence, hey, but how many decades is this going to be tried? Since there is a Community-Based stipulation, the kind this decorative adjective, is government-based. In fact, come to think of it, what has happened to just generalized DISCRETION in education, period? The concept that "education" won't happen without a program (particularly a government run one) is just a little "out there" to start with.
I also believe that if there were better things to do in class, or young people had a vision for surviving past 20 (in some communities), or succeeding in life, there just might be a little less screwing around before financial independence. Also what might be helpful if there was a general tendency to point them in the direction of financial independence, throughout the public schools. We are, however, generally speaking (it seems) teaching the vast majority to hope to hold a job, rather than hope to own or run a business. After all, can't EVERYONE run a business (?) so someone has to be the employees, right?
What better way to ensure a constant supply of willing employees (and a surplus of them, too) by the caste/income/race-sorting system we call public school education?
The local child support agency (the one that "bailed" in my case, coming to the rescue of the father who'd rather take the kids than get a job) is frequently airing its successes and programs on the local cable TV. What they don't tell us, in the programs aimed at young teens, is how they treat middle-aged parents in the family law venue. OR WHY . . . . . Too bad, that. . . .
Anyhow, in Kansas, a VERY small segment of what appears to be a wonderful research center, really:
Fiscal Year OPDIV Grantee Name Award Title Sum of Actions
2003 NIH UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS CENTER FOR RESEARCH INC STEREOTYPES, SHIFTING STANDARDS, AND SOCIAL JUDGEMENT $ 138,291
1999 NIH UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS CENTER FOR RESEARCH INC STEREOTYPES, SHIFTING STANDARDS, AND SOCIAL JUDGEMENT $160,365
(for the sake of margins, the same grant award, but , different fields displaying).
2003 R01MH048844 93242 DISCRETIONARY SCIENTIFIC/HEALTH RESEARCH (INCLUDES SURVEYS) NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION MONICA R BIERNAT $ 138,291
1999 R01MH048844 93242 DISCRETIONARY SCIENTIFIC/HEALTH RESEARCH (INCLUDES SURVEYS) COMPETING CONTINUATION MONICA R BIERNAT $ 160,365
(Where is the original, the "NEW" of this particular one, after which there was competing, then non-competing continuation?)
WHAT, you say, might this be? It's CFDA CODE 93242, Mental Health Research . . . . and just the tip of the iceberg on our lust to KNOW (and to predict, and to manage, and to manipulate, and to label, and to — well, it's all really for the national HEALTH):
We DO want to know why our neighbors (or others, or certain populations, or peoples, or income levels, or etc.) are mentally ill, and to verify (nay, certify) that they are, right? To help them. Become more sane. Like us (case in point, studying all this may not be a sign of sanity…..).
I could not (today) find the "abstract" for these, but below are some samples of abstracts (with the word "stereotype" in them):
Mental Health, Discretionary must be a large segment:
AT THE VERY BOTTOM OF THIS POST, I WILL LIST CERTAIN TYES OF RECIPIENTS: (ALL is too many):
(I thought you might enjoy that. . . . ) I'm not quite sure how shifting standards comes under Mental Health (which this grant is listed under), but hey, it takes all types. I'd love to see the final report. . . . .
Searching Federal HHS grants on just the word "stereotypes" brings up a mix of social and medical sciences, and some overlap.
ONE thing's clear, it's being studied. I wonder if this will reduce the amount of "stereotyping" going on, just as studying domestic
violence has reduced the amount of domestic violence, and promoting responsible fatherhood has produced an abundance of responsible fathers nationwide, diminished the number of, well, ones like Doug Ouellette and such. (Responsible in business, dangerous in marriage…. or at least being asked to separate from it…)
R01MH071749
Arizona STEREOTYPE THREAT AS A STRESS INDUCED COGNITIVE DEFICIT NIH NIMH $ 588,957
Stereotype Threat as a Stress Induced Cognitive Deficit
Project Start/End
01-AUG-2004 / 31-MAY-2008
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Prior work on stereotype threat (see Steele, Spencer, & Aronson, 2002, for a review) suggests that the stress of being targeted by negative stereotypes can cause stigmatized individuals to perform more poorly on complex cognitive tasks when anything is done to remind them of their membership in a negatively stereotyped group.
Although research has established the generalizability of these stereotype threat effects, a precise and integrated model of the processes by which negative stereotypes interfere with performance is still needed. This application draws on existing literatures examining how stress impacts cognitive processing and outlines a theoretical model that integrates cognitive, physiological, and affective processes that mediate stereotype threat effects on test performance by reducing an individual's working memory capacity. This model proposes that negative stereotypes reduce performance in testing situations because they present the individual with inconsistent views about the self that induce,
a) cognitive processing in an attempt to reconcile the inconsistency,
b) a physiological stress response involving increased stress hormones and sympathetic activation, and
c) attempts to suppress felt anxiety.
Each of these processes is hypothesized to have a negative effect on an individual's working memory capacity, a cognitive process integral to any complex mental task. The results of three preliminary experiments are reported to provide evidence that working memory capacity is a key mediator of stereotype threat effects on performance. The 11 experiments that are proposed will expand upon these findings to identify the processes by which stereotype threat interferes with working memory capacity and performance.
{{RATHER THAN, say, DOING something to alleviate the stereotyping in the situation..? }}
A significant impact of the present research is that in gaining a better understanding of the stress-related processes that are affected by stereotype threat, it becomes more feasible to develop strategies that will enable individuals to cope successfully with social stigma.
academic achievement, cognition disorder, prejudice, psychological stressor, psychophysiology, social perception, stress, university student anxiety, coping, culture, gender difference, hormone biosynthesis, neural information processing, racial /ethnic difference, self concept, short term memory, social psychology, sympathetic nervous system behavioral /social science research tag, clinical research, human subject, interview, psychological test
PI Name/Title
SCHMADER, TONI M.
PI eMail
UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA PO BOX 3308 TUCSON, AZ 857223308
F31HD058492
North Carolina RACE STEREOTYPES AND SELF PERCEPTIONS IN AFRICAN AMERICAN YOUTH NIH NICHD $ 33,879
Race stereotypes and self perceptions in African American youth
30-SEP-2008 /
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The purpose of the proposed study is (1) to examine the developmental progression of academic race stereotype endorsement in African American youth; (2) to explore, over time, the impact that academic race stereotype endorsement has on the academic self-concept and self-esteem of Black adolescents; (3) to examine whether racial centrality (i.e., the extent to which being Black is central to an individual's definition of self) moderates the relationship between stereotype endorsement and self-perceptions; (4) to explore the influence of parental racial socialization messages on academic race stereotype endorsement; and (5) to determine the relationships among stereotype endorsement, racial centrality, racial socialization, and decisions about higher education. 135 African American eleventh graders in a rural school district will participate in the project. These students participated in the first wave of the Adolescent Identity Project when they were in middle school. Written parental and student consent will be required for study participation. Consent letters will be distributed to students in their English classes. Once consent has been received, students will be administered self-report questionnaires in small groups (5-10 students) at their schools. Trained research assistants will instruct students on how to complete each measure and will be available to answer questions. Once questionnaires are completed, the research assistant will thank the students and give them a $5 restaurant gift certificate. In addition, during the students' 12th grade year, they will be mailed a follow-up packet. Students will be questioned about their college plans (whether or not they are planning to attend college and whether it is a Historically Black College or University), SAT scores (if applicable), end of grade scores, and stereotype endorsement. The proposed study will significantly contribute to the body of knowledge on African American adolescents' achievement-related beliefs and how they develop and change overtime. Understanding achievement-related beliefs will provide a pathway for explaining the factors that contribute to and promote achievement motivation and academic success for African American adolescents. Public Health Relevance: This Public Health Relevance is not available.
There are no thesaurus terms on file for this project.
OKEKE, NDIDI A.
okeke@email.unc.edu
UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA CHAPEL HILL Office of Sponsored Research CHAPEL HILL, NC 27599
NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF CHILD HEALTH AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
ZRG1
This looks interesting, and like it ought to justify several more fatherhood grants:
R01DA024029 PATERNAL CRIMINAL JUSTICE INVOLVEMENT AND SUBSTANCE USE IN CHILDREN & ADOLESCENTS NIH NIDA $ 1,592,006
And, WOW, it's a new one: so new, not even any thesaurus terms for the abstract yet. Started 2008,
Principal Investigator, an Assistant Professor at Columbia, Institution< NY State Psychiatric Institute, and
the Recipient (by the way, these are hyperlinks; you can click away, as can I…. Start with the grant numbers here) is a scary-sounding:
"Research Foundation for Mental Hygiene, Inc."
Total of all awards: $ 858,685,338
(YES, you read that right: $858,685,338 from 1997-2009)
OR, from another data resources:
http://www.usaspending.gov/faads/faads.php?recipient_name=Research+Foundation+for+Mental+Hygiene%2C+Inc.&sortby=r&detail=0&datype=T&reptype=r&database=faads&fiscal_year=&detail=-1&datype=T&submit=GO
(i am beginning to wonder whether this is partly WHY the US is the world's largest "jailor" — population research?).
This one here seems very relevant, but only about $350K:
R21HL088620 MEASURING CULTURAL COMPETENCE AND RACIAL BIAS AMONG PHYSICIANS NIH NHLBI $ 346,500
I mean, I'm sure this would affect quality of health care. I know I had a sexist oby/gyn for the 2nd child (but I stood up to him, and there was a younger on on duty also, who accepted that not every woman who gives birth should be automatically anesthetized and cut….)
(Then again, the place this grant goes to, I happen to know, got about $127 Million in grants in single year…..)
Here's one that interests me, as a musician, obviously. I'm surprised to find $3mil on this, as typically music is the first thing cut from the public school curriculum in tough times (i.e., periodically…..)
R01NS050436 INTEGRATIVE STUDY OF VOCAL DEVELOPMENT NIH NINDS $ 3,219,146
well, NO, that's apparently about the male zebra finch. . . . Go figure…..
But $858 million?? over about 12 years? That's like, HEY — what's going ON with that foundation??
It's not just the "mental hygiene" concept, but the "Mental Hygiene, INC." Sounds sci-fi.
(Added 08-11-09: I did look up some more on who ARE they?; it's on the web, and free for anyone else who is willing to put in the time to look. And a bit of an eye-opener, too. They have done some good work, helping people after 9/11. But it's major business, and was set up in 1952 to facilitate research projects. )
Paternal Criminal Justice Involvement and Substance Use in Children & Adolescents
R01DA024029
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Of the 6.5 million adults who were under some form of correctional supervision in 2000, 3.6 million were parents,[{AND MOSTLY MEN}} thereby affecting 7.1 million minor children. Nationally, approximately 85% of all prisoners are male. Contrary to stereotypes, many of the fathers have significant connections to their children: prior to arrest 44% of incarcerated fathers lived with their children and 65% of the others continued at least monthly contact while in prison. Note however, that among incarcerated fathers >60% reported using drugs in the month before their offense; 25% reported a history of alcohol dependence; 14% reported mental illness and 70% did not have a high school diploma.\
Yet, despite evidence that parental involvement with the Criminal Justice System (CJS) is related to children's elevated risk for substance use, psychopathology, and future incarceration, no rigorous studies of a representative sample of such children have been conducted.
{{I thought it was FATHERLESSNESS, not FATHER-INCARCERATION that was the main issue, from what we have been hearing nationally, through the courts, HHS, government, and initiatives….}}
A better understanding of the specific impact of paternal incarceration, from a developmental perspective, could be expected to provide insight into ways of tempering or averting many psychosocial adverse outcomes in the youth.
(ANOTHER Idea (mine) might be to find ways to keep the fathers if possible from the behaviors that got them incarcerated to start with. .. . . And then that'd be one less generation to be so impacted. What do you think?)
The main objective of this investigation is to understand the impact, over time, of paternal involvement with the CJS on their children's substance use, psychopathology, and development of risk behaviors leading to involvement with the Juvenile Justice/CJS. This proposal aims to overcome methodological limitations of previous investigations and will provide generalizable findings relevant to developing public policy for improving the lives of affected children, including reducing their risk for substance use and incarceration. Our framework acknowledges that paternal involvement with the CJS occurs in a complex environment, where risk factors cluster, leading to a number of both direct and indirect sequelae. We will recruit a sample of children (ages 10-14) following the arrest of their fathers. The sample will be representative of CJS fathers from a disadvantaged community (the South Bronx, NYC), who have close contact with their child(ren). They will be recruited through collaboration with a publicly assigned legal defense team, the Bronx Defenders. An age- gender matched comparison group of children whose fathers had never been incarcerated will be recruited in the same residential area. The study includes collaboration with agencies whose involvement make this inherently difficult study possible: including the NYC DOE, NYC DOH-MH, NYC ACS, as well as collaborators and advocacy groups, some participating on the Study's Advisory Board.
PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: From a public health perspective, policy driven decisions regarding youth, especially those at elevated risk for untoward outcomes, must be based on sound scientific data. The goal of the proposed investigation is to advance our knowledge and understanding of the consequences of paternal involvement with the Criminal Justice System on the substance use/abuse/dependence and other psychopathology of their children. Knowledge about the determinants, over time, for negative youth outcomes, as well as protective factors, is critical to advancing targeted interventions in an effort to break the cycle of Criminal Justice involvement of the next generation. Public Health Relevance: This Public Health Relevance is not available.
{{I have a "dumb" idea. Take some of the monies spent studying male zebra finches, and the ones on lethality risks for domestic violence femicides, which are being ignored in public policy (courts) anyhow, and put them towards things that would help break the cycle of (1) ILLITERACY and with it (2) POVERTY. Then I suspect — barring continuing racial profiling by arresting officeres, and a few other possible institutional factors (why not study the INSTITUTIONS as much as the people IN them, eh?) there might be lower incarceration rates. And Research Foundation Inc. could go find something else to research…))
{{PUT IT INTO: Expressive arts, creative arts, dance, and so forth. Put it into college scholarships. Put it into supporting the EXIT from the public school systems that undereducate and badly socialize. . . . Let's Get Honest!!}}
HOVEN, CHRISTINA W. ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
ch42@columbia.edu
NEW YORK STATE PSYCHIATRIC INSTITUTE NEW YORK, NY 10032
RPIA
While money will ALWAYS flow to study incarcerated African American males (or females), how about some to help in DOING the studies, not BEING studied? "Nationally, African Americans, Latin Americans, Native Americans, and some Asian Americans are underrepresented in the sciences and social sciences. "
Maybe this project wasn't structured right, it only coughed up $81K: but it sounds reasonable to me:
R25MH070369 PROMOTING HS MINORITY ADVANCEMENT IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES NIH NIMH $ 81,491
Promoting HS Minority Advancement in the Social Sciences
01-JUL-2004 / 30-JUN-2006
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The long-term goal of the proposed HS-COR Honors Research Training program is to achieve ethnic parity in admissions to (goal=100%) and success in undergraduate programs (goal = 100%) related to the biomedical sciences or mental health fields. Nationally, African Americans, Latin Americans, Native Americans, and some Asian Americans are underrepresented in the sciences and social sciences.
{{POSSIBLY — just conjecturing here, total hypothesis, but I HAVE been nosing around a lot of these grants for many months now — POSSIBLY because the powers that be would rather STUDY such populations than have them participate in running the studies. JUST an idea…}}
The specific aims of the program are to increase underrepresented student success by: (a) identifying 6 students who appear to have the greatest potential, (b) training students in the fundamental assumptions, value of, and pitfalls of research, (c) facilitating students' specific research skills by their working with a faculty mentor on a specific research project, and (d) providing specific information and support to ensure that students have the qualities required to be successful in an undergraduate program, such as assistance with SAT preparation and the presentation of research in science fairs. Students will attend a summer training program on the research process that is designed to build scientific and critical reasoning skills and a practical seminar series and work one-on-one with their research mentors.
Faculty mentors' research projects reflect a variety of areas including the neuropsychology of Alzheimer's disease, quality of life of elderly women, effects of stereotype threat on academic achievement of minority students, adolescent wellbeing, and violence prevention. Evaluation of three goals is specified.
The goals are: (a) admission to college;
(b) success while in college; and
(c) professionalism.
Each goal is made more specific and specific program components are matched with each goal.
academic achievement, behavioral /social science, ethnic group, secondary school, training, vocational guidance African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, Native American, health science research potential, mental health personnel, university adolescence (12-20), behavioral /social science research tag, human subject
QUILICI, JILL L.
jill.quilici@csun.edu
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY NORTHRIDGE OFFICE OF RESEARCH AND SPONSORED PROJECTS NORTHRIDGE, CA 913308232
ZMH1
This might upset a few apple carts and probably wouldn't be duplicated. Better to mentor children of prisoners, than potential social science superstars….
This one got over $1 million, so it must be very important (or, hard to study):
Massachusetts FACE OVERGENERALIZATION, PREJUDICE, AND STEREOTYPES NIH NIMH $1,403,454
Took 4 years.
10-SEP-2003 / 30-JUN-2007
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Considerable research demonstrates a strong tendency to use facial appearance when forming first impressions.
(What's more, common sense says this as well)
Moreover, these impressions show remarkable consensus, yielding significant social consequences.
(ibid).
The long-range objective of the proposed research is to explain consensual first impressions of faces and to develop methods for ameliorating their negative social consequences.
Consensual First Impressions of Faces? Does this relate to (or, lead to…) "consensual sex."??
The working hypothesis is that the psychological qualities that are accurately revealed by the functionally significant facial qualities that mark babies, unfitness, emotion, or identity are overgeneralized to people whose facial structure resembles that of babies, a particular level of fitness, a particular emotion, or a particular identity. The research has three specific aims. One is to use connectionist modeling to test the facial identity overgeneralization hypothesis that the tendency for responses to strangers to vary with their facial resemblance to known individuals contributes to racial prejudice and stereotyping.
The connectionist modeling experiments seek to demonstrate that the physical similarity between two faces can in and of itself account for similar impressions of them quite apart from similarities in the social categories of the faces. The second aim is to test whether generalized mere exposure effects can be used to reduce race and age prejudice and stereotyping, as predicted by the facial identity overgeneralization hypothesis. The mere exposure experiments seek to demonstrate that increasing the familiarity of an out-group facial prototype will decrease negative reactions to out-group members. The third aim is to use functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to investigate neural activation patterns in response to faces that are predicted from each of the three overgeneralization hypotheses. The fMRI experiments seek to determine whether categories of faces that are differentiated by human judges' ratings and by the activation they elicit in connectionist modeling experiments also elicit distinct patterns of neural activation, thereby demonstrating a neural substrate for the overgeneralization effects. By focusing on the structured facial information that influences prejudice and stereotypes, the proposed research brings a novel theoretical perspective to the field of social cognition, demonstrating that the intrinsic properties of faces make a significant contribution to social biases that have been largely viewed as social constructions. It also suggests novel interventions for reducing prejudice.
face, impression, prejudice, racial /ethnic difference bias, face expression, handedness, identity, neural information processing, social perception, visual stimulus behavioral /social science research tag, clinical research, functional magnetic resonance imaging, human old age (65+), human subject, young adult human (21-34)
ZEBROWITZ, LESLIE A. PROFESSOR
zebrowitz@brandeis.edu
BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY 415 SOUTH STREET WALTHAM, MA 024549110
Total of all awards: $ 1,403,454
Oh, Here's a $2 million one: Must be longitudinal and very relevant to national health and wellbeing or safety:
R01HD021332
TEXAS ORIGINS AND SIGNIFICANCE OF APPEARANCE-BASED STEREOTYPES NIH NICHD $ 2,352,235
R01HD021332 ORIGINS AND SIGNIFICANCE OF APPEARANCE-BASED STEREOTYPES NIH NICHD $ 2,352,235
Origins and Significance of Appearance-Based Stereotypes
01-SEP-1986 / 31-DEC-2007
This abstract is not available.
LANGLOIS, JUDITH H. CHARLES AND SARAH SEAY REGENTS' PROFESSO
langlois@psy.utexas.edu
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AUSTIN PO Box 7726 AUSTIN, TX 78713
(NOTE: project duration says 1986 – 2007. These records therefore don't show 1986 – 1997, probably similar amounts/year.
Well, since this project was over with one and a half years ago, perhaps we can write and find out what they learned.
http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/group/LangloisLAB/
http://www.psy.utexas.edu/psy/crl.html#scope
The Children's Research Laboratory (CRL) was founded in January 1982 to facilitate training and research on a wide variety of topics relating to infant and child development. We are located in the Seay Psychology building at the corner of Dean Keeton and Speedway on the University of Texas campus.
Approximately 7 faculty members and 20 graduate students currently conduct research at the CRL. While most are affiliated with the Department of Psychology, research assistance also has been provided to faculty from the Linguistics Department, the Department of Human Ecology, and the College of Education. Our current facility includes a waiting room for parents, numerous laboratory suites, offices for faculty and graduate researchers, a student lounge, and a developmental psychology library. Space is also available for visiting faculty and post-doctoral fellows. In addition, the CRL provides invaluable training to approximately 150 undergraduate students per year. Their close work with both graduate students and faculty on specific research projetcts prepares them for graduate work toward advanced degrees or other careers involving children.
Our research has examined a broad range of topics, including studies of infant vision and audition, the early development of cognitive and intellectual ability, the development of language, parent-infant interaction, social stereotypes by young children and adults, and the causes of parental abuse of children. Research projects at the CRL are funded primarily through federal and private foundation funds.
Rebecca Anne Hoss, Judith H. Langlois, Rebecca Bigler, Jacqueline D. Woolley, Robert A. Josephs, Kristin Neff, …
This dissertation is dedicated to all those who have supported and guided me in my quest for a graduate degree in psychology, including my loving husband Chance Lawson, my unconditionally supportive…
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1129416
(Abstract:)
The relation between physical attractiveness and behavior was examined by assessing whether behavioral differences exist between attractive and unattractive children.
{{As determined by . . . . .??}}
64 3- and 5-year-old boys and girls were selected as subjects on the basis of physical attractiveness. Same age and sex, attractive, unattractive, and mixed-attractiveness dyads were formed and were observed in a seminaturalistic play setting. A categorical observation system was used to record affiliative, aggressive, activity-, and object-directed play behaviors. A developmental pattern was found for aggression: no differences based on attractiveness were evident in 3-year-olds, but 5-year-old unattractive children aggressed against peers more often than did attractive children. Unattractive children were generally more active than attractive children. Few differences in affiliative behaviors were found between attractive and unattractive children.
This is a side-note to a Judith Langlois site, but I don't think the topic is "incidental" to WHAT is our federal HHS department doing with these grants (and why):
It is useful to distinguish, in a first approximation, between behavioral biology in general, and the more special fields of classical comparative psychology, classical ethology, and the newer fields of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Contemporary animal behavior research often tries to combine the methods and insights of the experimental approach of comparative psychology with the field observational approach of ethology. Comparative psychology originated in North America as a branch of experimental psychology; its practitioners were mainly interested in differences between species, especially in intelligence and learning. Classical ethology is a branch of biology that originated in Europe, used observational rather than experimental methods, and was interested first and foremost in the naturally occurring behavior of animals. Although the dichotomy must not be overstressed, animal behaviorists tend to be trained in psychology, work with "bright" animals, and generally are interested in learned behaviors; while contemporary ethologists, sociobiologists, and evolutionary psychologists are likely to concentrate on innate behaviors. While the study of learned behavior is both important and immediately applicable to human psychology, these behaviors do not have an evolutionary basis beyond the neural capacity to learn. (For a more detailed account of the differences between these traditions, see, e.g., Barry Sinervo.)
The research covered in this area introduction encompasses a very large domain. For the sake of convenience, we have divided it in clusters that are listed alphabetically under the conventional labels "animal behavior," "animal cognition," "ethology," "behavioral ecology," "cognitive ecology," "neuroethology," "sociobiology," and "evolutionary psychology." It should be borne in mind throughout that these labels reflect little more than the contingencies of the history of behavioral biology, and that in practice, the boundaries between these sub-areas tend to be quite blurred.
The question I pose is whether historians and social scientists have much to gain from models of cultural evolution that treat cultural change as a kind of selection process. Can such models provide a unifying paradigm for the social sciences that plays the same role in the study of human culture that models of biological evolution play in biology as a whole?
As an explanatory theory of human behavior, dynamical ((Kind of dynamic, but not quite, so only "dynamical"??) models of cultural evolution and social learning hold more promise of success than models based on rational choice. Under the right conditions, evolutionary models supply a rationale for Nash equilibrium that rational choice theory is hard pressed to deliver. Furthermore, in cases with multiple symmetrical Nash equilibria, the dynamic models offer a plausible, historically path-dependent model of equilibrium selection. In conditions, such as those of correlated encounters, where the evolutionary dynamic theory is structurally at odds with the rational choice theory, the evolutionary theory provides the best account of human behavior.
— Brian Skyrms
Evolutionary Psychology (EP)
EP was articulated in the wake of human sociobiology's unsuccessful attempts (most notably, Lumsden/Wilson 1981) to come to grips with gene-culture coevolution. Its goal is to uncover "the psychological mechanisms that underpin human … behavior, and … the selective forces that shaped those mechanisms" (Donald Symons). Its key assumptions are, in Eric Alden Smith's accurate summary, modularity (human behavior is guided by specialized cognitive mechanisms performing specialized tasks); historicity (natural selection shaped those modules to produce adaptive behavior in the paleolithic EEA or "environment of evolutionary adaptedmess"); adaptive specificity (adaptive outcomes, e.g., mate preference, are very specific); and environmental novelty (modern environments are characterized by an unprecedented degree of novelty). From these assumptions, EP deduces that valid adaptive explanations must refer to genetically evolved psychological mechanisms linked to specific features of the EEA; that "culture," "learning," "rational choice," and "fitness maximization" are insufficiently modular to be explanatorily realistic mechanisms, whether cognitive or behavioral; that contemporary human behavior may often be maladaptive; and that measuring fitness outcomes or correlates of contemporary behavioral patterns is irrelevant.
{{I"m tempted to add, this includes collective institutional behavior in many matters. Either we (so to speak) are trying to study, manage, and predict human behavior, so as to better MANAGE it, (evolutionary bias) OR we (so to speak) are trying to enforce a certain religious paradigm on the entire country, a paradigm in which all animals are equal, but SOME (male) animals are more equal than others. And, anyone, incidentally, who doesn't agree with the above will be tortured in one (or more) institutions, until they do. How this differs IN THEORY AND PRACTICE with what this SAME United States is sending troops overseas to quell (insurgents, and make the world safe for "democracy," I'm not sure – – it does have frightening similarities. Except, in many other countries, I could probably only put up ONE blog post saying this. . . . . . if I dared. We DO make fun of our government pretty well, I admit }}
ANYHOW, do you catch the flavor of the lingo?
By the way, calling people "bipolar" is popular these days. Never fear, a "Special Unit of Government" is on it, since about 2002, with a Mental Health Research Discretionary type grants. Apparently designed for this particular recipient only: (this is the only recipient that came up under Mental Health Research Discretionary and "Special Unit of Government."
Fiscal Year Grantee Name State Grantee Class Award Title Award Action Type Sum of Actions
2009 CAMBRIDGE HEALTH ALLIANCE MA Special Unit of Government ADVANCED CENTER FOR LATINO AND MH SYSTEMS RESEARCH NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION $ 821,185
2009 CAMBRIDGE HEALTH ALLIANCE MA Special Unit of Government INNOVATIONS IN THE MEASUREMENT OF RACIAL/ETHNIC DISPARITIES IN MENTAL HEALTH CARE NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION $ 85,881
2009 CAMBRIDGE HEALTH ALLIANCE MA Special Unit of Government LITHIUM MAGNETIC RESONANCE SPECTROSCOPY OF CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS WITH BIPOLAR NEW $- 105,248
2008 CAMBRIDGE HEALTH ALLIANCE MA Special Unit of Government INNOVATIONS IN THE MEASUREMENT OF RACIAL/ETHNIC DISPARITIES IN MENTAL HEALTH CARE NEW $ 85,844
2008 CAMBRIDGE HEALTH ALLIANCE MA Special Unit of Government LITHIUM MAGNETIC RESONANCE SPECTROSCOPY OF CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS WITH BIPOLAR NEW $ 213,300
2007 CAMBRIDGE HEALTH ALLIANCE MA Special Unit of Government A TREATMENT OUTCOME ANALYSIS FOR BEHAVIORAL ADDICTIONS NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION $ 77,680
2006 CAMBRIDGE HEALTH ALLIANCE MA Special Unit of Government A TREATMENT OUTCOME ANALYSIS FOR BEHAVIORAL ADDICTIONS NEW $ 80,000
2006 CAMBRIDGE HEALTH ALLIANCE MA Special Unit of Government ADVANCED CENTER FOR LATINO AND MH SYSTEMS RESEARCH SUPPLEMENT FOR EXPANSION $ 59,555
2006 CAMBRIDGE HEALTH ALLIANCE MA Special Unit of Government HMO SELECTION INCENTIVES AND UNDERPROVISION OF MH CARE NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION $ 80,561
2005 CAMBRIDGE HEALTH ALLIANCE MA Special Unit of Government ADVANCED CENTER FOR LATINO AND MH SYSTEMS RESEARCH NEW $ 921,689
2005 CAMBRIDGE HEALTH ALLIANCE MA Special Unit of Government HMO SELECTION INCENTIVES AND UNDERPROVISION OF MH CARE NEW $ 82,500
2004 CAMBRIDGE HEALTH ALLIANCE MA Special Unit of Government PSYCHOPATHOLOGY AND CONTROLLING BEHAVIOR IN ADOLESCENTS. NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION $ 200,000
2003 CAMBRIDGE HEALTH ALLIANCE MA Special Unit of Government LATINO RESEARCH PROGRAM PROJECT NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION $ 898,383
Total (quick-check) $6,753,531
WHO, you may say, is the Cambridge Health Alliance, and what are they doing? What's so special about them?
Psychopathology and controlling behavior in adolescents. . . . . . . Perhaps someone ought to study where they've been for the prior teen years, and take a look at which institutions as well as which environments. . . . .
5R01MH62030-020 (Federal Grant ID — you can look it up):
Psychopathology and Controlling Behavior in Adolescents.
25-SEP-2001 / 31-AUG-2006
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Recent attachment-related studies {{PROBABLY ALSO FEDERALLY FUNDED}} have demonstrated that both childhood behavior problems and adolescent psychopathology are predicted by (1) disorganized infant attachment behavior, behavior that is characterized by conflicting behavioral tendencies and the lack of a coherent relational strategy for dealing with stress (2). However, based on current literature, it is unclear whether a validated measure of disorganized attachment in adolescence exists.(3)
The first aim of the proposed study is to develop and validate a coding protocol for identifying controlling-punitive, controlling-caregiving, and other insecure-disorganized behavior in adolescence. (4) The coding scheme will be based on previous work in the field (5) and will be applied to two attachment-related parent-adolescent interaction assessments. Participants will be 120 adolescents and their mothers from low-income families, (6) 65 of whom who have participated in a longitudinal study at ages 12 and 18 months, 4-5 years, and 7-9 year. (7) The construct validity of the new measure of controlling attachment strategies will be assessed in relation to coding of Unresolved or Cannot Classify attachment strategies as assessed by the Adult Attachment Interview and will also be validated against broader aspects of parent-adolescent interaction assessed in a standard revealed differences conflict resolution task, as coded by the Autonomy and Relatedness Scales. (8)
The second aim of the study is to assess whether overall risk in infancy is an important antecedent of disorganized/controlling attachment strategies in adolescence. (9)
Mediational models will test whether the onset of behavior problems in the early school years or the mother's lack of facilitation of automony and relatedness in adolescence adds to and/or mediates any observed relation between early relational risk and adolescent attachment behaviors. (10) The third aim of the study is to assess the degree to which adolescent disorganized/controlling attachment strategies are associated with adolescent psychiatric morbidity. Psychiatric diagnoses will be assessed by the Structured Clinical Interview for Diagnosis (SCID) Axis I, the borderline and antisocial personality disorder sections of the SCID II, the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) , and the Adolescent Dissociative Experiences Scale (ADES). Longitudinal analyses will further assess the degree to which early relational risk and early school age behavior problems are important precursors of adolescent psychopathology. The proposed study will contribute to increased understanding of long-term developmental trajectories that eventuate in psychopathology. In order to implement prevention or treatment programs for reducing adolescent antisocial behavior and psychopathology, it is essential {{FOR WHOM??}} to seek a thorough understanding of the developmental pathways through which such behavior develops over time.
adolescence (12-20), child behavior disorder, child psychology, longitudinal human study, low socioeconomic status, parent offspring interaction, psychopathology age difference, behavior prediction, caregiver, conflict, depression, disease /disorder proneness /risk, gender difference, human morbidity, infant human (0-1 year), maternal behavior, mental disorder diagnosis, psychoanalysis, psychological stressor, psychosocial separation, racial /ethnic difference behavioral /social science research tag, clinical research, human subject, interview, videotape /videodisc
LYONS-RUTH, KARLEN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
klruth@hms.harvard.edu
CAMBRIDGE HEALTH ALLIANCE 1493 CAMBRIDGE ST CAMBRIDGE, MA 02139
COMMENTARY BELOW:
Assistance to Recipient(s) "Cambridge Health Alliance"
(FY 2000-2009)
Federal dollars: $25,309,682
Total number of recipients: 1
Total number of transactions: 87
Top 5 Known Congressional Districts where Recipients are Located
Massachusetts 08 (Michael E. Capuano) $8,151,249
Top 10 Recipients
CAMBRIDGE HEALTH ALLIANCE $25,309,682
Government $20,271,453
Other $4,681,488
Nonprofits $311,588
For Profits $41,653
Higher Education $3,500
Individuals $0
Type of projects: Top 5.
93.242: Mental Health Research Grants (Doesn't quite match the total above, eh?, same category) $11,129,223
93.145: AIDS Education and Training Centers $3,953,377
93.252: Healthy Communities Access Program $2,476,400
93.887: Health Care and Other Facilities $1,633,902
93.243: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services_Projects of Regional and National Significance $1,450,000
Posted in Designer Families, History of Family Court, in Studies, Organizations, Foundations, Associations NGO Hybrids, Vocabulary Lessons
Tagged with obfuscation, social commentary, U.S. Govt $$ hard @ work..
@kwff14 Not following this case currently (I did read about it. Pardon me; dealing with homelessness at the moment)… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…. . . 44 minutes ago
Well, that's one way to waste others' time (delete a Tweet after it's drawn some responses… — as I recall, lots of… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…. . . 48 minutes ago
(And/or to avoid paying child support should [she/they] get free). If Abusers seek ownership of women & children,… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…. . . 51 minutes ago