Tell your story to the Elkins Family Law Task Force Nov 12 5-6:30 PM
From:
Harry Crouch (harryal@earthlink.net)
Sent:
Sat 11/08/08 4:33 PM
To:
Harry Crouch (harryal@earthlink.net)
From Don Saxton NCFM VP…
Harry Crouch
Here is an opportunity for activism and to tell your story. This one really counts.The Elkins Family Law Task Force sprang from the Elkins case which went to the CaliforniaSupreme Court. The Court ruled that Elkins had in no way received due process. The ChiefJustice was so concerned that he ordered the creation of this task force.
Part of their work is to take in stories from litigants around the state in the form of focus groups. One of these is being held this next Wed Nov 12 in a Pasadena Library. Immediatelycall Christine Malinowski at 310 339 3969 to reserve a spot. It is $75 paid to YOU to show up and tell your story.
Google this address for directions
La Manda Park Library
140 S. Altadena Dr., Pasadena CA 911807
HERE IS THE ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE WATSONVILLE FOCUS GROUP
– ONLY THE PLACE AND TIME ARE DIFFERENT
As part of the statewide Elkins Family Law Task Force the
Santa Cruz Superior Court has been asked to participate in two Family
Law Focus groups, one in English and one in Spanish to take place at
the Watsonville Public Library the first week of November during the
noon hour. The litigants participating can be represented or self
represented litigants. Litigants will be asked about their overall
experience with family law proceedings therefore the focus groups need
litigants who are at least half way through their court process (for
instance a divorce). The only family law case types that can not
participate are DV only cases and adoptions. Each litigant will
received a $75 gift card. Attached are brochures regarding this
project, English and Spanish.
If you have any clients interested please have them contact the focus
group consultant directly, e-mail is preferable. The consultant will
screen for eligibility and give the specific dates of the focus group.
Her name and contact information is:
HERE IS MORE ABOUT THE TASK FORCE
In a nutshell, The Elkins Family Law Task Force, chaired by Associate
Justice Laurie D. Zelon of the Court of Appeal, Second Appellate District
(Los Angeles), was appointed in May 2008 to conduct a comprehensive review
of family law proceedings and recommend to the Judicial Council of
California proposals that will increase access to justice, ensure due
process, and provide for more effective and consistent rules, policies, and
procedures.
Committed to Equal Justice and a Collaborative Process
The Elkins Family Law Task Force was appointed in response to an August 2007California Supreme Court opinion, Elkins v. Superior Court (2007) 41 Cal.4th1337, which held that marital dissolution trials should “proceed under thesame general rules of procedure that govern other civil trials” (id. at p.1345). The charge of the task force is to propose measures to improve
efficiency and fairness in family law proceedings and ensure access tojustice for all family law litigants.
Family law cases are critically important to litigants, children, andfamilies, as well as the community at large. The increasing demands oncourts dealing with family law cases include complex legal issues, the highvolume of cases, and staggering numbers of self-represented litigants-inmany communities, over 75 percent of family law cases have at least oneself-represented party.
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Several hundred Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) buses feature misleading, father-bashing ads purporting to address the serious issue of domestic violence.
One ad depicts a happy little girl with the message “One day my husband will kill me.” Another shows a smiling boy with the message “When I grow up, I will beat my wife.”
The kids are talking about their fathers, and their pathology is due to their fathers’ violence. The ads are, to put it bluntly, hate speech against fathers.
We want DART to take down these anti-father ads. To send a protest email and fax to DART executives, click here.
To depict only males as perpetrators of domestic violence, and only females as victims, is a severe distortion. DV research clearly establishes that men account for half of all DV victims and incur a third of DV-related injuries, as women often employ the element of surprise and weapons to compensate for men’s strength.
In earlier years, it was common to see crime stories presented as if only African-Americans and Latinos were perps, and whites their only victims. We now recognize that these distortions are bigoted. DART’s ads are the same kind of distortions, only the “perps” are now dads.
To send a protest email and fax to DART executives, click here.
The offending ads were placed on the buses by The Family Place, a Dallas Domestic Violence service provider. Family Place Executive Director Paige Flink told Fox News in Dallas that says she designed the ads to provoke, saying “I hope you are offended.”
Flink is practically daring the fatherhood movement to respond, and assumes that domestic violence organizations can insult men with impunity. As a general rule, she has been correct–the domestic violence establishment, much of it funded with your tax dollars, has been allowed to get away with serving the public the false woman-as-victim/man-as-monster domestic violence model.
To send a protest email and fax to DART executives, click here.
DART Buses & Trains serve a total of 10 million commuters per month. To read the Associated Press’ and others’ coverage of the ads, click here.
The message of the DART ads is clear–kids need to be afraid of fathers. Boys need to be afraid to grow up to be like dad, and girls need to fear marrying a man like dad.
Dads-as-Monsters ads such as these influence our popular culture, our news media, our legislators, and our family law courts. If you’re a divorced dad who can only see his kids a few days a month, or who’s the victim of false accusations of abuse, ads like these are one reason.
To send a protest email and fax to DART executives, click here.
Two major billboard companies–Clear Channel Outdoor and CBS Outdoor–have already rejected these ads. Jodi Senese of CBS said the ads “can be both misleading and disturbing.”
There are three ads in this series–the two mentioned above and also one apparently gender-neutral ad which discusses the issue of domestic violence and teen suicide. We have no problem with the third, but we want the first two–”One day my husband will kill me” and “When I grow up, I will beat my wife”–removed.
To send a protest email and fax to DART executives, click here.
We abhor domestic violence and child abuse in all forms, and give credit to agencies like The Family Place which help victims. However, by failing (or refusing) to recognize male victims of domestic violence, the domestic violence establishment and The Family Place harm male victims and their children.
Society once swept domestic violence under the rug, marginalizing abused women and their children. As California’s Third District Court of Appeal recognized in a recent decision, today male victims and their children are marginalized. These DART ads are part of that marginalization.
Internationally-recognized domestic violence expert John Hamel, LCSW, a court-certified batterer treatment provider and author of the book Gender-Inclusive Treatment of Intimate Partner Abuse, explains:
“Men account for half of all DV victims and incur a third of DV-related injuries. Ignoring female-on-male violence inhibits our efforts to combat domestic violence.”
In the column to the right we provide quotes from numerous internationally-respected domestic violence authorities, all of whom, attest that domestic violence is committed by both men and women.
To send a protest email and fax to DART executives, click here.
The most recent large-scale study of domestic violence was published in the American Journal of Public Health last year. The researchers analyzed data concerning 11,370 respondents. According to the researchers, “[H]alf of [violent relationships] were reciprocally violent. In nonreciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases.” (This study is illustrated in the diagram at right from the Psychiatric News, 8/3/07).
A quarter of the women surveyed admitted perpetrating violence, and when the violence involved both parties, women were more likely to have been the first to strike.
Such findings are consistent with decades of domestic violence research. The National Institute of Mental Health funded and oversaw two of the largest studies of domestic violence ever conducted, both of which found equal rates of abuse between husbands and wives.
New California Appeal Court Ruling: ‘Domestic Violence Is a Serious Problem for both Women and Men’
“California domestic violence laws violate men’s rights because they provide state funding only for women and their children who use shelters and other programs, a state appeals court has ruled.
“The decision by the Third District Court of Appeal in Sacramento requires the programs to be available to male as well as female victims of domestic violence…
“Justice Fred Morrison said in Tuesday’s 3-0 ruling, the state acknowledges that ‘domestic violence is a serious problem for both women and men.’” –(San Francisco Chronicle, 10/16/08)
California State Long Beach University professor Martin Fiebert maintains an online bibliography summarizing 219 scholarly investigations, with an aggregate sample size exceeding 220,000, which concludes “women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners.”
Nor is this violence trivial. A meta-analytic review of 552 domestic violence studies published in the Psychological Bulletin found that 38% of the physical injuries in heterosexual domestic assaults are suffered by men.
Dr. Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling of the University of South Alabama says that as she and other researchers grappled with this research, “Every time we tried to say that women’s intimate partner abuse is different than men’s, the evidence did not support it.”
According to Dr. Donald Dutton, author of Rethinking Domestic Violence, research shows that domestic violence is actually more common in lesbian relationships than in heterosexual relationships. For example, one study of 1,100 lesbian or bisexual women who are in abusive lesbian relationships found that the women were more likely to have experienced violence in their previous relationships with women than in their previous relationships with men.
Domestic violence service sometimes providers justify their exclusion of male victims by citing crime and/or crime survey statistics which show that most reports of domestic violence are by women. Dr. Dutton explains:
“Domestic violence ‘research’ has been misleading, in that data has been extracted from crime reports and/or crime victim surveys – in which men underreport more than women – and have been publicized as indicating domestic violence is a gender issue (male-perpetrator/female-victims).
“In fact, when larger surveys with representative samples are examined, perpetration of domestic violence perpetration is slightly more common for females…”
In the column to the right we provide quotes from numerous internationally-respected domestic violence authorities, all of whom, attest that domestic violence is committed by both men and women.
To send a protest email and fax to DART executives, click here.
According to the most recent data available from the US Department of Health and Human Services, mothers are more likely to commit physical child abuse, emotional maltreatment, and neglect than fathers. The only form of child abuse fathers are more likely to commit is the one that’s the most infrequent—child sexual abuse.
According to Child Maltreatment 2006 (pictured), a report by the Federal Administration for Children & Families, leaving aside killings by nonparents or by mothers and fathers acting together, mothers committed almost three-quarters of the parental murders of children. If one looks only at murders committed by mothers and fathers acting alone, the ratio is over 2 to 1 committed by mothers.
Leaving aside child abuse by nonparents or by mothers and fathers acting together, mothers committed almost three-quarters of child abuse.
If one looks only at child abuse committed by mothers and fathers acting alone, the ratio is 2.3 to 1 committed by mothers.
The data cited here are raw statistics, and all raw statistics are subject to various biases and influences. However, they do very much contradict the DART ads’ de facto claim that it’s fathers and only fathers who are a threat to their children.
To send a protest email and fax to DART executives, click here.
Fathers & Families, a national shared parenting organization, and Los Angeles journalist/radio commentator Glenn Sacks are partnering in a campaign to ask DART to remove these anti-father ads.
To send a protest email and fax to DART executives, click here.
Contact DART Executives & Ask Them to Remove These Anti-Father Ads
Below are the phone numbers, fax numbers, and email addresses for DART’s leading executives. I suggest campaign supporters email and fax all of them by clicking here, and also call the executives listed below.
If the intended party is not available, which will often be the case, please leave a short, clear message telling them that you want DART to remove these ads. Leave your name, phone number and email address. Please remember to always be polite, respectful, and to the point.
Let us know what happened when you called by clicking here.
Running these campaigns takes time and money–to make a tax-deductible contribution to support our efforts, click here.
To discuss the DART campaign on the campaign blog, click here.
Many of our supporters live in the Dallas area and use DART. If you are one, please contact us by clicking here.
Several hundred DART buses feature misleading, father-bashing ads purporting to address the serious issue of domestic violence. One ad depicts a happy little girl with the message “One day my husband will kill me.” Another shows a smiling boy with the message “When I grow up, I will beat my wife.”
To depict only males as perpetrators of domestic violence, and only females as victims, is a severe distortion. DV research clearly establishes that men account for half of all DV victims and incur a third of DV-related injuries, as women often employ the element of surprise and weapons to compensate for men’s strength.
Family Place Executive Director Paige Flink, whose organization created the ads, told Fox News in Dallas that says she designed the ads to provoke, saying “I hope you are offended.” Is this the image that DART wants to impart to the hundreds of thousands of families it serves?
The ads’ message is clear–kids need to be afraid of fathers. Boys need to be afraid to grow up to be like dad, and girls need to fear marrying a man like dad.
We ask that DART remove these two offensive ads from its buses as soon as feasible. To discuss how this crisis can be resolved, please contact Ned Holstein, MD, MS, Executive Director of Fathers & Families, at (617) 542-9300.
(Note: Fathers & Families does not have a problem with the apparently gender-neutral third ad, which discusses the issue of domestic violence and teen suicide.)
Phone
Area Code
Number
Including your phone number will help authenticate your letter. Phone numbers are not used for any purpose other than this letter and are not shared with any third party.
DR. PHIL AND PARENTAL ALIENATION.
1. DR. PHIL. The Dr. Phil show called CRC. They are seeking a husband and wife, or separated husband and wife, engaged in a custody battle, involving such things as denial of access (visitation) or parental alienation. Both the mother and father would have to agree to appear on the Dr. Phil Show. If you know of any such couples, please get word to CRC asap.
2. PARENTAL ALIENATION. For the first time, we have a definite date from the Dear Abby column as to when the article on parental alienation will appear. It is Monday, November 3. Dear Abby will respond to a person who asks about parental alienation, by criticizing the practice, and by referring her readers in 1,400 newspapers to the Children’s Rights Council, and our website. Some of you may get calls from readers. Between now and Nov. 3 you may wish to contact the local newspaper that carries Dear Abby or other media and offer your own comments or possible interviews with victims of parental alienation.
If you can be on the show please e-mail: crc_sandiego@yahoo.com
The most recent large-scale study of domestic violence was published in the American Journal of Public Health last year. The researchers analyzed data concerning 11,370 respondents. According to the researchers, “[H]alf of [violent relationships] were reciprocally violent. In nonreciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases.” (This study is illustrated in the diagram at right from the 
