I was speaking to some friends recently who told me that in the Magistrates Court in Hartford, representatives of Fatherhood Initiatives recruit clients right outside the courthouse doors.
What is the purpose of these Fatherhood Initiatives? Ostensibly, the purpose is to assist fathers in developing their job skills, to encourage them as parents and to provide them with peer support and improve their ability to meet their child support obligations.
However, advocates have discovered a more suspect motivation for these contacts.
In a recent article entitled, "A Life Sentence" independent journalist Keith Harmon Snow spoke about how Family Court systems across America are taking children away from fit mothers and handing them over to abusive fathers in record numbers.
The impetus behind this social trend arises from millions of dollars in funds handed over to the States by the Department of Health and Human Services. I have seen different figures in terms of how much money is involved here, but I would guess that the best estimate is approximately $150 million per year in HHS money that is specifically designated to support fatherhood initiatives, plus around $4 billion designated for the Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE). Particularly advantageous to those interested in taking advantage of this financial windfall, fathers in these programs are not required to adhere to TANF deadlines or work requirements that are normally a standard for accessing these funds.
Furthermore, there is very little oversight of this money, which means that such programs have gotten away with using fatherhood funds to assist abusive and violent fathers in custody battles against protective mothers. These fathers are told that they have two choices -- risk jail for failure to pay child support, or embark on a custody battle to take the children from the Protective Mother and thus eliminate child support altogether.
What would you choose?
Thus, fathers who have had little contact with their children for years, who have physically and/or sexually abused the children and their mothers, often fathers just being released from jail, end up fighting and succeeding in getting custody with the collusion of family court services and mental health professionals.
According to Anne Stevenson, a freelance journalist, since eligibility for these programs is not needs based these fatherhood funds can be distributed not only to low income fathers, but also to middle and upper middle class fathers, even billionaires.
The moment a protective mother goes to trial court in order to obtain back child support, or bring financial matters of any kind before family court, these funds get dispersed to the fathers.
High Conflict Divorces are a particularly excellent source of funds for family courts that have been corrupted by fatherhood funds. High conflict divorces release funds to a broad range of family court services, GALs, custody evaluators and mental health professionals who then get involved in the case.
As columnist Anne Stevenson describes it, the HHS policy of subsidizing the homes and legal battles of unfit, unwilling, and violent fathers has "created a new breed of dangerous Welfare Kings". In these custody cases, at the beginning "only the offender is sick, but when one violent offender gets custody, the whole family needs treatment. Consequently, it is also not uncommon for dozens of family court mental health and legal professionals to come onto such a case to sustain an abusive father's deadly custody rights through HHS programs."
The result is that everyone, sometimes even the judges, ends up getting a payoff.
The result is that everyone, sometimes even the judges, ends up getting a payoff.
I have avoided discussing this matter simply because of the enormity of this situation. How do you grapple with such a monolithic violation of the human rights of protective mothers, not only in Family Courts throughout the nation, but also here in Connecticut, in our own communities, right on our front doorsteps!
To grasp the extent of it, try typing variants of the words "Fatherhood Initiative in Connecticut" into google--you end up with hit after hit.
One of the top results I obtained when I started my investigation on google was the "John S. Martinez Fatherhood Initiative of Connecticut" which operates apparently under the auspices of the Connecticut Department of Social Services.
Under this initiative, according to information sheets the Initiative provides, funds are directed towards assisting fathers in connection to custody. For example, the sheet "Financing Fatherhood Programs" states that "Welfare funds can be used to assist never-married parents to develop joint parenting plans, develop marriage and relationship building skills, or for mediation services."
Under "Building Services to Help Fathers" the information sheet says, "TANF dollars can be used to support a variety of services for fathers--employment assistance, counseling, parenting plans, mediation, parenting education, substance abuse and domestic violence."
According to Anne Stevenson, what this amounts to is that, for the purpose of switching custody from protective mothers to abusive fathers, those fathers who agree to engage in custody battles are provided with free attorneys, free housing, free groceries, free car maintenance, gas, and other transportation costs, free healthcare and dental care, plus cash, while having all their child support obligations suspended.
This information sheet further advises "policymakers", which I assume includes legislators, to "use the budget process to direct funding for the development of fatherhood programs and services." In addition, it advises them to "Use TANF funds to make competitive grants to local programs that operate fatherhood programs." and "Direct agencies to use TANF funds to assist fathers."
With all these millions and millions of dollars directed towards supporting fathers, what chance do protective mothers have?
And these information sheets caution, "States are not spending millions of dollars in TANF resources" that are still waiting and available. Plus, not only are there millions and millions of dollars in TANF resources out there that still need to be used, States can tap into more fatherhood funding if they approach other resources like WtW and Title XX block grants.
Can you see that this is so mind boggling that I have delayed reporting on it? I just couldn't even begin to comprehend such a monstrous situation.
What this does, of course, is make me look back on my own family court case and on the many cases I have discussed on this blog and ask: Were fatherhood funds behind each of these custody battles? I have only just begun my investigation of this subject matter, and will continue to write more about it. But if anyone has a comment and/or any personal experience with this issue, I would be interested in hearing from you.