A civil rights issue
Social worker Edward Nichols, who helped found FAIR (Father`s Advocacy, Information and Referral Corp.) in 1982, now with 4,000 members, comments that noncustodial parents are being denied the same civil rights as blacks in the 1950s and `60s.
”It`s a basic civil rights violation. It reminds me of Birmingham in 1959. We`re not even allowed on the back of the bus: We`re chasing the bus down the road-and not only that, we`re paying for the tickets that got our wives and kids on the bus.”
Paying for those tickets is a big part of the frustration. (Nichols stresses that in spite of the emphasis on fathers, his group also assists noncustodial mothers. ”Judges look at them like they`ve got a horn growing out of their head,” he says. ”Prejudice is not sexist.”)
Laws are getting tougher on noncustodial parents who don`t meet their child-support payments. And custodial parents who don`t get the money are entitled to get free legal help from the state`s attorney`s office.
But there`s no free help or mandated remedies for the abuse of visitation privileges.
”We can withhold child support payments from a paycheck, but you can`t have automatic withholding on children,” says Elizabeth Krueger, an attorney in Du Page County. ”On visitation rights, you`re dealing with an entirely different animal. A divorce decree might say `reasonable visitation.` But people differ wildly in what they think `reasonable` means. If people choose not to do what the court orders, then you have to take a lot of long, hard steps. It can cost thousands of dollars.”
Stricter enforcement
Family therapist Steve Stone disagrees that the abuse of visitation privileges cannot be treated with the same decisiveness as lack of child support payment.
”There needs to be the enforcement of visitation so there`s no room for violation,” he says. ”We need swifter measures to remedy . . . there should be access to free legal assistance. And it shouldn`t be such an adversarial process. Now there`s all this legal jockeying that can go on for months. It just perpetuates the situation.”
Often fathers get so frustrated that they quit paying child support.
A study done by FAIR two years ago correlated support payments with visitation. More than 2,200 divorced fathers in 48 states were interviewed.
”We found that 77 percent were not able to visit their children as ordered by the court,” Nichols said. ”We found that the default rate in support payments was 63.9 percent where there was this visitational interference, as opposed to 6.1 percent default where there was no
interference. That`s a 10-fold increase.
”We also correlated the expense in hiring lawyers, and found a very high correlation. The mean average amount paid to attorneys during a 12-month period was $4,320. The amount defaulted by the same subjects was $3,780. Those are compelling numbers.
Supporting lawyers
”So what we see is that fathers are supporting their attorneys rather than their children. And dads run out of money before judges run out of patience.”
The same correlation between child support compliance and visitation was found last year in a pilot study, ”The Survey of Absent Parents,” funded by the federal Department of Health and Human Services.
”There`s a direct connection between those fathers who visit their children and payment compliance,” said Freya Sonenstein, principal investigator for the study. ”When there was weekly contact, payment compliance rose 50 percent.”
Noncustodial parents don`t just pay legal fees in their struggle to remain parents. The custodial parent often uses the child as a means to get more money: ”I`ll let you have the kid if you pay me more every month.”
Gone without warning
That`s what happened to Tom A., a police officer. He came home from duty on New Year`s Eve, 1983, and found an empty house. No furniture, no wife and no child. Just a note from his wife, saying that she was filing for divorce.
”It was three months before I got to see my son at all. The divorce was final in 1984, but then my unique problem is that I`m a shift officer. I have rotating days off. And she`d say that I could only see my son on the days that had been established.
”The decree said I could have him on alternate weekends, but there were weekends I had to work. I went to court. Then she filed to raise child support. The judge said no increase in support, but the visitation would stay the same. I had lost.”
He decided to increase his child support by $50 in exchange for being able to see his son on his days off. ”Last year I spent $6,000 in legal expenses. That makes $50 extra a month seem insignificant, especially since it means I can see my son. But why couldn`t we have agreed to all this through mediation? Why was it all so adversarial?”
Another poignant note he slips in: His former wife remarried a month after their divorce. His son now calls his stepfather ”Daddy” and calls him by his first name. ”Yeah. It makes me feel terrible.”
Looking for answers
Is there an answer?
”The only thing that can happen is that people change,” Krueger said.
”Maybe we should make it more difficult for people to get married and have children. Maybe we should have some kind of parenting school, but that`s idealistic. I truly don`t know what can be done.”
Groups such as FAIR are actively working to help the noncustodial parent remain a parent, and Nichols predicts that it will take federal court cases to really make a start in solving the problem.
He concludes: ”All I can say now is that maybe we`re not going backwards as fast as we used to be.” –
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People interested in information on FAIR can contact the group by calling 800-722-F-A-I-R.
