If you owe money to the government, they will go after you. If you owe money to your landlord, he will find you. If you owe money to the phone company, a credit-card company, the electric company, they will track you down and collect. But if you owe money for child support, that debt is not taken seriously. It`s only money owed to kids.
-Bernadette Puente, divorced mother owed $50,000 in child support
She found him on her own.
When several government agencies that had years to track him down didn`t, Cheryl Walker finally did it herself.
She did her own detective work, once driving from Chicago to Florida, visiting several counties, combing through courthouse records, dropping quarters in numerous pay phones, doing some fast talking. And on her own she finally found the man who 15 years before had walked out and left her with three little boys, an empty bank account and no child-support payments.
After he left, she cried at night. And prayed. And wondered how she`d make it alone. But she simply had to make it. So she pulled herself out of her confusion and gloom and raised the boys, working three and sometimes four jobs to do it. She taught dance during the day, worked nights as a nurse`s aide and on weekends cleaned people`s apartments. She also did the payroll books for a fruit-harvesting company, working on the figures at her kitchen table.
During those 15 years, she sewed her own clothes, paid the rent, recycled her sons` blue jeans, laid down the law for them at 10 p.m., cooked the meals, changed the window screens, bought the boys their first razor, threw the birthday parties, took them to baseball games, wrote checks to hospital emergency rooms and balanced the household budget.
She did this with no child support. Although ordered by a judge back in 1977 to pay $90 a week to help support the kids, her former spouse ignored that obligation. Twice he was arrested for failing to pay, but twice he was released on bond. Then he just disappeared.
There are state laws requiring that he pay his share of child support, but year after year he was able to evade those laws by moving from state to state, acquiring new Social Security numbers and working for himself instead of employers through whose payroll records he could have been traced.
By the winter of 1991, he was $60,000 in arrears, and Walker had little hope of his ever paying up or even getting caught. The system still puts a low priority on arresting and prosecuting a man-or a woman-who does not pay child support. The system doesn`t take it as seriously as, say, a $60,000 debt to the IRS or a $60,000 bank embezzlement or a $60,000 default in loan payments. His debt was `only` child support. Money that`s owed to children. His children.
After 15 years of calling state agencies whose lines were always busy and whose workers were too busy or indifferent . . . after 15 years of dealing in vain with the child-support-enforcement offices of Illinois, Michigan, Florida and California and with the court systems of three counties in three states
(Cook in Illinois, Pinellas in Florida and Macomb in Michigan) . . . after 15 years of being told again and again that she needed copies of this in triplicate and copies of that in duplicate and of hearing, ”There is nothing new on your case, Mrs. Walker; call again in a few months because we can`t find him,” Cheryl found him herself.
And not where she had expected. Using a method she doesn`t want to publicize for legal reasons, she finally learned that he was in Gilman, Wis. Driving there in her oldest son`s car, she found him living outside that small central Wisconsin town in a house on a 164-acre farm with a big silo, swings in the yard and a new pickup truck. There was a snowmobile in back and dogs in the yard. It was a ”Mayberry R.F.D.” existence.
After finding his name on a plat map in the local county library, she drove to the town and, as fate would have it, spotted him in his pickup truck on the main street. ”I saw his face-after 15 years-and I couldn`t believe it,” she says. She followed him home and took pictures of the property. She learned that he had a new wife and child, his own land and his own house. He was living as if Cheryl and the boys never existed and as if a court order requiring him to pay child support had never been issued.
But Cheryl Walker thought it was about time he paid up, so she reported his whereabouts, papers were served on him and she now awaits a hearing in a Wisconsin court.
There are hundreds of thousands of women across the country who, like Cheryl Walker, are left to raise their children by themselves with little or no child support from their former husbands. Their ranks are swelling, and non-payment of child support is becoming a national scandal. In Illinois, according to the state Department of Public Aid, non-payment of support is the main reason half a million children are on welfare. According to national and state figures, women and children are the fastest-growing members of a new poverty class.
”When parents don`t pay to support their kids, taxpayers support them,” says Illinois Public Aid Director Phil Bradley.
A divorced mother of three says it less diplomatically: ”When the ex-husbands don`t pay, Uncle Sam does. And that`s you and me picking up the tab. When is society going to tap them on the shoulder and say: `Hey Bub. Start paying. They are your kids. You helped put them on this Earth.` ”
Some $18 billion in unpaid child support is owed in this country, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. The figure is considered a low estimate. Fourteen million child-support cases are pending in the U.S., of which five million have come up in the last five years. Of the $11 billion in child-support payments ordered by the courts annually, only an estimated $5 billion is paid; the remaining $6 billion goes unpaid or is paid late.
In Illinois alone, $728 million in child support is owed to an estimated 600,000 children. ”Illinois is one of the dark holes of child support,” says one child-support activist. But Illinois is not alone. Together with neighboring Ohio, Wisconsin, Missouri, Indiana and Michigan, this block of six Midwestern states accounts for $7.2 billion in unpaid child support.
”He`s never paid a penny,” says Michele Miller, a 29-year-old divorced mother of a 9-year-old girl. ”And he wasn`t even ordered to pay that much-just $50 a week.”
Miller and her ex-husband were divorced in Indiana in 1987. She now lives in suburban Elmwood Park and is employed as a construction worker. He lives, she believes, somewhere in Tennessee.
Her frustration is not just from having to raise her child without financial support but from being unable to get some action from the state and federal agencies that are supposed to help her. One of the biggest problems is that her ex-husband has left the state.
Last summer Miller took a day off from work to keep an appointment with the Chicago office of the Department of Public Aid`s Bureau of Child Support Enforcement. She had been waiting for weeks for this meeting and was anxious to get the ball rolling on her case.
The meeting started with a caseworker taking down information from Miller, who had come in thinking she had all the necessary data with her. The session came to an abrupt stop when Miller said she thought her ex-husband was now living in Tennessee.
”Oh, he`s in Tennessee. I can`t do this today,” the case worker said, according to Miller. ”I said, `Why not?` And when she didn`t give me much of an answer, a supervisor came over and quieted me down. He said the reason they could not do it `today` was that they needed three certified copies of the divorce decree, which I did not have and nobody had told me to bring.
”So I said, `OK, I`ll get them and I`ll be back.` The caseworker said:
`Well, we can`t take you back today. Make an appointment, and we`ll see you in four to six weeks.` I said: `No, my appointment was for today. I`ll be back today. I can`t wait.`
”So I got in my car, drove to Indiana, got three certified copies, drove back, walked in and said, `Here`s your damn copies.` They told me to take a seat and wait. I told them I was the first one in that morning, I`d taken a day off work, I`d been docked a day`s pay, I`d just driven to Indiana to get them what they wanted, and now I needed to get things moving. So they let me back in.
”That was last summer. In November I went back again and gave them the same information: his Social Security number, his address, his work phone number and the number of my divorce decree. In January I called them again and gave them the same information. I still have no court date, no report of progress, no nothing. The system is set up, I think, so I`ll give up and quit coming in. I can`t take a day off from work once a week to go in and raise hell, but I`ll keep calling and I won`t give up.”
The irony, Miller says, is that her ex-husband has called her several times, and when she asks him why he hasn`t paid any of the $15,000 he owes in child support, he says his new wife`s ex-husband hasn`t paid his child support, so he doesn`t have enough money to pay his own child support. ”It`s a vicious circle,” she says with disgust. ”And a whole bunch of us women are going round and round.”
In Illinois, a custodial parent-usually the mother-trying to collect child support can end up having her case handled by a myriad of bureaucracies, from the Department of Public Aid`s Bureau of Child Support Enforcement to the county state`s attorney`s office, the sheriff`s department of enforcement section and the clerk of the Circuit Court.
In Cook County, all of these offices are overburdened and not always working in harmony with one another. The Cook County state`s attorney`s office, for instance, last year tried to handle 62,470 child-support non-payment cases, and the state has more than 260,000 child-support cases pending.
According to the U.S. Census, half of the men who owe child support don`t pay all of what they owe, and a quarter of them do not pay anything at all. There are, according to a 1990 census study, 10 million households nationwide with 16 million children living without their fathers. A quarter of those households are living below the poverty level. Non-payment of child support is becoming a critical factor in thrusting the American single-parent family into a life of poverty.
The more that parents fail to meet their child-support obligations, the more the cases stack up unresolved in various government agencies and the harder it becomes to enforce the court-ordered payments. Those in need of the money often do not know the law, their rights or how to cut through the red tape. Frequently they do not know where to go or whom to call.
”It`s like not knowing how to spell a word,” says Donna Caliendo, a divorced mother of three children who works at Triton College. ”You ask someone, and they tell you to look it up in the dictionary. But how do you look up a word in the dictionary when you don`t know how to spell it? That`s how a lot of these women feel when they try to collect child support. They don`t know the laws that are on their side, they don`t know the agencies to go to, and when they find them, nobody tells them the right things to do. They don`t know how to get their case into court without getting the runaround for months and years. A lot of them give up. In essence, if you want some action, you have to know how to spell.”
This summer Caliendo finally started receiving child support from two ex- husbands (one hadn`t paid for seven years and the other for two years)
after she got an order for the money to be withheld from their paychecks. Recalling the years when she received nothing from either man, she says, ”If it weren`t for my mother, I would have been living in a car.”
While learning the ropes and wending her way through the bureaucracy, Caliendo discovered that her file had been sent from Du Page County to Springfield and inadvertently shunted off to a warehouse. She insisted that it be found and that her case be reopened so that her ex-husbands could be located and withholding orders issued.
”There is almost an epidemic; the figures are mind-boggling,” says Cook County Judge Everette Braden of the child-support problem. Braden sits in child-support court and hears 60 to 100 cases a day. The problem in the past, he says, is that there was no strict enforcement of the orders to pay. Now, if the non-custodial parent falls behind in payments after 60 days, the money can be withheld from his paycheck-if he gets a paycheck and if he can be found.
”Failing to pay child support is still (socially) acceptable. It is the only acceptable form of child abuse in our society,” says Geraldine Jensen, national president of the Association for Children for Enforcement of Support (ACES), a group headquartered in Ohio and with chapters in 49 states that tutors the divorced custodial parent on how to obtain child support.
”It is a crime against children. Men do it because they get away with it. They get away with it because it is acceptable. I think these men who don`t pay feel that when they divorce the wife, they divorce the children too. They don`t pay, and they don`t look back.”
