Taken Into Custody

I have written previously of the threat to the Constitution emanating from the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary. There is another grave threat, on a different level, to the integrity of the legal system and to the core values of our society: The destruction of due process of law in the family courts, a malady that has now reached epidemic proportions throughout the Anglosphere.

Of all the scandalous behavior of the Left, perhaps none is so underreported as the systematic destruction of marriage and the family that is now practiced by the governmental divorce and child-custody machinery. This industry and the travesties it has perpetrated are summarized proficiently in the 2007 book, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family by Stephen Baskerville, a professor of political science at Patrick Henry College.

Declares Baskerville:

This book is about our unwillingness to confront the most destructive and dangerous injustice in our society today: the systematic seizure of children by government officials and the criminalization of their parents. A parent today who has committed no legal infraction can have his (or sometimes her) parenthood and relationship with his children criminalized entirely through the actions of others in ways that are completely beyond his control. [The book] focuses largely on fathers and divorce, because these are the ones most commonly involved.

The attack on fathers has been facilitated by the myth that they are abandoning their children in droves, at which point they become “deadbeats,” and must be tracked down by government officials seeking justice for the forlorn wives and children. Nothing could be further from the truth, writes Baskerville:

The myth of the deadbeat dad has already been discredited conclusively by Sanford Braver and other scholars. We have already seen that Braver is one of many social scientists who have found that few married fathers voluntarily abandon their children. Beyond this, Braver has also shown that little scientific basis exists for claims that large numbers of fathers are not paying child support. Braver found that government claims of nonpayment were derived not from any compiled database or hard figures but entirely from surveys of custodial parents. In other words, the Census Bureau simply asked mothers what they were receiving….Fathers overwhelmingly do pay court-ordered child support when they are employed, often at enormous personal sacrifice.

In the vast majority of cases, it is the wife who initiates the divorce proceedings. She is encouraged in this action by the regime of “no-fault” divorce. The old concept of marriage as a contract has broken down; today, the flimsiest, most whimsical reasons can be offered as justification—if justification is even needed.

At least two-thirds of divorces are initiated by women, whether measured by official filings or surveys of couples. Moreover, few of these divorces involve grounds, such as desertion, adultery, or violence. Most often the reasons given are “growing apart” or “not feeling loved or appreciated.”….The advent of “no-fault” divorce in the early 1970s, often blamed for leaving wives vulnerable to abandonment, has left fathers no protection against the confiscation of their children….Either spouse may end the marriage at any time without any agreement or fault of the other….The spouse that divorces or violates the marriage contract through adultery or desertion incurs no liability for the costs or consequences, creating a unique and unprecedented legal anomaly.

Once this machinery is set in motion, the deck is stacked against the father. In the blink of an eye, he can be evicted from his home, forbidden from seeing his children, have his assets seized, his wages garnished, and he can be assessed huge fees—all without due process of law. Though not even charged with committing a crime, he is presumed guilty. Many of the proceedings are held without his knowledge or presence, and he cannot cross-examine witnesses.

In a macabre recitation, Baskerville shows how each amendment in the Bill of Rights is being systematically violated, with no appeal. For example:

The Fourth Amendment protects the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures.” Yet as we have seen, parents suspected of no legal wrongdoing and who have given no grounds or agreement for divorce are routinely ordered without warrants to surrender not only their children but personal diaries, notebooks, correspondence, financial records, and other documents. Those unwilling or unable to produce the demanded documents can be fined, ordered to pay attorneys’ fees, and summarily incarcerated. We have also seen that fathers are regularly interrogated behind closed doors about intimate family matters most parents would not normally discuss with strangers, such as conversations with their children and spouse, and they can be jailed for failing to answer….In shades of Soviet psychiatry, citizens who refuse to submit to this inquisition—and even those who do not—can be ordered to undergo a “mental evaluation.”

The divorce and child-custody apparatus has grown to enormous proportions. It is a veritable industry, with judges, lawyers, social workers, collection agencies, therapists, psychiatrists, caseworkers, and researchers making their living from the ever-expanding pie. The enforcement effort employs thousands of agents who have a degree of authority and immunity that is unthinkable for ordinary police and law enforcement agencies. It has become an independent fiefdom, with no oversight and little scrutiny, with an entrenched interest in generating more divorce, more restraining orders, more mental evaluations, and more outrageously inflated child-support payments (commonly approaching or exceeding the income of the victim).

Writes Baskerville:

No-fault divorce released women legally from their marital vows but gave them no means to finance their new liberation….Children provided the leverage. The effect of unilateral divorce combined with the new child-support laws has been to underwrite forced divorce, rendering it a very lucrative enterprise not only for mothers but for other interests such as state governments….

Another myth deconstructed by Baskerville is that fathers commonly commit child abuse, incest, and wife-beating. In reality, this is rare. Mothers are more likely to use violence on fathers, and children are most subjected to abuse in single-parent households headed by a woman:

It is not fathers but mothers—overwhelmingly single mothers—who are by far the most likely to injure and kill their children. Data from the Department of Health and Human Services, an agency strongly pervaded by a feminist culture, consistently show that women are much more likely than men to be perpetrators of child maltreatment: “almost two-thirds were females,” the 1996 report states, and subsequent studies contain similar findings. Given that “male” perpetrators are not usually fathers but much more likely to be boyfriends and stepfathers, fathers emerge as by far the least likely child abusers….There is no evidence that the child abuse epidemic has anything to do with fathers except insofar as they are prevented from protecting their children or that allegations made against fathers during divorce proceedings are anything other than a smokescreen to disguise the real abuse.

After describing in gory detail the horrors of the family-law system (backed up, I might add, by reams of studies and testimony), Baskerville turns his attention to the culprits, those whose ideology has resulted in one of the grossest perversions of justice in American (and British, and Canadian) history. There are several culprits, but towering above them all are the feminists, who have carved out this untouchable empire for the purpose of destroying fatherhood and the nuclear family.

Hostility to the family in general and fathers in particular is clearly manifest in many feminist writings. “Patriarchy’s chief institution is the family, within which men hold the power to determine the privileges, statuses, and roles of women and children,” write [academics] Esther Ngan-ling Chow and Catherine White Berheide. “Such a structure is buttressed by traditional gender-role ideology and is further institutionalized and reproduced in gendered power relationships throughout society.” This rejectionism elaborates on an older Marxist contempt for the family going back to Friedrich Engels….[University of Pennsylvania president] Amy Gutman believes government officials should censor parent-child communication by intervening against parents who “bias the choices of children toward some disputed or controversial ways of life and away from others.” Similar language was used in the Soviet Union, where in fact the world’s first no-fault divorce system was implemented….Mainstream feminist academics openly express disdain for family privacy and for a private sphere of life beyond the limits of government interference….Political theorist Carol Pateman insists that denying “the dichotomy between the public and the private is, ultimately, what the feminist movement is about.”

A key buzzword used by advocates of this ideology is “for the children.” This is the clarion call behind the incessant demand to insert the power of the state into the deepest recesses of the private lives of the citizenry. Children are used, in the most cynical fashion, to attain political ends. This has reached the highest echelons of America’s Leftist establishment:

The philosophy of turning children over to state control and denying a sphere of family privacy is succinctly conveyed in Hillary Clinton’s aphorism, “There is no such thing as other people’s children.” Hillary rejects the notion that “families are private, nonpolitical units whose interests subsume those of children” and believes instead in “the status of children as political beings.” Commenting on these passages and others like them, the late Barbara Olson wrote, “For Hillary, children are the levers by which one forces social change.”

Overall, Taken Into Custody is a balanced, non-emotional, well-written, and copiously footnoted exposé. The only sour note, I would say, are several odd forays into macro-level political analysis, such as the perplexing statement that “it is perhaps a legacy of the Enlightenment that today both liberals and conservatives seem to worship at the altar of the meritocracy.” The author would have been better advised to confine the scope of the work to his area of expertise, in which his competence is duly impressive.

In any case, the book is a must-read for understanding the nature and scope of this insidious attack on a key foundation of Western society.

[Quotes taken from Stephen Baskerville, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family, Nashville, Cumberland House, 2007, pp 19, 116, 37/44-5, 88, 124, 201/200, 231, 228, 290, respectively.]