The Gender, Sexuality, and Race Room
The online MRAs tell us incessantly that fathers face sex-discrimination in family courts. Here's what child welfare advocates have to say about that claim:
That right there explains a lot of my childhood!...the myth that family courts unfairly favor mothers helps protect abusers. According to the Pew Research Center, the vast majority of custody cases are settled out of court, and in 70 percent of those cases, mothers end up with primary custody. But, according to a Massachusetts study from the 1980s, when fathers contest custody, they win 70 percent of the time.
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A national study by Meier, a professor of clinical law at George Washington University and the founder of DV LEAP, looked at 240 child-custody cases. In those cases, alleged child-abusers won custody or unsupervised visitation with a child victim 81 percent of the time.
“What the data show is that alienation does a lot of damage when a father claims it against a mother who is claiming abuse, that it is not gender equitable, that it doesn’t work the same way in reverse,” says Meier. “Parental alienation is very gender biased. It does a lot more damage when a father wields it than when a mother wields it. And it does more damage when she claims abuse.
That's right, it's the norm for fathers to win custody whenever they contest it, especially when they are accused of abusing their own children, by their own children! Getting accused of abusing your child, especially if it's sexual abuse, actually increases a father's odds of winning custody, where in criminal court, by contrast, the same testimonials would be consider sufficient evidence to convict! That lines up with my experience. So the next time you hear some MRA online complaining about how the family courts favor women, just remember this!
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Originally Posted by Chris
