I protest.

You're right about one thing - I was too hasty in responding to your claim about "blood relatives." What I meant to say, and should have said, is that biological fathers perpetrate less than 10% of child sexual abuse, the largest share of which is perpetrated by non-family members. These figures can be obtained from the DoJ studies you've cited yourself, once you go to the trouble of disambiguating biological fathers from the other people the DoJ equates - through bias or sloppiness - with fathers, such as step-fathers and live-in boyfriends. As I said, the "typical" scenario - that is, the one that prevails in over fifty percent of case - doesn't involve a biological father, and your evidence actually supports my contention.

This is apparently upsetting to you for some reason that I'd rather not speculate on.

On another false claim you've made, kindly show any credible evidence that fathers who seek custody are likely to win it; and by the way, please check "Dividing the Child" by Eleanor E. Maccoby and Robert H. Mnookin, Harvard University Press, 1994. It shows that mothers win custody in contested cases five times as often as fathers.

But you needn't worry about these things, Frank, until you find a woman to marry and father a child. Those experiences often cast a new light on theories of gender absorbed from the media or wherever yours may have come from.

And good luck to you - you'll need it. Many of today's divorced fathers did in fact do their utmost to practice shared and equal parenting while they were married, only to learn that the women they married discarded their feminism at the courthouse door. We do take responsibility for making bad partner choices, but just as we don't send shoplifters to the death house, poor mate selection shouldn't be punished by twenty or more years of state-sponsored emotional and financial abuse.

And yes, I am a veteran of the civil rights movement, as are many of my colleagues in the fathers' movement within and without elected office, as I've already said.

But don't feel that you have to respond to any of what I've said - it's better that you think about it with an open mind than that you try and argue without knowledge of the facts.

Bennett, you are an ass. I'm tired of doing your research for you, do it yourself, doing as I did and showing sources and hard numbers. Kindly keep your ad hominem attacks to yourself, they are just another transparent and juvenile debating tactic.

Oh, and your assertion that "largest share of [child sexual abuse] is perpetrated by non-family members" is simply false. Go back and read the entry again. "Non-family members" can account for no more than 35 percent of cases. If there's a blind spot here, Bennett, it isn't mine.

"A veteran of the civil rights movement," indeed. You nauseate me.

Finally, just for the record, I am married. No kids yet, but that will change shortly. I've also been married before, though, sadly, the deck was stacked against us; my first wife, who was also molested, in her case by more than one blood relative, committed suicide a few years ago.

Now go take your blinkered pig-ignorance elsewhere. I have no time or patience for it any longer.

By the way, what "Dividing the Child" actually concluded is that the statistics are inconclusive, and don't provide definite support for either side of the "who wins custody battles" debate. When Richard uses that book as a source, he's going directly against the explicitly-stated conclusions of the authors. The remainder of this comment is quoted from the book.

* * *

We have found that although mothers receive sole physical custody in the vast majority of cases, the proportion of joint or father custody outcomes approaches 50 percent for high-conflict families. At first blush, this finding would appear to disprove allegations that the California divorce process reflects and perpetuates gender bias. Why, after all, shouldn't a 50-50 distribution of outcomes suggest gender neutrality?

Both advocates for women's rights and advocates for fathers' rights would probably reject this reading of our findings, and in fact the presence or absence of gender bias in the legal process is not so simple to establish. A fathers' rights group might well argue that since the overall gender ratio in cases where there are conflicting requests is 2 to 1, the law in action still reflects a maternal presumption. Why, after all, would fathers who conceded custody at lower levels of the conflict pyramid have settled for less than they wanted if they believed they had a 50 percent chance? Advocates for women, on the other hand, would counter that our findings demonstrate that escalation of legal conflict over custody clearly operates to the benefit of fathers. As we demonstrated in Chapter 3 before divorce mothers are the primary caretakers of children far more often than men. Thus, a 50-50 distribution of outcomes should be considered neither fair nor neutral. Rather, a "fair" distribution of outcomes should reflect differences in the care-taking base rate for mothers and fathers.

[…]Alternatively, suppose that, on the merits, custody claims of mothers were, on the average, no stronger than the claims of fathers. (Imagine a judge going into her chambers and flipping a coin in all contested cases.) The outcome ratios might still vary by conflict level if most mothers simply cared more about the custodial outcomes than most fathers, and were therefore more prepared to escalate the conflict to a higher level rather than settle for less than their preferred custodial alternative. Because it takes time and energy to work one's way up the conflict pyramid, this would imply that only in a small minority of families would the father be prepared to pay the price, even though those who did so might have a 50 percent chance of prevailing.

[…]But one thing does seem reasonably clear: our finding that the gender ratio of custody decrees at the top approaches 50-50 even though the overall ratio among conflicted cases is closer to 2 to 1 in favor of mothers demonstrates neither the presence nor the absence of gender bias.

Thanks very much, Amp. You've provided a much-needed dose of fact to the argument. It sounds like the authors have proven pretty conclusively that the evidence is inconclusive. :-)

Which is what my reading of the data in the Child Maltreatment report seemed to suggest.

Chances are that Frank will delete this comment, as he has to others of mine in the past, so I'll make it brief.

The point under discussion is gender bias, of course, but not as Ampersand tries to re-frame it. Frank made the claim: "When men ask for custody of their children, they almost always get it", and I contested that claim. In order to disprove it, I don't have to prove gender bias against men in family court (not that it would be difficult to do so), I merely have to prove that there's no overwhelming likelihood of fathers winning "almost all" the time.

Maccoby and Mnookin's "Dividing the Child", a study of court decisions in the most progressive two counties in the nation where joint custody are concerned, does indeed prove what I say it proves. It shows that when mother and father both ask for sole custody, mother wins it four times as often as father (p. 104); when mother asks for sole custody and father asks for joint, mother wins 67% of time, and father's joint custody wins 30% of the time (ibid.); you only get a 50-50 outcome from looking at cases decided by the courts of appeal (p. 273), a very, very small number.

What's more interesting, from a bias standpoint, is what happens when mom and dad reach an agreement between themselves and bring it to the court to complete the legal process. You'd expect that the court would simply rubber-stamp these agreements (which most often award sole custody to the mother) because the law explicitly requires the court to do so. But they don't; even if mom and dad agree on joint custody, the court still awards custody to mom 31% of the time, and to dad 8% of the time (p. 103).

Clearly, Frank's claim that fathers who seek custody "almost always get it" is false, and there's no ambiguity about it.

You know, Richard, you really lie a lot. First off, I deleted exactly one of your comments, so you should refer to "another of" rather than "others of." Second, the point under discussion was not "gender bias," it was rates of child molestation. You tried to steer it toward gender bias when you realized you couldn't prove your unsubstantiated assertions about the rates of molestation.

That said, I admit that my comment was a bit off-the-cuff and I hadn't researched it. I don't plan to research it now, either. Debating with you is an utter waste of my time and energy, since you are not interested in real debate, only in using any kind of specious argument to "win." Your citations from a single book notwithstanding, I don't trust a single thing you have to say, since you have abundantly proven that you will happily distort, shade and omit facts to support your agenda.

As to gender bias, from Amp's comment:

... a "fair" distribution of outcomes should reflect differences in the care-taking base rate for mothers and fathers.

This is very important. A man who is not a caregiver should not expect to receive custody upon request even in a gender-neutral system. But more importantly:

But one thing does seem reasonably clear: our finding that the gender ratio of custody decrees at the top approaches 50-50 even though the overall ratio among conflicted cases is closer to 2 to 1 in favor of mothers demonstrates neither the presence nor the absence of gender bias.

In other words, the authors state explicitly that their data cannot be taken as evidence for either conclusion. It is completely inconclusive. Yes, my statement was incorrect on its face; it turns out that the situation is considerably more complex than a single facile statement can describe. However, its implication and my intent in making it, that there is no "gender bias" in family law, is neither proven nor disproven by your source. Such proof is, in fact, explicitly disavowed.