ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, February 26, 1996 TAG: 9602270024
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICHARD CARELLI
SOON AFTER she lost custody of her young daughter, Michelle Thompson-Pattan founded the Michigan Alliance for the Rights of Children to give women who share her plight somewhere to turn.
Large national feminist organizations like the National Organization for Women are not in business to help mothers facing loss of child custody, so women like Thompson-Pattan are forming grass-roots organizations.
``I speak from experience. There are too few places where women facing heart-breaking and financially ruinous situations can get help,'' says Thompson-Pattan, who spent more than $100,000 in legal fees and costs in losing custody to her daughter's father.
Groups like the Michigan Alliance have sprung up across the country because fathers increasingly are fighting for and winning child custody. Many women who join these groups contend that the legal system discriminates against mothers.
``It's a backlash battleground and women are getting chewed up,'' says Phyllis Chesler, an authority on child-custody proceedings that stem from divorce.
Chesler, author of ``Mothers on Trial,'' says her research shows that fathers who seek custody of their children now win more than 70 percent of the time.
``Financial resources is a key ... women generally don't have enough money to engage in this trench warfare,'' she says.
``Double standards pervade the child-custody courts,'' Chesler says. ``Fathers often win custody even when they are parentally uninvolved or abusive; mothers lose it for any departure from an idealized stereotype of motherhood. Many good mothers, not crazy or man-hating women, are being torn from their young children's lives.''
And ``feminists' desire to invite men into the nursery has caused confusion or ambivalence'' among leading women's groups, keeping them from the fray, she says.
Emily Brundage of the Committee for Mother and Child Rights in Virginia says custody courts are failing to protect vulnerable children.
``Men who fight for custody are not necessarily the nurturing, supportive type. Many have hidden agendas - a need to control the mother and children, avoiding child support payments or even to continue an abusive relationship,'' she says.
But David L. Levy of the Children's Rights Council says focusing on the hottest custody battles ignores the bigger picture. Women head 85 percent of the nation's single-parent families, he notes.
``Cases involving prolonged and bitter litigation may represent 3 percent of all custody proceedings,'' says Levy, whose group is accused by women's organizations of being more interested in the rights of fathers than those of mothers and children.
Levy, however, says some fathers' rights groups criticize his organization for not being militant enough. And he offers no apologies for fathers who enter custody fights with fatter wallets than their ex-wives.
He, too, criticizes custody courts.
``The courts love to pick winners and losers,'' he says. ``That's appropriate when you're fighting over a piece of furniture, but by picking winners and losers in custody, you assure that the children are losers. We need to demilitarize divorce.''
Liz Richards, who leads the National Alliance for Family Court Justice from her Virginia home, is particularly embittered by her experiences in the Virginia court system.
Richards says she and other women in her group have encountered ``judicial conduct maliciously defiant of the evidence and standards of justice. ... It is so bad, I'm recommending to Virginia legislators a plan for replacing them with computers,'' she says.
Richard Carelli covers the Supreme Court and legal affairs for The Associated Press.
- The Associated Press
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