[kixiQu]

Having a system as described where parents with evidence of abuse can't protect their kids from abusers seems absolutely unacceptable. Patching over that with the current unfair assumptions about men vs. women as suitable parents isn't better!

[dsadfjasdf]

oh is that how it's described?

[mionhe]

Well, the author of the article found several people sharing experiences that they heard from other people that seem to give credence to that view.

Hard to know at this point if the problem is with specific judges, with the way the law is written, or if the presentation of these experiences are made to seem more numerous by the way the article presents the story. It also didn't cover instances of abuse coming from mothers, so there's at least a little bias in the story.

[JPKab]

Feminist activists funded my mother's legal bills to win custody of me and my 4 siblings when she and my father divorced. My mother was a bipolar drug addict and the activists ignored this, and within a year social services gave us back to my father after neighbors called the police when my older sisters asked them for food. The police found me and my twin brother inside, abandoned in a crib, my mother nowhere to be found.

We suffered a year of neglect and abuse because of biased custody laws pushed by feminist activists, who project the traits of the worst men onto all of men, and pretend all women are angelic. I deeply resent it, and the "critics" in this article are doing the same thing.

[kixiQu]

I am a feminist here commenting in support of shared custody.

[cam_l]

Not entirely true. They actually removed family violence as a direct factor and instead now look at the safety of all parties and best interests of children as the primary factors. We are yet to see how it plays out. But anecdotal data from people I know in the family court space suggests some judges are using the change to effect better and safer parenting arrangements and some are using it as a way to dismiss entering complaints of family into the record at all (even ones verified by police).

As i recall, the mandatory shared parenting was a stupid & anachronistic captains call from little johnny, via toxic father lobby groups. It put more levers for coercive control at the hands of the few men who perpetrate family violence and just made everything more difficult for everyone else. Remember, something like 80-90% of parenting cases which enter the family court system are settled out of court. But of the ones who do go through the courts, family violence is a factor in something like 70% of those cases.[0]

I have no doubt that the increase in family violence, both incidence and intensity, in the over the past 20 years is directly linked to this policy.

[0] it is hard to get current stats on this figure, they are now lumping fv in with all safety factors, including drug use and criminal activity.