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FATHERS' RIGHTS GROUPS DECRY COURT PROCESS Despair of Divorce and Loss of Kids Compounded, Advocates Contend By David Crary, The Associated Press One divorced father commits suicide on the steps of San Diego's courthouse. Another sets his car afire at Alaska's child-support office. Others, in an all-too-common scenario, kill their ex-wives, their children, then themselves. Men who snap in such violent ways have few defenders. Yet fathers' rights groups, joined by a few academic experts, see a common denominator in the recent bursts of rage, and ask whether the U.S. family court system could be partly at fault by deepening the despair of divorced men. "None of these guys are poster children," said Lowell Jaks, president of the Alliance for Non-Custodial Parents Rights. "But when you cause this much pain to so many men, there are going to be repercussions. A certain percentage are going to crack." Women's groups and government officials doubt that courtroom bias is the cause for most of these destructive outbursts; some experts say divorced men simply experience more isolation after divorce than women. But Jaks is convinced of his position. He has even distributed newspaper articles to his organization's members noting the problems with child custody and child support that angered John Muhammad, the alleged Washington-area sniper, and Robert S. FLores Jr., who killed three University of Arizona nursing professors before killing himself. "Some guys kill themselves, some snap and go out and kill others," Jaks said. "You can dismiss them as crackpots, you can say we need more protection for women, but it's not going to take away the problem." Augustine Kposowa, a sociologist at the University of California-Riverside, has done studies concluding suicide rates among divorced men are higher than for divorced women or married men. He attributes the different to what happens in family courts. "Decades ago,the pendulum swung in favor of the men, but clearly in the past two decades the system is stacking up against men," Kposowa said. "The man loses his marriage, then loses a second time when child custody is granted to the woman," he said. "Unless something is done, by examining family laws and having new policies to aid men, the situation is bound to get worse." Extrapolating Kposowa's research, fathers' rights activist David Roberts contends that child-support orders, part of what he calls "the war on fathers," contribute to the suicides of more than 5,000 divorced fathers each year. Roberts, president of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, concedes that his estimate is unprovable and that suicides often might stem more from personality factors than legal bias. But he is bitter at what he perceives as unwillingness by politicians and most academics to take the suicide and violence phenomenon seriously. Outside fathers' rights ranks, government officials and leaders of women's groups acknowledge that divorce and custody procedures are imperfect. But they don't believe the courts can be blamed systematically for divorced fathers' actions. Nancy Duff Campbell, co-president of the National Women's Law Center in Washington, D.C., said many of the men who snap might have had violent tendencies over a long period that preceded and contributed to divorce and loss of custody. "Sure, there are cases where injustices are done. But the notion that the system is playing a strong role here is greatly exaggerated." Campbell endorsed efforts to improve divorce and custody proceedings for both genders, so that parents who lose a dispute will feel they had a fair hearing. Joey Binard of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges said states are shifting away from the traditional presumption that mothers should get post-divorce custody of children. Many states say preference should go to the parent most involved with the children, she said, "but that still leaves men on the short end of the stick because most are not primary caretakers." Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, said divorced men who commit violence are "the rare exception." Men commonly experience depression or other mental health problems after a divorce, Horn said, and some family courts might still give "subtle preference" to mothers in custodial hearings. "Even if, objectively, there is no bias, if the man perceives it as such, it's a source of stress," Horn said. Frustrations over child support and visitation figured in several recent violent incidents across the country. Among them:
Dr. David Gremillion, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and adviser to the Washington-based Men's Health Network, said the high suicide rate among divorced men stems in part from being psychologically unprepared for the break-up. "A lot of men don't realize the degree to which their social connectedness depends on their wife," he said. "When it hits them upside the head, and they begin to realize what they've lost, the impact can be striking."
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