The Los Angeles County Child Support Services Department boasts
an impressive record. According to its Web site, in 2002 alone CSSD
“established paternity for more than 65,000 children, and
distributed over $428 million for families.” But taking into
account the L.A. bureaucracy’s ruthless crusade to find
“deadbeat dads,” as well as the widespread problem of
paternity fraud, the numbers become a lot less impressive.
The Los Angeles Times reveals that in 79 percent of L.A. child
support cases, paternity is established by default judgments in
municipal court, meaning that paternity is simply presumed but not
proven. Men are declared “default” fathers when they
fail to contest paternity allegations within a month, but many men
report that they never learned of the allegations in time.
According to U.S. Citizens Against Paternity Fraud, as many as
30 percent of “fathers” paying child support nationwide
may not be the actual fathers.
The problem is not confined to California. Federal initiatives
begun in the late 1990s require states to search vast databases of
tax records for “deadbeat dads,” but do not specify
rigid standards of accuracy in paternity identification.
This kind of aggressive child support enforcement can have
devastating personal consequences. State authorities begin taking
“Dad’s” wages and ruining his credit, by
reporting owed arrears to credit agencies ““ measures that
ensure the financial security of single mothers, at the expense of
justice for the men erroneously declared fathers. Instead, states
should establish paternity with hard and fast DNA evidence before
notifying employers and credit agencies. Judges should never be
left to decide a paternity case without such easily obtainable
evidence.
Efforts to enshrine in law the ability of judges to refer to DNA
tests, however, have encountered ferocious opposition. In September
2002, for instance, California Gov. Gray Davis vetoed the Paternity
Justice Act under pressure from the National Organization for Women
and children’s advocacy groups. The legislation would have
freed thousands of paternity fraud victims from unwarranted
child-support obligations by allowing judges to overturn default
paternity judgments when confronted with DNA evidence disproving
paternity.
Defending opposition to the Paternity Justice Act, an official
from the Children’s Advocacy Institute in San Diego said,
“We’re glad that the governor put children
first.” Advocates of “children first,” however,
could instead focus their efforts on the federal guidelines for
welfare assistance, which require states to identify fathers before
giving assistance to single mothers. Paternity justice need not be
a zero-sum fight between single mothers and men wrongly declared
fathers.
Trying to explain feminist opposition to paternity justice laws,
Victor Smith, president of Dads Against Discrimination, observes
that Americans “have a healthy disrespect for fathers.
It’s socially ingrained in our society.”
Feminists sometimes allow this disrespect for men to spill over
into their rhetoric. Activist Helen Caldicott argues that men are
psychopaths (in her more diplomatic phrasing of it,
“societies dominated by male values” condone
“violence and killing” and “psychotic
behavior”), and she also points out that men are
“clinically and psychologically dead.”
Some might claim these women are joking. But is their man-hating
humor really that funny? After all, who cares that the clinically
and psychologically dead psychopaths are forced to support other
people’s children? Maybe men are guilty and should pay,
simply because they are men.
Opponents of paternity justice, even if they don’t like
men that much, should keep in mind that it’s not really a
gender issue at stake. Paternity fraud devastates not only the men
erroneously declared fathers, but also their families. This
includes the children, who really are theirs, whom they must also
support, sometimes on meager incomes. Laws exonerating paternity
fraud victims and rescuing their families from undue financial
hardship deserve support, not the blind opposition and gendered
hostility they have encountered so far.
University Wire