"Dad's Rights Advocates Come of Age"
by Thom Weidlich

ONCE JUST AN ANGRY FRINGE, NOW THEY TARGET CUSTODY, WELFARE AND CHILD SUPPORT LAWS

He had thought about the change before, but it crossed his mind again. In February, Chicago attorney Jeffery M. Leving was in Kansas City, Kan., for the midwinter executive committee meeting of the National Congress for Men and Children, a fathers' rights group. As he sat at a table with other leaders, it occurred to him how much the membership had changed in a few short years.

"When I first started working with men's groups there were a lot of angry men and not many professionals," says Mr. Leving of the Law Offices of Jeffery M. Leving Ltd. "Now we have a lot of lawyers, doctors, politicians, journalists. It's probably one of the reasons the work is becoming more mainstream."

Suddenly, every day is Father's Day. Dads are in demand. Recently, Time and U.S. News & World Report ran cover stories extolling the importance of fathers to children. In October, Vice President Al Gore was keynote speaker at a Dallas gathering concerning the role of fathers. In January, the new U.S. Commission on Child and Family Welfare set up shop in Washington, D.C., to explore ways of ensuring children's financial and emotional support.

The new father focus is due in no small part to grass-roots campaigning by a "subspecies," the divorced dad.

During the past decade, fathers' rights groups sprang up across the land like so many Blockbuster Video stores, numbering about 280 now. Their mantra: Mothers aren't enough, children need both parents.

The fathers groups are fighting against a perceived anti-male bias in family courts, and for mediation, parent counseling, joint custody, enforcement of visitation privileges, and neutral dropoff/pickup centers for feuding parents. Right now, their sights are set on the Republicans' Contract With America's welfare provisions; they want their issues hoisted on the marquee.

There were 1.2 million divorces in 1993; 40 percent of children live in households without their biological fathers. The father-activists argue that single parenthood -- and a legal system that keeps them from playing any meaningful role in their children's lives -- has caused America's social ills to spin out of control: crime, teenage pregnancy, high school dropout rates, even divorce itself. And people are beginning to listen: The fathers' rights movement is easing in from the margins.

"Fathers' rights groups have been responsible for a number of states enacting laws that have neutralized child custody standards and have moved for joint custody," says Sanford N. Katz, Boston College Law School family law professor.

It's a welcome change for a group that not long ago was itself blamed for a host of society's problems. "Divorced dad" was almost synonymous with "deadbeat dad." It's not that the stigma has worn off, but these groups have made it known that their members want to do more for their children than write support checks.

It would be wrong to overestimate their influence. The most frequent figure mentioned for the number of men involved is a modest 10,000. Even now, for most groups "headquarters" means a desk, a telephone and a fax. Their success is due largely to the energy of a handful of individuals. It is also due to the changing character of the movement. Mr. Leving and several other activists admit that, early on, it had its share of "women haters."

Says Professor Katz: "I think fathers' rights groups have taken a much more realistic view of their situation. For the most part, they were angry men who thought they were done in by the system. There has been a change in their attitude and they've been much more constructive of late."

'TOO MUCH STICK'

What the Republicans have proposed so far in the way of welfare reforms is a great disappointment to the fathers' groups. The Contract With America's Family Reinforcement Act calls for cracking down even harder than past federal legislation on non-custodial parents -- usually fathers -- who don't pay their child support. But dads' rights advocates want equally forceful measures to assure that custodial parents -- usually mothers -- adhere to visitation agreements.

"So far the Republicans don't address our issues, but I think they are generally receptive," says Dick Woods, head of Fathers for Equal Rights, based in Des Moines, Iowa. "They understand that welfare has hurt families. The bill so far is too much stick and not enough carrot."

Bill Harrington, national director of the American Fathers Coalition, based in Washington, D.C., has scheduled a symposium March 6 to present his group's welfare proposals to congressional staffers. The proposals include giving custody to dad if mom applies for aid, accountability by recipients for how the money is spent and preference over others for non-custodial parents at employment agencies.

Where the fathers groups and the House Republicans do see eye-to-eye is paternity establishment. Under the markup of the contract's welfare-reform bill, the Personal Responsibility Act, released from a subcommittee Feb. 15, recipients may have sanctions imposed if the state cannot confirm who the father is.

PATERNITY'S PULL

The paternity issue transcends the welfare debate. Chicago's Mr. Leving, for example, drafted a bill introduced this year in the Illinois House of Representatives that would require all new mothers to identify the father. Mr. Leving says the law is needed because fathers often don't know they've sired children.

Though they went nowhere, President Clinton's welfare proposals last spring were dad-friendlier; they supported mediation, supervised visitation, neutral drop-off centers and parent counseling.

"Clinton deserves credit because he put our issues on the agenda," Mr. Harrington says. "We met with the Clinton people five or six times and they listened. Our biggest problem is that the Republicans want to move so fast we can't be heard. They wrote all this in the back room."

Several fathers' rights activists expressed distaste that President Clinton's Feb. 27 decree ordering a crackdown on federal workers who fail to pay their child support did not contain similar flogging for visitation violators.

ACCESS COUNSELING

Though the fathers groups are currently engrossed in the welfare fight, they have other concerns. For them, child support and visitation rights are riveted together like two steel beams -- if not de jure, then defactor.

The fathers want more stringent measures to ensure visitation -- and they're making progress. Several states, including Illinois and Missouri, have criminalized visitation interference by custodial parents.

But the big push is support for "access counseling" -- Mr. Woods' carrot -- in which parents are taught communications skills to work through visitation snags. Under the Family Support Act of 1988, Mr. Woods was awarded a $300,000 federal demonstration grant to study whether access counseling leads to more cooperation between parents. Mr. Woods says the Iowa Human Services Division, which collects payments from non-custodial parents, found his program was responsible for a 15 percent increase in payments, from $330,000 in the final quarter of 1991 to $380,000 in the same quarter of 1992.

Beginning in late March, the Commission on Child and Family Welfare -- of which Mr. Harrington is a member -- will hold hearings on a variety of topics, including how custody and visitation decisions are made and enforced. Robert E. Robles, a family court judge in Las Cruces, N.M., says he hopes the panel will find plausible alternatives to the adversarial system in family disputes.

The fathers are also true believers in joint custody, the area where they've made the most progress. According to James A. Cook, president of the 16-year-old Joint Custody Association in Los Angeles, approximately 38 states provide joint custody by statute, the rest by court rulings. Mr. Cook says the current push is to create a preference or rebuttable presumption for joint over sole custody. He says 13 states now have such provisions.

Dads advocates prefer residential joint custody, which allows children to live alternately with both parents, as opposed to joint legal custody, which places children with one parent, but gives both a say in such things as their religious upbringing, health care and education.

Not all men favor the arrangement. "Lawyers have a tendency to use the vague term 'joint custody' without spelling out the balancing of the rights," says Louis Filczer, an attorney and executive director of the American Divorce Association for Men, based in Arlington Heights, Ill. "We favor co-parenting. A presumption should take place that both are equal, that they are co-parents after the filing. And if there's a hearing to rebut that presumption, then the burden is on who brought the divorce." (Most divorces today are filed by women, the men say.)

The fathers have faced opposition on these issues, mostly from women's rights groups -- it's safe to say that creationists and evolutionists hold more beliefs in common. Just as men smell judicial bias against them, some women fell justice's scales have tipped too far against them. Dads' rights advocates, for example, clash with women's rights groups over welfare, linking child support to visitation, joint custody and mediation.

They also view mandatory paternity establishment as a nightmare for poor mothers. To receive welfare assistance under current law, women must disclose the father's identity. Under the Republican proposal, the recipient would be penalized if the state could not locate him.

"A significant factor in welfare is that the father is not paying," says Lynn Hecht Schafran, of the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York. "If the father has the money, why isn't he paying?"

As for custody, some women say it's mostly a ploy; men file for it only to gain leverage in the battle over marital property. Typically, studies show, custody is not contested and goes to the mother.

But men argue that the father accedes to this only because he assumes -- or his lawyer tells him -- the courts almost always rule that way. Whether the courts actually do so is fodder for high-temperature debate.

"Any time a single father wins custody of the kid, they say this is a blatant form of sex discrimination, that women are being downgraded for wanting to go out and get a job," says Joseph McMillen, a Kansas City, Kan., sole practitioner and the executive business director of the National Congress for Men and Children. "But that's been the law with regard to men from the beginning of the century."

The men also contend courts assume mothers make better parents, and this is why dads advocates favor mediation over litigation. The women's groups generally oppose mediation because they say it lacks accountability and because it more often results in low child support -- or worse, custody awards to men. In extreme situations, mediation also can put women across a friendly table from the very person who is sexually or physically abusing them or their children.

OUT OF JOINT

As for joint custody, for the most part women's rights groups are unconvinced of its charms. "Their theory is that men are entitled to the children half the time," says Lynn Z. Gold-Bikin, president of the American Bar Association's Family Law Section and a name partner in Norristown, Pa.'s Gold-Bikin, Welsh & Associates P.C. "That's not necessarily mainstream and not necessarily in the best interests of the child."

The women's groups point to studies showing that children do not fare well under joint custody. In California, they say, the arrangement was made an option in 1979 but, because judges interpreted it as a preference and because research revealed its side effects, the law was changed in 1989 to make it explicit that it should not be presumed. Mr. Cook, however, says the current language favors neither joint nor sole custody.

Several representatives of the women's rights groups expressed reserve about the new influence of the fathers groups. "There has been this emphasis on the importance of fathers in the child's life, which we accept," says Elisabeth Donahue, counsel to the D.C.-based National Women's Law Center. "We just hope the idea that mothers are important too doesn't get lost."

Some observers feel both sides contribute to the already contentious nature of family law disputes.

Says Linda Silberman, professor at New York University School of Law: "A lot of reform efforts don't get far along because of their agendas. Interest-group politics plays a role, and it's a shame. I wish they were all out of there."

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