Good afternoon. My name is Anne Mitchell; I am a single mother, a practicing family law attorney, and a fathers' rights advocate. I am the director of the Fathers' Rights & Equality Exchange, and I am thrilled to have been invited to participate in this first workshop on working with fathers. The organizers are to be commended for recognizing the need for this subject to be addressed, and I hope that this will be the beginning of an ongoing and meaningful dialogue within our professional communities.

We can no longer deny that the absence of a father from a child's life has a serious and profound effect on that child. The incidence of youth violence in this country has reached epidemic proportions, and, as David Blankenhorn notes in his book, Fatherless America:

Put simply, we have too many boys with guns primarily because we have too few fathers.
[David Blankenhorn, Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problems; BasicBooks, New York, p. 31]

And it isn't just our sons who are so deeply affected by the absence of their fathers: teen girls raised in father-absent circumstances are more than 100% more likely to give birth to their own father-absent children. [Garfinkle & McLanahan, Single Mothers and Their Children: A New American Dilemma (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute, 1986; pp. 30-31]

Even from a financial standpoint, and considering the concern about women and children in poverty, it is clear that the ongoing presence of a father in his child's life is beneficial to everybody involved. Our own Federal government has found that child support orders are fully complied with as much as 90% of the time where the father has frequent and ongoing contact with his children.

Why then are we, those of us in the professions represented at this conference, so reluctant, so stuck in our ways, that we are not all actively encouraging maximum father-involvement within these disunited families? You would think, given all that we know about the devastating effects of father-absence on all involved, that we would be encouraging, indeed insisting on, fully involved fathering whenever possible.

And yet, just two months ago, the Federal Bureau of Census released the astonishing figure that 42% of noncustodial fathers have no timeshare privileges. [Federal Bureau of Census, from the 1992 Child Support Supplement to the Federal Current Population Survey; released September 1995.]

What is going on here?

It is we, the family law professionals - attorneys, judges, and social workers, who must take responsibility, both for this mess our children are in, and for remedying the situation.

And in order to do this, we need to really examine ourselves; we need to own up to our own biases, and we need to rise above them, and educate ourselves, and make decisions and recommendations from a place of knowledge and understanding.

In 1992, Professors Maccoby and Mnookin published the Stanford Child Custody study under the title Dividing the Child. They studied nearly 1000 divorcing couples in Santa Clara and San Mateo county, and what they found was astonishing, even to them.

Fathers do want to be fully involved in their children's lives. Some fathers even want custody, and for the right reasons. Some mothers even want those fathers to have custody.

One of the most compelling pieces of information to come out of the Maccoby-Mnookin study was this: In cases where both mother and father requested that the father have custody, the court still gave custody to the mother in over 12% of the cases! [Maccoby & Mnookin; Dividing the Child: Social & Legal Dilemmas of Custody; Harvard Press, Cambridge, MA, 1992, appendix A]

We, all of us here today, have a duty to work to overcome these inherent biases and blind spots in our system, and to ensure that our children's right to an involved relationship with both parents is not only protected, but expected.

I would like to close by sharing with you some actual quotes from single fathers who are members of our organization. In order to be able to start working to reinvolve fathers, it is important that we understand what these fathers are dealing with, not only in terms of society, and the family law system, but internally and emotionally as well.

We asked our membership to share with us their thoughts as to why they may have been incorrectly perceived as not wanting to be involved with their children; what was going on that may have caused them to become disinvolved when what they really wanted was quite the opposite. This is what they had to say:

"There was a period of almost two years after my divorce that I found it extremely difficult to keep in contact with my infant son. The fact that he was an infant, and geographically far away, made it impossible to speak with him on the phone; therefore, the only way I could gain any knowledge of his wellbeing was to speak with my ex. In attempting to do so I was constantly reminded of all that went wrong in our marriage. Even though my motivation in contacting her was to speak about our son because I could not carry on a conversation with him, the conversation with her inevitably became so painful that I began to avoid them completely, rarely taking the initiative to call. "

"When I first left, I had grand plans for how this would all work out. I envisioned that I would meet with my children, we would spend quality time together and do fun things. What has really happened is that I grow farther away from them every day.

"Even with full visitation, no schedule, no supervision, 'come anytime you want' visitation, it is unbelievably difficult to really do that. I sit at home thinking about them every day and every night. I reach for the phone but I never make that call. About once a week I manage to scrape up enough courage to make that call.

"All of the guilt of leaving comes to the surface when I am with them. I sweat like I am breaking a fever, I dread who I will meet while I try to maintain the normalcy of their lives, and I sob uncontrollably during the ride home afterwards. I am watching them grow away from me as all the people around them try so hard to take my place - and it seems sometimes that they have. Sometimes I ask myself: 'What'sthe point? I am not really part of their lives anymore. My ex has told them that I am not their father anymore and that they don't have to listen to me.'"

"Over the last three years I have concerned myself with the feelings of a lot of other people: my daughter Marissa, my new wife and her family, my family, and even Marissa's mother. On the surface it probably appeared I was a pretty cold fish.

"But inside, where I am alone with my thoughts, there has been turmoil. The long drive to and from work, sometimes with tears in my eyes, wondering what she looks like now. Fighting the urge to go past the house and catch a glimpse of her playing outside. Always wondering if I was doing the right thing by keeping the fighting to a minimum. I hope in time people will realize that control over other individuals at the sacrifice of children is more than just morally wrong, it can ruin a constantly growing string of peoples' lives, most notably our children."

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