Child Support: A broken system

Unused_UserID · 2019-06-21T17:08:58+00:00

I'm not saying that children should not be fiscally cared for by both their parents.

Do you think you should pay for a car that you didn't agree to buy?

xNOM · 2019-06-21T22:55:12+00:00

That is because our legal system is structured in a way that assumes heteronormative family units with the male as the high earner.

Well that's a charitable way of looking at it. That was true 40 years ago. Today the real reason, is that it's just a legal scheme to extract money from men and give it to women. If men got custody 75% of the time (instead of women, the way it is now) child support law would evaporate instantly.

mycroftxxx42 · 2019-06-21T20:14:30+00:00

Neither parent has the right to terminate their parental rights and responsibilities. That's just the thing.

As for child support being "broken"? I'm not going to say I disagree, but I am going to say that the system as it exists is superior at upholding the principles from which it is derived than any proposed alternate to date.

Family law courts do not operate on justice. Justice is not something that they care about. If they were an AI, people would say that the maker got the utility function wrong. Family courts exist to uphold the "best interest of the child" in the same way that other courts uphold justice.

Yes, it's a somewhat subjective concept. Yes, this means that family courts only vaguely emulate "justice" when there are no kids involved, since they expect adults to handle their own shit. On the up-side, the degree of subjectivity is a matter of lots of thinking and lots of consultation of research. You generally can't make a judge stay on top of the child psych literature, but if they don't listen to experts and make too many decisions at odds with what people consider to be the best practices, their lives get difficult. Thankfully, even the sexist mommy-judges want to get things right and take the idea of child primacy seriously. It's what they get up in the morning for, even when the rest of their life is a trash fire.

So, knowing the above, it's not surprising that the courts behave the way that they do. Family courts did assume heteronormative family units with male breadwinners, but as that has changed, so have they. They just haven't changed much in the fundamental areas that affect child support, because they haven't had to.

Take the "debtor's prison" aspect of child support enforcement as an example. The reason that they can send you to jail for not paying is because the support is structured as an order by the court, rather than as a civil judgement. If you can't pay a judgement, the mechanisms to squeeze that money out of you are slow and intentionally gentle. If you ignore an order of the court, the court can and will slap you down without losing a step.

Child support used to be listed as a judgement, and it used to generally be ignored. Shifting it to being an order of the court was a remedy that could be made without a lot of laws being changed and it gave family courts - WHO ONLY CARE ABOUT CHILDREN - a tool to push back against non-payers.

Does that mean that poor men who have ended up unfairly being appraised as high-earners can end up in jail? Yes. That is a real problem with the system as it exists now.

The only thing I can say about it is that I have seen it happen once, with a young man who I think had chronic depression and got on the wrong side of the judge. The judge was convinced that he could earn more than he was, and refused to alter his required payments or give him a break on the arrears. That man went to jail a couple of times for 90 days. It was injustice in discrimination against someone who is very likely disabled.

But, that was once in the ten years I worked as a legal assistant for a lawyer who did this for a living. Literally a sizable chunk of her income came from being a public defender for men who were in arrears for their child support and facing contempt charges and possible jailtime. Generally the outcome was getting told to straighten up and stop fucking around, get some legal aid to change the support amount if things are really broken, and pay something every month to avoid coming back to court. (between that work and all of the divorce/custody work we got as referrals from Fathers for Equal Rights, our all-women-but-me law firm qualified as a serious source of Men's Rights activism.)

If there is a gentler and more equitable system that satisfies that core KIDS FIRST value set that the courts are built on, there's going to be surprisingly little resistance to adopting it. People know that the child support bureaucracy is fuckey, but it has a job to do and the system does it as best as they've been able to make it.

Sidenote: I'm guessing that someone named /u/WomanHornyForTrump probably won't want to hear this, but the simplest change to "the system" that would reduce the chances of anyone ending up in jail would be for the social safety net programs to become the right of everyone. If we went full Bernie Sanders, the state would have a lowered legal interest in the money that single parents receive. It's the state welfare agencies that tend to pursue child support arrears the most emphatically. If they didn't have a reasonable expectation of repayment, if that sort of social support was everyone's right unconditionally, the amount of child support court cases would drop overnight.

I just wanted to point out that "simple" solutions that preserve the core values of the family court system exist, they're just seen as more unpalatable than innocent people in jail. Cause reasons.

Title	Child Support: A broken system
Author	WomanHornyForTrump
Upvotes	14
Comments	9
Date	June 21, 2019 2:52 PM UTC (7 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/c3bjd4/child_support_a_broken_system/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/child-support-a-broken-system.875069 https://theredarchive.com/post/875069

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