Men: Perpetual Victims of Lies and Assumptions
Someone with the Franklin County (OH) Child Support Enforcement Agency (FCCSEA) has published three newsletters to clarify the issues of paternity establishment, child support guidelines, and administrative enforcement tools. Near the top of the paternity newsletter it reads, “Children deserve the love and support of both parents.” However, the remainder the newsletter highlights all of the ways men are made victims of a system that is overly biased toward women as opposed to truly looking out for the child.First and foremost, a child needs more than money to live a good life. A good life is based primarily on the love and acceptance a child receives from his family, or people close to him. A good life is also based on the examples a child sees on a daily basis, and the ambition to succeed instilled in him by those role models. Money alone does not make a child happy, especially when he craves the presence of an absent father.
This system of having one agency solely focused on money is inherently flawed, and is counter-productive to providing a child with the love and support of both parents. There should be an agency to looks at legitimate paternity establishment and visitation rights along with financial support. Because FCCSEA focuses only on money any man who has sexual relations with a woman is subject to become a victim of the agency’s multiple enforcement tools.
Before any order of financial support is determined, paternity should be established. FCCSEA makes a couple of assumptions that make any man an automatic suspect. First there is the assumption that a child born during a marriage, or 300 days after the end of a marriage, is the child of the mother’s husband. Second, there is the assumption that 60-days is enough time for the truth of paternity to come out if the man voluntarily accepts responsibility. There is a third assumption which is made by the family court system that a man who does not appear for a paternity hearing is admitting paternity, and is therefore subject to the judge’s ruling.
The first two assumptions are based on a woman’s truthfulness. While all women wouldn’t lie about such an important thing as a child’s father, why automatically assume that none would? Dishonesty is not gender-specific; women can be just as devious and underhanded as men. With a system that doles out money without a check and balance, why wouldn’t an immoral woman lie to get free money? The third assumption is based on the state’s need to spend as little money as possible. The more men the state can make pay support for single-parent children, the less the state has to pay to support them. The truth of paternity is trumped by the state’s budget.
In cases where the legitimate father of a child is unwilling to support his children, the current system is beneficial. Men are just as capable to use children as tools of revenge against women as women are to use his children against him – but that is the point of renovating the current system. Children are used as pawns by both genders far too often for a support agency to not concern itself with paternity and visitation. FCCSEA should make sure that any child in its system knows his real father instead of making assumptions about a man who was with the mother around the time of conception.
According to the FCCSEA newsletter, there are conditions under which paternity can be vacated, provided the man produces contrary DNA evidence that is no older than six months. However, the presumed father must hire a private attorney, because all of the FCCSEA attorneys represent the state – and therefore the mother. So in addition to paying undue child support, a man who is not a child’s father has to pay for a DNA test and a retainer in order to be heard in court. But even that does not guarantee relief. A family court judge can base his final ruling on what he thinks is in the best interest of the child. In other words, if a man provides DNA evidence showing he is not the father, a judge can make him continue paying child support anyway.
Furthermore, if a man paying child support can afford an attorney, and he presents DNA results that exclude him from paternity to a judge who does overturn the support order, the light that man sees at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train. According to the newsletter, “If a [paternity] judgment is vacated, any support already paid would generally not be recovered, and any arrearages owed would remain collectable.” That is the definition of being between a rock and hard place. Even men who have been wrongly imprisoned for 20 years are treated better than men who are victims of presumed paternity.
Men imprisoned for burglaries, rapes, and murders they did not commit have their records expunged, and can sue the state for millions in lost wages, lost family time, lost freedom, and attorney fees. What do I get for proving I didn’t father a particular woman’s child? Nothing. Under these current laws and this current system, I cannot get my money back and I still have to pay any missed payments. What sense does it make that a man would pay for a DNA test, and lawyer fees, on top of the child support payments, only to have to keep paying the child support once I prove myself to not be the child’s biological father?
The child receives virtually nothing as well. A man is going to be resentful of a child for which he has to pay money for who isn’t his. That child misses out on the love and guidance a father can give him. The only true beneficiary is the woman getting free money. As much as the Black community sings the praises of single mothers, a child raised without a father is a damaged child to some degree. There is something missing from a child’s life when the father is not involved – or even known. A child of a single-mother can lead a productive and positive life. But no matter how successful that child is, nothing can fully take the place of having his father in his life. Thousands of young Black men are in jail because they are searching for something neither their mother, nor a monthly check could provide.
In the 70s and 80s the welfare system made a practice of splitting up Black families. Now in the 90s and 2000s child support systems across the country are making perpetual victims out of men. FCCSEA touts that it collected $1.87 billion in child support in 2002. But from whom did they collect that money? Fathers who should pay child support, or men who are caught up in the system due to a woman’s lies and the state’s assumptions? If children deserve the love and support of both parents, then men deserve the right know for certain they fathered the child for whom they are paying support.
Single father who are looking for assistance can contact the following groups:
Fathers Rights Inc
Families Need Fathers
Fathers Rights
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