Planetary Alliance for Fathers in Exile, "PAFE", Fleeing dads start new lives Sun, December 10, 2006

Not wanting to pay child support to children they can't visit, some fathers adopt new identities abroad to evade the law.

Roger Debois, of France, claims men from all over the world reach out to him and his organization, Planetary Alliance for Fathers in Exile, for a new identity and new life free of old obligations such as child support. (Photo illustration by KEN WIGHTMAN, LFP)

Thousands of men who don't have access to their children are choosing to start a new life in another country.

But is it the unbearable pain of not seeing their children that causes them to flee or the chance to get out paying child support?

The Planetary Alliance for Fathers in Exile (PAFE) believes men are persecuted and offers them a way out.

An underground organization based in Nice, France, PAFE claims to have assisted 250,000 North American men start new lives in Europe.

Through encrypted e-mails and clandestine phone calls, PAFE prepares men to leave everything behind, lines up work for them abroad and changes their identities.

Alliance founder Roger Debois, who also goes by the name Jean Kelly, said he was a New York City emergency-room physician before starting PAFE. He assists North American men, including 4,000 Canadians, who want to start over. Many are the victims of "unethical lawyers,'' Debois said.

Ottawa lawyer Pamela Cross, executive director of the National Association of Women and the Law, said that's easy to say, but untrue.

"The real activism on the part of fathers' rights groups coincided perfectly with the federal government passing changes to the child support system in 1997. It made it much more difficult for non-custodial parents not to pay appropriate levels of child support," she said.

Debois, through a series of e-mail interviews with The London Free Press, said he has helped men from London.

When asked to set up an e-mail interview with one, he said they all declined. "I asked," he wrote, "but they all said they don't want competition."

Debois did arrange an interview with an Ontario man but that was as specific as the man would get about where he used to live.

The man called himself Pete and said he left Ontario for Austria and then Bulgaria because "every girlfriend I met declined to have a serious relationship, claiming I was not free to marry because of child-support obligations cutting into a future household."

Pete, who said he is a pilot, started a new family and has two children, aged four and one.

He has a 12-year-old son from a first marriage but said Canadian laws handed the boy to his ex. "Now I consider him a lost son."

Pete believes he made the right decision to leave Canada and give up the fight for his son.

"My potential was too precious to waste it on lawyers."

Cross said fleeing shows fathers were never really interested in their children. <HA!>

"I do find it interesting . . . how often when men fight for custody and don't get exactly what they want . . . those men just vanish from the child's life. And then you've kind of got proof that this was never about the father wanting to be involved with the child."

PAFE used to have a website but has recently gone underground, Debois said, because "we act against family court orders."

Heidi Nabert, a director with Fathers Resources, a group that aids and supports fathers going through custody battles, was alarmed when she learned about PAFE.

"To create a new identity for someone is illegal," she said. Nabert questions the legality of helping fathers abscond child support.

Asked if men are leaving the country to get away from support payments, Debois responded with a link to a Global Television website promoting a documentary about two men's access struggles against a system they believe has a "deep and persistent gender bias against fathers."

The program notes fathers have gone bankrupt trying to gain access to their children. The documentary calls for changes to Canada's divorce laws to give more fathers more time with their kids.

Andrew Koster, the producer/director of the documentary, is a divorced dad himself. "Divorced fathers are presumed to be absent from the lives of their children by their own choice and often painted in the media as deadbeats or aggressors."

A London divorced father of three understands what drives a man to contact PAFE.

"We lose our role as fathers, husbands. I want the public to be aware of how tough it is," the father said.

Memorandum by Planetary Alliance for Fathers in Exile (PAFE)

INTRODUCTION

There are over 100,000 British fathers in Europe who have fled GB for they saw no future with CSA and no enforced visitation. They work in many jobs all over Europe, and many improve their own home to sell for profit, using "black" labour fathers to help them making a living without tax obligation. Their kids grow up fatherless. The fathers have often been accused of violence because allegations of family violence are the weapon-of-choice in divorce strategies. Lawyers, and paralegals in women's shelters, call them "The Silver Bullet". False abuse allegations work effectively in removing men from their families. The impact that the removal of fathers has on our children is horrific. Here are some of the consequences of the removal of fathers from the lives of their children. The Impact on our Children Inter-spousal violence perpetrated by men is only a small aspect of family violence. False abuse allegations are only a small tile in the mosaic of vilifying the men in our society. They serve well in successful attempts to remove fathers from the lives of our children.

The statistics:

— 79.6 per cent of custodial mothers receive a support award.

— 29.9 per cent of custodial fathers receive a support award.

— 46.9 per cent of non-custodial mothers totally default on support.

— 26.9 per cent of non-custodial fathers totally default on support.

— 20.0 per cent of non-custodial mothers pay support at some level.

— 61.0 per cent of non-custodial fathers pay support at some level.

— 66.2 per cent of single custodial mothers work less than full time.

— 10.2 per cent of single custodial fathers work less than full time.

— 7.0 per cent of single custodial mothers work more than 44 hours weekly.

— 24.5 per cent of single custodial fathers work more that 44 hours weekly.

— 46.2 per cent of single custodial mothers receive public assistance.

— 20.8 per cent of single custodial fathers receive public assistance. [Technical Analysis Paper No 42—US Dept of Health and Human Services—Office of Income Security Policy].

— 40 per cent of mothers reported that they had interfered with the father's visitation to punish their ex-spouse. ["Frequency of Visitation" by Sanford Braver, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry].

— 50 per cent of mothers see no value in the fathers continued contact with his children. ["Surviving the Breakup" by Joan Berlin Kelly].

— 90.2 per cent of fathers with joint custody pay the support due.

— 79.1 per cent of fathers with visitation privileges pay the support due.

— 44.5 per cent of fathers with no visitation pay the support due.

— 37.9 per cent of fathers are denied any visitation.

— 66 per cent of all support not paid by non-custodial fathers is due to the inability to pay. [1988 Census "Child Support and Alimony: 1989 Series" P-60, No 173 p 6-7, and "US General Accounting Office Report" GAO/HRD-92-39FS January 1992]

— 63 per cent of youth suicides are from fatherless homes. [US DHHS Bureau of the Census]

— 90 per cent of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes.

— 85 per cent of all children that exhibit behavioural disorders come from fatherless homes. [Center for Disease Control]

— 80 per cent of rapists motivated with displaced anger come from fatherless homes. [Criminal Justice and Behavior, Vol 14 p 403-26]

— 71 per cent of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes. [National Principals Association Report on the State of High Schools]

— 70 per cent of juveniles in state operated institutions come from fatherless homes. [US Dept of Justice, Special Report, Sept 1988]

— 85 per cent of all youths sitting in prisons grew up in a fatherless home. [Fulton County Georgia Jail Populations and Texas Dept of Corrections, 1992]

— Nearly two of every five children in America do not live with their fathers. [US News and World Report, 27 February 1995, p 39] There are:

— 11,268,000 total custodial mothers.

— 2,907,000 total custodial fathers [Current Populations Reports, US Bureau of the Census, Series P-20, No 458, 1991] What does this mean? Children from fatherless homes are:

— 4.6 times more likely to commit suicide;

— 6.6 times to become teenaged mothers (if they are girls, of course);

— 24.3 times more likely to run away;

— 15.3 times more likely to have behavioural disorders;

— 6.3 times more likely to be in state-operated institutions;

— 10.8 times more likely to commit rape;

— 6.6 times more likely to drop out of school;

— 15.3 times more likely to end up in prison while a teenager. (The calculation of the relative risks shown in the preceding list is based on 27 per cent of children being in the care of single mothers.) And—compared to children who are in the care of two biological, married parents—children who are in the care of single mothers are:

— 33 times more likely to be seriously abused (so that they will require medical attention); and

— 73 times more likely to be killed. ["Marriage: The Safest Place for Women and Children", by Patrick F Fagan and Kirk A Johnson, PhD Backgrounder £1,535.]
The following is from an article in the (Canadian) Report Newsmagazine, Daddy's girl matures later—Stepfathers are shown to produce "precocious puberty" in young females, by Candis McLean, 2001 04 16, p 46. One in six girls in Britain now enters puberty by eight years of age, according to recent research. This compares with one in 100 a generation ago. "Girls are now having sex before their great-great-grandmothers had their first period. Half of all girls in Britain will have entered puberty by the age of 10," announced Professor Jane Golding, director of the study at Bristol University's Institute of Child Health last June after tracking the development of 14,000 children from birth. In North America, one in seven Caucasian girls and half of African-American girls enter puberty (develop breasts or pubic hair) by the age of eight. The parade of suggested triggers has included obesity, pollution and food additives (see this magazine, 16 November 1998). New research, however, suggests a radical new theory—that the father-daughter relationship is also a very important factor in when girls mature. One of the leaders in this research, American Bruce Ellis, is a psychology professor at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand . . . According to Prof Ellis' research, "The clearest finding to emerge from this research was that it was the absence of warm, positive family relationships, rather than the presence of negative, coercive family relationships, that forecast earlier pubertal development in girls." But, while warm relations with both parents predicted later puberty, the more relevant was "father-daughter affectionate-positivity"; in fact, the more time spent by the father in childcare when the daughters were four to five years old, the less pubertal development by Grade 7 . . . Prof Ellis does not think that pheromone exposure within the home is the only factor at work. He continues, "It is also likely that girls who have high-investing fathers in the home tend to begin sex and dating at a later age and thus have less pheromonal exposure to male dating partners in early adolescence." He concludes his article (to be published in a book entitled Just living together: Implications of cohabitation for children, families, and social policy) with the statement that the inherent instability of cohabiting unions—an average duration of about two years—means any children will be three times as likely to live with a biologically unrelated parent which could result in earlier onset of puberty. In girls, this is associated with negative health and psychosocial outcomes: greater risk of breast cancer in later life, unhealthy weight gain, higher rates of teenage pregnancy, low birth weight babies, emotional problems such as depression and anxiety, and problem behaviors such as alcohol consumption and sexual promiscuity. [My emphasis -WHS]

The Report article recommends to parents that to be successful in, Preserving childhood:

— Stay married.
— Keep stress levels down; do not overbook children's activities.
— Prevent obesity.
— Provide a high-fiber diet with plenty of fruits and vegetables.
— Cut out fast food.
— Keep your daughter active; get her interested in a sport or out playing with other kids.
— Throw out the TV.
— Send early-developing girls to same-sex or age-segregated schools to reduce exposure to older boys.
The following is from the newsletter Common Sense & Domestic Violence, 1997 12 24 Children and Single Moms whether it is caused by violence or not, children living with single moms don't do well in our society. It used to be the exception. Now it is becoming the rule and progressively worse. Is that not child abuse too?

WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHILDREN FROM SINGLE-MOTHER FAMILIES

1. Children from single-mother families are 2.21 times (221 per cent) as likely to have one or more total problems than those from two-parent families, twice as likely to have an emotional disorder, etc. (The probability of this being due to chance is smaller than 1 in 1,000.)

2. Weighted projections to reflect national population of children.

3. Data for items so annotated apply for 6- to 11-year-olds only. All other data in the table apply to 4- to 11-year olds. [Source: Growing Up In Canada, National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (Human Resources Development Canada, Statistics Canada, Catalogue no 89-550-MPE, no 1, November 1996, p 91) Available from StatCan. It is only available in hard copy. $25 +GST)]

STOP ABUSE OF MEN

There has been a war going on for years, right under our noses. It's sometimes violent, but oftentimes it's a war of words. It's been going on here in Britain for years, but only in the last few years has it been more prevalent.

It's a war on gender.

More specifically, it's a war of women against men. We don't see it on a casual basis, but we do see it in other ways—education, the workforce and our personal lives. And it's time to stop and embrace the changes that have been made since the 1960s and 1970s instead of exclusively focusing on the few things we haven't achieved.

In the beginning, the feminist movement made great strides in making sure women had rights in American society. But the problem now is that along with those strides, women have taken a step back because of those women that I commonly call "gender feminists".

The definition of a gender feminist is that of a woman who hates men so much that she's willing to advocate under the veil of rights for women but whose real agenda is to malign men. They are not to be confused with the women who are honestly making an effort to make sure there are equal rights for both men and women.

Christina Hoff Summers, in her book "The War Against Boys," focuses on the aspect of the gender wars that has been having the most affect on boys—education. Boys today are less likely to go on to college, and are more likely to be put into detention or reprimanded just because they are boys.

Another aspect that's often seen is in the law. Many of you might have heard about the guy dressed as Batman on the ledge of Buckingham Palace, who was protesting for father's rights. Although it's probably not the most effective way to get your point across, he did have a point—fathers have fewer rights after a divorce or separation, seen strictly as a financial windfall for the mother than as an important person in the child's life.

I've read many stories online of terrific fathers being denied visitation because the mother, in her bitterness, either made accusations against the father of sexual or physical abuse that weren't true or simply denied visitation to the other parent. They then call them "bad fathers" because they've been worn down due to being denied access to their kids. A friend of mine had the former happen to him, and he hasn't seen his daughter in a number of years because of it.

More evidence of the bias against men exists when you hear the term "deadbeat dad" in the news. Although there are some men who deliberately don't pay child support, most are just guys trying to make ends meet after being forced to pay large amounts of child support that they can't afford.

What are often ignored is the women who don't have custody who refuse to pay child support—no one mentions the "deadbeat mom," because it's not "politically correct." These women are often allowed to get away with not paying because they are the mothers.

CONCLUSION

We demand joint physical custody and all laws to be abolished re child support. Parents shall support children when they are with them, which can be physically arranged on a weekly basis where children have two homes each.

A fatherless society increases crime and that in turn feeds the legal system

Some advocates for mothers' rights have claimed that the gender-neutral best interests standard disfavors mothers and operates to deprive women of a critically important bargaining chip with which to counter attempts to reduce child support and property distribution (Polikoff, 1982; Weitzman 1985). Singer & Reynolds (1988) for example, boldly state: Proponents (of joint custody) ignore what studies increasingly confirm: divorcing husbands routinely and successfully use the threat of a custody fight to reduce or eliminate alimony and child support obligations. Such custody blackmail has been identified as a major cause of the impoverishment of divorced women and their children.

However, in fact, there are no empirical studies that support such an argument (Maccoby & Mnookin 1992). In fact, the available data suggest that the opposite is true. There is solid evidence that parents in joint custody situations are much more likely to meet child support obligations. Studies of payment rates for joint custody parents, and those non-custodial parents who are able to remain a viable part of their children's lives, show much higher compliance (Hillary 1985; Montana Child Support Advisory Council 1986; Pearson & Thoennes 1986; Lester 1991). Lester (1991) as one example authored a report for the US Department of Commerce, Bureau of The Census. The report indicated that fathers with parental responsibility pay 90.2 per cent of money owed; fathers with contact pay 79.1 per cent of the money owed, and fathers with neither parental responsibility nor contact pay 44.5 per cent of the money owed. Unfortunately the census report used only self-report figures of the mothers who were due to receive the monies, and those figures may be self-serving overestimates of non-compliance.

There is also considerable evidence that parents in joint parenting arrangements do more in terms of extras such as school payments and the like, which go beyond the court ordered financial responsibilities. While this result is more tentative than the conclusion on compliance, it would seem reasonable that by empowering someone, that person would be more likely to remain supportive financially, than if they are forced to become a mere visitor to their own children.

Data collected prior to the introduction of the Child Support scheme link contact between parents and children with levels of child maintenance payments. Funder (1989) found that absence of contact or conflict associated with contact was related to lower maintenance received. In its analysis of the pre-Scheme child support payments of over 3,000 parents, the Australian Institute of Family Studies found that payments were less likely to be made where contact was infrequent or not taking place (Harrison, Snider, & Merlo 1990). Other investigators described the weakening of ties between non-resident parents and children as a cause of child maintenance default (Wade 1980). These data, taken together, indicate that sole residence determinations, as opposed to joint residence determinations, tend to work against the economic best interests of children. Sole residence preferences lead directly to less financial support for children of divorce. The economic evidence suggests that seeking ways to increase non-resident parental contact with their own child is the most effective method of increasing compliance with child support orders.

25 February 2005