You know, everytime I read something about a divorced dad going off his rocker and kidnapping his kids and killing himself and them, all I can think is: why is anyone surprised, except that it doesn't happen more often?
There are no valid excuses for anyone to commit such a horrendous crime.
Btw, the situations that I know of are quite different. I am related to a father who received full custody of his son after he divorced his wife for cheating on him.
I also know a woman whose husband left her for another woman when she was seriously ill and pregnant with their second child, and that father was given joint custody. As a result, he drags her into court for everything, has left her penniless, as she struggles between paying medical bills and courts costs fighting him off. He doesn't even spend time with the kids when he has them - he has other people watch them for him - it's all about control to him.
So things are not so cut and dry. I do think a mother should be given primary custody, only to be taken away if she alone is the one who dissolved the marriage or if she presents a danger to the kids.
Excellent point. The answer seems to be "no":
Andrew and Noel met in high school. When Noel gave birth to Evelyn, at age 16, the couple had already split.
I wrote:
"You know, everytime I read something about a divorced dad going off his rocker and kidnapping his kids and killing himself and them, all I can think is: why is anyone surprised, except that it doesn't happen more often?"
T of T replied:
There are no valid excuses for anyone to commit such a horrendous crime.
I didn't say there were. What I AM saying is that it's no wonder these guys go nuts and flip their lids. Understanding it is not the same as excusing it.
As for the situations you've experienced ... they're not representative of the bias, IMO and experience. It's not fifty-fifty badness. Moms are OVERWHELMINGLY favored in family law courts; women OVERWHELMINGLY are the ones that file for divorce (one book I have says it's something like 80 percent), and frivolous reasons like "irreconileable differences" (i.e., no cheating, physical or verbal abuse, or drug abuse involved) are most often cited.
In other words, if a married women with children gets bored with her husband or is unhappy with their circumstances, she can divorce him just like that, get custody of the kids, probably remain any home that they've purchased while pop has to move out, be entitled to a good portion of the father's income for child support, and never have to prove to the court or father that the money is used for the actual support of the children.
Although in print the parents have "joint custody," it is the parent who has been granted physical custody -- OVERWHELMINGLY the mother -- who calls the shots in schools, medical care, schedules, and discipline. Visitation for Dad is typcially four to eight days A MONTH, plus some vacations.
If for some reason the kid isn't available for visitation -- in other words, if the mother "frustrates" the kids' visitation with dad (which I and one of my brothers experieced OFTEN often often often often), the dad has no recourse except to hire a lawyer and take it to court -- most of the time, dad can't afford to do that. ON THE OTHER HAND, if there are any problems with Dad delivering child support, Mom pays no lawyer -- the DHS takes care of it for her.
It is VERY lopsided in favor of the mom, in other words. As for the father who doesn't spend time with the kids even when he has them ... if I hadn't opted to work at home, my husband would NEVER have been able to have any valuable visitation with his kids at all, because .... guess what .. he worked! In part to be able to pay enough child support to enable the ex-wife who left him, taking their two very young children with her, to be able to afford to work part-time so she could raise "her" (that's certainly what she called them) kids.
That's not to say there aren't lousy fathers/husbands out there who do dirt on the mothers of their kids. There are, and I know personally of a few. Yet I would BET MONEY that if you were able to get the real figures, women would outnumber men on that score about three to one, and it's been higher than that in my personal experience/observation. Our society enables it -- it not only refrains from any kind of chastizing of women who choose arbitrarily to divorce the fathers of their children or to get child support for kids they willingly had out of wedlock (why is it it's only MEN who are held morally responsible for that?), but our society today actually deifies single motherhood as some kind of marvelous accomplishment.
So, yeah, I think things pretty much are cut and dried most of the time: the men get screwed because the system is lopsided in favor of women.