Rising Misogyny

Listening to BC's authoritarian government, one can hear a rise in contempt and misogyny, a common trait for politicians who focus exclusively on money, real estate and commerce. What a sad day for BC, a once proud, progressive society. Great coverage.

presumption?

The presumption that children are "property" would seem to be indicative of a rather outdated mindset...
And the fact that women have been in the past more often awarded custody (not ownership) than men is evidence of the "anti-male", "extreme gender bias" of the organization? Seems to me it would likely show the failure of judges (the great majority male) to acknowledge new realities.

I can only concur that BC is a bad place to be a woman, but its not much fun on the Tyee, either. The hatred that spews forth whenever one attempts to address an issue of women is quite amazing. As G West has pointed out, misogyny is one thing, and personal attacks are quite another.

And of course, against the 'rules' here.

Yes Vivian, presumption..

It is the report card that labelled the children as possessed of women, not me. If it had suggested they are individuals produced of both parents, no comment would have been made.

I merely pointed out a pervasive bias against men receiving equal parenting, and a HoC bill designed to equalize it.

I see no personal attacks in this thread, save your suggestion of hatred. Go deal with those personal attacks where they occur.

page 9 of the report...

That you are quoting, jwstewart, reads thusly:

"Private family law services are out of range of many women: for instance, while the average two day civil trial in BC cost $38,130.00 in 2008, a female lone parent family earns an average of $37,700.00 per year in BC (compared to a male lone parent family that earns $55,300.00.) Yet it is civil legal aid, particularly family law services that women most often seek to access, so the drastic cuts to family law legal aid have a particular and disproportionate effect on women and their children."
Elsewhere in the report, most of the references are to 'parents'.

In case I didn't make it clear, I was also responding to G West.
And please be advised that my name - as in actual name, not 'handle' - is VivianLea, and I prefer to be adressed that way.

A matter of perspective

Gender equality, can somebody please give me a definition? I'm beginning to believe that everyone has their own interpretation.

All of the issues in this article need improvement for both sexes. Breaking it down into a battle of the sexes will accomplish absolutely nothing. Once sympathetic men are becoming more and more frustrated with this so called "womans rights" movement because of the constant gender specific framing of issues that are rellevant to both sexes.

Down the rabbit hole.....

"Brewin said de Jong and Corrigan are both correct. "Funding to the Legal Services Society has not been cut," she said. "Services to families that need legal aid have been cut . . . The funding wasn't cut but the services were."

That is my favourite quote of the year.

What Brewin says is entirely true....and reveals so well the crazy political syntax of these times we are forced to decipher in order to get at the truth.

Thanks for including that information in this article.... and I know this may be off-topic, though at heart I don't think it really is, but I would just like to post this:

Note to our Loyal Opposition:

Every time you ask a question in Question Period in the BC legislature about cuts to funding, you get the same coy diversionary reply by the BC Liberals government as revealed in the quote above - that they have actually increased funding.

I have heard this same question.... and the same sly answer chirped back by the BC Liberals over and over and over again -

As the Opposition your job is to expose the devious escape artistry tactics behind that so-called answer by the government. Problem is, you never follow-up your question with the next obvious one:

If the services are being cut, ask them where then EXACTLY, is the increased funding going?

Who is profiting from it?

Because services are both decreasing..... and entirely disappearing.

Families can't access them.

The citizens of this province who paid their taxes in good faith for these vital social services find the cupboard is bare.... or locked when they try to access them.

The funding is not going to services or to the people who need them (as the quote from the article above clearly reveals). So is the funding going to the bureaucracy, to CEO salary increases, severance pay, perks and expenses.... to who, what, when and where?

Please ask who is actually getting the increased funding because it is not going to fund services.

Maybe you could just quote from the article above.

Failing Grade?

"Failing grades were given for the province's failure to fully investigate the cases of missing and murdered aboriginal girls.................."

Hmmm. Anyone in LEAF even remotely qualified to assess a criminal investigation or is that just opinionated hogwash?

LEAF

The membership is almost exclusively female lawyers - they come from all kinds of firms and do all sorts of legal work.

Here's a little more information for you:

http://www.westcoastleaf.org/userfiles/file/LEAFlet-sep2008.pdf

perspective? exactly

Smart activists always delve into specifics, as LEAF has done here, looking at how and why BC legislation is consistently having a negative on women.

This doesn't mean there aren't other perspectives and sectors of society that need specific attention.

Forest workers, largely male, fisheries workers, too, have faced many crises that warranted specific attention to their experience, and how policies and laws have impacted on them, for example.

Other groups--such as recent immigrants may have other specific needs too. Homeless people, of course.

Drawing out this information about how law, policy and prejudice affects these people is reasonable and useful, not an attack on anyone else.

Great article. And great campaign LEAF!

:) Smile for GWest

Thanks for that comment- I was scared of what I would find on this thread.... but so far so good!

Perspectives indeed

IMO, regardless of how much legal support a woman has, in Court, the cards are stacked againt males.

On the one hand, ultra conservative judges seking to protect "family values" and the marriage contract, impose ruinous alimony and child support payments, while routinely awarding child cusstody to women.

And then there are those other judges who do the same, but this time favouring women for ideological reasons.

To be sure, there are judges who endeavor to find a just decision, but having one of these judges asigned to one's case involves the chanciness of a game of roulette - Russian roulette.

If simple justice could be seen to be a routine ocurrence in our Courts, the arguments above would disappear overnight.

ME2 From what I have seen for over 30 years of my adult life

and have seen a fair number of my friends undergo divorce and child custody proceedings, your perspective is about what mine is.

Alimony and child support

Are generally set according to very specific guidelines...here are the rules:

http://www.fmep.gov.bc.ca/resources/maintenance-calculator/

GWest, you missed the "rules" of something paramountly important

Sharing of custody, and visitation rights.

Dr Alexander

Dr Alexander - in a nutshell, activists have succeeded in persuading decision-makers that child support and custody/visitation are two entirely separate issues, over and above the evidence-based caveats of the social policy professionals. In other words, it’s deeply politicized and inextricable from the vote-getting strategies of political parties (and quite frankly, what politician wants to jeopardize the sought-after female vote with such an explosive and polarizing issue?). Just look at how much resistance there was to the gentlest and most soft-peddled introduction of joint-parenting principles into the mediation of family break-ups. It's a field of debate where feminist advocates enjoy an uncontested monopoly on the discourse. Fathers' Rights groups are dismissed and ignored with little consequence or public reaction, and there's nothing analogous to the Womynz Studeez departments in academia to help leverage a more even-handed discussion of all the issues involved. Plus, there's an incentive for the state to recoup social-welfare costs by targeting payments, and no counter-balancing incentive to tackle the family law racket to improve custody decisions and enable proper follow-through and accountability regarding fathers' visitation rights.

nightbloom

From what I have seen over the years... family law racket is about right.

Justice for the wealthy, injustice for women & children

With the dismantling of universal legal aide, women and children have been dropped from the agenda like a rock. The details are a bit complicated but ultimately not relevant: in BC, we have witnessed the dismantling access to the courts that women and children once had, to a miserly, broken down system of "N" "O" spells NO.

It is hard to envisage a more potent symbol. Reading the history of the destruction of legal aide perfectly summarizes the nasty tone of BC's elite. Dismantled precisely because it was creating a sea change in promoting equality for women and children. Male chauvinists can sleep well tonight, for some of their greatest wishes have come true.

Unless you're one of a tiny minority (wealthy women), the rest of the families have NO CHANCE of getting represented in court. Most wealth is owned by men, and they'll do just fine. Poor men will suffer, but not as much, as often violence and intimidation will be used in lieu of the courts.

How far BC has fallen. A real tragedy.

Dr Alexander

Dr Alexander, correct me if I'm wrong but you seem to be arguing out of both sides of your mouth. Why did you note the ommission of custody and visitation rights from the agenda, and then endorse the status quo on these issues? Perhaps I've misunderstood. Do you actually believe the systemic anti-male discrimiation in family law has been a good thing for the children involved? I know that the customary answer to this question is to dredge up a catalogue of abusive scenarios, but that doesn't accurately characterize most men caught in this predicament. Although family law *is* getting better (despite resistance from women's rights advocates), I'd be interested in hearing your justification for endorsing the "status quo ante bellum" on this particular issue. What non-anecdotal evidence do you have to support systemic discrimination against men when it comes to child custody and visitation?

scared...

Now would be the time, Fii, to say that if we allow 'them' to scare us away, 'they ' win...

Hehe- oh don't worry, as

Hehe- oh don't worry, as "scared" as I get... which isn't very :)

I see the usual suspects are off and ranting already about feminazis and womyns advocates, when the point is:
"Lack of childcare makes it hard for many women to find and keep jobs, she said. And women are more likely than men to be poor, she said. "We have the highest poverty rate in Canada here in B.C. and women are hit hard by that."

If men are being fleeced through alimony payments why are single mothers still the poorest of the poor in BC? Yes, for some men it is heartbreaking to get less/no custody, for others it may make little difference- not the point. The point is, cuts to programs are hurting low-income women and children.

Blind justice?

Aw gee, Nightbloom, I'm a bit disappointed that Your Holiness doesn't read my posts, since I always read yours - just to find out how the Moral Majority is doing these days.

I defer to GWest re the formula for child support. I was unaware that such existed.

Do similar formulas or conventions exist re child custody, alimony or distribution of assets? Could judicial bias enter into those cases?

In my one experience in Court - a child custody case - upon entering the courtroom, the judge picked up the file, glanced at it very briefly, and said "Hmmm, a chiid custody case. The child is a 5 years old girl, and a 5 year old girl should be with her mother"..."Mr (my lawyer)", "Why are we hearing this case?"

After my lawyer replied, I asked him if those words would be in the trancript.He told me that once the judge entered the room, eveything he says is recorded. I lost the custody, and the trancript omitted the judge's statement, and also changed the fact that he had throughout the hearing called my wife's lawyer by her first name and my lawyer by his last name.

Since those days, I've never believed for a moment that justice is blind.

The only really outrageous thing

about this is, that we discuss totally on the basis of whom among the disgruntled adults have the greater grievance! The victims in a broken family are the children, and everything that follows should focus on their needs and their welfare 100%. Sailing the family ship onto the rocks was already a crime, and discussing family matters and how to deal with the wreckage in any other terms than such as would put the children first and center, simply compounds the felony.

ME2

Must have been quite a while ago...things are really much better now.

In fact, I know of several law firms where the principals (many of them ladies who also belong to LEAF) pride themselves on the cases where they've gotten excellent child support and custody arrangements for men whose wives are working outside the home.

That kind of thing, and the increasing use of mediation, has been making a big improvement in the situation for children whose parents' inability to compromise in the face of marriage breakdown puts the young people in jeopardy.

This area of the law is never going to be perfect - in fact, the more emphasis on following the guidelines and staying the hell away from the courts altogether, the better.

dorothy, you make and important and essential observation.

The tendency to turn these things into a competition is deadly - and lawyers and courts are, at bottom, all about competition.

difficult times

Good points GWest. I admit to the possibility of having outdated information.

And Dorothy's comment is spot on.

However, the tying of ill-treatment of women re deficient social progams to gender bias is simply wrong. Rather it is due to the delibeate anti-Socialsm bias of Right-wing legislators.

These are difficult times for relationhips as we try to work out expectations of women versus those who would see them barefoot and pregnant, confined to the kitchen.

The likelyhood is that men and women are equally dissatisfied with the present situation, while both are well aware there is no equitable solution to be found in retuning to the "old ways".

Actually I had noticed it on

Actually I had noticed it on Cboo44's post, not ME2's... but anyway, I suppose what it really comes down to is the lack of a decent minimum living wage. A $6.50 training wage and $8 minimum?! Disgusting. I'm starting to notice hourly rates in my field (ESL) coming DOWN- not even remaining stagnant- due to the warped perception that $20plus an hour, if it's more than double the minimum, hey- must be really good money, and people are desperate for work now so "let's see what we can get away with".

So at least in regards to these points:
"The reviewers gave the province 'D's for its housing system, the weakness of its social assistance program and for access to childcare", if women (and men) were making enough to live on there would be less need for social housing, social assistance, etc. to begin with.