Article here. Excerpt:

'KJ Dell’Antonia, lead writer for the New York Times’ Motherlode, wants to know why moms are so much more likely than dads to know all the nitty-gritty details of their children’s lives.

And Bruce Feiler, another Times scribe, has the answer: It’s because mean mommies won’t relinquish control to their poor husbands! “The most significant predictor of dad involvement is the mom’s willingness to give up control and allow the father to do things a slightly different way,” Feiler writes.
...
Are we really going to blame so-called mean moms for the gender gap at home? To say nothing of a culture that presents sharing housework as emasculating (and, apparently, a boner-killer!) and asks CEOs and presidential hopefulsif it’s “responsible” to take on demanding, full-time work so soon after having a child? And really, Bruce Feiler? You’re comfortable giving men a pass on parenting because “When a mother criticizes her partner’s child-care efforts, it causes him to lose confidence and withdraw?” That’s the best you’ve got?'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Neither the Democratic nor the Republican versions of the Violence Against Women Act survived the last Congress. Now Democrats, headed by Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, vow immediate action on a new VAWA that does little to alter current flawed policies on domestic violence. The long hiatus in VAWA authorization represents a golden opportunity to get right what we’ve gotten wrong for so long.
 
VAWA’s detriments are too numerous to deal with here, but surely if we’re going to spend almost half a billion dollars to combat domestic violence, don’t we want a law that actually decreases its incidence?

The sad fact is that, almost 20 years after its first passage, VAWA proponents can point to no evidence of its success at doing so. True, late last year former NOW president Kim Gandy claimed that a recent report by the Department of Justice “showed conclusively” that VAWA has reduced rates of domestic violence. In fact, it’s done no such thing.'

Letter here.

'We need to protect all victims of intimate-partner violence, regardless of gender [“A second chance to protect abused women,” Opinion, Feb. 4].

The most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report on intimate-partner violence found that each year more men (5.36 million) than women (4.74 million) are victims of intimate-partner physical violence (Tables 4.1, 4.2 of full report) and psychological violence (20.5 vs. 16.5 million). Yet here in King County, there are no services for male victims. When I called I was referred to a program for male batterers.

Too often, men are told the programs only serve women, are accused of being the batterer or are laughed at. In one survey by Denise Hines & Emily Douglas, men who phoned the police were arrested more often than the women against whom they sought protection.

Story here. Excerpt:

'(Reuters) - A Florida judge has approved the adoption of a 22-month-old baby girl that will list three people as parents on her birth certificate -- a married lesbian couple and a gay man.

The decision ends a two-year paternity fight between the couple and a friend of the women who donated his sperm to father the child but later sought a larger role in the girl's life.

The ruling means the child's birth certificate will include a biological father and both women as parents in an unusual arrangement approved recently by a Miami-Dade Circuit Court judge.

The women, Maria Italiano, 43, and Cher Filippazzo, 38, had made several unsuccessful attempts to become parents using fertility clinics.
...
Under the judge's decision, the two women will have sole parental rights, although Gerina will be allowed to visit the child. He will not be expected to provide child support.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'Two male rape survivors who appear in "The Invisible War," an Oscar-nominated documentary about military sexual assaults, are criticizing the movie's brief focus on male victims as an ironic snub — and, in a fiery diatribe, one of the film's characters says the director "should be ashamed and embarrassed."

It's good to see that this stuff happens to high profile men too, and that it gets at least some attention. Quote:

'ABC News presenter Jeremy Fernandez has described the moment he was kicked off a Sydney bus after enduring verbal racial taunts earlier this morning.

After boarding a State Transit bus to drop his daughter off at preschool, Fernandez was the victim of racist abuse from a woman in her mid-30s with two young children of her own.

He said he endured 15 minutes of racial abuse - where the woman claimed she would drag Mr Fernandez off the bus if he didn't get off. But then it was the bus driver who eventually kicked Mr Fernandez off, claiming it was his fault for the altercation.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Tawana Brawley might finally have become a victim.

Not of former Dutchess County prosecutor Steve Pagones — whom she falsely accused of rape and who is now looking to collect on a defamation judgment he won against her. But of Al Sharpton and lawyers Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason, who used her for their own purposes and then left her hanging.

Brawley was a teen who told a lie, reportedly because she feared her abusive stepfather. But Sharpton, Maddox and Mason were adults. They ran with her story and made wild charges against Pagones and others, inflaming racial tensions for personal gain. Pagones, who lost his career and marriage over it, sued all four — and won.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'A bill to give equal custody rights to unwed fathers may be built on good intentions, but the potential for negative unintended consequences is unacceptably high. There are better ways to pursue the goal.

Prime sponsor Sen. Rick Murphy describes the bill, SB 1202, as an effort to address inequity.

“Absentee mothers can come back into the picture after years of absence, disrupt their children from a stable home with their father, and still have all the legal rights and be presumed by law to be the best custodian of the child,” Republican Murphy said by e-mail.

Ironically, that is a mirror image of the scenario envisioned by opponents of this bill. They say it will enable fathers to disrupt the lives of children, including those for whom they previously expressed no interest.

What’s more, advocates for victims of domestic violence say giving a man custody rights based solely on paternity could provide an abusive man with powerful legal leverage after a woman has fled a violent situation.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'True, one of the opponents of the bill, Democratic Sen. Karen Keiser, has been saying that girls are at risk of abuse if forced to tell parents about issues related to their sexuality. "There have been documented cases where young women have been abused, thrown out of the house and in rare cases actually killed," she reiterates to SW. But she says she's never put the blame specifically on dads.

"This is crazy," she says after hearing Backholm's rhetoric. "Young women have also been thrown out of the house by their mothers. It's not a gender issue."

Backholm's way of framing the argument might, however, be a clever way of tapping into the dads' rights movement, which has a host of grievances that spark ardent and bitter feelings, including the way fathers are treated in family court.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'(CBS) EUGENE, Ore. - An Oregon man is suing the U.S. Government and a female IRS agent he alleges pressured him into sex, by threatening a tax penalty.

Vincent Burroughs, of Fall Creek, Ore., says the harassing relationship began in August of 2011 when Dora Abrahamson, an agent with the Internal Revenue Service, called him and said he would be audited, CBS affiliate KVAL reports.

Burroughs says he didn't know Abrahamson, and that he hadn't met her before those calls - nor had he heard that he was being audited by the IRS.

"She was sending me texts that she wanted to come out, give me massages because she needed to help me relax," Burroughs said in a phone interview with KVAL News.
...
The lawsuit states: "She said that she could impose no penalty, or a 40% penalty, and that if he would give her what she wanted, she would give him what she needed."

Story here. Excerpt:

'A nanny hired by one Staten Island family ended up behind bars after the parents say they caught her abusing their infant.

Shocking video shows Mamura Nasirova, 52, repeatedly slapping a 5-month-old baby she was hired to take care of, police said.

Officials say Nasirova repeatedly hit the baby girl on her face and legs with an open hand and shook her, leaving the infant crying and red.

The video was recorded by a so-called "nanny cam" hidden inside a carbon monoxide detector inside the family's Staten Island home. When her parents saw what was going on, they ran home and called police.
...
When cops showed up to arrest Nasirova a week later, they say she refused to be handcuffed.

Nasirova is facing charges of endangering the welfare of a child and resisting arrest. She is due back in court Friday February 8.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'An end to permanent alimony certainly appears more plausible when it makes headlines in the Personal Finance section of U.S. News: Money. Geoff Williams, who has authored several articles about the finances of divorce, addresses how this is a holdover from a time when women were taken care of by their husbands.

In “Taking the ‘Permanent’ Out of Permanent Alimony” he states, “Permanent alimony was created in the days when women didn't go to college and rarely had careers, instead tending to the kids and household. Then it was sorely needed. Now, opponents argue, those reasons for its being are long past.”'

The Senate is expected to vote on VAWA today. Let's use these last moments to express our views to our lawmakers. 
 
http://www.saveservices.org/pvra/vawa-reform-principles

You can also find your senators here.
 
If you don't call, they'll never know what you want.

Teri Stoddard, Program Director
Stop Abusive and Violent Environments   
www.saveservices.org

Article here. Excerpt:

'The Chief Constable of the new Scottish single police force has suggested that men who are convicted of domestic violence while drunk should be banned from drinking alcohol.

I wondered what Lib Dem Voice readers thought of this proposal. In England, Drinking Banning Orders have been around for 7 years but the guidance on their use suggests that they may not be appropriate if an individual is subject to domestic violence proceedings.

I’d be interested to see if anyone has any knowledge of how these orders work in practice, and whether they are effective in reducing offending. Are they too illiberal, or are they liberating for potential victims?'

Link here. Excerpt:

'February 6th marks the tenth observance of the International Day of Zero Tolerance to Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C), an internationally recognized day to foster awareness of the devastating effects of FGM/C and renew the call for the abandonment of this harmful traditional practice. FGM/C is a practice that ranges from nicking to total removal of the external female genitalia. Some 140 million women around the world have undergone this brutal procedure and three million girls are at risk every year.