``...every one of my married and divorced men friends are held hostage to the whim of their wives or ex-wives by the fucking family law system...''
Could you elaborate? Joanna
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I don't know if I really want to. It's one of those things you need to see close up to understand its dynamics. None of what follows is my direct experience. It mainly comes from two different friends. One in a nightmare custody battle and the other from a lawyer who started off in family law and quit law entirely. It's aided by years of working with disabled in their battles with similar institutional systems in health, education, and welfare.
The family law system is just the tip of an iceberg. There are a whole variety of administrative justice systems that administer social policy: probation, juvenal justice, family law, welfare, health, INS. They are systems where a judge is the primary administrator or final arbiter backed up with various hierarchies of ancillary public institutions and officials. These systems function as the state enforcer of the social service industrial complex. They are the auxillary additions to the Castle of the prison industrial complex. The most basic of civil, legal and human rights are either completely missing or only marginally acknowledged for anyone trapped in these nightmares. The justification for this absence varies of course, but basically it comes down to the fact you have no rights because you don't need them or don't deserve them.
For example in family law, the rights of parents, particularly fathers are essentially irrelevant because what is at issue is the welfare of the child. What constitutes that welfare is determined by the court, not the parents. Whatever the bias of the court, is simply the bias of the court and its attending officials. The bias is heavily weighted to mothers in this particular county. But it varies from county to county---so there is no uniformity. The rule of law in this context amounts to the arbitrary and capricious, a tyranny.
While all that sounds fine if the father is a complete asshole, what makes it obnoxious is if he is not a bad guy or if his ex has convinced the court he is---and that is not very difficult to do. Most of the real bad guys just disappear and never deal with this particular system at all.
Mixed in with this bias, is another, that of class. Whoever is financially better off will win the day, if they want to. If they are well enough off, what they can offer is so much more materially beneficial to the theoretical welfare of the child, that they get more than a fair hearing. Plus they can afford a good lawyer or more accurately afford the billing for endless hours required, and more important they can afford to hire therapists, counselors, and various other professional specialists to say whatever. Part of the system is privatized, something along the lines of tow truck companies that impound your car. There is a whole cottage industry of family counseling, child therapists, doctors, social workers, mediators, advocates, and various and sundry para-professionals attached to the court and its systems. Don't let there be the slightest hint of drugs, sex, violence or any other anathema to the bourgeois body or you can kiss your kids goodbye.
If you are well connected you can have some secretary do the endless phone calls, call backs, reading, writing, appointment schedules, and so on. Like welfare it takes a full time administrative assistant to manage it all.
What that leaves are the guys who are not very well off, not very bright, and who do want their kids. That's the hook so they get screwed.
But the entire field of administrative law, or whatever you want to call these legal systems that enforce social policy really need a vast overhaul. They are oppressive in the extreme and can go ruinously wrong with very little or no redress. What makes them so bad is that they administer basic social relations and determine the scope of basic human liberties and whatever these systems determine is it, period.
I don't know, pick a section of The Trial or The Castle, or something from Foucault. Like that.
Now imagine a life completely determined by these systems in one form or another from childhood or adolescence to death. That is what a lot of the poor, working class, or underclass face. These are their primary contact with social justice in Amerika. So these systems function as primary organs of oppression and control. Anybody who can afford it or has enough education, or ironically has a sufficiently criminal mind can escape them. But a fair percentage of the male underclass spend their entire lives under administrative justice in one form or another. If it isn't probation, its family law court, or welfare, or the housing department, the cops, juvenal justice, rehab, night schools---whatever. If you are foreign born latino or asian, you can toss in a whole other level of the INS.
What it amounts to in existential terms is a permanent sentence of indeterminacy, like K's. A forever war with this department or that, in incomprehensible, incommensurable, inaccessible indeterminacy carried out to the point of a labyrinthine transcendence. After enough handling by officials and professionals, one starts to talk like them, and consider one's life from the third person, were theories and narratives for alternate scenarios stand in for living, because there is no living outside of these labyrinths.
Chuck Grimes