The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

PRINTDISCUSS

• « Prev | Main | Next »

  
  

  Who Gets Custody More Often, Mothers or Fathers?

  Well, Meghan, I didn't mean to bludgeon you about Clark What's-His-Name. Meanwhile, I'm still mucking around trying to find out who gets custody more often. I've got queries out to some researchers and will post here when I get answers. Until then, here's a commentary published by Sandra Kobrin in Women's eNews last year. She has the same impression that I have: that in the 1950s and 1960s, women almost automatically got custody, but now—when custody is contested—the pendulum has swung the other way. She mentions studies that show that, especially if the mothers were battered, fathers get custody and quotes researchers who believe that's true not just when mothers were battered. She says, for instance, that a 2004 Williamsburg, Va., American Judges Association study shows that battered women lose contested custody cases 70 percent of the time. I will look for the study. Her point is that most state legislation requires judges to favor joint custody arrangements; when that's not possible, judges are instructed to favor the parent who is most "friendly" to joint custody. That obviously puts a battered woman in a bad spot: If she seems desperate to keep her kids away from a batterer or abuser, she's going to be perceived as pretty durn unfriendly to joint custody.

  I don't know how this holds up beyond domestic violence situations. More stats when I find them. 

  Published Thursday, August 07, 2008 6:05 PM by E.J. Graff

  Filed under: motherhood, custody, fathers, domestic violence

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.