[QUOTE=Leaper]
Hijack: I don’t think that’s the main reason at all. It’s the flawed thinking that “well, the woman actually gave birth to the kids, owned all the pain and discomfort. She not only has a stronger biological tie to the kids, but if she went through all that pain, she’d NEVER abuse them in any way. The dad? He can leave at any time, so of course, he has no real tie to the kid, emotional, biological, or otherwise.”
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I actually know a lawyer who is a family court judge (in his case it’s a part time job that pays around $15,000 a year; his real job is as a commercial litigator where he makes around 10x what he does in family court)–and his explanation to a mutual friend of ours over dinner (who was involved in a nasty divorce/custody battle himself) was that in the vast majority of the cases, the mother worked less than the father. One of the primary factors in determining who will be the custodial guardian is who was the primary caregiver for the child. If mom typically got off work at 3 to pick up the kids, do stuff with them for 2-3 hours after school, and make them dinner and etc, then dad gets home at 5 or 6; mom can usually be argued to have more involvement with the child.
It’s not necessarily fair to the father, because if he wasn’t working those extra hours, his children would enjoy a lesser standard of living. But what it ultimately comes down to is, custody decisions aren’t made based on what is fair to the mother or the father, it is based on what is in the best interests of the child. The general consensus is, children are better off staying with the parental figure who most prominently did the “parenting” on a day to day basis. Divorce is always going to be disruptive to a child’s upbringing, the idea is, disrupting their upbringing as little as possible by keeping them with their primary caregiver is the way to go.
Other things factor in, and my friend in family court thinks a big problem is like the one you describe, often times very legitimate reports of abuse (physical, emotional, towards the husband or children–or drug addictions and et cetera) too often can’t be brought to light in such a way as to affect the decision. Most family court judges would never want to send a child to an abusive mother if the father was an all around better guy, wasn’t abusive, didn’t abuse drugs and et cetera. But unfortunately it usually boils down to “he-said-she-said” situations, and unless you can find plausible evidence to support your claims that the mother is unfit (which is no easy thing to do), usually the court will have trouble making a decision based on something that is not really verifiable. The mother having a criminal record would definitely help your case.
The case of women who are abusive to their children and husbands is often downplayed significantly–it is out there. And it is less likely to become a matter of record because husbands are less likely to call the police on abusive wives than vice versa (reporting domestic violence in general is already shaky even when it is men abusing women.) I knew a guy whose wife gave him a scar when she broke a large, framed mirror over his head in front of their two children. One time during a verbal argument she put a cigarette out on his chest, another time she hit him in the face with a ceramic plate. Through it all, he never reported this to the police and never really defended himself. The breaking point for him was when the mother pushed his son down a flight of stairs because she was in a drunken rage and he’d made a mess–he called the police and she got in serious trouble and was only given extremely regulated visitation rights when the divorce and custody battle was all said and done.