I know about DV procedures. They do not just capriciously target somebody simply because they are a man, as you insinuated. They do not procede with no evidence or “no investigation.”
It is impossible for you to know for a fact everything about someone else’s relationship.
I have additional anecdotal evidence in favor of Scylla’s POV. This coming from a friend of my sisters, who told police that her husband had hit her. According to her, her mere assertion set in motion a chain of events - with attorneys and judges jumping into the act without her even aking for it - that doomed her husband. She was quite pleased with this outcome, but she did tell my sister that the deck was severely stacked against men in such situations.
Diogenes:
Despite your claim at authority, you know absolutely nothing about the incidents I’ve described, and the fact that you’d try to contradict me on the facts of the matter of which you are wholly and entirely ignorant is truly an idiotic thing to do.
After two years of hardships and trials, 2 arrests, restraining orders, spending his life savings on lawyers, he now has full custody of the children.
At the final custody hearing at which I was a character witness, the judge apparently berated her for her history of fabricating these incidents against him. She was denied anything but supervised visitation until and unless she completed a rehab.
She didn’t. She just abandoned her kids completely and left the state.
She wrecked his life for two years based on fraudulent accusations. Don’t tell me it didn’t fucking happen. I was there. You weren’t.
Won’t argue with this, because I don’t know if the allegations were true or not. But there’s a big difference between "she was able to persuade people for two years that she was truthful and he wasn’t , or at least she was credible enough to issue restraining orders and visitation restrictions while the investigation and/or hearings proceeded " and “there was no investigation, no trial and they never asked him what happened because he was a man”. Diogenes didn’t say your friend was guilty regarding the allegations. He said you only had the information your friend gave you- you saw one occasion when she struck him and later accused him of striking her, but aside from that, you’re going by what he told you. You didn’t see an investigation not happen - at most you know no one asked you anything. You don’t know that no one asked him what happened, unless you are at his side 24/7- you only know that that’s what he told you. The allegations clearly did lead to a trial of some sort, although not a criminal one.
BTW, the fact that the wrong conclusion was reached doesn’t mean that no investigation was done.
I have not tried to contradict you on facts, Scylla, I am challenging your assertion that your friend was targeted BECAUSE he was a man, or that it is standard procedure for women’s centers to persecute innocent men.
I don’t know what you do for a living, but if you read a post which completely misrepresented or distorted your’s or your wife’s profession I doubt that you would accept it at face value.
I don’t doubt that you believe everything that you’ve said about the case.
The past two posts seem to be missing the point. It makes no difference if people are biased against them because they are men. I don’t think this is the case. But I do think that the system as a whole is worked up into such a frenzy over the issue of wife abuse that it is biased against anyone who is charged with this crime. Of course all these people happen to be men. The fact that the motivation for destroying these people is not the very fact of them being men is not relevant.
Diogenes:
Bullshit. I made no such assertion (though I will below.)
I neither misrepresented or distorted nothing. I relayed what happened.
This women’s aid group was overzealous. I didn’t say there wasn’t an investigation. Quite the contrary he was arrested twice. He had a restraining order placed against him. What in effect happened though is that he was treated as if the accusation was factual, and he had to prove that it wasn’t.
And you’re damn straight he was targeted because he was a man. This was after all a women’s rescue organization. It specifically exists for no other purpose than to help women get away from abusive men.
They didn’t help him. Nobody helped him. The assumption was that the allegations were true (because he was a man.) This organization is not interested in the man’s rights, and made no effort to prove the case before the acted. They took her and the kids on nothing more than her word the very day she went to see them.
Everybody thought he must have done something, including me. The accusation was every bit as good as the fact, and the scary thing is how bad a job she did at lying and making this shit up and how well it worked in spite of that.
If she’d shown even a modicum of intelligence the whole thing would have worked, but she fucked up by continuing to make accusations against him that were provable false.
I don’t care what you or your wife do in Minnesota. It has absolutely zero bearing on what occured in this particular instance in Pennsylvania.
I misrepresented or distorted nothing, and that you’d make such an accusation based on total ignorance is just wrong.
Do men beat women? Do those women need and deserve help? Do many of these organizations do good and needed work? Are their good responsible and caring people involved?
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. and Yes.
That didn’t mean that this guy didn’t get screwed for two years simply because he was a man, and his ex-wife was able to take advantage of the system.
The fact is that an accusation of abuse against the man makes a custody or divorce battle much stronger for the woman, and the temptation to make that acusation simply for that value is very high because of the benefits it can and does yield.
It gets abused, and it’s outright discriminatory because the system is stacked against the man in such a case, and he has no such recourse.
Yes you did. Take a look.
This was the part of your story that sounded the most fishy to me
and so I responded.
Now you’re changing your story.
Where are my roll eyes? Here they are. :rolleyes:
Do you really not understand this, Diog?
Is it too difficult, for you?
The women’s rescue group did not investigate. They took her at her word.
This does not mean that no investigation of any kind ever occured.
This guy was later arrested. He has a restraining order placed against him. Presumably there was an investigation by the police.
I don’t know why I waste my time with you.
Diogenes, the quote above does not mean that the kids were taken away for six months AND that no investigation took place for that same six-month period.
Scylla, correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m interpreting the quote above as this: The kids were summarily removed from the man’s custody immediately subsequent to the woman’s complaint. There was no investigation prior to the summary removal of the children to verify the woman’s complaint. The man did not see his kids for six months.
No. As I say in my original post, the women contacted this women’s rescue agency and they hid her and the kids that day, based on nothing other than her story.
He did not see them for about 6 months from that point.
Scylla,
I misunderstood this, as well.
And it was easy enough to misunderstand as the only agency mentioned was the women’s rescue group, and they did nothing but provide a place to stay for the wife and the kids in her custody who she had physically with her. Your friend and his wife had equal claims to custody until a court said otherwise. The women’s rescue group did not actually take the kids away from your friend - the wife did. The group would have provided the wife shelter even if she didn’t have the kids with her, and had the kids been with your friend at the time, the rescue group wouldn’t have been able to take them. It seemed that you were complaining about the system as a whole, but instead you apparently expected the rescue group to investigate (the job of the police) and to decide that your friend should have custody (the court’s job). The pupose of a rescue group or shelter is only to help the victim. And they have to take the victim at her word in terms of providing shelter, because what else are they going to do? Send the real victims back to their abusers while the investigation goes on?
Would the person who has suffered centuries of oppression please step forward?
When you said “no investigation” Scylla, I assumed you meant the police, since obviously a woman’s shelter is not SUPPOSED to investigate or prosecute cases. They SHELTER. That’s it
How about John Kroll, Joseph Healy, or Emil Sanielevici?
Oh, wait. They were white guys. Three white guys who are dead now because of the racist violence of one man whose name I will not mention because he deserves no more fame. They’re dead at the hands of someone who actually told an eye-witness to the shooting ‘Don’t worry sister, I’m only here to kill crackers.’
The three of them are all dead now, and rather like Matthew Sheppard and James Byrd, they were killed based on nothing other than hatred for a single characterstic they were born with. But you remembered Sheppard and Byrd, right?
So why didn’t you remember Kroll, Healy and Sanielevici were? Why didn’t you remember that the three of them died needlessly when a mass murderer decided to go to a McDonald’s and a Burger King and execute people because the door he himself ripped from its hinges wasn’t fixed fast enough? Because they were white?
This is an example of parent and child rather than husband and wife, but it still proves the same point. First let me say that my daughter and I get along just fine now. This all happened when she was in her teens. Also I am not going to go into the underlying causes, unless someone shows it is relevant to the subject.
At age fifteen she got a job at a franchise eating establishment (not fast food). One evening she did not come home and we frantically hunted everywhere with no success. I knew that she was scheduled to work the next day (Saturday) and so we waited for the time for her to show up. Before going to the mall, I called the police and asked if an officer could accompany me in case she decided to make a scene. When we got there the policeman suggested that he go in alone and that we wait in the parking lot. Since I was not there I can only tell you what witnesses said happened. When she saw the policeman she ran into the freezer and started yelling and crying. She said that she was terrified of coming home with me. The police came and got my wife and I and we were split up and questioned. Her twin brother was there and he was also questioned and after several hours we were able to take her home.
That taught her a lesson and after that she would take off and we wouldn’t see her for several days. We worked with the sheriff’s department, but after awhile they were tired of hunting her down. The courts weren’t interested, since she hadn’t broken any laws*. She would get people to hide her and lie for her, because they were told that I beat her and otherwise abused her. She would use them and eventually get kicked out. I don’t know how many people apologized to me for believing her story. At age 18 she ran away and we just didn’t hunt her anymore. That is when she learned another lesson, home is where you can get love, support and oh yes, money.
Regarding the disagreement between Scylla and Diogenes the Cynic, I understand Diogenes taking the criticism of the social workers personally, when it was not meant that way. There are wonderful lawyers, doctors, dentists and flight attendants, but they get a bad rap from the few bad ones. I get upset when someone says something against flight attendants just as Diogenes the Cynic reacted to a statement about social workers. The public would be in bad trouble without the dedicated work of most underpaid social workers, but there are bad ones (at least in Florida) and they should not be excused because of the work the good ones are doing. Which gets back to the OP and the fact that if something is wrong, it is wrong no matter who does it.
I think it’s interesting that some people keep trying to insinuate white people are valued less. I don’t remember any posts suggesting that crimes against whites were less tragic than crimes against minorities. But perhaps to suggest minorties have rights puts some people on the defensive. “What about us?”
Also, I don’t remember anyone saying a single person suffered centuries of oppression (groups of people, Libertarian, groups of people.) I don’t know what point is made by changing the language to change the meaning and then asking a rhetorical question.
Michael Jordan is rich, I’m not. White folks have been discriminated against by black folks. Men have been beat by women. Etc. But these happen much less than the inverse.
I just wanted to point out my exception to the whole “white males are oppressors” thing. While it is certainly true that white males have held power and oppressed alot of people, it is also true that these oppressors were the very few at the top of the power structure. The HUGE majority of white males have been labor that served the same oppressors. Tough to oppress people from the bottom of a coal mine.
skutir: As I see it, the entire basis of this thread is your belief that white poeple are ‘special’ and have it so much better than everyone else that we couldn’t possibly have anything to complain about. Everyone gets to pity themselves as much as everyone else. J. Random Whitestraightguy has just as much of an opportunity for his life to suck as C. Random Blackdude or R. Random Gayman. Your race, religion, or sexual preference doesn’t and shouldn’t affect your right to harp about your circumstances.
You misunderstand, FDISK. The entire basis of this thread is that some white straight men feel oppressed specifically because they are straight white men, and I asked if it was justified. I said that I myself find such notions sickening. Find the place where I said “white poeple [sic] are ‘special’ and have it so much better than everyone else that we couldn’t possibly have anything to complain about.”
Why can’t a white guy hear something like, “white men are not oppressed as a group, and I’m sick of hearing that they are,” without inferring “white people are inferior,” “you are personally responsible for slavery,” and “you’ve got nothing to complain about”? Is that honestly what you hear? Do you really believe that, since white men are not oppressed as a group, somebody is trying to take away your free speech, drag you to jail for crimes you didn’t commit, and doesn’t think your life has value?
“Your race, religion, or sexual preference doesn’t and shouldn’t affect your right to harp” No, I’m not suggesting we throw out the first amendment.
Blivit – oppression (and power) is a complicated structure with many levels. You don’t have to have absolute power to be an oppressor.