The huge majority of men who do not pay their child support are either (1) unemployed, (2) in prison, or (3) dead - literally. It is impossible, of course, to collect child support from any of these men, as they are unable to pay. Florida discovered this when they spend more than $4 million and collected a paltry couple of hundred thousand - proof positive that you can't enforce payment in the event that the obligor simply doesn't have the money - or isn't even breathing.

This myth that "deadbeat dads are common" is the fruit of often-cited Census data on child support compliance - data that is fatally flawed. The Census Bureau asked only custodial parents if they were paid in full and on time, and never cross-checked any of their information - nor did they ask the non-custodial parent! Needless to say, asking the recipient alone is akin to asking the fox to guard the henhouse. (Source: US Census Bureau)

WOMEN are in fact the majority of domestic abusers. The percentage is not very different - 55 to 45% according to the most credible and recent studies in both the US and Australia - but it is a fact. Further, controlling for the severity of violence (ie: hit with hand, used weapon, threw object, etc) women still out-abuse men by a small percentage. Yet virtually all domestic violence "programs" and laws suggest - if not outright state - that women simply don't perpetrate any domestic violence.

The "dirty little secret" in all of this is that the highest incidence of domestic violence is among lesbian couples. By definition there isn't a man in those households. If men were in fact the perpetrators of most domestic violence we would expect to see virtually no violence in lesbian households. Rather, on a percentage-of-household basis, they account for the largest percentage of such incidents among all household compositions.

Children are most likely to be physically abused by their mothers, and are more than twice as likely to be killed by their mothers than their biological fathers. They are most likely to be abused sexually by their stepfathers or mother's boyfriends - men who were invited into their home by their mothers! We could eliminate the majority of sexual abuse of children by refusing to allow a child to reside in his mother's home if she has a live-in lover or remarries. (Source: US Department of Health and Human Services)

However, unlike many "pressure groups" we do not advocate separating kids from their biological parents under any circumstance unless it can be proven that they are in actual danger of harm.

Even if you ask mothers how often this happens, only 12 percent attempt to claim that their ex-husbands voluntarily refuse to visit and spend time with their children. If you ask fathers, only three percent claim that they voluntarily miss time they should have with their children. In fact, a quarter of mothers admit they interfere with or deny entirely the children's father's access to their kids!

The truth is that according to a study done by Sanford Braver, PhD (Arizona State University) only one in six fathers get the custodial arrangements they wanted. A study done by Stanford University in the late 1980s showed the same thing - close to 70% of fathers wanted either joint or sole physical custody.

Statistically speaking, fathers don't abandon their children - they are forced out following divorce by the mothers of those children, usually without justification or legally-relavent cause.

Indeed, even today we see people cite this book as "proof" that child support awards are too infrequently collected and too small to begin with. Not one major media outlet has paraded the truth about this "study" - that is was and is patently incorrect both in its methodology and simple command of mathematics.

Not one state in the US requires recipients of child support to actually prove that the amounts received are 1) necessary to meet the children's needs or 2) are actually spent in the children. A number of states, in fact, actually document in their laws that part of the purpose of child support is to protect the standard of living of the custodial parent - almost always the mother - which would have existed had the divorce not taken place. If child support were actually for the children then a payer would be able to demand documentation that 1) the amount paid was actually necessary for the children's needs, and 2) was actually spent exclusively on the children.

In fact, one may reasonably wonder just what "child support" is really for, especially in the case where parents have joint physical custody. In most states, including Illinois, the presence of Joint Custody has very little, if any, impact on the award of child support - even though such practices appear to fly in the face of the statutes as written in many of these situations.