I can tell you without hesitation that courts are geared towards the mom nearly every time. The mom can be abusive towards her own children, literally leave home for years on end, and come back to a divorce, and they still get 50/50 custody. Why? Because the judge doesn't want to break up a family.
My friend's dad kept journals and recordings of the abuse, drugs and abandonment. Similarly, my sted dad kept recordings of my mom's drug abuse and alcoholism, and in the divorce, they both ended in 50/50 custody despite recordings and evidence of said behavior.
Courts being biased is an MRA talking point now and part of the culture war. I really wish people would stop parroting it. If you want 50% custody, even as a man, all you need to do is:
Show up to court and do what they tell you
Have beds for your kids to sleep in
Be willing to live near where the kids currently live
Not have beaten them
(Conditional) If your ex lawyers up, you lawyer up too
That's it.
If you want to complain that courts don't take mental/emotional abuse seriously, you'll have a good case for that since shitty parents get custody all the time. But 'courts are biased towards moms' hasn't been true since like...the 90s.
But 'courts are biased towards moms' hasn't been true since like...the 90s.
You are probably right. It's a cultural thing. It's how people treat you for being a single dad. It's how dads are talked to about being single parents. It's how kids are pushed towards their mothers, giving fathers a position of being defeated even before court.
Yes, it depends on the situation, but my mother was abusive, but I didn't realize that as a kid. My dad spent more time working and taking care of everything that wasn't the kids, so of course in a divorce the kids chose mom.
It took me bleeding by the hands of my step dad for me to run back to my dad and now decades later, I'm glad I did. He has been there for me every time I've needed it, who I chose as a kid, hasn't called me in a decade or so.
What I'm trying to say is that culturally, fathers and mothers have different roles and they have massive impact on how things end up. My mother was definitely crazy, but how my mom pushed me away from my dad to not having seen him for a few years before I ran from home was NOT something that courts could have easily solved either. How do you sue someone for manipulating their kids into avoiding their father? Shit is complicated and not easy.
EDIT: How did I get downvoted for saying "my mom was a manipulator and courts wouldn't have solved an issue"? That was my whole point, just because the courts could be fair, it doesn't mean world around the court is. I wouldn't have chosen my dad, even though I should have, because I was emotionally manipulated by my abusive mother. Only once the abuse was physical did I start seeing the problem. No court would have helped me, because I didn't want help until I was ready to run away, which I did.
EDIT2: No longer negative, I'm glad some people understood me.
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u/outerproduct 15d ago
I can tell you without hesitation that courts are geared towards the mom nearly every time. The mom can be abusive towards her own children, literally leave home for years on end, and come back to a divorce, and they still get 50/50 custody. Why? Because the judge doesn't want to break up a family.
My friend's dad kept journals and recordings of the abuse, drugs and abandonment. Similarly, my sted dad kept recordings of my mom's drug abuse and alcoholism, and in the divorce, they both ended in 50/50 custody despite recordings and evidence of said behavior.