Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Get Your Divorce Questions Answered

By Dennis Gac

The world has begun to grow extremely selfish these days. People do not think twice before contriving ways and means to destroy their elements of hate. Even their loved ones are not spared in this game of hate where they are used as pawns to win against enemies. It is more upsetting to see this being enacted between separated couples who blame each other for almost everything to let out their anger, frustration and hatred.

Mothers and fathers do not hesitate to make their children the centerpieces of such dirty mind games that they play against each other. To get what things that they want, like custody for example, mothers fling false allegations of child sexual abuse at the fathers. To counter it, men often come up with allegations of infidelity and the like. The worst thing about false allegations is, it is very difficult to prove them either wrong or right. The process of authenticating such claims often takes months and often years of legal procedure.

There are certain developments in judicial history that led to these eventualities. False allegations were encouraged after the passing of the Mondale Act of 1974 or the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA). This Act was designed with the intention of investigation and subsequent validation of child abuse claims. People looking for revenge were eager to use this as a tool to hurl false allegations at each other. Now, this does not mean to imply, that, during divorce proceedings all claims made a re deliberately untrue.

Instead, it is definitely true though a lot of these accusations do hold ground; a lot of them are made for the sake of it. Unfortunately, the fathers have to bear the bigger brunt in these cases. Using the maternal complex to win over juries, mothers have often made false allegations against the fathers, concerning alcoholism, sexual and physical abuse and so on. Under therefore mentioned Act, CPS workers are entrusted with the task of evaluating and proving such claims, and often professional pressure and fear of erroneous consequences have led them to pass biased decisions.

Two symptoms have been identified in false allegations being used in divorce proceedings. Firstly, the Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) in which the child is alienated from one parent by the other. Secondly, the Sexual Allegation In Divorce (SAID) whose consequences are highly erroneous. In this kind of a false allegation, one parent is accused by the other parent of sexually molesting the child. Quite obviously, it is the father who suffers the social outrage because in our society sexual molestation is considered to be one of the most severe and unforgiving crimes. Amidst all this mudslinging due to false allegations, it is the child who suffers most and eventually grows up as a traumatized individual with psychological ailments. The saddest part is that, caught up in their own little worlds, people forget the fact that they are stooping as low as using their own children to be the puppets in their dirty little games.

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