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Sweden seems like a progressive country to the uninformed. It has parental leave policies for both genders. While mothers have always availed themselves of such leave, fathers seemed reluctant. So the parental leave laws have changed over time to encourage fathers to take time off of work after the birth of a baby. At present, two months of the 390 leave days allocated for parents must be used by the father or they are lost.

(from Why it’s time to reimagine masculinity at work and at home.)

Consider contemporary family life in Sweden. In the past, new parents split 390 days of paid leave however they liked—monthly, weekly, daily, and even hourly. Women used far more of it than men. But today, new fathers no longer rush back to work, leaving the mother to raise little Sven all by herself. The reason for the change? Smart public policy.

In 1995, Sweden passed a simple but revolutionary law: couples would lose one month of leave unless the father was the one who took it. A second use-it-or-lose-it month was added in 2002, and now more than 80 percent of Swedish fathers take four months off for the birth of a new child, up from 4 percent a decade ago. And a full 41 percent of companies now formally encourage fathers to go on parental leave, up from only 2 percent in 1993. Simply put, men are expected to work less and father more.

By altering the roles of the Swedish father and the Swedish worker, Sweden’s paternity-leave legislation has, in turn, rewritten the rules for Swedish men (and, by extension, women). “Swedish dads of my generation and younger have been raised to feel competent at child-rearing,” writes Slate’s Nathan Hegedus, an American who experienced the system firsthand. “They simply expect to do it, just as their wives and partners expect it of them.” If a man refuses time at home with the kids, he faces questions from friends, family, and, yes, other guys. Policy changes produced personal changes—and then, slowly but surely, society changed as well.

On the surface, this sounds quite progressive. The United States lacks similar leave policies and American men often feel discouraged from taking time off from work for family matters. They fear they will be looked down upon, ridiculed, or passed over for promotions if they take more than a short time away from work for a new baby.

But the reality is that Sweden’s progressiveness is merely a veneer over a solid core of the same false feminist male-bashing that predominates in the Western world. Children in Sweden, you see, are treated as property of the mother. If the mother doesn’t want to share, she simply starts making false abuse allegations. No proof is required, obviously a mad mom’s word is more reliable than all the evidence in the world. She will be quickly and easily rewarded with sole custody, marginalizing the father to no more a few days per month with the children.

Many fathers quickly see even this small amount of contacted whittled down to just a few hours of supervised visitation, supervised because obviously fathers cannot be trusted with children if the mother says so. In Sweden, as in the United States, men are guilty upon accusation and must struggle to prove themselves innocent, a task which is effectively impossible in many cases. After all, if you are a man who was accused of some crime that nobody else saw and there is no evidence of it occurring or not occurring, how are you to prove that you didn’t do it when a mom says you did? You can’t, so her lies win.

If a father fights for equal child custody, Swedes will consider him a brute. If he is beaten senseless by false accusations from a malicious mom, his life in tatters, he will suffer in many ways including by very limited contact with his children. Then Swedes will consider him a deadbeat. Being a father in Sweden is a losing proposition, the only chance of success is at the whim of a woman. But if she changes her mind, for any reason — her affair, her drug abuse problem, etc. — the father is instantly a degenerate who should be banned from seeing the children without the watchful eyes of the state closely monitoring his every move.

This is no different, really, than the United States and many other nations in which men are not even second-class citizens in all matters involving families and children. Not only is this extremely unfair, it contributes to a wide range of social problems including gender conflict, parental alienation child abuse, and harming children’s educational attainment and mental health.

To their credit, many women understand these issues very well and fully support equal rights. Some of them are strident enough about it to actively support both the father’s rights movement and going to significant effort to ensure their own ex-partners stay involved in their children’s lives. Unfortunately, there are more than a few naysayers remaining. Some of them are quite intent on not only denying equal rights but going so far as to even any messages that advocate for changes they do not approve.

Amnesty International Shows Its Sexist Bias

A lot of children in Sweden are upset about deprivation of access to a loving parent, generally their fathers. Four Swedish high school students, Sara Sivesson, Jerry Wallén, Sandra Atas, and Oskar Krantz, set out to expose Sweden’s human rights crimes against children and fathers to the world. They produced a video which they submitted to Amnesty International for a human rights video contest. Their video explains what happens to so many Swedish fathers who long to spend time with their children but who are prevented from doing so by the typical false feminist tool of false accusations.

The video made it to the finalist stage. The students were of course very excited by this.

But then a woman’s violence organization in Uppsala reportedly demanded that Amnesty International remove the video from the competition and its website.
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Statistics from many studies in the last few decades show that domestic violence is not a gender issue. Harvard Medical School and the US Centers for Disease Control studied 11,000 men and women ages 18-28 and found 24% of heterosexual relationships have had violence in them. Half of these relationships experience reciprocal violence, meaning that both partners have physically assaulted each other. Of the other half, women committed more than 70% of the non-reciprocal violence and were more likely to hit first in the reciprocal violence. Both sexes suffered significant injuries.

Domestic violence is typically an issue of control and learned abusive behaviors stemming from childhood. Nobody deserves to be abused, but contrary to popular misinformed opinion, it is clear that both genders are often responsible for abuse. Yet men continue to be wrongly blamed as nearly always being the abusers.

The result of this bias is that domestic violence problems do not get resolved. The false feminist fringe’s male-bashing propaganda seems to claim that the only good man is a dead man, or perhaps one who obeys and subordinates himself to a dominant woman. It turns out that physical violence often results from attempts to wrongly control another person. While abusers certainly use physical violence to control, victims also use it to resist control. Children in the home suffer and may learn to become abusers themselves, and these future abusers are likely to attack both genders.

Police seldom believe male victims of DV. They often allow the female perps to go right on abusing. It’s not uncommon for them to arrest the male victim because they refuse to believe that women can be violent. Some police departments even have “must arrest someone” orders for DV calls, so if the cops can’t figure out what happened, by default they arrest the man.
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The US Census Department revealed that marriage rates in 2009 were the lowest in more than 100 years. While they attribute it to the economy, those of us who have seen what it is like to have children and marital conflict in the US know that the government’s anti-family and victim-persecuting policies are major disincentives to marrying.

Given the lack of psychological education for children, many suffer badly from child abuse with no help coping. Many of these abused kids go on to become abusers themselves.

Few know how to identify these abusive adults until after they marry them and discover they are being emotionally, verbally, and sometimes physically abused on a frequent basis. It is far too easy to inadvertently marry a sociopath.

Even when you figure out you have married an abusive person, the courts will often, perhaps even usually, not protect you from these people. Instead, they take the abuser’s side and help them commit even more abuses. “Take the kids, take the house, it’s your reward for terrorizing your spouse” is the common refrain of the black-robed bandits in American family law courts.

Is it any wonder why more and more people are wondering whether marriage in America is even safe any more?

Further Reading

Donald Bren’s $3 to 9 Million in Child Support Enough, Says Jury

Escaping Sociopathic Abuse Almost Impossible When Children Are Involved

American Judicial Terrorism May Lead to Widespread Violence

Stopping Parental Alienation Requires Family Court Reforms

Census data: Weddings in 2009 at record low level

The US Senate is at its typical deceitful antics again. Senators are once again debating more repressive legislation, this time in the form of the Food Safety Accountability Act of 2010. This legislation is designed in part to silence those who cite research on foods and supplements that have beneficial effects to health. The main sponsor of the legislation, Senator Patrick Leahy (Democrat from Vermont), claims he’s trying to protect Americans from unsafe contaminants in foods and supplements. But the legislation is so defective that, if passed, it will almost certainly be used by the FDA to continue to attack, persecute, and shut down companies and organizations that publish citations of scientific research that shows their food and supplement products are beneficial.

If after reading this article you are persuaded that this new legislation has some problems and should not pass in its present form, please take action by contacting your Senators to oppose the bill. It takes just a couple of minutes to do this.

FDA Happy to Sacrifice Your Health, Life, and Freedom for Its Money and Power

Why does the FDA want to silence these people? Simple, they are a threat to its income and influence.

Innovative food and supplement companies sell a wide variety of highly beneficial products that often out-perform expensive and side-effect laden drugs at a fraction of the cost. The FDA would rather have you buying the latest and greatest statin drug to lower your LDL cholesterol, not eating healthy foods and taking cheap and effective supplements like niacin, plant sterols, red yeast rice, and fiber supplements that all have scientific backing for lowering LDL cholesterol without the dangerous side effects of statins.

Why does the FDA prefer statins? Again, follow the money. Statin makers are big pharmaceutical companies. They pay billions in fees to the FDA to approve these drugs. The FDA is addicted to these fees. While the drug companies “complain” about the high fees, they are actually very happy to participate in this plot because it enables them to introduce pricey new products every year, many of which work not much differently from the dozens of similar products already on the market, and keep smaller competitors from cutting into their markets. The FDA is a very good business partner in that it helps create drug monopolies and destroy any competition that may arrive before it can take too big a cut out of big pharma and FDA profits.

Small companies can’t afford $1 billion plus drug approval processes that take several years, even more than a decade, to get a drug approved. So many small companies that want to offer consumers products to help solve their health problems have turned to foods and supplements as the only route available to them.
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A few weeks back, we published an announcement about the Canadian Symposium for Parental Alienation Syndrome. The regular registration fee is $195 per person. However, ACFC (American Coalition for Fathers and Children) supporters can get a discounted rate of $150 and bring along a second person (new spouse, friend, grandparent, etc.) to the conference for free. Here’s the full announcement from ACFC:
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We recently received notice that the American Coalition for Fathers and Children is working on putting together graphics and slogans for signs, banner, brochures, flyers, and other literature to support its goals of enacting shared parenting legislation and reform of child support and domestic violence laws across the United States. They are putting together working groups to create this content and have some people with professional backgrounds in graphic design already on board. They would like to get more skilled volunteers involved. They are also seeking ideas to develop into signs and other materials to help parental rights and family law reform groups get their messages out to the general public.

We’ve seen some of the signs and banners similar groups have created (California Coalition for Families and Children comes to mind) and would like to encourage them to share their work and ideas with ACFC. ACFC aims to build a library of such content and share it with like-minded groups and individuals.
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California billionaire Donald Bren had two children with former girlfriend Jennifer McKay Gold. They had a 13 year long affair, but they never married and he had little involvement with the children. Gold claims that Bren promised he would be involved in the children’s lives and that his failure to do so is a violation of agreements between them. Therefore Gold and the children, David Bren, age 18, and Christie Bren, age 22, decided to sue Donald Bren for $134 million in back child support.

Donald Bren is Rich

Bren is very secretive and media-shy about his life, income, and assets. Estimates are that his assets may be worth around $12 billion, largely derived from real estate development in Southern California. Forbes Magazines has placed him 16th on its list of the 400 richest Americans.

He and his attorney claim he paid about $10 million in child support, vacations, cars, and other payments and gifts to Gold and the children during their childhood. He felt obligated to ensure they would receive advanced education through graduate school if they wished, received luxury German cars when they started to drive, and live in an upper middle class standard of living well beyond that of most of the US population. Clearly these children were not in need of more money.

Is Gold a Golddigger?

Gold disagrees on the amounts. She and the children also claim that he owes far more because he didn’t stay involved in their lives.
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Serenity Gandara

Renee Maese, grandmother of deceased foster child Serenity Gandara, has decided what she can best do to honor her granddaughter’s memory is to fight against the abusive CPS and foster care system in California. Each year, dozens of children die in California foster care homes from child abuse. Serenity was one of these children. Her foster parents, Albert and Carla Garcia, are more than a month later still missing and wanted by police for murder and child endangerment.

Maese explains that the 3 year old girl’s death on July 18, 2010, has motivated her to work to change the system to protect children and families:

I will be the first to admit, if it wasn’t for Serenity dying, I probably would be doing my everyday life things, but now I’m advocating for Serenity. Deceased children no longer have a voice, but being her Grandmother, I will speak for her and fight for her justice.

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Until you’ve been through a divorce in a child abusing nation like the United States or United Kingdom, you likely have no clue of the extortion and abuse families are put through by the courts and governments of such nations. But that may change as more and more fathers with ties to the entertainment and mass media industries start to open up about their experiences, particularly how their children and they are blocked from contact with each other with the full cooperation of the courts in what amounts to state-sponsored parental alienation child abuse.

Noted writer Louis de Bernieres, author of Corelli’s Mandolin which was later turned into the movie Captain Corelli’s Mandolin starring Nicolas Cage and Penelope Cruz, has recently experienced state-sponsored parental alienation himself. He seldom gets to see his children Robin and Sophie, all of five and two years old respectively, as the courts engaged in the usual sexist practice of marginalizing the father. He’s now joined UK’s shared parenting group Families Need Fathers to fight against the ongoing abuse by UK courts and government against children and families.
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The medical examiner has reported that Bakersfield foster child Serenity Gandara, a 3-year-old girl living in the home of relatives, was found dead on the living room floor of the home. Blunt-force trauma injuries are the cause of death. The foster parents, Albert and Carla Garcia, are being sought by the government for murder and felony abandonment.

Grandmothers Maria Garcia and Renee Maese both state that other relatives wanted to care for Serenity and her abandoned brother Isaiah. Isaiah is still alive, but was found with injuries appearing to demonstrate a pattern of ongoing physical child abuse. Kern County CPS refused to place the kids with other relatives, preferring to leave them with Albert and Carla Garcia despite child abuse complaints by Maria Garcia.

After Maria Garcia complained to the CPS social worker that they ignored her reports, CPS took away another child in her care apparently as retaliation. The child was returned after local media started asking questions. It is common for CPS agencies in the United States to use children as pawns to punish those who question their actions.
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