realworlddivorce.com

Here are some excerpts

Very accurate portrayal:

"...support enforcement procedures have proved very effective against delinquent parents, but at the expense of due process. A man's right to be heard [following the loss of a job, for example] has been sacrificed to the desire to impose punishment."

"The definition of a 'right' is something that you can go to court to get enforced. By this standard, at least in my state, children do not have a right to spend meaningful time with their fathers and fathers do not have any right to a parental role with children." What about the "fathers' rights" groups that periodically lobby Legislatures? "They are asserting rights that do not exist, that the public does not recognize, and whose recognition is opposed by a multi-billion dollar industry in most states. The only right that is real is the right for a plaintiff mother to get money from a defendant father while simultaneously keeping the children away from the father. You know that it is real right because you can go to court and get a judge to order it."

And for New York:

"New York is a true winner-take-all state. Unless the plaintiff and defendant agree on joint custody, a judge will award sole custody to one parent, reducing the other to an every-other-weekend visitor. Thus the children will be with one parent 83.3 percent of the time (Kepanis says that a typical visitation schedule is for the loser parent to see the kids from Friday afternoon through Sunday afternoon, with a two-hour mid-week visit). With ownership of the children will come a guaranteed stream of child support, roughly half of the loser parent's after-tax income in the case of two children. Ownership of the children also will tend to result in exclusive use of what had been the marital home, at least until the children turn 21..."

"The mom will usually get the custody at the trial. Judges are usually older and they are used to the way things were back in the day, with the mom being the primary caretaker of children."

"This is in line with the traditional New York system that child support doesn't depend in any way on the winner parent's income. In theory, a person earning $10 million per year as an investment banker could obtain 50 percent of a schoolteacher's after-tax income as child support. Does it really happen? "All the time," says Kepanis. "The woman will say 'I'm entitled to child support under the law so I will take it.'"

"New York statutes permit a court to order the parent paying child support to pay for private school and/or college in addition."

"NY court approves extended jail for child support non-payments" (Associated Press, June 7, 2016) says that "State law generally limits Family Court to imposing single six-month sentences [for overdue child support]" but that, as a result of a ruling by "New York's highest court," a defendant could be ordered to serve three consecutive sentences, 1.5 years of imprisonment."

"Among residents surveyed by the U.S. Census Bureau in March 2014, 91 percent of those collecting child support were women."

Do men have this "birthright" to which Hogan referred in the early 1990s? "Not in the U.S.," said one attorney. "The definition of a 'right' is something that you can go to court to get enforced. By this standard, at least in my state, children do not have a right to spend meaningful time with their fathers and fathers do not have any right to a parental role with children." What about the "fathers' rights" groups that periodically lobby Legislatures? "They are asserting rights that do not exist, that the public does not recognize, and whose recognition is opposed by a multi-billion dollar industry in most states. The only right that is real is the right for a plaintiff mother to get money from a defendant father while simultaneously keeping the children away from the father. You know that it is real right because you can go to court and get a judge to order it."

Other than a statutory formula for post-divorce maintenance ("alimony"), Attorney Kepanis doesn't see any changes on the horizon in New York. There is no interest in shared custody among the legislators: "Fathers are interested in it but nobody else cares."

One prominent New York attorney, not a family law specialist, summed up her perspective on a typical divorce: "It's very simple. You have money. She wants it."