'You've bankrupted my dad'

'You've bankrupted my dad': 13-year-old girl to sue Child Support Agency after legal battle left father with crippling debts

By Andy Dolan
Last updated at 7:30 PM on 29th December 2009

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A teenager is sueing the Child Support Agency in a landmark court case accusing them of trying to destroy her 'hero' father and happy family life to pay off the mother she no longer wants to see.

Emma Chapelhow is launching legal proceedings after the CSA threatened to throw her dad David in jail, seize her home and pet pony to help pay £43,000 in back-dated payments they claim he owes.

Now the 13-year-old girl - who instructs her own solicitor - will become the first minor in England to mount a judicial challenge to the CSA.

Landmark case: Emma Chapelhow claims legal battles have forced her father David, right, to live in a caravan to make ends meet

In 2007, a judge ruled that Emma no longer needed to stay in her mother's care after the youngster told a court hearing she wanted to live with her father on his farm in Wellow, Notts.

Her father David, 42, claims the decade-long legal battle he fought in the family courts against his ex-partner Janette Plummer and the Government agency left him with crippling debts.

The former graphic designer is currently living in a caravan in a muddy field with Emma and his wife Gair, while they rent out their farmhouse to make ends meet.

He paid maintenance to his ex-partner while Emma lived with her in Brighton, but he has challenged the CSA's 'outrageous' demands for the backdated cash.

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After years of wrangling he was handed the huge bill in 2006 and told his lifestyle was 'inconsistent with income'. David says that's all down to the CSA believing his ex-partner's 'fantastical' claims of his luxury living.

Emma was left in tears back in September when bailiffs acting for the CSA came to the farm and allegedly threatened to take her pet pony Pringle to help meet the payments. Since then her father has been involved in further court hearings and the matter has still not been resolved.

Now the teenager has warned the CSA that because she has not had a satisfactory response she intends to start legal action.

In a letter to CSA chief executive Mark Grimshaw, Emma wrote: 'My name is Emma Chapelhow and I am 13 years old. In 2007 I moved to live with my father. The judge said that I am old enough and able to instruct my solicitor, which I did.

'The court moved me to my father. They said that my mother could not see me again. I am very happy living with my Dad and Gair, who has spent 10 years fighting for me. He is a hero.

'I know my dad spent everything he had fighting for me and I know that he has no money left, and because of this he rents his house and we live in a caravan. My Mum does not have to pay my Dad for me now and this is unfair.'

'Outrageous' demands: The CSA threatened to seize Emma's pet pony, Pringle, to help pay £43,000 in backpayments it claims her father owes

Emma is suing under Article 2 of the Child Support Act 1991 - a guiding principle of the Agency which orders CSA officials to 'have regard to the welfare of any child likely to be affected by his decision'.

She believes that the CSA's action breaches the code as it will bankrupt her father and force her into poverty, which is completely at odds with Gordon Brown's government policies.

Emma said: "I do not understand why the CSA are doing this and why my mother is putting money before my future. I've asked her to stop all this because she can, if she wanted.

'I will take legal action because the CSA have failed to protect me and are still failing to protect me. How can taking my home and financial stability away to pay the mother who the courts are protecting me from not affect my welfare?'

David, who is jointly taking legal action along with his daughter, said: 'They are ignoring her needs as a child and putting both the CSA and the mother she no longer wishes to see before her.

'And to make matters worst when she has written to them they about possible legal action they have ignored her letters too and keep writing back to me.

'Enforcement action will have no effect except to put Emma in child poverty.'

The National Association for Child Support Action (NACSA) claims Emma is the first child in England to sue the CSA.

Since it was created in 1993 the CSA has been constantly under fire. According to the Department for Work and Pensions one-in-four decisions made by agency officials are simply wrong.

Emma's mother Janette Plummer, who lives in a large detached home in Brighton with new husband Lee, has not paid any maintenance to her ex-partner in the three years since her daughter moved in with her dad.

She has said the decision to award custody to Mr Chapelhow had her support and claims that the backdated maintenance would bankrupt him are untrue.

A Child Support Agency spokesman said they could not comment on individual cases, but it was not their policy to carry out any enforcement orders which could affect any child's living conditions.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1239217/Youve-bankrupted-dad-13-year-old-girl-sue-Child-Support-Agency-legal-battle-left-father-crippling-debts.html#ixzz0b76xXJN5

‘Deadbeat dads’ is term unfair to caring fathers

By JOSEPH C. VAUGHN Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2009

EMAIL SHARE PRINT

The general perception of child support in non-intact families is that, after divorce or other family court actions, fathers usually are expected to maintain their own household and provide payments to custodial mothers in their homes. The problem with this typical court assignment is that it often restricts a woman’s ability to work full time and, just as often, it places a hard budget burden on men who don’t enjoy enough time with their children.

Several decades after the last feminist movement, the majority of mothers do work outside the home today, either part time or full time. Economic inflation, the cost of health care and the subsequent need for day care, however, have outpaced the benefits of two-parent incomes in most families, intact or otherwise.

Feminists often complain that gender bias and wage disparities in the workplace prevent women from becoming self-sufficient and realizing their full potential as contributing members of society. The larger truth is that, if mothers were ordered to equal child placement in most family courts, they would have much more time to achieve those economic goals.

Family breakups are generally just as financially difficult for fathers as for mothers. Women’s advocates often claim that divorced or separated mothers are quickly reduced to poverty, while newly single fathers enjoy large increases in their standards of living. Once again, this is outright nonsense. The average, wage-earning father can ill afford to maintain his separate household with wage deductions of 19 percent or more, as well as a share of medical and educational expenses for his children.

Media reports refer to many fathers as “deadbeat dads.” Most single fathers are either on schedule or at least making their best efforts to pay their court-ordered obligations. Up until the recent, nationwide economic collapse, the huge majority of these noncompliant men were low-income parents who are most likely to be unreliably or irregularly employed.

It’s doubly insulting to call a man a deadbeat dad in the public arena. Those who use such angry, insensitive language don’t know the complete history of his marriage, his divorce, his health status or his employment. Like the N-word for black people or the B-word for women, this term demeans his value as a father who loves and cares about his children. It also implies that he’s a stereotype, no better than all the other dads who won’t, or can’t, support their children, especially in the current recession amid an employment market that’s been steadily outsourcing jobs to places such as China, India and Mexico for several decades.

It’s time to stop scapegoating fathers who, all too often, have lost jobs with competitive wages and benefits to business forces beyond their control. Non-intact families in the future will be much healthier economically when both parents enjoy more equal time with their children and, as a result, both mothers and fathers will have the time to pursue worthwhile, self-supporting employment.

Joseph C. Vaughn of Milton is a former board member and peer counselor for Wisconsin Fathers for Children and Families, www.wisconsinfathers.org. He can be reached by phone at (608) 580-0780; e-mail vaughnjo@yahoo.com.

Marriage: The Replacement for Welfare

Posted: May 02, 2009
1:00 am Eastern

By David R. Usher
© 2009

For the past 15 years, liberals have abused the consequences of marriage-absence as political wildcards to justify legislation entitling even more of it.

The term "marriage-absence" refers to adults of marriageable age living outside the institution of heterosexual marriage.

In the vast majority of cases, living in a state of marriage-absence drives our most costly and urgent social and economic problems, including the majority of poverty for women and children, lack of health care coverage, intergenerational illegitimacy, child educational and mental health issues, substance abuse, domestic violence and much of our crime problem. The budget burden is growing explosively. Economic conservatives must note that tremendous costs of marriage-absence imposed on business and taxpayers has historically precluded sustainable zero-deficit spending since the 1960s.

Living outside the institution of marriage is often thought to be a lifestyle choice. However, this simplistic view ignores the vast array of federal and state policies baiting individual to prefer non-marriage, to the ultimate detriment of themselves, their children, society and taxpayers. The problem of intergenerational marriage-absence will not abate, and the success of the American Experiment is already in great danger. It is now necessary to address the policies entitling harmful lifestyle choices, replacing them with policies that encourage positive lifestyle choices.

Conservatives fail to grasp the necessity of positively applying these problems as motivators to effect marriage-positive change for the benefit of everyone.

Welfare reform was unsuccessful because the important goals of improving marriage rates and reducing out-of-wedlock births were not addressed. Single mothers must work full time and children must be raised by day-care centers and schools – driving the day-care and schools-as-parent crises. Welfare reform turned fathers into status criminals facing jail if they cannot provide a mandated welfare payment often in excess of real earning capacity.

Since welfare reform was enacted in 1996, out-of-wedlock births skyrocketed and marriage rates continue to slide. Robert Rector pointed to the missing policy link in 2007: "If poor mothers married the fathers of their children, nearly three quarters of the nation's impoverished youth would immediately be lifted out of poverty."

The recently enacted SCHIP program is national health care in the name of marriage-absent children. It is just another entitlement luring more bad marital and reproductive decisions that invariably come full circle to hurt most women.

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was hastily re-authorized with full bipartisan support in late 2007. Unfortunately, VAWA is a primary destroyer of marriage, immigration law and due process standards. Only a sworn statement is required to instantly seize marriages, assets, green cards and a breathtaking array of free benefits. VAWA has historically provided no salient results and has harmed marriage because it fails to positively address the primary driver of spousal violence – substance abuse – a preventable and very treatable addictive disorder.

Democrats have briskly accelerated execution of the National Organization for Women's gender juggernaut since the elections. President Obama anointed eponymous lesbian Kim Gandy as social policy guru by creating the White House Council on Women and Girls. Gandy ecstatically bragged, "We got the entire Cabinet." She forgot to mention the rest of Congress and America, too.

Liberals know that Republicans always go along with feminist social legislation if it is unrelated to abortion or gay marriage. Liberals now see a fantastic opportunity to sneak volumes of legislation through Congress while Republican attention is focused on tumultuous economic and war issues.

In the coming months, we will witness a torrent of gender-based federal legislation designed to further destroy heterosexual marriage and force everyone with cash to subsidize it.

For example, the National Organization for Women wants legislation ensuring that America's economic vicissitudes impact only men (who have already sustained nearly 80 percent of job losses in the current recession). The Security and Financial Empowerment Act (H.R. 739) would make it difficult or risky for businesses to dismiss women who claim to be victims of domestic violence, and leave businesses on the hook for unemployment benefits if a woman claims she cannot work due to alleged abuse. The existence of evidence of abuse or trauma is not required.

President Obama wants to expand marriage-absence by creating "baby colleges." This is a dangerous merger of the nanny state with education. It would form a leviathan encouraging unmarried mothers to become workaholics while their parental roles are further weakened. More children will be raised at the whim of the state (like Maoist China once did), while more essentially parentless children will end up in foster care.

Additionally, we will soon see legislation to enact I-VAWA (which would directly entitle U.N. feminists to destroy marriage around the world), reverse the Defense of Marriage Act, criminalize those who oppose gay marriage, ratify CEDAW (placing our laws, customs and educational materials under control of U.N. feminists) and enact the "Freedom of Choice Act," repealing all state controls on abortion.

Realizing achievable conservative answers

Republicans were overrun by Herbert Marcuse's new-left war on marriage-based capitalism because the RNC lacks policy positively addressing the desperate problems of women living in marriage-absence. The RNC still does not understand it will continue losing elections until carefully crafted marriage-positive policies attractive to women (and men) are brought forth.

Marriage-absence is the greatest social and economic problem we face. The vast majority of poverty, crime, child problems, the "need" for abortion and deficits would disappear if we develop policies that stimulate women to choose marriage, reward marital responsibility, provide simple elective programs helping spouses rise above or recover from common problems such as substance abuse, and smoothly transition men and women from the claws of the welfare shredder to marriage.

Marriage is the only institution guaranteeing women economic support and the necessary assistance of an invested husband. Conservatives who wish to win must build their races on "marriage values" – restoring the right of women to enjoy these benefits – while short-circuiting programs encouraging or enticing women to throw their rights out at a weak moment.

Marriage predicts the best outcomes for women and children. The conservative agenda must promise women better futures than merely surviving as perennial wards of Washington – living in unsustainable communities full of disaffected men.

Ronald Reagan set an end-goal we have not yet pursued when he said, "Welfare's purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence." Marriage is unquestionably the replacement for welfare. Trickle-down socioeconomic policies will build strong marriages as successfully as trickle-down economics builds the economy. Concurrent application of trickle-down social and economic polices confidently predicts an era of consistent zero deficits, a stronger and more competitive workforce, and substantial budget left over for the war on terror and rebuilding the economy.

My college classmate John Podesta established the Center for American Progress not as a think tank, but an "action tank" designed to formulate, market, organize and enact liberal policies. Without a similarly aggressive conservative organization bearing brilliant marriage-values policy, Republicans will never muster the votes necessary to retake Congress and the White House. I urge Republican leadership to pursue "marriage values" as soon as conservatively possible.


David R. Usher is president of the ACFC Missouri Coalition, a social policy analyst for over 20 years and a 1974 graduate of Knox College in Galesburg, Ill..



http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=96776

The Failure of “Family Policy”

by Stephen Baskerville
January 11th, 2008

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/index.php/2008/01/11/the-failure-of-family-policy/#more-477

Welfare reform was supposed to discourage unmarried child­bearing. However, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) recently disclosed that out-of-wedlock births are at a record high. The Census Bureau also reports that, for the first time, married couples constitute less than half of the nation’s households. Thus, whatever the budgetary savings over the past ten years, from the standpoint of the family, welfare reform has failed.

The continued rise in out-of-wedlock births no longer proceeds from just low-income teenagers. In fact, the NCHS reports that the birthrate among girls 10 to 17 dropped to the lowest level on record. It is the sharp rise in births among unmarried mothers in their late 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s that accounts for the record levels. Inspired by such books as Rosanna Hertz’s Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice and Peggy Drexler’s Raising Boys Without Men, these women are moving beyond divorce to dispense with marriage altogether.

It would be a mistake to attribute this trend solely to cultural and lifestyle decadence. The ongoing sexual revolution is now codified in government policies that do more than discourage family formation: They empower officials to dissolve families and offer generous rewards for doing so. The growth of unwed childbearing in the middle class, like the older problem in low-income communities, grows directly out of welfare.

While the conservative focus on the broader cultural causes of illegitimacy is appropriate, neglecting the practical legal issues can hinder our ability to confront the problem. Political scientist James Q. Wilson epitomizes the conservative establishment’s paralysis when he throws up his hands: “If you believe, as I do, in the power of culture, you will realize that there is very little one can do.”

Many social conservatives have cast “family values” in terms of issues that, while undeniably important, are more consequences than causes of family breakdown. Today, the most direct threat to the family is not homosexuality, pornography, popular culture, euthanasia, cloning, or abortion. It is the elephant that barged into America’s living rooms almost four decades ago: As Michael McManus of Marriage Savers writes, “Divorce is a far more grievous blow to marriage than today’s challenge by gays.” While this, too, began as a lifestyle option, it quickly translated into highly destructive policies.

Beginning in the 1970’s, America quietly embarked on the boldest social experiment in her history. With no public discussion of the possible consequences, laws were enacted in virtually every jurisdiction that ended marriage as a legal contract and precluded couples from creating binding agreements to rear children. Regardless of the terms on which a marriage is entered, government officials can now, at the request of one spouse, simply dissolve it over the objection of the other and with no penalty to the moving party. As far as the federal and state governments are concerned, all couples are cohabiting.

The sexual revolution prepared the way for this massive change, but, as Melanie Phillips writes in The Sex-Change Society, “The divorce laws . . . were reformed by unrepresentative groups with very particular agendas of their own and which were not in step with public opinion.” Changes in the law preceded the cultural shift, as “Public attitudes were gradually dragged along behind laws that were generally understood at the time to mean something very different from what they subsequently came to represent.”

The National Association of Women Lawyers claims credit for pioneering no-fault divorce, which it describes as “the greatest project NAWL has ever undertaken.” As early as 1947, NAWL began promoting no-fault divorce to bar associations and state governments.

While the left was revolutionizing the legal structure of marriage, the conservative response was to lament and bemoan. “Republicans did not want to alienate their upscale constituents or their libertarian wing, both of whom tended to favor easy divorce,” writes Barbara Whitehead in The Divorce Culture, “nor did they want to call attention to the divorces among their own leadership.” When Vice President Dan Quayle famously denounced unwed motherhood, he was careful to add, “I am not talking about a situation where there is a divorce.” Maggie Gallagher’s complaint has become a prophecy for today’s politics: “Opposing gay marriage . . . is for Republicans an easy, juicy, risk-free issue. . . . The message [is] that at all costs we should keep divorce off the political agenda.”

The divorce revolution weakened marriage and fatherhood among members of the middle class in striking parallel to what welfare inflicted on the poor. In addition, the surge in divorce has expanded the welfare state itself to include the middle class, turning programs conceived to address the problems of low-income, single-parent homes into financial incentives for middle-class divorce.

The welfare reform of 1996 did not end the federal subsidy of single-mother homes; instead, it shifted it to mandatory child support — after all, fathers should be supporting their children. Like the original federalization of child-support enforcement back in 1975, the target was willfully absent fathers who had abandoned their children, leaving them on the dole.

In fact, no evidence has ever demonstrated that large numbers of fathers were or are deserting their families and not paying child support. Unchallenged research has long established that fathers are forcibly separated from their children by divorce courts and criminalized by child-support orders that are patently impossible to pay. The “deadbeat dad” is largely the creation of bureaucratic policies and of the feminist ideology that drives them.

Over the years, child support has increasingly functioned less as a way to reduce or recover welfare costs and more as a forced subsidy on middle-class divorce. States are paid by federal taxpayers based on the amount they collect. This encourages them to neglect welfare families, for whom the program was designed, because there is little money to be had. Instead, enforcement agencies have shifted their focus to middle-class families, for whom the program was never intended, because they can collect large sums and, with them, lucrative federal funds, which can then be spent for any purpose. Using child support, state governments found they could raise revenue through the growth of single-parent homes.

The perversity of the incentives is diabolical. States have a financial incentive to generate fatherless children in the middle class, which they procure by providing sweeteners for single motherhood—expedited divorce, automatic and exclusive mother custody (regardless of fault), minimal visitation by fathers—turning as many men as possible into payers (including some who are not even fathers) and setting child-support awards as high as possible. It is hardly surprising that the vast majority of divorces in which children are involved are now filed by women.

Federally regulated child support effectively transformed welfare from an issue involving public assistance into one of law enforcement, creating yet another federal police force without clear constitutional justification. The welfare state is employing the penal apparatus to ensure itself continued funding and growth, with methods far more draconian than those used (so far) to collect taxation.

These programs are virtually unassailable, not only because they balance state budgets, but because they play upon our natural sympathy for women and children. Anyone questioning child support incurs feminist charges of defending “deadbeat dads.” Further, by appealing to superficially conservative values, feminists have gained allies among centrist Democrats as well as the neoconservatives who dominate Republican family policy. Even family-values conservatives are reluctant to challenge policies they know to be driving single motherhood and criminalizing fatherhood.

This tacit left-right collusion has locked us into a tragic bureaucratic cycle in which the cures are causing the disease. And the malady of fatherlessness will continue to worsen as long as government officials have a free pass to socialize childrearing.

Whatever its intentions, the state can never create or restore family life. The best it can do is stop destroying it.

Stephen Baskerville, an assistant professor of government at Patrick Henry College, is the author of Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland House).

This article first appeared in the January 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.