Biased PBS "documentary" sparks new calls to terminate government funding of public television

Biased PBS "documentary" sparks new calls to terminate government funding of
public television
"Breaking the Silence" - A grotesque misrepresentation of domestic violence
and child custody cases

October 24, 2005
by Mark Charalambous

http://www.mensnewsdaily.com/archive...ralambous10240
5.htm

Whether it is science education in programs like NOVA or serving the public
interest by informing them on vital matters of state such as in the
excellent recent Frontline episode, "The Torture Question," PBS should be
viewed as a national treasure.

But its sycophantic allegiance to left wing identity politics on matters of
social interest has put it squarely on the dark side of the Culture Wars,
and in increasing numbers responsible Americans have no choice but to join
the chorus calling for the end of all government support for PBS.

I have been active in the Fathers Rights movement for over a decade. I am
one of the founders, and the Spokesman for, CPF/The Fatherhood Coalition.
Like most advocates and activists in the movement, my involvement in the
issue arose from my own family breakdown that began in 1991.

As you know, the Fathers Rights community is up in arms over this
documentary.Over the past several days hundreds of correspondences from the
FR community to PBS, as well as your responses, have been widely circulated
over the internet. I am not going to repeat the various arguments that you
have now doubtless been made aware of concerning the statistics and reality
of domestic violence and abuse allegations as they impact child custody
adjudications. Suffice it to say, there exists one overarching truth
regarding divorce, domestic violence, and child custody:

Divorce has become a process of criminalization for fathers fighting to
maintain their relationships with their children.

Not just the family courts, but our entire culture, has been waging a War on
Fatherhood for 30 years and counting. Good, loving, law-abiding fathers are
routinely criminalized by the divorce process, losing not only their
children, but their wealth, their careers and reputations, their health,
their sanity, their freedom, and in some cases their very lives. It is an
undisputed fact that divorcing mothers can and do destroy their
ex-husbands-not vice-versa-with the aid and abetment of a legal system that
has been poisoned by victim-feminist ideology. It is no surprise that we
now hear of women throwing parties to celebrate their divorces.Undoubtedly,
a feature of such celebrations is the gloating over how much punishment,
legal, financial and emotional, the woman has inflicted on her ex-husband.
There are no divorced fathers throwing parties.

The notion that it is mothers who are discriminated against by an
uninformed, under-educated, and sexist judicial system that actually rewards
fathers who beat their children by giving custody of the children to them is
simply grotesque. I hesitate to make a comparison that may appear to
trivialize the enormity of the Holocaust, but this twisted perspective is
like claiming that Nazis in Germany were victimized by Jews.

Allow me to point you to an article that describes in detail some of the
ways invidious male hatred is promoted in the public sphere and inculcated
into college students. In the standard college textbook used in
introductory sociology courses in many if not most colleges ( Essentials of
Sociology, James Henslin), students are instructed in the very first section
of the book, where it describes the do's and don'ts of doing research, that
researchers should not bother to investigate the gender breakdown of battery
in marriages because it is already known that the problem of domestic
violence is overwhelmingly one of men battering women.

Amazingly, this instruction comes on the very next page following a call-out
box that warns students about making assumptions based on common sense by
listing several coincidentally politically incorrect notions that are deemed
to be false. For more information on the corruption of the behavioral
sciences vis-à-vis feminist indoctrinated male hatred, please refer to my
article, "Junk science proliferates in domestic violence research," For The
Record, Feb. 2003, which can be found online at:
http://www.fatherhoodcoalition.org/c...Record0302.pdf .

Rather than setting out a point-by-point rebuttal of claims made by the
makers of the documentary, I wish here going to make you aware of some facts
concerning Mr. Lundy Bancroft, who from several accounts appears to be the
motivating force behind this documentary. Being a Massachusetts-based
organization, we are familiar with Bancroft, who is a Massachusetts
resident.

Bancroft has been active in vilifying fathers and males in general for many
years. The thesis of this documentary-that fathers (i.e., "batterers") are
being rewarded by the Massachusetts family court system with custody of
their children because of the ignorance or gullibility of sexist judges-is
his latest campaign.Prior to this, among other like endeavors, he has sold
himself as an expert on "dating violence," gaining him access to
impressionable teenagers. A few years ago he collaborated with some
Wellesley academics and one from the Harvard School of Health with a couple
of "studies" to prove the same thesis on "battered mothers."

The science behind these "studies" is non-existent. Fatherhood Coalition
research director Steve Basile's attempt to gain access to the study data
were eventually squelched by a threatening letter from the legal counsel of
Harvard's President Larry Summers. For a blow-by-blow rundown on his
attempt to gain access to the study, read "Harvard researcher hides study
data behind university lawyers," For The Record, July 2004, found online at
http://www.fatherhoodcoalition.org/c...Record0407.pdf .

Basile's own groundbreaking research study on the adjudication of domestic
violence restraining orders in a Massachusetts court (Gardner District
Court) has been published in two separate articles in the Journal of Family
Violence. Please go to
http://www.fatherhoodcoalition.org/c...tudy_index.htm to find links
to the study and all articles we have compiled that pertain to it.

Getting back to Lundy Bancroft, he is a known quantity to us on a more
direct and personal level. I personally had the misfortune of having him
assigned as a GAL in my case. At the time I had no idea who he was. This
was before he was "canned" by the Hampshire County Probate & Family Court
because he was, by his own admission at a seminar he conducted on this same
subject in June, 2003 in Northampton, MA., so "far out of bounds" (as
related by a Fatherhood Coalition member who attended the event).

In my case, two interviews were conducted, and so I had the opportunity to
interact with Bancroft directly over several hours. I am not going to
discuss the issues of my case here, though I will be happy to do so
privately with anyone who is interested. Nor am I going to give voice to my
opinions and impressions of him as a person from these two meetings. Lundy'
s own work speaks for him well enough.

Suffice it to say, I was flabbergasted with his report, though I fully
understand that my experience with him as a GAL was not in any way unusual.
In Massachusetts, the job of the GAL is to provide the path of least
resistance for the judge to make the standard, predetermined, custody
judgment: physical custody of the children to the mother, with the new
"family" financed wholly by the "throwaway dad."

The Fatherhood Coalition hear on a daily basis from dozens of divorced dads,
mostly via our public email list-server (electronic bulletin board). This
is a very active board, and much information is shared. Not surprisingly,
several fathers and second wives have shared their experiences with having
Bancroft for their GAL. Again not surprisingly, he is universally detested.
But after all, according to Bancroft, these men are all batterers, and so
their antipathy towards him would be expected.

But besides these accounts, I am privy to information about Bancroft of a
much more personal nature. I know someone for whom Lundy Bancroft was not
an appointed GAL, but a party to a child custody/divorce action. This
person will remain nameless here because there are children involved, but
they are willing to speak to interested parties about Bancroft. This party
has also told me that they would consider going "on the record" depending on
the situation. If you wish to speak with this person, please let me know
and I will arrange the interview.

In this case of which Bancroft was a party, the four principals involved
were all ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluations. This divorce docket is
in Dedham Probate & Family Court, and dates from the late nineties. The
records, including Bancroft's psychiatric evaluation, are sealed.

The evaluation was done by a licensed PhD psychologist affiliated with the
Mass. General Hospital Children and the Law program. Following is a
paraphrasing of what is in the evaluation, as this document was available to
the principals in the action as it formed part of the case, and was read by
them. They do not have a printed copy of the exact report.

According to my source, the evaluation states: It is no surprise that Mr.
Bancroft is in the field he is in because it empowers and enables him to
exert an enormous amount of control and feed his hunger for controlling
behavior.

Furthermore, in the evaluator's opinion, he has borderline rage and
significant issues with rage control. His belief in his own expertise and
professional standing is described as being "based more in fantasy than
reality."

My source claims that Bancroft used his intimate knowledge of the domestic
violence and child abuse regimes to engineer the termination of a father's
relationship with his daughter. Bancroft is married to the mother of this
child. He employed the services of kindred spirit and witch-hunter Dr. Eli
Newberger, the highly criticized former head of the child sexual abuse unit
at Boston Children's Hospital. It is widely known-and even reported in the
pages of the Boston Globe-that Newberger's unit always found for sexual
abuse when investigating allegations.

Regardless of what credence is given to Bancroft's psychological evaluation,
his life's work betrays a person obsessed with hatred of men. He is what we
in the Fathers Rights community refer to as a classic "victim-feminist."
His life's work revolves around the demonization of men.

Several years ago I found an article written by Bancroft in 1992 that
displays a disturbing worldview. The link to this article was:
http://garnet.berkeley.edu:3333/.cco...ck5/lundy.html. I
don't know if it can still be found on the internet.

"Male Violence and Imperialism," appeared in a university journal, the War
Research Info Service, described as a "quarterly newsletter for campus peace
activists (since renamed Study War No More)." The theme of the issue was
"Masculinity and War/ Feminism and Non-Violence." In the article, Bancroft
posits a link between American imperialism and violence against women. Here
are some excerpts from the ~2500-word article:

"Male battering and U.S. intervention are often viewed, even by political
conscious people, as irrational or as aberrations (sic) from the norm. . In
order to stop battering and war, we must recognize their true causes. State
violence and domestic violence occur because they serve a purpose in
creating and enforcing abusive relationships, either between two countries
or between a man and a woman. Battering and war play a critical role in
keeping sexism and imperialism alive.

"Sexism is about exploitation. It is about male domination and control very
specifically over women, and for specific purposes. . And it's about
exploitation of women's giving of nurturing: requiring women to give love,
support and understanding to men and children, while men give only minimal
emotional nurturing in return.

"Imperialism is also about exploitation. It is about domination and control
by large and powerful militarized countries over much less powerful, less
militarized countries. . It's about exploitation of a country's labor by
forcing people to work at slave wages, to the benefit of those in the
dominant country. . So like sexism (male domination of women), imperialism
is about setting up systems of unequal exchange, where the dominant force is
able to dictate the terms of exchange.

"Systems of exploitation, of unequal exchange, require violence. They can't
stay in place without it because people resist oppression, courageously and
creatively, all the time... To keep sexism operating, there must be violence
against women. . Similarly, imperialism requires war. It requires bombing,
defoliation, economic blockades, and other violent ways of keeping countries
from developing such as by blocking their access to technology and capital
through the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

"First of all there is the myth that both battering and imperialism are
irrational. There is the notion that men batter women because they don't
know what they are doing.Because they are tortured inside, and in tremendous
pain, they lash out against those they love the most. They lose control of
themselves.What we have learned in working with men who batter is that they
know precisely what they are doing. They choose the amount of violence they
use. They set limits for themselves that they don't cross, and use violence
in particular ways in order to get the control they want in that
relationship. What batterers have in common is the expectation that they
will be able to enforce their will.

"There's a similar mythology around imperialism, that the US doesn't know
what it's doing abroad, that in misguided attempts to help out in other
parts of the world, it stumbles into doing a lot of damage. Many liberal
opponents of the Vietnam War made this argument, and we lived with it in the
1980s around Nicaragua."

What is evident from this article is that Bancroft is not just the typical
zealot who views male-female relations through the victim-feminist prism of
men's control of and violence toward women, but has gone further and sees
this as the answer to... life, the universe, and everything.Like Karl Marx,
Bancroft believes he has found the animating force behind all of human
history. For him, imperialism and war is just a macrocosmic reflection of
men's violence against women.

To hold such a distorted worldview, he must have deep-rooted personal
'issues.' His fixation on domestic violence and his attitudes about men
(the entire article must be read to fully appreciate this) can only be
described as an obsession.

Bancroft has also been involved in various and sundry pop psychology trends,
such as "co-counseling" and "re-evaluative" therapy. He authored a book
dealing with these treatment methods, Humanity Unbound. According to a
review of the book, he had been involved in these therapies, but "due to
abuses of both authority and sexual exploitation at the highest levels of
the RC organization, and after failed attempts to bring needed reforms to
the movement, he departed."

In closing, please do not mistake this message as a personal vendetta by an
embittered man who lost his children through divorce. Quite the contrary.
Despite the best efforts of Lundy Bancroft and the judges whom I faced, I
now enjoy a fulfilling, fruitful and loving relationship with my children,
who now live with me. I am one of the lucky ones who survived Massachusetts
family court.

Lundy Bancroft is not the source of this problem; he is but a particularly
virulent symptom of it. Every day, new Lundy Bancrofts are being created in
our colleges, universities, and even primary and secondary schools that have
been poisoned by male-hating, feminist infiltration to one degree or another
of practically all school curricula, with the possible exception of math,
engineering and the natural sciences.

The fact of the matter is that Bancroft, Eli Newberger, and people like them
have caused an incalculable amount of harm in many, many people's lives-not
just fathers, but also their children and other family members. We in the
Fathers Rights community are facing a propaganda and disinformation
juggernaut from these zealots and all those, like you, that have been misled
by them. PBS still has time to correct this gross miscalculation by
imposing a moratorium on future showings and by actively pursuing the real
issue from a responsible viewpoint in future programming.

Please give us reason to not now lobby for the termination of government
subsidies for public television.

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Liberalism: that haunting fear that someone,
somewhere, can help themselves without
Government intervention.