So, in response to yesterday’s post, I have been asked what are some of the other reasons that cause men to become disinterested in dating and marriage. I have a list as long as my arm. But here’s another one for today. Today’s reason is that the legal is system is biased against men. There many examples of the bias, but I’ll focus on sentencing.

The study I want to talk about today is called “Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases“, and it’s published in the peer-reviewed journal “American Law and Economics Review”.

The abstract says this:

This paper assesses and decomposes gender disparities in federal criminal cases. It finds large unexplained gaps favoring women throughout the sentence length distribution, conditional on arrest offense, criminal history, and other pre-charge observables. Decompositions show that most of the unexplained disparity appears to emerge during charging, plea-bargaining, and sentencing fact-finding. The approach provides an important complement to prior disparity studies, which have focused on sentencing and have not incorporated disparities arising from those earlier stages. I also consider various plausible causal theories that could explain the estimated gender gap, using the rich dataset to test their implications.

The key sentence there is “It finds large unexplained gaps favoring women throughout the sentence length distribution, conditional on arrest offense, criminal history, and other pre-charge observables.”

I also found this paragraph interesting:

The estimated gender disparities are strikingly large, conditional on observables. Most notably, treatment as male is associated with a 63% average increase in sentence length, with substantial unexplained gaps throughout the sentence distribution.

This anti-male discrimination becomes apparent to men when they are going through the divorce process.

About 70% of divorces are initiated by women, and most of them for frivolous reasons (reasons that were not recognized as valid in the law prior to “no-fault-divorce” being enacted). The reasons are also not recognized in the Bible. Throughout the divorce process, men encounter anti-male bias. This begins with the common use of false accusations against the man, in order to get sole custody, which provides the woman with greater child support payments from the man. These false accusations are usually not based on any evidence, such as police reports. They just emerge during the divorce proceedings and are used to eject the man from the home, and get the woman sole custody of the kids. In 90% of cases, the woman gets sole custody of the kids. And this is despite the fact that single-father homes have similar outcomes for children as married two-parents homes. The results of single-mother homes are disastrous for children in many areas, including poverty, crime, mental health,  sexual activity, etc. But the court system insists on doing what is worse for children by separating the father from the child. Even the meager visitation rights that fathers get are not enforced.

Failure to pay alimony and child support can land men in prison. And the laws are enforced very unfairly there, as well. Consider this case from Canada:

A wealthy businessman will have to pay more than $50,000 a month in spousal support for 10 years to a woman with whom he had a long-term romantic relationship even though they kept separate homes and had no children together, Ontario’s top court has ruled.

Seeing this, many men today have declined to participate in dating and marriage. And I could come up with dozens more reasons like this one. Based in peer-reviewed studies. It’s not one reason deterring men from marrying, it’s dozens of reasons. In every case, society has decided that men are expendable. And sadly, the church has largely ignored the root causes of men’s retreat from dating and marriage. The church simply has nothing at all to say to men who are faced with these risks, costs and disincentives.

When I explain these problems to pro-marriage conservatives, they confess to never having heard about any of these issues. They say “I just like the idea of people falling in love and having lots of cute babies”. They haven’t really bothered to think about the calculations that men run before deciding what to do with women. Maybe it’s time for Christian leaders to do a little more homework about these issues. Maybe there is something Christian churches can do to make marriage a bit more appealing to men.

We are already seeing this happening in conservative states like Florida and Tennessee. In Florida, there are new laws requiring that child custody be 50-50 in most circumstances. This acts as a deterrent against women who want to file frivolous divorces just to get child support from wealthy men. Florida also banned permanent alimony, which is another positive step to make marriage more fair for men. (Although many women in Florida were furious about it). In Tennessee, it is now a misdemeanor to claim child support payments from a man who is not the biological father of the child.

These are the kinds of policy solutions that will bring marriage back. But I’ve never heard Christians talking about these issues. All I ever hear from pious Christian leaders is that men need to “man up”, as if manning up makes the threats from feminist laws and courts disappear. It doesn’t work, but it does signal virtue, which seems to be the goal of many pious Christian leaders. We’re going to have to do better than virtue-signaling if we want to reverse the decline of marriage. It’s not going to be solved by shaming and blaming men.

Statistics show that men are choosing to disengage from dating and marriage. There are many reasons for this. I can name a dozen. One of the reasons is “paternity fraud”. Paternity claims occur when a woman has a child, and then tries to collect child support from a man by claiming that he is the father. Sometimes, the man she identifies as the father is not the actual father. This is “paternity fraud”.

Before I get started on paternity fraud, let me explain how child support works today, from this article in USA Today:

The most well-known case was of a Kansas boy who, at age 13, impregnated his 17-year-old baby-sitter. Under Kansas law, a child under the age of 15 is legally unable to consent to sex. The Kansas Supreme Court in 1993 ruled that he was liable for child support.

California issued a similar state court ruling a few years later in the case of a 15-year-old boy who had sex with a 34-year-old neighbor. In that case, the woman had been convicted of statutory rape.

In both cases, it was the state social-services agency that pursued the case after the mother sought public assistance.

[…]In Arizona, the Department of Economic Security oversees child–support enforcement. Its written policy is not to exempt situations like Olivas’ from child-support responsibilities, unless the parent seeking child support has been found guilty of sexual assault with a minor or sexual assault.

[…]The state has more routes than the courts to acquire money from a parent. It can garnishee wages up to 50 percent of disposable income. It can take a tax refund. It can put a lien on a home or a vehicle. It can suspend driver’s licenses or revoke passports. And it can seize money out of bank accounts.

And another one from Fox 2 Detroit:

A Metro Detroit man cleared his name after Friend of the Court sent him a letter saying he had a baby with a woman he never met.

[…]Late last year, DeAngelo received a letter from Friend of the Court in Berrien County saying that he was the father of a baby girl.

“Said she’s a stripper from Detroit, we had a one-night stand at some hotel, and this is the story that was told to me,” DeAngelo said.

His wife first spotted the letter in the mail from Friend of the Court.

“Let’s just set the record, I trust my husband,” Tyahvia Smith said. “I know his character, man of integrity.”

While waiting for the child’s mother to take the baby for a DNA test, DeAngelo said the school where he teaches received an inquiry for possible garnishment in case the child was his.

“It made it something that is not being alleged, but now it’s something that’s being taken into action and no paternity has been established,” he said.

Finally, the woman had the DNA test done, and DeAngelo has since gotten a letter confirming he was not the father.

The request for money comes to the man’s employer first, the DNA test comes later, and only if the man fights the system to get it.

I show these cases, so that people will understand what men are facing from social services agencies and courts. Basically, in cases where a woman statutory rapes a man, she is still entitled to child support from the victim of the rape. One can imagine the uproar if the sexes were reversed. The laws are anti-male in many ways, this is just one example. Anti-male laws deter men from dating and marrying women.

Now let’s look at paternity fraud, another example of anti-male bias in the legal system.

Here’s a story about it from CBS News Detroit:

A Detroit man has been ordered to pay $30,000 in back child support for his ex-girlfriend’s child — even though he’s not the father.

Carnell Alexander brought his case to Wayne County Circuit Court with hopes for a fix. Instead, Judge Kathleen McCarthy told him Tuesday he waited too long to challenge the situation and “failed to take this matter seriously.”

Alexander said the paternity case started in the 1980s when the woman gave his name to a case worker so she could get assistance for her baby, who was born in 1987.

The woman agrees that Alexander wasn’t the father and a DNA test taken in 2013 backs that up. But that wasn’t enough to sway McCarthy, who ruled that despite the case being decades old, Alexander still has to pay.

Here’s another story of paternity fraud from NBC News Miami:

A man in North Florida is fighting the state after he was told to pay child support despite DNA tests proving that he was not the father.

Joseph Sinawa told NBC affiliate WTLV-TV that he signed the birth certificate because he did truly believe he was the father – adding that the mother of the child doesn’t want him to have to pay, but the state is forcing the issue.

“She told the judge she just wants this to be done and over with, and so do I,” he said from his home in St. Augustine.

Sinawa found out he was not the father after the DNA test was administered by a St. Johns County court following a custody question – but the state’s Department of Revenue appealed the decision because they say Sinawa has not properly attempted to disestablish paternity.

“At the time it had been taking $83 out of my paycheck, more than 1/3 of my pay,” he says. “When I thought I was the father I didn’t have a problem with it.”

Sinawa is currently representing himself in court cases due to financial issues and has filed the necessary paperwork, but no time table has been set and it is unknown if he will be refunded any of the money spent.

According to this study in  the peer-reviewed journal Epidemiology & Community Health, the median rate of paternity fraud across various studies is 3.7%:

Paternal discrepancy (PD) occurs when a child is identified as being biologically fathered by someone other than the man who believes he is the father. This paper examines published evidence on levels of PD and its public health consequences. Rates vary between studies from 0.8% to 30% (median 3.7%, n = 17).

Even men who are not at risk for paternity fraud understand the lesson of paternity fraud. The courts are anti-male, and men need to stay well clear of those courts. And that means minimizing exposure to those courts. And that means keeping to themselves, and tending to their own problems and pursuing their own goals.

Men are getting smarter now. Men understand that society does not have their interests at heart. Now men want to be left alone.