To the editors:
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Leving seems incensed that the legal system now takes child support more seriously than it used to. But, in the first place, this development is scarcely the result of any overwhelming pro-woman or pro-mother sentiment on the part of our legislators. Child support enforcement is a pro-taxpayer move, since many of the children whose fathers will not support them end up on the welfare rolls. Assuming Mr. Leving pays his taxes, he should welcome child support enforcement as much as any of the rest of us. And secondly, while “visitation abuse” is now a misdemeanor, there is no corresponding criminal penalty for sustained and wilful failure to pay child support. The contempt penalties he objects to are still civil in nature, and carry no legal stigma.
Most family lawyers share Mr. Leving’s discomfort with both the concept and the reality of “visitation.” I regularly get, in almost exactly equal proportions, two sets of questions from the women I represent in divorces: (1) “How can I keep that S.O.B. from ever seeing the kids again?” and (2) “What can I do to make him visit the kids?” The first question grows out of a marital situation which may have involved physical and/or emotional abuse of the wife and possibly the children by the husband, and in which (I hear this over and over and cannot believe it is always fabricated) “he never spent any time with the children while we were living together, so why is he making all this fuss now?” The second situation is even more heartbreaking. Many divorced men simply cut off all contact with their children. They may do it to avoid paying child support, or to avoid having anything to do with the ex-wife, or because they never cared that much about the family in the first place. But children, especially those who are school-age and over, take this very hard. One eleven-year-old boy in one of my cases used to talk about his “ex-father.” I have to tell the mothers in these cases that visitation, while it is supposedly for the benefit of the child, cannot be enforced on behalf of the child. Only the noncustodial parent can enforce visitation rights. If he chooses not to, that’s the end of the story (and, presumably, of the parent-child relationship).
It would be hitting below the belt to comment on what your article tells us about Mr. Leving’s personal life (though it is hard to resist speculating that the poverty of his childhood must have resulted from his father’s failure to pay child support). He has, of course, the right to choose his clientele like any other attorney, for reasons of economic practicality or personal conviction. But he has no right to expect us to feel sorry for his clients, while their wives by and large are on welfare or in minimum-wage jobs, and get their legal representation (if any) through public, private, or volunteer legal aid.
