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Dads on
the run
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You've
lost your wife, your kids, your house,
and any money you earn goes to your
ex. Your only hope may be the highly
secretive organization that is helping
hundreds of divorced Canadian dads
flee the country and start a new life
Candis McLean -
September 5, 2005
In January, Gordon,
a B.C. divorced dad, was desperately
e-mailing men's groups for help. Having
lost his job more than a year ago,
he had nevertheless been ordered by
a judge in December to pay $22,000
in annual child support for his three
kids--kids he hadn't seen in 24 months.
He was out of money, out of resources
and was becoming depressed and suicidal.
Then he received a strange e-mail.
"We know what you are going through,"
it read. "Many of your Canadian
and American comrades/brothers/friends
are taking asylum to start a new life
away from the oppression of their
governments. To save their lives.
Do you want to join them?"
Unsure of what to
do, Gordon (not his real name) replied
with an e-mail requesting more information.
What followed must have seemed like
a spy novel come to life: Gordon was
told to go to a public library and
e-mail the details of his situation,
using s-mail, a highly-encrypted e-mail
service, that could not be monitored
by the FBI or RCMP. He was to use
a woman's name as his moniker. "I
will then give you another s-mail
address and will never use this one
again," the source, who called
himself Sandy, explained. |
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Sandy
identified himself as a men's rights
activist. He confided in Gordon that
he had been through a messy divorce
of his own: his ex-wife had accused
him of sexually abusing their children.
And though she eventually admitted
all the allegations were made up,
the 11 years of court battles that
Sandy had fought to clear his name
had cost him over a million dollars,
leaving him destitute, and inspiring
him to help other dads who were facing
prosecution and ruin in bitter divorces--by
helping them escape.
Sandy
instructed Gordon to erase all references
to their communication on his home
computer and then clean his hard drive.
"After that please comm [communicate]
only from public libraries. Now, if
you want to go any further, send |
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me
a new email address, NOT IN YOUR NAME!!!
We will set a time and I will give
you a phone number. Get a calling
card from a convenience store, pay
cash. You will use that to call me
from a payphone to a payphone."
He also prepared Gordon for the major
life change he would have to make
to extricate himself from his legal
troubles. |
"Start
selling and pawning everything you
can w/out tipping your hand,"
Sandy wrote. "Do you have construction
skills, a craft or trade that is saleable
on the cash market?" Then he
told Gordon to "pack as if you
are taking a sudden vacation,"
and gave him the sort of instructions
one might need if he were on the lam
from the law, or trying to escape
persecution in some oppressive country: |
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PACK
LIGHT - CLOTHES, TOOLS OF YOUR TRADE,
AND MINIMAL FISHING & CAMPING
GEAR. PAY CASH ON THE ROAD. GO TO
SMALL STORES W/OUT CAMERAS IF YOU
CAN FIND THEM. TAKE EXTRA FUEL SO
THAT YOU GET 5-600 MI BEFORE STOPPING
TO FUEL. DELETE THIS MESSAGE AND ALL
OTHER CORRESPONDENCE W/ME AND OTHERS.
COMMIT ADDRESSES TO MEMORY. |
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In
fact, Gordon would be on the
lam from the law. And the organization
that Sandy represented, the Planetary
Alliance for Fathers in Exile, believes
that dads just like Gordon all over
North America are being persecuted
by an oppressive regime--the family
court system. According to their website,
PAFE is dedicated to helping fathers
escape and obtain new identities and
jobs in Europe. The way PAFE explains
it, divorced dads are at war with
a system they cannot hope to defeat.
The website claims that 100,000 men
are annually forced to leave the U.S.
alone due to the "feminist fraud"
that has tainted the justice system
against men. "This exodus is
proof that America is living in a
war zone with or without Iraq,"
the PAFE site reads. "There are
dead, dying, wounded and missing among
its ranks each day. The number of
men forced into illegal and treasonous
debtor's prisons in America stands
at around a quarter of a million.
There are still men paying into this
diseased system, so that they can
see their children and 'be safe' month
to month |
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.
. . [N]o father in his right mind
should go along and support this fraud.
Fathers have 3 choices--take their
kids into hiding overseas, stay and
show civil disobedience, or go overseas
alone to start a new life. All else
is slavedom or death."
In his first Canadian
interview ever, the man who heads
up PAFE, "Jean Kelly," admits
that even his own name is a pseudonym.
A decade ago he was a New York City
emergency room physician, when a friend
of his, a Canadian doctor, approached
him to help him find a way to reduce
the suicide rates among divorced fathers,
and to help his associates who found
themselves unable to continue with
their careers because they were consumed
by custody, access and child-tax issues.
Kelly happened to hear about a policy
begun by the French government, seeking
highly educated immigrants as part
of its competitiveness policy. He
immediately realized that the opportunity
represented a way out for thousands
of men who thought they had none.
Today, Jean
Kelly says he has four nationalities,
and goes by two different names, and
he and the colleagues he has helped
are all in hiding. Over the past five
years, he says, his organization,
headquartered in Nice, France, has
helped 4,700 divorced fathers from
several countries to escape what they
consider to be "illegal and inhumane"
custody and access laws, by moving
to Europe and changing their identities.
Nearly 100,000 men, Kelly says, have
fled from Great Britain and 137,000
from Australia. So far, he claims
1,000 Canadian men have gone into
exile.
"My former Canadian
wife took my two daughters to her
mother, claiming sexual misconduct,"
says one father, who chooses to call
himself "Lee" rather than
reveal his identity for this story.
Lee fled Canada and was able to find
work, through the assistance of PAFE,
in the information technology industry,
with a major multinational corporation
in Japan. He could not stay in Canada.
"I had 17 witnesses in court
stating they never saw anything unusual
in my behaviour towards my daughters.
It was no use," Lee says. "The
Toronto judge gave her custody, and
myself supervised access. If I ever
was to have [another] family I would
be greatly disadvantaged both financially
and socially with the burden of the
decision of the judge. I chose to
cut all ties to my past and start
anew."
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Today, Jean Kelly
says he has four nationalities, and
goes by two different names, and he
and the colleagues he has helped are
all in hiding. Over the past five
years, he says, his organization,
headquartered in Nice, France, has
helped 4,700 divorced fathers from
several countries to escape what they
consider to be "illegal and inhumane"
custody and access laws, by moving
to Europe and changing their identities.
Nearly 100,000 men, Kelly says, have
fled from Great Britain and 137,000
from Australia. So far, he claims
1,000 Canadian men have gone into
exile.
"My former Canadian
wife took my two daughters to her
mother, claiming sexual misconduct,"
says one father, who chooses to call
himself "Lee" rather than
reveal his identity for this story.
Lee fled Canada and was able to find
work, through the assistance of PAFE,
in the information technology industry,
with a major multinational corporation
in Japan. He could not stay in Canada.
"I had 17 witnesses in court
stating they never saw anything unusual
in my behaviour towards my daughters.
It was no use," Lee says. "The
Toronto judge gave her custody, and
myself supervised access. If I ever
was to have [another] family I would
be greatly disadvantaged both financially
and socially with the burden of the
decision of the judge. I chose to
cut all ties to my past and start
anew." |
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Some
of the men PAFE helps are hiding from
convictions that would see them go
to jail if they were ever tracked
down. But many others simply see no
future in Canada, where they believe
they will never be treated fairly.
"Mainly, though," says Kelly,
"they love children, they love
to have a relationship, and hardly
any new wife is going to put up with
having to pay tax to the ex. Especially
those who are highly educated professional
women, because their income, as well
as their husband's, is going to be
taken into consideration in the [support]
equation."
Kelly
says that once they are overseas,
the men find work all across the European
Union. And the opportunities are |
tremendous
for men who have skills: "We've
got scientific institutions, high-speed
railways, a space agency," says
Kelly. "We've got the biggest
passenger plane in the world. We take
anyone who's got experience and education.
For those without, we provide work
in the building industry, farming
and transportation." PAFE says
that officials in the French and Spanish
governments are actively helping the
group to make it easier for skilled
workers to start a new life. "We
take the skilled and highly educated
gladly--engineers, high-tech computer
skills, scientists--but we are also
doing a lot of humanitarian work,
preventing people from going to jail."
Among his clients, he says, "a
large number have PhDs--the 'who's
who' among scientists and engineers."
Men who aren't highly skilled often
work in the underground economy and
pay no taxes. "We help anyone
who wants to have a life again and
use their potential to the fullest,"
Kelly says. |
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In
addition to helping what he sees as
a persecuted group, Kelly is paid
to bring fathers over by the companies
that want to hire them--like a headhunter.
For the father on the run, the services
are free. All he must do is get himself
overseas. "Everything is arranged.
We can even provide an assortment
of East European women from whom to
choose a new wife--those that don't
suffer the illusion of feminist indoctrination
dished out by Hollywood about leaving
marriages for imagined greener pastures,"
Kelly adds.
Fleeing one's home
naturally means leaving behind children.
But the majority of fathers are non-custodial
parents who have no access to their
kids anyway. "Too many fathers
don't see their kids because there
were sexual allegations made against
them by these women in order to get
cash and custody," says Kelly.
"They are not classified as missing
people, but have to be crossed off
the child support computers because
they've been out of the system for
two years. They are known to be overseas
because, upon leaving the country,
the information from their passport
is fed into the computer."
One father who identifies
himself simply as "David,"
who fled Canada several years back,
writes in an e-mail to the Western
Standard about the decision to
leave his children behind: "I
figured that, despite the heartache
of leaving the kids, either I don't
see them from jail, or I don't see
them from the U.K. So I chose to not
see them from the U.K." David,
who works in the computer industry,
says that his child support had been
calculated by the Justice Department
based on a salary he was earning during
the nineties' dot-com boom. When his
salary fell, along with the fortunes
of the computer sector, he was no
longer able to keep up with payments.
David insists that he continues to
pay support according to Canadian
government guidelines, but he now
uses his actual salary in the formula.
"However that's not good enough
for the government," he writes.
"I still probably won't be able
to return to Canada due to the arrest
warrant which has been issued, although
I can't be extradited for a non-criminal
offence. I try to speak with my children
on the phone each week, but it's not
the same."
Edward Kruk, a social
work professor at UBC and author of
the book,
Divorce and Disengagement: Patterns
of Fatherhood Within and Beyond Marriage,
confirms that, in his studies of "disengaged
non-custodial fathers," he has
interviewed fathers living in Canada
and Britain. And, he says, in his
experience, their decision to leave
their families, their careers and
their country behind is typically
made only when there appears to be
no hope for them to escape their desperate
situation. "When parents cannot
agree on a parenting plan and the
court must decide, 85 per cent [of
decisions] result in sole maternal
custody, 10 per cent in sole paternal
custody, and the other five in a variety
of arrangements including split custody,"
such as splitting the kids up between
the parents, says Kruk. But shared
parenting--or joint physical custody--is
virtually non-existent in Canada.
That's despite the fact that the body
of study "indicates that on every
single adjustment measure, children
fare better in joint custody than
sole," Kruk adds. --
The judicial system's structural barriers,
the mechanisms and institutions that
polarize parties, and the feeling
that many men have of being seen strictly
as someone to be harassed for financial
support rather than someone to provide
social and psychological support for
their families--all that, combined
with the pain of being unable to see
their children, can be overwhelming.
Many divorced fathers, Kruk says,
find they get little support through
the mental health system where they
are considered "deadbeat"
or violent and irresponsible--both
as marital partners and parents. "A
lot of stereotypes dominate the field,"
Kruk acknowledges. "It's rare
to find much sympathy in my own field
[of social work]. Most programs are
geared to toward mothers and children,
as though children's needs were identical
to mothers, but there is almost nothing
for fathers. For all these reasons,
many fathers just disappear."
When the father is
reduced to the status of visitor,
the relationship becomes constrained
and artificial, particularly for fathers
who were previously very close to
their kids. "They soon find they
have very little influence and aren't
really able to parent, so they take
on an avuncular, rather than a parental,
role," Kruk says. "The stereotype
is that they don't care, but the reality
is that fathers have made every effort
to establish meaningful parental relationships
and are thwarted." In his own
study, Kruk found those fathers who
are most attached and involved with
their children's care, and who want
to share parenting, are the ones most
at risk of losing access over time,
because the courts often view their
attempts to gain more access as harassing
their former wives. Child Custody
and Domestic Violence: A Call for
Safety and Accountability, a 2003
training book for family court judges,
by London, Ont., psychologist Peter
Jaffe, actually warns judges to be
suspect of fathers looking to increase
access: "Many batterers pursue
visitation as a way of getting access
to their ex-partners," writes
Jaffe. "They may seek custody
to engage in prolonged litigation
during which their legal counsel and
the court process mirrors the dynamics
of the abusive relationship."
In the past, studies showed that over
50 per cent of non-custodial divorced
fathers gradually lose all contact
with their children, notes Kruk. At
that point, it's not hard to see why
some dads begin to consider a fresh
start altogether. |
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While
PAFE exists precisely to help fathers
escape what it considers unjust custody
and support arrangements, the ideal,
says Jean Kelly, would be for dads
to be able to stay home, near their
children, and be treated fairly by
the courts. "If Canada wants
a healthy society it should not bow
to minority interest groups,"
he says, referring to the feminist
activists he says have upended the
justice system, turning it against
men. "Individuals anywhere will
escape from laws which are unfair
and damaging to themselves and society."
The societal damage
isn't all that hard to see: hundreds,
perhaps thousands, of skilled and
educated men fleeing Canada for life
is something any economist would easily
recognize as an undesirable policy
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outcome.
Kelly estimates that in a typical
case, a single exiled father could
cost Canada $2 million in lost skills
and foregone future income. And there
is the immeasurable cost that comes
from such a large number of children
growing up without a father in their
life. |
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But
Kelly speculates that, in many cases,
politicians are unlikely to worry
about those sorts of things: "Feminist
governments are happy they [the dads]
are overseas because they are not
the ones who are going to vote for
them." For those Canadians, however,
who are uncomfortable with the idea
of so many fathers being driven out
of Canada, the answer is to demand
a fairer divorce system. There should
be a requirement for joint physical
custody in all but the most extreme
cases, with the financial responsibility
for the kids falling to both parents,
rather than aggressively going after
the father's income alone. "That
gives incentive to the fathers, saves
the kids and saves on taxes,"
says Kelly. "Fathers would be
working and contributing." More
importantly, they could remain in
their old lives, in contact with their
loved ones. For, while lawmakers here
may largely see them as financial
sponsors, and governments abroad see
them as a way to attain badly needed
skills and labour, in the end these
men on the run are, above all, somebody's
dad.
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