Supervised Visitation: Paying $120 for 90 minutes with your kid
Massachusetts News
By John Maguire
"Supervised visitation" is a booming part of the industry today. In 1994, only three visitation centers existed -- they were pilot projects in Springfield, Roxbury and Brockton. Today, there are 13 state-funded centers absorbing nearly a million dollars a year. These centers not only get state funding, they also charge fathers for the privilege of seeing their own offspring. Rates go as high as $120 for ninety minutes.
The assumption "is that a lot of dads are abusing their children and their access to their children must be supervised," declares Michael Ewing, a fatherhood activist. Though research suggests this assumption is completely false, the supervised visitation industry has skyrocketed anyway.
The centers strongly assume that children's fathers are guilty of some unnamed crime. Caring fathers with the bad luck to be accused often endure insulting, exploitative treatment to see their children. They complain rarely, because the social workers can and do end visitation for little or no reason.
Pamela Whitney, a social worker who came to the Massachusetts Department of Social Services in 1986 as a consultant, has been Director of Domestic Violence and Family Support Services since 1994. Her office is at 24 Farnsworth Street in Boston. She supervises a budget that was $13.6 million last year, and may go higher.
She says supervised visitation is recommended "where there has been a separation between the parents and a history of domestic abuse."
When challenged, she backtracks and admits she meant to say "accusation of domestic abuse."
She says her department pushed for visitation centers, beginning with three pilot centers in the early 1990s. The department recommended expansion, "because the courts found it so helpful and useful." Now there are 13. She said her goal was to have at least one in every county. More are probably coming.
"The feeling on the part of the courts and others was it was often unsafe for children to visit with their offending parent," she said. She acknowledged that when she said "offending parent" she meant a parent who had been accused of an offence.
Each state-supported visitation center is funded by D.S.S. to such a level that it has at least $75,000 to work with. The money goes to fund staff and a "budget coordinator." The coordinator "does outreach to the courts and other agencies." D.S.S. funds also pay, she said, for "the people who are actually doing the visit between the parent and child."
"Some visits don't need to be supervised," she said. "But in other cases where there is higher risk involved...this provides supervision for those who are doing the actual visit." The observers are trained according to "guidelines" developed by the central nexus for DV policy in the state, theGovernor's Commission on Domestic Violence.
She acknowledged that the same accusation that forces a man into a center, also forces him to pay both his and his wife's fees. "If A says that B is abusive, then B has to pay the money," she said.
Ms. Whitney said she thought the sliding scales ranged from $1 to $5, and that an indigent parent could do community service to pay for his visitation time.
But in reality, at least in Robert Straus' center in Cambridge, the sliding scale runs from $20 to $40 or $80 per hour, and any parent who cannot pay cannot see his children.
Asked her reaction to the case of the father of three who recently had to pay The Meeting Place $120 to see his children for 90 minutes, she said, "I've never heard of such a thing. One hundred twenty dollars a visit is extraordinary."
"All these visitations have been ordered because the children involved are at risk," explains Robert Straus, a lawyer and social worker, and currently director of the Meeting Place, in Cambridge. Straus has been a key figure in our state's development of professional supervised visitation. Asked to explain "at risk", he says: "You have a range of physical and sexual abuse situations where the parent is either alleged to be, or been proved to, abuse the child."
"As you know," he adds, confidentially, "there have been a number of deaths in Massachusetts." When asked to name an actual child's death he was referring to, however, he said he could not remember.
Straus has been part of an informal matrix of lawyers, judges, social workers, academics and domestic violence activists since the early 1990s. These people, some idealistic and some merely pragmatic, have networked, talked with each other, served on various commissions, boosted each other' s careers, and helped to expand the definition of domestic violence, and the size of state and federal funding massively.
Straus is a leader now, and heads what is called the Supervised Visitation Network. He described the growth of that group in glowing, emotional terms during a phone interview.
"The Supervised Visitation Network started in 1992. A group of people met in New York through the Ethical Culture Society, which had started a supervised visitation program in New York City. At that point it was just 30 people from around the country, most of whom had never met anyone else doing supervision. We had all been working in isolation. It was an extremely high energy meeting. It was very much an informal association of people helping each other out. It began with a handful of members and now has over 400 members throughout the U.S., Canada, and Australia. It's a fascinating field...because when it began it was virtually without funding."
But not any more. Though The Meeting Place began in 1991 with only a grant from the Boston Bar Foundation, and continued to 1998 "without a penny of public money" that public money is starting to flow now, Straus admits with a tone of satisfaction.
The major state source is through the state DSS Domestic Violence Unit, whose budget of over $900,000 "has been an immense advance over the last few years.."
What if the father doesn't have enough money to see his kid in a given week? "Difficult question," answers Straus, who pauses and then says the father gets "a week's grace" and then the child-father contact is cut off.
His program never tries to get husbands and wives to talk out their problems privately, he said, but urges them to go back to court instead. He said children are in visitation for long periods, from nine months to many years. He said that no matter how well, how happily, the father-child interaction is going, his program never recommends to the judge that supervision should end and normal parent-child contact resume.
These programs have sprung up all across America " entrepreneurial tricks and ideas spread easily each summer at this industry's conferences. Wherever supervised visitation has appeared, criticism has followed.
In Virginia, Michael Ewing, president of the Virginia Fatherhood Initiative, has an unusual perspective. He is one of the few pro-father people ever to run a "visitation center." His non-profit organization applied for and got a federal grant to negotiate access and visitation issues between divorced parents. He hoped to show that in situations of conflict between divorced parents, supervised visitation was not necessary. He sees such programs as "designed to humiliate men." In his program's first year, the Norfolk area courts made more than 700 case referrals. "We solved all of the problems but two," Ewing said. "Only two families required supervised visitation."
"There are many ways to handle the exchange of children without having parents supervised. We ran a neutral pickup and drop off program and there were no problems. We made clear to parents that they had to be 'model citizens' during drop off, or they would be reported to the court."
He said the supervised visitation idea has been " beefed up with phony statistics" and there is very little need for it.
Solid research shows that most physical child abuse is done by mothers, or by mothers' live-in boyfriends. Ewing is one of many in the fathers' movement who wonder why natural fathers " who in reality are quite unlikely to abuse their own children " are targeted for the humiliation of supervision "I think there's another agenda here," he says. "Some special interest women's groups think that males in general are disposable. We're great sperm donors and paychecks " but beyond that there's not much need for good fathers or good men."
He said he thinks supervised visitation came about "because women wanted to con- trol the dad's access to their children, and to humiliate them by making them see their children in the presence of a social worker and pay for the privilege of doing so."
Perhaps because of its success, Michael Ewing's non-visitation-center approach to family conflict lost its funding in the second year. He said he thinks a local social worker who had lost clients due to Ewing's success complained to an influential state senator.
How many of these supervision cases really require supervision for the safety of the children? Michael Ewing doesn't think very many: he found two cases out of 700.
But the domestic violence entrepreneurs and state officials live in a different world from us. A sense of nameless vague threat is always in the background. To hear the pros talk, all the men they deal with are batterers, sexual abusers, or virtually time bombs of violence. Repeated cliches like "at risk" and "a safe place" and "maintaining safety" pepper their sentences. Yet, in many cases, there is no evidence of violence or any kind of serious harm to children " merely an accusation by the mother. But in the DV industry, when the accusation is made, the case is closed.
At least some of the men interviewed for this story are devoted fathers. It is clear that some have heroically maintained contact with their children over a period of years, despite having to pay a small fortune in cash and endure repeated harassment by petty, vindictive state officials. During a dozen hours of telephone interviews, not one supervised-visitation official spoke any word of praise for any man's love of his children.