New Zealand Equality Education Foundation
(incorporating the International Ex-Fetus Association)
Law School Proves that Family Court Must Be Opened Up.
© Peter Zohrab 2005
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The principal Men's Rights argument for completely opening up the Family Court to the public and the media is the claim that the professional who participate in Family Court processes are, in general, biased against men (or biased in favour of women, which amounts to the same thing, in practice). This is a hard thing to prove, and the professionals themselves no doubt see themselves as unbiased, or as able to pick up their own biases, which comes to the same thing. However, I have just (in March 2005) graduated with a Bachelor of Laws degree, and my experiences in Law School give me absolute confidence that the above-mentioned anti-male bias is a fact !
Family Dispute Resolution in Japan
Professor Taimie L. Bryant, in her article, Family Models, Family Dispute Resolution and Family Law in Japan ((1995) 14 UCLA Pacific Basin LJ 1), refers to the Japanese ie model of the family, "a patrilineal, patriarchal chain of authority extending between the eldest sons of successive generations." She goes on to state:
"Family Court mediation, which is a prerequisite to litigation of most types of family disputes in Japan, reinforces this ideology of ie .... This Article explores how and why this is true despite the fact that neither the laws regulating the family nor the legal system as it deals with dispute resolution requires the adoption of one particular model."
It is probably typical of a (latently) Feminist legal article that Bryant's reasoning is not particularly clear, but the core of her explanation of why Japanese Family Court mediation reinforces the ideology is as follows:
"...clients must present their positions and the backgrounds of the dispute in terms that would meet with approval by wealthy members of a generation or two older than they" (i.e. the mediators -- PZ)
Assuming that Bryant's analysis is more or less correct, we can see that mediation, being a confidential process held behind closed doors and ratified by the Family Court, would tend to reinforce the ideology and values of the mediators, which in New Zealand includes Family Court judges. As Bryant points out, clients have to present their positions and the backgrounds of the dispute in terms that would meet with approval by the mediators. This puts men at a disadvantage, since the Western legal culture has to a large extent adopted Feminist ideology and grafted it onto conservative, anti-male chivalry -- as can be seen from other pages on this website, e.g.:
Dispute Resolution in Australia
One of the last two courses I did towards my LLB was on Dispute Resolution,
taught mostly by a female professor (a former lawyer) from an Australian
university,
who was born in Germany and practices and teaches mediation (where the
golden
rule is confidentiality) in Germany, as well as in Australia and NZ. Her
name is
Professor Nadja Alexander. She apparently no longer does Family mediations,
but she told us about her view of a dilemma she was in, in one Family
mediation.
As well as group sessions, she also did individual sessions with the
parties
(which she thinks is a good thing). In one of the individual sessions,
the
wife said she was going to take the child and flee the country without
telling anyone. Then, in the mediator's next individual session with the
father, he said that his child had told him that the wife was going to
take
the child out of the country. The mediator had a horror-struck expression
on her face as she told us this. Then, she said, she went back to the
wife,
worried that she couldn't ethically tell the wife that the husband knew
(she
was apparently not at all worried when she learned that the wife was going
to flee the country -- the problem was that the husband knew !). So she
asked the wife, "Are you sure no one knows ? Have you told anyone
?" The
wife replied, "I told my child, that's all." Then the mediator
asked her,
"Would your child have told him ?"
I find it absolutely incredible (as no doubt you do as well) not only
that she broke confidentiality to act against the father's interests --
but
especially that she did not have the slightest notion that she had done
anything wrong -- to the point that she actually told us this as part
of a
university law course on mediation ! I suspect that she no longer does
Family mediation because of this incident, but no one appears to have
actually told her that she had done anything wrong, or punished her
professionally. In fact she still goes to Germany and argues the case
for
mediation using individual sessions (which are not common in Germany)
-- if
German mediators have heard about this incident, I am sure that would
be one
reason why they don't agree with her !