David Blankenhorn, in his book Fatherless America, calls fatherlessness America=s most urgent social problem.  Statistics bear this out.

The issue behind this issue is probably understood by only a handful of people because it involves one of the best-kept secrets in America, and that is the true agenda of the N.O.W. and radical feminist organizations called NGOs, ie, Non-Government Organizations at the UN sympathetic to it, which issue studies like the one we are discussing on these boards.

It is beyond our scope to enter into the historical detail of the origins of radical feminism but you may visit Erin Pizzey=s site to get an idea of this (Erin Pizzey was the founder of the first women=s shelter in the world, in Chiswick England. Soon after the shelter opened its doors, Pizzey took a poll and noted that of the first 100 women that came there, over 60% were more abusive than the men they were fleeing. See http://telusplanet.net/public/sheep_/pizzey.htm).

One of the salient agendas of gender feminism (as defined by Christina Hoff Sommers in Who Stole Feminism) is to attack the so-called patriarchy. For the non-anthropologist, the term patriarchy essentially refers to the system of marriage as society=s primary child care and rearing institution. Observers have pointed out that the patriarchal system was coincident with the emergence of civilization as we know it. Was this just a coincidence? A vast body of highly visible empirical evidence suggests that it was not. Consider that over the past thirty years as the traditional family broke down in favor of the mother-child unit, there was a parallel and essentially equivalent breakdown of the rest of society, mirrored in spiraling crime, drug abuse, teen suicide, teen pregnancy, failure in school, violence among young people and a general inability of children and young people to cope with life.

As this deterioration process progressed certain groups, such as the National Fatherhood Initiative under Wade Horn, were monitoring it and issuing warnings about father absence and its effects on society. These effects should have been noticed by everyone, but many politicians and the public at large were busy enjoying our prosperity and tilting at social windmills of far less importance to the future of our children. At the same time other groups were busy fomenting the social change that was causing these grave problems. One was the National Organization for Women, which claimed to speak for every American woman. Another that was later identified as having an agenda consistent with the latter organization=s was the American Psychologists Association, which is now headed by a radical feminist. The N.O.W. pushed for a platform it broadly called women=s rights, including abortion, even late-term abortion, which the AMA said is never justified. It also pushed for the Violence Against Women Act, of which it succeeded in passing the first part (VAWA I). However, due perhaps in part to the growing public alienation of this group, the second part has faced serious constitutional challenges in the Supreme Court. Some feel that this legislation is unfair because it urges special protection to only one group, while the other, men (who are 2/3 of the victims of all violence, street and domestic together) are left unprotected. There is also the problem that this legislation, by specifically denying custody to men accused of abuse, would enshrine in law the notion that it is primarily men who abuse children (60% of child abuses are perpetrated by women, acc to the publication AChild Maltreatment 1996@ by the US Dept of Health and Human Services). Here the hidden agenda is seen as keeping children away from fathers.