Need convincing? Hear this father’s stories.
Twentieth-century sexism hurt women a lot. It hurt men too, as you’ll learn listening to examples from the life of Walla Walla resident Stanley Green. Stanley is on the speakers bureau of Stop Abuse For Everyone and has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, ABC News 20/20, and numerous other print and broadcast media in the U.S. and Canada. He is a supporter of the ongoing effort to establish a Washington State Commission on Boys and Men.
The experiences Stanley recounts in the video below will be eye-opening for someone who views sexism solely as a women’s issue. This footage is from a speech at the Men and Families Conference held this past September in Toronto — an event that, impressively, received support from the government of Canada.
Below is a lightly-edited transcript of Stanley Green’s words in the video above.
The law says men can’t be victims
A hospital security guard came moments after I was attacked [by my ex-wife], and I asked him to call the police. When the police arrived I insisted that they take a report.
“We’re not taking a report from you buddy. You’re lucky we’re not hauling you off to jail!”
Why did that happen? Because at the time this happened in Long Beach, California, state law defined domestic violence solely as something that a man does to a woman. That law changed 17 years later when Marc Angelucci — my long-time friend, colleague, and martyr (he was assassinated two years ago) — won a California court of appeals case [Woods v. Horton, 2008] which required all domestic violence programs to serve everyone regardless of gender. But at that time, gender bias was a codified into the statutes of the State of California.
See related: CDC Alters Webpage On Teen Dating Violence to Hide Male Victimization
“You need to fulfill a traditional father role!”
Several months after the attack, I was in family law court. I had been the primary caregiver of our children for five years. The judge asked me what my career plans were. At this point in the trial we were only discussing material and economic matters; there was no evidence yet submitted on parenting, custody, or anything like that. The judge asked me what my plans were. I said I was working on developing a consulting career that would allow me to work out of a home office. I described the kinds of technology available at the time that I could use, and the concept that as my children got older and got into school, I would work outside the home more.
The judge, a man who was probably born in the 1910s (I point that out because there are generational attitudes here), bellows, “Young man, you need to go out and find a regular job and fulfill a traditional father role. Your children will respect you more, and what’s more you will respect yourself more. And you will be living nearby with continuing and frequent contact.”
The buzzword “continuing and frequent contact” was a key example of what I call the language of oppression of family court. Continuing and frequent contact, in the context of California family court, meant the kids are with dad every other weekend and maybe one evening a week and during certain vacations. The judge had already made up his mind on where the children would go because of my gender. No evidence had yet been presented regarding parenting skills.
Custody of the children awarded to the abuser
Later, there was a custody evaluation process. I tried to talk to the custody evaluator about the domestic violence. He said, “You’re being controlling. I’m running what we talk about here.” Nonetheless, he recommended joint physical and legal custody for a year to see how things worked out. In the trial, an attorney asked him if one parent were to receive sole custody, which parent would be the most likely to facilitate access to the children for the other parent. He said it would obviously be the father.
The judge (who made the gender biased remarks I pointed out earlier) ordered that my abuser was to receive sole physical and sole legal custody of our children. I nearly vomited. My parents had to prop me up to be able to walk out of the courtroom.
For the rest of their childhood and into adulthood, I had no authority and no say in any decisions about the health, welfare, or education of my children.
See related: How Ms. Magazine Helped a Man Whose Wife Seriously Injured Him
June Dunbar and the making of an activist
I submitted a transcript of the judge’s biased remarks to the Los Angeles County Commission on the Status of Women. (There was and is no commission on the status of men.) One of the commissioners, the late June Dunbar, wrote a letter on the commission’s letterhead to the supervising judge protesting the gender biased remarks of the judge in my case. It had no legal effect, but it was great moral support.
Sometime later I met Ms. Dunbar at a meeting, and I said to her, “It’s an honor to meet you. I consider you to be a feminist with a lower case f.” She knew what I meant — that she was a feminist who was actually committed to the ideals of equality. Her lens was primarily looking at women and girls, but she focused on inequalities rather than on the typical dogma of the Second Wave Feminism of that era.
June Dunbar invited me to participate in a committee she chaired with the Los Angeles County Domestic Violence Council, and that is what launched me as an activist. She became my mentor.
See related: Why We Need to Reject the Term ‘Gender-Based Violence’
I attended the Los Angeles County Domestic Violence Council meetings and the committee Ms. Dunbar chaired. (This domestic violence council represents a county with more than ten million people!) In those meetings I met Pat Overberg, who was doing her pioneering work at that time (the early 1990s), and I saw firsthand how terribly Pat was treated by most of the women in that council because #1) she served men and #2) she had a transgender person on her staff. Under 1990s Second Wave Feminist dogma a transgender man was a woman who had given up the sacred precincts of womanhood, and a transgender woman was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Treat all males as perpetrators
After I’d had several months of intensive therapy, including months where I was seeing psychiatrists and psychologists a few times a week, and I felt I had achieved some level of healing, I decided to make one last effort to get my assailant [my ex-wife] prosecuted. I called Rainbow Services, a domestic violence program in the Harbor District of Los Angeles, and the person who answered was clearly treating me as a perpetrator posing as a victim. Because of all the intense therapy I’d had for many months, I was assertive with her, and they put the executive director on the line. If I had been treated that way in the immediate aftermath of the attack it probably would have pushed me into being suicidal. The executive director told me that they trained their frontline staff to treat any male caller as a perpetrator posing as a victim.
Hear the rest of Stanley’s stories by watching the video.
