Lisa Scott is a family law/divorce attorney based in Bellevue who represents approximately an equal share of male and female clients. Co-founder of Taking Action Against Bias in the System (TABS), Lisa has fought for equal justice and gender equality in the family courts since the ’90s.
Lisa spoke with Washington Initiative for Boys and Men about matters in Washington state. We broke the footage down into three short videos. The first one was “The difficulty of fighting for fairness for men in Washington.” This second one is titled “What it’s like being a woman advocating for men.”
Above is a 7-minute video that shows excerpts from our conversation with Lisa Scott. Below is an edited transcript of the video.
It was harder to marginalize me
WIBM: In our culture, we’re better at recognizing areas where women experience discrimination or hardships than where men experience discrimination or hardships. But because of your job, you’re able to empathize with men in a way that I think is pretty unique – both among men and women. It was only a few years ago that my own eyes opened to see ways in which men as a class of people suffer and experience discrimination, but you’ve known it for a long time. What’s it like to occupy that unique perspective you have?
Lisa Scott: It’s great, because whenever I went down to the legislature, the reaction was sort of like, Oh! Wow! This is a female, a woman who is trying to advocate for more fair treatment of men and fathers.
I had clients over the years who would say, We should go down to the legislature. We should get the laws changed. They would go down and testify, but there was typically this underlying suspicion: Well of course they’re saying these things. They’re just disgruntled dads!
These men were marginalized as ‘just angry dads’.
See related WIBM blog post and video: Lisa Scott explains why it is particularly difficult fighting for fairness for men in Washington state
I was able to detach things from gender
As the face of TABS, being a woman was obviously a huge benefit. Some of the other activists, the women’s activists… There was this one time when we were going into a hearing about some bill, and I was getting some real evil eyes from some of these other people like, There’s that Lisa Scott again! They could see that I was able to detach things from gender. If I’m in Olympia advocating for equal treatment for both genders, they would have a hard time marginalizing me as an angry male.
By the way, I’ve seen cases where there’s horrible unfairness to dads, and I’ve seen cases of unfairness to moms too.
I saw good dads put through the wringer
My gaining perspective on the unfairness really dates back to those early high-conflict cases I had, where several of my clients who were dads – and they were good dads, they were really super good dads – they were put through the wringer. They were just beaten down by the system. I had a real personal sense that this was a real problem. These were not situations where someone is actually an abuser and they just want to get back at their ex, and so they’re doing everything they can through the legal system.
In fact, I think in some cases, the soon-to-be ex realized that their spouse was a really good dad, and probably would get more time or maybe even custody, and so the other spouse made a first strike by alleging domestic violence, child abuse, or whatever because they knew the dad was a good dad.
And what did the women see when they walked into the courthouse? All these brochures asking, How can we help you? Are you being abused? Are you a victim? Let us help you. If you were a woman you had all the help you could possibly need, but if you were a dad it was like, Where’s the help? So a lot of these women took advantage of and manipulated the system to get the upper hand on the dad.
Speaking up for gender equality
I was able to go to the legislature and do some of our community events, and stand up and say, Hey, I’m a woman advocating for fairness for both men and women. It was a lot harder – though not impossible – for the other side to denigrate me. I could tell that there was an underlying attitude on their part like, She’s obviously being manipulated by these fathers that just don’t want to pay child support. That was certainly not the case.
For guys who went through these horrible custody cases, after the cases were over it took them years and years to recover financially and otherwise. So for them to be able to do any activist work was almost impossible. They couldn’t take a day off work to go down to Olympia!
With TABS, we tried to hear from different people, understand their issues and frustrations with the system, and then fashion bills to make it better.
I think that these last last few years in the legislature… You asked me if things are better or worse. In some ways things are better. But in some ways it’s getting worse.
The system should not prejudge you
I still get calls from people who’ve never met me, but they read some articles on my website, and their reaction is, “I thought you were talking about my case. You described my situation exactly.” Sometimes their case is over, and they just want to become an activist and help change the system.
There might be people out there listening to this, and it’s kind of too late for them, but they think, Maybe there’s somethings I can do to help out the next generation and make things fairer for my kids or other people’s kids. So I appreciate Washington Initiative for Boys and Men being active and taking a lead to make things better.
WIBM: Thank you. I appreciate the all the work you’ve done and your sincere desire for equality and fairness – nothing more and nothing less.
Lisa Scott: Exactly, and that’s all I have ever wanted. I’m not trying to make men or women or dads or mom’s superior. I always wanted it to be that if you enter the family law system, you are treated equally and fairly, and you should not be prejudged based on what you look like. Isn’t that what everybody wants? Isn’t that what we hear every day? People should not be prejudiced or prejudged. That’s all I ever tried to do. I’m hoping it will get to that point.
END
Read this piece Lisa Scott Scott submitted to the Eastside Journal newspaper back in 2001 about how too many male victims of domestic violence were not treated fairly and too many female abusers were given a pass.