Below is an edited version of a piece originally posted at FixFamilyCourts.com written by Sherry Palmer, a parental rights advocate. It was written in 2017, but Kyle Paskewitz, who is mentioned in the piece, has confirmed with us that the family court situation in Washington has not substantially improved since then.
Washington state has had an equal parenting law since 2002. Who knew?
Washington’s equal parenting law (RCW 26.16.125) says:
Custody of children
Henceforth the rights and responsibilities of the parents in the absence of misconduct shall be equal, and one parent shall be as fully entitled to the custody, control and earnings of the children as the other parent, and in case of one parent’s death, the other parent shall come into full and complete control of the children and their estate.
Revised Code of Washington 26.16.125
Parents, however, are still not getting equal custody.
A residential custody time study was done by the state of Washington in 2013. It revealed that even though 86% of the custody cases had no risk factors with either parent — meaning no domestic violence, substance abuse, or other dangers posed to the children — equal time custody orders were still only issued approximately 18.9% of the time!
What is happening? Why are parents spending thousands of dollars fighting for equal custody, and they are still walking away less than 20% of the time with equal custody orders?
Also read: 7 important lessons from Eddie Murphy in Daddy Day Care
“Best interest of the child”
There is a section in Washington’s domestic relations law that specifies the criteria for parenting plans, and it substantially subverts any presumption of equal custody. The judges still use the (very problematic) phrase “best interest of the child” as a way to get around the equal parenting statute.
Kyle Paskewitz is a father in Pierce County who wanted 50/50 custody. He hired five different attorneys, and none of them told him that there was an equal parenting statute in Washington law. Kyle thinks that this is because it would not be profitable for them. The attorneys allow their clients to think that they have to fight for equal custody. (Kyle is the founder of the nonprofits Family Court Reform USA and Parentalink.)
Reader, what has been your experience in family courts? Were you told that Washington has an equal parent statute by an attorney or judge? Did you benefit from this statute? If you were aware of this statute and you raised it, what was your result?
Judges know they’re biased against fathers
We end with an attorney explaining how laws that intend to decrease the percentage of sole parenting orders often have little real-world effect:
…In the meantime, we’ll hope for better out of those judges than is probably wise. We recently saw an excellent review of the social science literature by Dr. Linda Nielsen. Family court judges and lawyers alike agreed that fathers aren’t treated fairly in child custody proceedings, but astonishingly, those judges all but promised to continue that very unfairness. One study of judges’ attitudes found large majorities of the respondents holding the opinion that mothers are “naturally” better parents than fathers.
So it’s no surprise that when researchers Margaret Brinig and Douglas Allen analyzed Oregon’s legislative effort to reduce the number of sole custody orders, they found that Oregon’s new law had essentially no effect. The legislature intended more cases of shared custody to result from the law, but the state’s judges had other ideas.
The point is that we’ll never fix the terrible problems of family courts simply by legislation.
Attorney Robert Franklin, board member of the National Parents Organization (bold emphasis added)