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 multiple short video excerpts, of which this first one is titled “The difficulty of fighting for fairness for men in Washington“. Lisa explains that in Washington there are powerful groups that in some ways stand in the way of fairness and equal treatment for men.
Above is a 4-minute video that shows excerpts from our conversation with Lisa Scott. Below is an edited transcript of the video.
What’s unique about Washington state?
WIBM: What is the difference between Washington’s current custody laws and what some other states are passing, where equal shared parenting is the default parenting arrangement when divorce happens?
Lisa: The difference in this state is we have what’s called a “best interest of the child” standard. Some states I think are trying to make equal time the presumed parenting arrangement, unless you can prove that there is a reason not to. A lot of people, including me, believe that that should be the way it should be.
WIBM: That sounds like progress to me.
Lisa: Right, exactly. But in Washington State – oh boy… We were lucky to get the improvements to the law we got back in 2007.
WIBM: Why were we lucky? What is it about Washington state?
Lisa: There are a lot of groups that strongly believe that men and women are not equally capable of parenting; that women or mothers are better parents and should be the presumptive parent – even though they kind of don’t want to state it that clearly. They couch it in terms of, ‘Well, if there’s abuse or domestic violence, there can’t be equal custody.’ And in their worldview, almost every case when the parenting arrangement is contested, the father has to be an abuser. If he wasn’t an abuser, he would just let the woman have what she wants. I mean think about it: Why is he denying the mother of his children the right to parent her kids? How terrible is that? I’m exaggerating of course. But, in this state, those groups are super powerful. A lot of it comes from the activist women’s groups, the domestic violence advocacy groups that have been around for many, many years.
See related WIBM piece: A mom speaks lovingly about the value
of her children’s dad to their family [Video]
Lisa: When we came along – TABS and some other like-minded activist groups – we were able to get some of these changes made. If you look at some of the changes to the laws that were done back in 2007, the other groups always wanted stuff, like, If you’re going to get this change in the law that you want, then we want this other change. So we got a few of our goodies, and they got a few of their goodies.
Money is a big factor
Lisa: A lot of these groups are funded by donations, some are government-funded, some are literally government employees. They are on the payroll. They don’t have to worry about losing money to spend half a day or a whole day in Olympia. So they have the ability to do it, whereas we activists in TABS did it 100% on our own time.
I think there is some real work that needs to be done. I would love to see more presence for equality and fairness down in Olympia.
I see some changes coming on some of the domestic violence stuff — things that I call their ‘wishlist’. Just in this last session, there’s been an update on some domestic violence and protection order laws that I think are going to be negative for a lot of people.
I would like to see more activity in that area. Maybe you could take it over!
See related WIBM piece: Powerful pro-fathers message given from governor Inslee appointee to State Fatherhood Summit
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.
