No virtue in 'virtual visitation' rights

Jewish World Review ^ | July 16, 2002 | Glenn Sacks & Dianna Thompson

[SJackson]

Last week's ''virtual visitation'' ruling by a Massachusetts court points to a new and dangerous trend in family law - judges permitting mothers to move their children hundreds or thousands of miles away from their fathers and justifying the separation by ordering Internet video conferencing as a purported substitute for a father's time with his children.

In her ruling, Judge E. Chouteau Merrill awarded a Boston-area woman sole custody of her three small children and gave her permission to move the children 225 miles away. Merrill granted two weekend visits a month to Paul, the ex-husband and father of the couple's 5-year-old son and twin 2-year-old daughters. The children will be moved to Long Island.

Paul's standard weekday visitation right was replaced by a right to ''virtual visits'' on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 6 to 7 p.m. Merrill explained that the computer conferences will be relatively cheap and will allow Paul to read to his children and help them with their homework.

According to Tom Harrison, publisher of Lawyers Weekly USA, virtual visitation is the ''cutting edge of divorce law'' and will ''become accepted and possibly even commonplace over the next few years.''

Hundreds of thousands of divorced dads like Paul are victims of ''move-away moms'' who either do not value their children's relationships with their fathers, place their own needs above those of their children, or use geography as a method of driving fathers out of their children's lives. The misplaced use of virtual visitation as a rationalization for the troubled consciences of both move-away moms and family court judges will exacerbate the problem.

In one highly publicized case, a self-deluded mother said that virtual visitation allowed her to ''feel more comfortable that I'm not destroying my son's relationship with his father'' by deciding to move away. It seems unlikely that, were the situations reversed, she would be happy with biweekly virtual visitations.

Even if one accepts the Merrill ruling's dubious rationale, virtual visitation opens up endless opportunities for interference by custodial parents.

Today many divorced dads endure the heartache of being told that they cannot see their children because they always have ''dentist appointments'' or ''birthday parties to attend'' during their scheduled visitation times. In the era of virtual visitation, there will be an inordinately large number of technical problems with custodial parents' Web cameras, and the repair shops will be operating at an unusually slow pace.

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[Blood of Tyrants]

What do you expect from a legal system where men are regarded as sperm donors and nothing more?

And people wonder at the motivation of kidnapping ones own children and disappearing.

[ctonious]

And people wonder at the motivation of kidnapping ones own children and disappearing.

..and they wonder about the marriage strike and "Peter Pans that won't 'commit'". Who would risk marriage and children under these punitive laws? Apparently, "commitment" is a one-way street.

[Illbay]

And people wonder at the motivation of kidnapping ones own children and disappearing.

This is true, but the one who ALWAYS loses is the kid. Too bad both parents can't keep that in mind.

But then, if they REALLY cared about how their kids feel, they would work on making their marriages work.

[Illbay]

I'm afraid you're right. My son is 24 years old, and marriage is the farthest thing from his mind. And he says "Dad, you and Mom got divorced, I'm just not really keen on following your example."

[LibKill]

This stinks.