Paternity fraud

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Main articles: Paternity (law) and Paternity testing

Paternity fraud is the act of falsely naming a man to be the biological father of a child, particularly for the purpose of collecting child financial support (also referred to as child maintenance), by the mother when she knows or suspects that he is not the biological father. The term entered into common use in the late 1990s. It has been given significant coverage by U.S. activists and authors Tom Leykis, Glenn Sacks, and Wendy McElroy. In Canada, the Canadian Children's Rights Council has advocated in Canada's national media in support of this issue which is related to child identity rights and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child [1].

In cases of paternity fraud, there are many potential victims: the defrauded man, the child deprived of a relationship with his/her biological father, the biological father who is deprived of his relationship with his child. Subsidiary victims include the defrauded child's and the men's families. In particular, financial hardship may have resulted for the defrauded man's children and spouse in cases in which the man made child support payments for the unrelated child.

In some jurisdictions in some countries, there is limited opportunity to legally challenge the assumption of paternity. For example, by forbidding men to challenge paternity, especially in the context of marriage, by limiting the amount of time allowed to challenge paternity, or by allowing women to make a claim paternity without adequate chance for rebuttal by the alleged father. Such is the case in state of California U.S.A.. In some jurisdictions, the husband of the mother of a child is held to be the father, regardless of biological relationship.

The ready availability of genetic fingerprinting allows men suspicious of paternity fraud to request a paternity test to make positive identification of the father. In many countries, such tests require the consent of the mother or an order made by a family court though this is not universally true.

Access to such testing is restricted in some jurisdictions as it is held to not be in the best interests of the child for such information to become available. A man finding out that the child is not his biological child contrary to information supplied by the mother may result in his rejection of the child or mother.

Statistics from the United States, Australia and other countries suggest that approximately 30% of of all paternity tests exclude the putative father as biological father [1]. These numbers do not reflect the overall incidence of paternity fraud in the general population, because the numbers are based on tests performed in cases in which the alleged fathers suspected they were not the biological fathers of the subject child. For example, see the AABB statistics for 2001 in PDF [2].

According to Steve Scherer, a senior scientist in the department of genetics at the Hospital for Sick Children (Toronto), 10% of babies born in Canada are victims of paternity fraud.[3] A 10% paternity fraud rate was cited during a science seminar for Canadian judges in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada in November, 2002 by a panel of medical experts.[4]

Dr. Jeanette Papp, director of genotyping and sequencing in the University of California at Los Angeles department of human genetics is of the expert opinion that 15% of children born in the Western world are victims of paternity fraud. [5]

Paternity fraud statistics for Australia provided on a TV show aired by the Australian Broadcasting Company stated that for the year 2003 more than 3,000 DNA paternity tests were ordered by men in Australian, and in almost a 25% of those cases, the paternity test revealed that the children they thought were theirs were actually sired by another man.[6] The Canadian Children's Rights Council's [7]commonly uses a paternity fraud rate of 15%.

Between 30 and 50 per cent of women cheat on their partners, compared with 50 to 80 per cent of men, according to Dr. Judith Eve Lipton, a psychiatrist with the Swedish Medical Center in Washington D.C. who, in 2001, co-wrote The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People with her husband, David P. Barash Ph.D.[8] Other statistics place this number at approximately equal for the two sexes, at approximately 60 %,

Child identity rights are stated in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of The Child (UNCRC)[9], the most ratified human rights convention of our world. It represents the rights of those under eighteen years of age, which comprise about 25% of the world population. UNCRC Articles 7, 8 and 9 specifically provide for a child's right to be raised by both biological parents, to be identified properly at birth, and require that the government birth registry contain an accurate record of the identity information of both biological and social parents. Examples of "social parents" include, but are not limited to, adoptive parents, kin parents, couples or single women who have no direct biological connection with the child because of their use of donor sperm and eggs.

A self-reporting national poll of 5,000 women in Scotland conducted in 2004 concluded that half of the women said that if they became pregnant by another man but wanted to stay with their partner, they would lie about the baby’s real father.[10]

Contents

[edit] Paternity Fraud as domestic violence against men and children

Domestic violence takes physical and non-physical forms. Men and children suffer considerable acute and long term emotional, psychological, economic and social harm from paternity fraud, and as such, paternity fraud represents one of the more common forms of domestic violence against men and children.

Unfortunately, in many countries, the law offers no protection to the male victim or child of this form of domestic violence. This rewards and encourages the victimizers leaving men and children largely defenceless. The coercive power of the state is used to continually perpetrate the ongoing victimization of the male spouse - even after the relationship has ended. Government agencies responsible for the integrity of birth records accept birth registration forms without paternity testing. In some countries a duped husband may incur the the responsibility of fatherhood and sign the birth registration forms believing that he is the biological father of the child. In doing so, in some countries, he becomes legally liable for life for the child even when it is proven with DNA evidence later that he is not the biological father of the child and was deceived by the mother.

Unfortunately, the law often assumes that the male spouse is the biological father of any children that are born during the marriage. This represents one of the common sexist positions embedded in law in this area that dates back to times when women were powerless under the law, when adultery was a seriously punishable crime, and before the invention of safe and effective paternity testing which - if made standard a standard part of antenatal or post-natal testing could virtually eliminate this form of domestic violence.

Children suffer when they discover that the man they thought was their biological father is proven not to be. Identity issues seriously affects a person's mental health. This was proven with a great deal of testimony before various governments' legislative committees by the people that were conceived by use of anonymous egg and sperm donors. The egg and sperm donors are now required to provide identity records and major medical information for the rest of their lives to assist those who were created by means of egg and sperm donors. This includes the federal laws of the UK, Canada and Australia to mention a few. In Canada, see the Assisted Human Reproduction Act.

Child victims of paternity fraud are deprived of important major medical information that they would have if they had been raised and had an ongoing relationship with their biological father.

[edit] New technology to stop paternity fraud, Non-Invasive Prenatal Paternity testing

Scientific tests can now determine paternity at 13 weeks into a pregnancy using non-invasive testing methods in all cases. [11] This involves a simple blood sample taken from the pregnant woman's arm and a cheek cell sample taken by means of a scraping of the inside of the alleged father’s or fathers’ cheek(s) using a buccal swab ( large “Q-tip”). [12]

The pregnant female's blood carries the fetus' genetic material which can be compared to the DNA of the alleged father. As of 2008, this method performed by one advanced Canadian laboratory had a 100% accuracy rate for all non-invasive prenatal DNA paternity tests performed by them in the last year. They do a mandatory post-natal DNA paternity test and guarantee the results of both tests. Confirming tests using after birth samples are required in most countries because the family laws haven’t kept up with the technology.

Unlike current standards of harvesting placental tissue cells as is required for chorionic villus, or entering the uterus to sample the amniotic fluid surrounding the baby as is performed with amniocentesis, this new technology extracts Fetal Nucleic Acid material comfortably and safely from a simple blood specimen collected from the mother’s arm to determine the genetic status of the fetus. Effective screening will be accomplished in the future without the associated risks which may cause a spontaneous abortion and the services of an OB/GYN.

[edit] Accreditation of Testing Laboratories

In the United States, the American Association of Blood Banks (AABB) provides accreditation of laboratories performing DNA testing.

In Canada, accreditations are provided by the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), an agency of the Government of Canada.

ISO 17025 Standards, CAP-CLIA ASCLD/LAB International are other standards.

In the UK, The Department of Constitutional Affairs maintains a short list of companies who are accredited for parentage tests as directed by the civil courts in England and Wales under section 20 of the Family Law Reform Act 1969.

[edit] Cases

  • Liam Magill.[13][14] was initially awarded compensation for damages, not to be confused with the costs of raising the children, against his ex-wife for pain and suffering as a result of the paternity fraud, but lost on appeal heard by the highest court of Australia. The sole issue of this case was civil damages for deceit (fraud)( not reimbursement of child rearing costs or child financial support paid). As of January 2007, Australia doesn't have a "Bill of Rights" or "Charter of Rights" like Canada, The United States and the European Union. Equality of sex (gender) was therefore not an issue at trial. The complete transcripts of the case heard by the High Court of Australia and the related issues are available.[15] This case gained world-wide attention. A book titled "Days of Tempest: The Liam Magill Story" was written about this case by American author and lawyer Lea Anna Cooper. [16] The author cites media reports that a female judge, one of the Australian High Court's judges that heard the case, had previously had an affair resulting in a child, and had herself committed paternity fraud against the child and her husband.
  • Jim Knapp AKA Jim "Jones"[17], was found to not have fathered a child for whom he was paying child support after a 12 year battle in the California court system.
  • A South Korean man won compensation for pain and suffering damages of $42,380 when his wife had another man's baby and committed paternity fraud. Reported June, 2004 in Associated Press, USA [18]
  • Sixteen months after his divorce, Richard Parker, a Florida resident, discovered the child he was paying support for was not his via DNA testing. Florida justices ruled 7-0 against him, stating that Parker must continue to pay $1,200 a month in child support because he had missed the one-year post divorce deadline for filing his lawsuit. His court-ordered payments would total more than $200,000 over 15 years to support a child she had with another man.Christian Science Monitor
  • In New Mexico, a man was forced to pay a total of $20,000 for a daughter that never existed. Steve Barreras, the paternity fraud victim, successfully sued a blood laboratory for their role in the DNA hoax. The DNA came from an adult daughter with help of a lab employee. Viola Trevino was sentenced to 16 months in federal for claiming the "girl" on tax returns. Trevino owes the IRS over $2200 for the fraud and Barreras $26,000 in child support and lawyer's fees. [2] In November 2007, Trevino was supposed to answer state charges that include kidnapping, fraud, and perjury, but disappeared. A warrant was issued for Trevino, who could face another 45 years in prison [3]. She was arrested days later. [4]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Child Identity Rights and Paternity Fraud
  2. ^ 2002 Annual Report for Parentage Testing conducted in 2001 by the American Association of Blood Banks, PDF
  3. ^ "Mommy's little secret" The Globe and Mail, Canada's largest national daily newspaper, 14 December 2002
  4. ^ "Mommy's little secret" The Globe and Mail, Canada's largest national daily newspaper, 14 December 2002
  5. ^ "Mommy's little secret" The Globe and Mail, Canada's largest national daily newspaper, 14 December 2002
  6. ^ "Who's your daddy?" Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), TV show "The 7:30 Report" aired 22 November 2004
  7. ^ "Child Identity Rights", position statement, Canadian Children's Rights Council, Canada
  8. ^ "Mommy's little secret" The Globe and Mail, Canada's largest national daily newspaper, 14 December 2002
  9. ^ The United Nations' Convention on the Rights of the Child
  10. ^ "96% of women are liars, honest" published in The Scotsman, Scotland's national newspaper, 9 December 2004
  11. ^ "NON-Invasive DNA Prenatal Paternity replaces Amniocentesis testing"
  12. ^ "DNA Paternity Testing in Canada" Canadian Children's Rights Council
  13. ^ Paternity fraud 'dad' loses appeal, The Age, 9 November 2006 - 11:35AM accessed 16 November 2006
  14. ^ Magill v Magill (2006) HCA 51 (9 November 2006) in the High Court of Australia
  15. ^ "High Court of Australia Hears Magill v. Magill Paternity Fraud case"
  16. ^ "Days of Tempest: The Liam Magill Story" Australian Paternity Fraud website
  17. ^ "Who's Your Daddy?" Metroactive 19-25 July 2006 accessed 16 November 2006
  18. ^ "Court: woman must pay husband for baby", Associated Press U.S.A., 1 June 2004

[edit] External links