A New Attack on Shared Parenting
By Don Hubin
Opponents of presumptions of equal shared parenting have attacked it from many directions. NPO, sometimes working together with the International Council on Shared Parenting, created a series of handouts to respond to the fallacious attacks on shared parenting. Recently, opponents of shared parenting have adopted a new strategy. It’s fallacious. (It’s what logicians call an ad misericordiam fallacy—an argument that attempts to persuade by appealing to feelings of sympathy.) But it’s likely to be effective on people who don’t know the relevant facts.
The strategy is simple. Begin with a horrible, tragic story about innocent children being murdered by a parent—the grislier the better. Then draw the conclusion that courts should not have any presumption in favor of equal shared parenting. Hope that readers are so troubled by the heartbreaking story—and so sure of your moral virtue for calling it out as being horrific—that they’ll simple accept the conclusion without thinking too hard about whether it actually follows from the premises.
One recent example of this fallacious reasoning making it to national media is a story that The Guardian published. But this is not a one-off thing. The anti-shared-parenting (and misleadingly named) Center for Judicial Excellence issued a press release that takes a similar, if less graphic, position. In short, the attack is: if you want to protect children from being murdered by one of their parents, you have to oppose presumptions of equal shared parenting.
It’s a terrible argument! And for many distinct reasons. I have detailed many of the problems with this argument, and in particular with the story published in The Guardian, in an article just published in The Daily Wire. Here, I’ll list just a few:
No presumptive equal shared parenting bill I’m aware of, and certainly none that NPO has ever authored or endorsed, applies the presumption in cases where there is credible evidence of child maltreatment or intimate partner violence. If courts are doing a good job of identifying dangerous parents, presumptions of equal shared parenting simply won’t apply. The argument commits another elementary fallacy called ignoratio elenchi (fallacy of irrelevant conclusion).
If courts are not doing a good job of identifying dangerous parents, and certainly sometimes they fail, those parents will routinely be awarded at least the old standard of parenting time—every other weekend and one evening a week, half the holidays, and part of the summer. It is preposterous to suggest that a parent is a great danger to the children if they are in that parent’s care 50% of the time but no danger to the children if the time is limited to that outdated schedule.
There has been no evidence presented that indicates that presumptions of equal shared parenting increase the incidence of domestic violence or child maltreatment. Indeed, what evidence we have available points in exactly the opposite direction. As NPO has documented in educational handouts, the experience of both Kentucky and research in Spain supports the conclusion that intimate partner violence decreases—indeed, significantly decreases—when there are presumptions of equal shared parenting. And as NPO reported in another educational handout and expand on in a previous article in Shared Parenting News, what research we have available supports the conclusion that presumptions of shared parenting do not increase, but in fact decrease, child maltreatment (abuse and neglect). Furthermore, in state after state, independently conducted polling shows that the great majority of, well over 70% believe that, “when there is conflict between divorcing parents, awarding sole custody to just one parent increases that conflict.”
Don’t be taken in by this argument. Don’t dismiss the concerns about domestic violence and child maltreatment; they are valid and of great importance. But when someone suggests that these tragic stories are reasons to oppose presumptions of equal shared parenting, demand that they “show you the beef”! Our laws and policies should be based on evidence, not fallacious appeals to emotion.
