Last month, Mark A. Castillo allegedly confessed to drowning his three children in the bathtub of a hotel room at the Inner Harbor. Mr. Castillo, who reportedly told police a divorce and custody battle with his estranged wife had propelled him to kill his children, is charged with three counts of first-degree murder.
The Castillo tragedy might have been seen as a wake-up call to stop being politically correct about mental illness and accept the fact that people who attempt suicide or engage in exceptionally erratic behavior might be unacceptable behavior risks to children. Instead, observers are drawing flawed conclusions from this terrible incident - conclusions that threaten to do serious harm to many innocent fathers embroiled in custody disputes.
What went wrong in the Castillo case, according to domestic violence activists, is not that the courts were allowing an obviously mentally ill person to visit his children. Rather, they seem to feel the problem is that the mother's claims of abuse were not automatically believed.
Horrific, unusual cases such as the Castillos' can be a nightmare for the fathers' rights community. Based on years of experience practicing family law and as a father's rights advocate, I know that such incidents bring activists out of the woodwork to decry a system that does not treat nearly every "he said-she said" accusation as a case wherein what "she said" is the truth. For example, Joan Meier, a faculty member at the George Washington University law school, wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post this month stating that "mothers rarely fabricate or exaggerate the dangers they see. ... 'Bitter custody disputes' do not arise in a vacuum - most arise in the context of mothers seeking to end abuse or protect their children."
The activists do have a point. If nearly every allegation of domestic violence were accepted on its face as the truth, there would be less domestic violence. However, hundreds of thousands would wrongfully be thrown out of their homes, separated from their children and face undeserved legal penalties.
Such an outcome would contradict what our nation stands for. American society is supposed to avoid prosecution and persecution of the innocent as an acceptable casualty in bringing the guilty to justice and protecting victims.
