Paternity fraud

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 child support purposes, 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.

In many jurisdictions, the husband of the mother of a child is held to be the father. The concept has been given significant coverage by activists and authors Tom Leykis, Glenn Sacks, and Wendy McElroy

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, and any other family of the defrauded man (such as children or wives) who are forced to live on tighter budgets due to child support payments.

In some jurisdictions, there is limited opportunity to legally challenge the assumption of paternity by limiting the amount of time allowed to challenge paternity, or by allowing women to claim paternity in nearly anonymous conditions. Such is the case in the American state of California.

The ready availability of genetic fingerprinting allows men suspicious of paternity fraud to request a paternity test to make positive identification of the father. Yet, such tests usually require the consent of the mother or an order made by a family court.

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 and the mother for her perpetration of the fraud.

Companies that provide commercial DNA paternity testing in the United States claim that 30% of their clients are victims of fraud [1], but the use of this figure may be misleading: it originates from the annual statistics provided by the American Association of Blood Banks (AABB), which has a bias towards people suspecting fraud, so it is not a statistic referencing the general population. See the AABB statistics for 2001 in PDF ^[1].

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.^[2] 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.^[3]

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. ^[4]

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.^[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%. Child identity rights are stated in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of The Child (UNCRC)^[8], the most ratified human rights convention of our world. It represents the rights of those under 18 years of age which comprise about 25% of the world population. UNCRC Articles 7, 8 and 9 specifically provides for a child's right to be raised by both biological parents, to be identified properly at birth, and that the government birth registry contain an accurate record of the identity information of both biological and social parents. Examples of "social parents" includes, but is not limited to, adoptive parents, kin parents, couples or single women that 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.^[9]

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Paternity Fraud as domestic violence against men

Men 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.

Unfortunately, in many countries, the law offers no protection to the male victim of this form of domestic violence. This rewards and encourages the victimizers leaving men largely defenseless. The coercive power of the state is used to continually perpetrate the ongoing victimization of the male spouse - even after the relationship has ended.

Unfortunately, the law often assumes that the male spouse is automatically responsible for any children that are born during the marriage. This represents one of the common sexist traditions 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.

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

Scientific tests can now determine paternity at 12 weeks into a pregnancy using non-invasive testing methods in many cases. This involves a simple blood sample taken from the pregnant woman's arm. The pregnant female's blood carries the fetus' genetic material which can be compared to the DNA of the alleged father.^[10] Professor Dennis Lo Yuk-ming is the Dr. Li Ka Shing Professor of Medicine and Professor of Chemical Pathology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is one of the world's foremost researchers on this technology.^[11]

Cases

• Liam Magill.^[12][13] 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 this case heard by the High Court of Australia and the related issues are available.^[14]

• Jim Knapp AKA Jim "Jones"^[15], 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 ^[16]

• 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

References

1. ^ 2002 Annual Report for Parentage Testing conducted in 2001 by the American Association of Blood Banks, PDF
2. ^ "Mommy's little secret" The Globe and Mail, Canada's largest national daily newspaper, 14 December 2002
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. ^ The United Nations' Convention on the Rights of the Child
9. ^ "96% of women are liars, honest" published in The Scotsman, Scotland's national newspaper, 9 December 2004
10. ^ "DNA Paternity Testing in Canada" Canadian Children's Rights Council
11. ^ "An Earlier Look At Baby's Genes" Science Magazine, U.S.A. VOL 309 2 SEPTEMBER 2005, Published by Advancing Science, Serving Society (AAAS)
12. ^ Paternity fraud 'dad' loses appeal, The Age, 9 November 2006 - 11:35AM accessed 16 November 2006
13. ^ Magill v Magill (2006) HCA 51 (9 November 2006) in the High Court of Australia
14. ^ "High Court of Australia Hears Magill v. Magill Paternity Fraud case"
15. ^ "Who's Your Daddy?" Metroactive 19-25 July 2006 accessed 16 November 2006
16. ^ "Court: woman must pay husband for baby", Associated Press U.S.A., 1 June 2004

• Missouri Legislation to enable victims of Paternity Fraud relief