Seattle paper exposes DV problems

The Spearhead blog quotes an article on domestic violence:

The Seattle Weekly, a middle-brow, usually liberal Seattle publication, has come out with a long article about the abuses men are subject to in family court. Those of us who have been through it are already all too familiar with what happens, but people are still surprised by the blatant anti-male bias ...

Given their extremely rushed proceedings, family-law commissioners often punt to such “expert” evaluations to make recommendations that can be heard in later hearings. Smith did that in Richard’s case, ordering a “risk assessment” from a counselor who specializes in domestic violence.

Richard says he welcomed the assessment. “OK, great,” he says he thought. “Now I’m going to go to somebody whose job it is to ferret out the truth.” He says he didn’t even mind paying the $1,000-plus fee.

But when counselor Doug Bartholomew came out with his report a month later, Richard was even further in the hole. The counselor did say that he couldn’t determine whether Richard had assaulted his wife. Yet Bartholomew still recommended that Richard attend a domestic-violence treatment program, as well as a class called “DV Dads.”

Why? For one thing, he held out the possibility that Richard was dangerous. He attached extreme importance to the engineer’s attempt to have the counselor look at a mental-health self-evaluation his wife had done. “Since submitting someone’s private records against their will is so inherently antisocial, it raises the question of whether or not he’s capable of similar ‘stop at nothing’ behavior,” Bartholomew wrote.

Richard’s personality and background were also suspect, according to Bartholomew. For one thing, he was successful. “The downside of success, and he’s been very successful, is that we tend not to learn compassion, empathy, or insight.” Richard, he wrote, “has never experienced tragedy.”

Richard suffered from a “Puer complex,” the condition of being an “eternal boy,” in Bartholomew’s estimation. The engineer was unable to describe his son in an “I-Thou manner,” an apparent reference to philosopher Martin Buber’s description of seeing other people as possessing distinct wants and needs. This seemed to account for Bartholomew’s finding that Richard posed “some risk of further psychological abuse.” As the counselor put it a year and a half later at trial, “the most conspicuous feature” of his evaluation was Richard’s “indifference” to his wife’s “feelings and needs.”

One of his readers writes:

You are I think being quite unfair to Bartholomew. Whatever his personal failings, he has a part to play (apparently) in the Democratically mandated system of Family Law in your State. He is doing his job, badly perhaps, with anti-male prejudice, quite possibly but it is his living, and probably the only one he has. It is not Bartholomew who makes the decision of the Court, but the appointed Judge, neither is Bartholomew responsible for the system in which he works.

Even arms dealers (though usually it is States) to Third World countries are doing their job, and a quite legal job too. ...

Hard on him? If he is giving expert testimony to the court, then he is responsible for everything he says. It is no excuse to say that he is just applying the court's prejudices.

If an FBI expert lied in court to frame a terrorist suspect, then I would say that he should be prosecuted for perjury. It is no excuse at all to say that the USA has an official policy of imprisoning terrorists. We don't have an official policy of lying in court.

Likewise, when these supposed expert submit a cooked report because that is what the judge expect, then they are both contemptible. And when they are greedy, incompetent, corrupt, anti-Christian bigots, then we should all point it out.