Outside Israel very little is known about the
horrendous policies of Israel’s Welfare Authorities when it comes to
fathers in divorce seeking contact or visitations with their children,
or when women whose children are forcefully kidnapped into outplacement
facilities and foster homes. The fathers and mothers end up seeing
their children in supervised visitation facilities, known as Contact
Centers, “Merkaz Kesher”. These are secured and heavily guarded
facilities where the parent gets one hour a week, and sometimes even
less to be with the children in a tiny room, watched by a social worker,
and under strict compliance rules such as no photos, no gifts and no
spontaneous dialogue.
In
case of men in divorce, the chances of a man ending up in a Contact
Center are almost one in four, i.e. almost 25% of fathers are sent
there, as opposed to 1%-2% in USA and 3% in Australia. In Israel a man
can be sent to a supervised contact center simply upon the wish of the
woman, “lack of trust”, upsetting the social worker, or as a tool to
coerce higher child support.
Overseas Supervised visitations normally serve
violent, alcoholic or homeless men. In Israel, because women are
immune from prosecution for false domestic violence, false complaints
are the norm, the standard, de rigueur. Almost every
contested divorce in Israel starts with a false complaint by a woman, an
immediate 15 day order of removal from the marital home, and a
“recommendation” (which is actually a determination) by a social worker
to the Judge, to allow child contact only under supervision of social
workers.
The article below sheds light into one of
Israel’s most atrocious aspects of gender apartheid against men.
However, some women also see their children in Contact Centers. That
happens because when poor women ask for help from the Welfare
Authorities, the woman are branded as “neglectful” and the children are
taken away, into shelters for which the government pays $4,850 a month.
The Welfare policies are unwilling to invest a single shekel into the
mother’s economic well being, so that she will be able to provide better
for the purportedly “neglected” children.
This is a translation of an article published
in Hebrew at Israel Hayom by Naama Lanski and Michal Yaakov Itzhaki on
February 2, 2014.
