The AP is reporting the story of Lt. Eva Crouch of the Kentucky National Guard.
She had raised her daughter for six years following the divorce, shuttling to soccer practice and cheerleading, making sure schoolwork was done. Then Lt. Eva Crouch was mobilized with the Kentucky National Guard, and Sara went to stay with Dad.It seems that while Crouch was deployed to Iraq, Sara's father, Charles, had gone to court and obtained a permanent order granting him custody.
A year and a half later, her assignment up, Crouch pulled into her driveway with one thing in mind — bringing home the little girl who shared her smile and blue eyes. She dialed her ex and said she’d be there the next day to pick Sara up, but his response sent her reeling.
“Not without a court order you won’t.”
Not fair you say, and you are right. Unfortunately many courts believe child custody issues trump the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act of 2003, which generally stays all court proceedings while a service member is deployed overseas. From the point of view of most Judges, a Court's first duty is to the "best interests of the child." The best interests are the present interests of the child. If there is a parent willing and able to act right now, the interests of the deployed parent are secondary.
Jeffery M. Leving and Glenn Sacks identify a couple of related family law problems. The first is
paternity fraud. According to Carnell Smith, Executive Director of the National Family Justice Association, deployed soldiers are often "targeted and preyed upon" by unscrupulous "father shoppers" who falsely designate absent military men as the fathers of their newborns. He says:A third family law deployment problem involves child support paid by reservists.
"The military provides a steady, easily garnished income as well as medical care for the baby. It's hard to contest paternity when you're thousands of miles away and losing a good chunk of your income to child support. Sometimes the guy ends up on the hook for 18 years of child support simply because he served his country."
Support orders are based on civilian pay, which is generally higher than active duty pay. When called up, a reservist sometimes pays an impossibly high percentage of his (or her) income in child support, which hurts his (or her) current family. Because those who fall behind in child support are charged stiff interest and penalties, a returning reservist may spend years working to pay off arrearages incurred during his service overseas. Worse, some could even face arrest and incarceration.Some states have passed laws alleviating the above cited problems. Others haven't. How is your state treating its deployed parents and their children?
These may sound like "conservative" or "angry father" problems, but they really aren't. They are problems that confront many of our deployed troops. According to the AP story, "Military and family law experts don’t know how big the problem is, but 5.4 percent of active duty members — more than 74,000 — are single parents, the Department of Defense reports. More than 68,000 Guard and reserve members are also single parents. Divorce among service personnel is rising."
There are some pretty obvious solutions. As to custody, courts should be limited to temporary orders so long as a service member is deployed. Paternity fraud is easily solved by paternity testing. When you are a 20 year old soldier paternity testing is expensive. It is also difficult to accomplish when you are deployed in Iraq. The accused soldier's military branch should pick up the bill and its JAG should work on behalf of the deployed service member. Finally, the military should pick up a reservist's full child support obligation while he or she is deployed. The solutions cost money. So what. It's the least we can do.
Oh, Lt. Couch recently won custody of her daughter. The Kentucky Supreme Court, citing recently enacted law, overturned the trial court's decision. I would say it was a happy ending, but this is a family law matter, there are never any "happy endings."
