![Sample our Health and Social Care journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5938/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Health-Social-Care.jpg"})
Abstract
Because of a reliance on women's shelter samples extrapolated to community or custody samples, both Jaffe, Johnston, Crooks, and Bala (Citation2008) and J. B. Kelly and Johnson (Citation2008) have developed a misleading evaluative framework for custody assessors, one that maintains a focus exclusively on males as perpetrators of family violence to both their spouses and children. We present extensive research to challenge and contradict this gender paradigm framework. Since custody assessments typically involve conflicts between a male and a female, generic assumptions favoring either gender must be avoided if justice is to prevail. The gender paradigm sets a framework for evaluation that is inconsistent with social science studies, many of which are unreported by J. B. Kelly & Johnson and by Jaffe et al. The implications of the gender paradigm for custody assessment are discussed and a more balanced view, consistent with the research literature, is proposed.
Notes
Controlling/jealous behaviors were defined as: “Prevents you from knowing about or having access to family income even when you ask”; “Prevents you from working outside the home”; “Insists on knowing who you are with at all times”; “insists on changing residences even when you don't want or need to”; “Tries to limit your contact with family and friends.”
In some cases, such maternal supremacy may still be based on a couple having had a homemaker/breadwinner division of primary parental roles within the intact family. However, when both parents have worked outside the home and fathers have had more direct, hands-on involvement—including, in traditionally maternal modes of parenting—functional post-separation co-parenting should no longer automatically be expected to depend on the father taking instruction from the mother.