Many men feel they get a raw deal from the family court system when it comes to custody and access to their children. But are specialist lawyers the answer?

Andrew Jones was shocked when his wife started a child custody battle in 2014. The couple had separated five months earlier after, he says, he caught her in a series of extramarital affairs. They had agreed on an informal settlement: he moved from their 2,700 sq ft home into a mobile home, paid her $500 a month in child support and could spend equal time with their five- and three-year-old kids. When he received the letter with a court date, Jones was not hopeful.

I felt like I wasnt going to have a life, says the 46-year-old who works as an HVAC technician. I heard so many horror stories of divorce and how pretty much women get all your paycheques and you have no way to live.

Jones (his last name was changed to protect the identity of his children) represented himself in court while his wife hired an attorney who he says is well-known in their North Carolina county for getting women anything and everything they want in court. The attorney, he says kind of gives you the feeling that she hates men. That all men are dogs and men dont want to be in their childs lives.

Jones nervously told the judge all he wanted was equal time with his kids. The following month, he received a letter from the court saying he owed $1,300 a month in child support a payment that would be big stretch on his wage of $26 an hour. He had already cleared out his savings to pay off his and his wifes combined debts, so to keep up with payments Jones sold his truck, $4,000 worth of tools, and stopped eating out or having a social life. But the money wasnt even the worst part: he was only allowed to see his kids eight days out of the month.

When you have kids it changes your life, he says. You cant go without them and [when you do] it wears you down emotionally and physically.

In family law, tales of fathers who pay exorbitant child support and rarely get to see their kids are commonplace. Recently, firms that specialize in mens divorce have popped up all over America to capitalize on so-called gender-based discrimination in courts. While many family law firms have seen a drop in divorce filings, these niche attorneys claim business is thriving.

Yet their very existence if controversial. Critics claim any good lawyer is equipped to handle a mans divorce and that instead of pushing for greater equality under the law, these firms perpetuate sexist stereotypes about women.

While family laws are gender neutral, theres no doubt that judges and lawyers interpret them based on certain beliefs. In many cases, judges still consider a woman the more natural caretaker, a stubborn holdover from the decades in which mothers only worked at home.

According to recent census data, 82% of mothers have primary custody of their children and 53% collect child support, compared with 29% of men. The numbers certainly suggest the need for mens divorce attorneys, but they lack important context: less than 5% of child support cases are actually settled in court, which means most parents decide themselves that the mother should be the primary caregiver. After all, a Pew survey shows married women spend twice as much time with their kids than their husbands do.

But Joseph Cordell, founder of the largest mens divorce-focused firm in America, says the stereotypes of mothers as nurturers and men as providers leads to systemic discrimination against fathers.

As a society weve made progress regarding gender in a number of areas, he says. But the dark corner of the room when it comes to civil rights, I can tell you, is dads rights in family courts.

The most common issues, he says, are that men rarely get equal access to their children and are often victims of false abuse allegations. Cordell estimates that 85% of temporary restraining order requests during divorces are mere tactics. Margaret Ryznar, an associate law professor at Indiana University, says her research shows a minority of women seek protective orders during divorce and that since domestic abuse is a he-said, she-said crime its often impossible to prove whos lying and whos not.

Kirby Ingles, who lives in Missouri, says he experienced bias during the 2009 custody battle for his five-year-old son. His attorney, who did not specialize in mens divorce, told him that the court judge would most likely lean towards [your ex-wifes] side because the child is five or six years old so needs their mother. Ingles wanted more custody and joint decision-making but was told this is how judges usually rule. They didnt really want to do the work and put up a fight and do any digging in the case, he says.

Ingles wife got primary custody, but he has hired a mens divorce lawyer to renegotiate his child support payments after being hit with a decrease in his salary. He says his new advocate is more sincere and compassionate to his needs than a regular family law lawyer and is more equipped to deal with specific issues that affect him such as father alienation.

But not all experts think mens divorce specialists provide added value. Ryznar thinks regular family law attorneys are equipped to handle any case and that the niche mens firms are largely a marketing ploy to drum up business.

Many also see an underlying sexism in firms that specialize in fathers rights, a flagpole issue of the misogynistic mens rights movement. Ryznar says that while stay-at-home moms are less common these days, working women still do most of the domestic work, which has a negative impact on their salaries. Courts take into account and compensate [mothers] for the fact that [they] took hits to their career to take care of kids, she says. These mens divorce firms perpetuate the stereotype of a woman whos just after her husbands money. That is not true in many real cases.

But Cordell, who is a supporter of the mens rights movement, finds these arguments absurd. He views the treatment of men in divorces as a civil rights issue, equating their struggle for equality with that of black people fighting against racism and segregation in the south. To suggest to me that guys asking for fairness in family court are guilty of some sort of anti-feminist position or sexism is beyond response, he says. Its an insult to guys.

Of course, some mens rights attorneys hold less extreme views. Anne Mitchell, who opened one of the first fathers rights practices in the 1990s, is anti- angry mens organizations but says the stereotype that most men want to dodge child support is also not true.

Overwhelmingly guys [are] not looking for custody or to screw their exes, she says. Theyre just looking to be more involved in their childrens lives than the typical still default schedule: every other weekend and one day during the week. Mitchell, who no longer sees clients, strove to give fathers a reality check about which legal battles were worth fighting.

As a society we have really come to demonize men. Theres just definitely a faction that believes all boys have the potential to grow up as rapists and are angry, she says. Without the right coaching [men] show up at courts looking angry and that feeds right into the bias. Mitchell always tried to keep dads out of court, preferring to settle matters in counseling a strategy she said most firms focused on billable hours unfortunately avoid.

Theres no doubt Jones, the man struggling to afford child support, was in a better situation before stepping foot in a courtroom. About a year and a half after his initial appearance, he returned to court with a lawyer to argue for more visitation rights. He was unsuccessful his ex-wifes lawyer argued that he was an unfit father because he whoops his kids butts with a belt to discipline them, which he admits is true, and is often on call for work.

But without regular access to his kids, Jones says his life has deteriorated. His ex wouldnt let him talk to their kids on the phone and he stopped getting notified by their school about report cards and field trips.

Jones began lashing out at colleagues, and was written up so many times by management that he was fired. His new gig pays less $22 an hour and as a result hes more than $5,000 behind on his child support payments and $2,200 behind in rent. Now when Jones sees his kids, he cant even afford the $10 to take them to their favorite place, a bounce house with inflatable slides.

Im home alone and have no money to go nowhere, he says. I cant even get my kids something. I dont wish this for nobody. I feel like a homeless guy with a job.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/oct/15/fathers-rights-divorce-lawyers

In the years since Cathi Hanauers bestselling anthology of life stories, the women she spoke to have new goals

In 2002, Cathi Hanauer published The Bitch in the House, a bestselling compilation of 26 life stories by women who felt they were carrying a disproportionate load in the home and in their lives.

They were angry and disillusioned, sexually unfulfilled, financially over-burdened, their menfolk were lazy and unappreciative, and their children messy and that was just the start.

Fourteen years on, Hanauer reports, this same generation of women, now in their 40s and 50s, are happier. The children have left, husbands have been sidelined in many cases, and they are now free to redefine themselves in new and decidedly post-feminist ways and all the better for it.

That, at least, is the broad premise of The Bitch is Back a book in which Hanauer sets out to codify through personal accounts the gains women have made in an era of rapid, if uneven, personal and professional assertion.

The theme of the first book was anger, women juggling careers and young children and feeling like feminism had failed them, Hanauer said. But now, as weve settled into early midlife, Ive noticed that more women are making dramatic changes. The changes she noticed women around her making include leaving marriages sometimes for other women having babies on their own, or choosing to live alone.

Statistics bear out her observations: 51% of women in the US are single, 43% of mothers are unmarried, women over 50 are now twice as likely to divorce as in 1990, half of divorces for those over 40 are initiated by women.

Its about how not to be the bitch in the house any more, about how not to be angry and disappointed, but about how you choose to get yourself happier in midlife.

In the book, we meet a woman who plans to leave her husband because she is frustrated by his lack of sexual interest; another faces the opposite issue. A woman describes dating again in her 50s, others confront anxieties about appearance, health, loss, dating younger, dating older, not dating at all.

While no convenient marketing term has been coined for this phase reckoning or reawakening, Hanauer suggests these are ideas reconditioned from the 1960s that, thanks in part to technology but mostly to economic equalisation, have become part of the social mainstream.

Back then it was the radicals and the fringe; now everyone talks about this, Hanauer says. As women have become stronger economically, theyve started to be able to say the things they have thought for a long time.

Traditionally, she says, we have heard a lot about the male midlife crisis but much less about a comparable phase for women. Midlife used to be the time a lot of women started to feel invisible but now were able to ask, am I happy in this marriage? Am I happy in this town? Am I happy in this job?

The choice, she says, is to calcify or decide to make things better: Early midlife is a last chance to do that. But not everyone, she says, needs a radical overhaul: Frustrations are normal, so for many women its a matter of adjusting expectations and making a few subtle adjustments.

Hanauer, who has published several novels, is married to Daniel Jones, editor of the New York Times Modern Love column and author of the Bitch series counterpart compilation, appropriately titled The Bastard on the Couch. When the Observer spoke to Hanauer, the couple were driving to a book reading in Massachusetts.

The bitch and the bastard hit the road together and that led to the Modern Love column. Weve always been very in sync that way and supportive of each others careers, she says. Our careers bounce off of each other, though people keep asking him if hes going to do The Bastard Returns. For the record, Jones says no way, but concedes he might do The Bastard is Still on the Couch.

Theres still an element of disquiet about the use of the word bitch in the title. In September, the New York Times used the title The bitch America needs for a pro-Hillary Clinton political opinion piece. The choice drew widespread criticism, with some readers writing in to say that the paper had stooped to tabloid titillation.

For Hanauer, the title was conceived partly as a response to Virginia Woolf and her riposte to a 19th-century poem by Coventry Patmore, The Angel in the House, about the passive qualities of his perfect wife. Woolf thought the repressive ideal of women represented by the poem was still so potent that she wrote, in 1931, Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

Hanauer says that while some women were dismayed by the title, others recognised themselves. They thought, yes, thats me. They said they felt angry and mean and didnt want to feel that way. But they were also strong and assertive,and thats the good definition of the bitch in the house even when were not being angelic.

For the couple, their shared exploration into this realm has produced one sustaining observation.

Weve learned that there are so many different ways to do things, different ways to be and ways to be happy. The main thing is to figure out what works for you, says Hanauer.

Theres no normal. No right or wrong. Its just yourself, your happiness and your obligations and how to combine those to have a better, more content life.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/15/cathi-hanauer-bitch-returns-older-and-wiser

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Lloyds Banking Group has confirmed 1,230 jobs are being cut as part of its continuing restructuring plan.

The bank, which is 9% state-owned, and has been working to reduce costs and improve returns for shareholders.

The jobs will go from the group operations, retail, customer products and marketing, finance and risk divisions.

The cuts are part of the 9,000 job losses the bank first announced in October 2014.

The bank said the process involved “difficult decisions” and all affected staff had been told.

Employee unions Accord and Unite were consulted prior to the announcement, the bank said, but Unite national officer Rob MacGregor called the move “horrific”.

Lloyds said its policy was to use natural turnover and to redeploy people wherever possible in order to “retain their expertise and knowledge” within the firm.

Voluntary redundancy packages will also be offered with compulsory redundancies happening as a “last resort”.

Another part of the strategy to cut costs and modernise is the closure of hundreds of branches of the bank.

In July, the bank said it was doubling the number of planned branch closures to 400. They will all close by the end of 2017.

The bank attributed the cuts to changes in people’s banking habits, with more demand for online services, as well as the sustained period of low interest rates.

“Lloyds continues to cut jobs as part of its efficiency drive, which comes as no surprise given the uncertain economic environment the banking sector now faces,” said Laith Khalaf, a senior analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.

“Some of the job losses stem from Lloyds cutting its cloth, but some are simply about the ongoing rise of digital banking services, which are reducing the need for a high street presence.

“Job losses are never positive news, but what Lloyds is doing at least in part reflects an ongoing shift in how customers transact with their banks,” Mr Khalaf said.

Last week, the government scrapped plans to sell its remaining stake in Lloyds to members of the public, citing market volatility for the decision.

Instead, the stake will now be sold via a “trading plan”, with small tranches of shares sold to institutional investors.

Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37627913