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Paternity fraud
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Paternity fraud is the act of falsely naming a man to be the biological father of a child, particularly for the purpose of collecting child support (also referred to as child maintenance), by the mother when she knows or suspects that he is not the biological father. The term entered into common use in the late 1990s. It has been given significant coverage by U.S. activists and authors Tom Leykis, Glenn Sacks, and Wendy McElroy. In Canada, the Canadian Children's Rights Council has advocated in Canada's national media in support of this issue which is related to child identity rights and the U.N.
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Encyclopedia
Paternity fraud is the act of falsely naming a man to be the biological father of a child, particularly for the purpose of collecting child support (also referred to as child maintenance), by the mother when she knows or suspects that he is not the biological father. The term entered into common use in the late 1990s. It has been given significant coverage by U.S. activists and authors Tom Leykis, Glenn Sacks, and Wendy McElroy. In Canada, the Canadian Children's Rights Council has advocated in Canada's national media in support of this issue which is related to child identity rights and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.
In cases of paternity fraud, there are many potential victims: the defrauded man, the child deprived of a relationship with his/her biological father, and the biological father who is deprived of his relationship with his child. Subsidiary victims include the defrauded child's and the men's families. In particular, financial hardship may have resulted for the defrauded man's children and spouse in cases in which the man was forced to make child support payments for the other man's child.
In some jurisdictions in some countries, there is limited opportunity to legally challenge the assumption of paternity. For example, by forbidding men to challenge paternity, especially in the context of marriage, by limiting the amount of time allowed to challenge paternity, or by allowing women to make a claim of paternity without adequate chance for rebuttal by the alleged father. Such is the case in state of California. In some jurisdictions, the husband of the mother of a child is held to be the father, regardless of biological relationship.
The ready availability of genetic fingerprinting allows men suspicious of paternity fraud to request a paternity test to make positive identification of the father. In many countries, such tests require the consent of the mother or an order made by a family court though this is not universally true.
Access to such testing is restricted in some jurisdictions as it is held to not be in the best interests of the child for such information to become available. A man finding out that the child is not his biological child contrary to information supplied by the mother may result in his rejection of the child or mother.
Statistics from the United States, Australia and other countries suggest that approximately 30% of all paternity tests exclude the putative father as biological father. These numbers do not reflect the overall incidence of non-paternity events in the general population, because the numbers are based on tests performed in cases in which the alleged fathers suspected they were not the biological fathers of the subject child. For example, see the AABB statistics for 2001.
According to Steve Scherer, a senior scientist in the department of genetics at the Hospital for Sick Children (Toronto), 10% of babies born in Canada are victims of paternity fraud. A 10% paternity fraud rate was also cited during a science seminar for Canadian judges in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada in November, 2002 by a panel of medical experts.
Dr. Jeanette Papp, director of genotyping and sequencing in the University of California at Los Angeles department of human genetics is of the opinion that 15% of children born in the Western world are victims of paternity fraud.
Paternity fraud statistics for Australia provided on a TV show aired by the Australian Broadcasting Company stated that for the year 2003 more than 3,000 DNA paternity tests were ordered by men in Australian, and in almost a 25% of those cases, the paternity test revealed that the children they thought were theirs were actually sired by another man. The Canadian Children's Rights Council's commonly uses a paternity fraud rate of 15%.
Between 30 and 50 per cent of women cheat on their partners, compared with 50 to 80 per cent of men, according to Dr. Judith Eve Lipton, a psychiatrist with the Swedish Medical Center in Washington D.C. who, in 2001, co-wrote The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People with her husband, David P. Barash Ph.D. Other statistics place this number at approximately equal for the two sexes, at approximately 60%.
Child identity rights are stated in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), the most ratified human rights convention in the world. It represents the rights of those under eighteen years of age, which comprise about 25% of the world population. UNCRC Articles seven, eight, and nine specifically provide for a child's right to be raised by both biological parents, to be identified properly at birth, and require that the government birth registry contain an accurate record of the identity information of both biological and social parents. Examples of "social parents" include, but are not limited to, adoptive parents, kin parents, couples, or single women who have no direct biological connection with the child because of their use of donor sperm and eggs.
A self-reporting national poll of 5,000 women in Scotland conducted in 2004 concluded that half of the women said that if they became pregnant by another man but wanted to stay with their partner, they would lie about the baby’s real father.
Paternity Fraud and Parental Rights
In most Western countries there is a short window for a man to challenge paternity claims, and, in case of marriage, the law automatically assumes that the child is the husband's. Critics claim this rewards and encourages the perpetrators of paternity fraud leaving men defenseless. The male spouse may be victimized even after the relationship has ended through the child support enforcement system. Government agencies responsible for the integrity of birth records accept birth registration forms without paternity testing. In some countries, the victim of paternity fraud may incur the responsibility of fatherhood and sign the birth registration forms believing that he is the biological father of the child. In doing so, in some countries, he becomes legally liable for life for the child even if DNA evidence should later prove that he is not the biological father.
Critics of current laws point to cases in which the child's mother simultaneously limited the legal but non-biological father's access to the child while at the same time using the legal definition of fatherhood to obtain child support. After years of bonding, many non-biological fathers have come to see the children as their own, regardless of DNA.
Children suffer when they discover that the man they thought was their biological father is proven not to be. As asserted by testimony related to anonymous sperm and egg donors, identity issues can seriously affect a person's mental health. The egg and sperm donors are now required to provide identity records and major medical information for the rest of their lives to assist those who were created by means of egg and sperm donors. This includes the federal laws of the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia to mention a few. In Canada, see the Assisted Human Reproduction Act.
In addition, child victims of paternity fraud are deprived of important major medical information that they would have if they had been raised and had an ongoing relationship with their biological father.
New technology to stop paternity fraud, Non-Invasive Prenatal Paternity testing
Scientific tests can now determine paternity at 13 weeks into a pregnancy using non-invasive testing methods in all cases.
This involves a simple blood sample taken from the pregnant woman's arm and a cheek cell sample taken by means of a scraping of the inside of the alleged father’s or fathers’ cheek(s) using a buccal swab ( large “Q-tip”).
The pregnant female's blood carries the fetus' genetic material which can be compared to the DNA of the alleged father. As of 2008, this method performed by one advanced Canadian laboratory had a 100% accuracy rate for all non-invasive prenatal DNA paternity tests performed by them in the last year. They do a mandatory post-natal DNA paternity test and guarantee the results of both tests. Confirming tests using afterbirth samples are required in most countries because the family laws haven’t kept up with the technology.
Unlike current standards of harvesting placental tissue cells as is required for chorionic villus, or entering the uterus to sample the amniotic fluid surrounding the baby as is performed with amniocentesis, this new technology extracts Fetal Nucleic Acid material comfortably and safely from a simple blood specimen collected from the mother’s arm to determine the genetic status of the fetus. Effective screening will be accomplished in the future without the associated risks which may cause a spontaneous abortion and the services of an OB/GYN.
Accreditation of Testing Laboratories
In the United States, the American Association of Blood Banks (AABB) provides accreditation of laboratories performing DNA testing.
In Canada, accreditations are provided by the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), an agency of the Government of Canada.
ISO 17025 Standards, CAP-CLIA ASCLD/LAB International are other standards.
In the UK, The Department of Constitutional Affairs maintains a short list of companies who are accredited for parentage tests as directed by the civil courts in England and Wales under section 20 of the Family Law Reform Act 1969.
Cases
Liam Magill
- Liam Magill. was initially awarded compensation for damages, not to be confused with the costs of raising the children, against his ex-wife for pain and suffering as a result of the paternity fraud, but lost upon his ex-wife's appeal to the High Court. The sole issue of this case was civil damages for deceit (fraud) (not reimbursement of child rearing costs or child financial support paid). As of January 2007, Australia doesn't have a "Bill of Rights" or "Charter of Rights" like Canada, The United States and the European Union. Equality of sex (gender) was therefore not an issue at trial. The complete transcripts of the case heard by the High Court of Australia and the related issues are available. This case gained world-wide attention. A book titled "Days of Tempest: The Liam Magill Story" was written about this case by American author and lawyer Lea Anna Cooper.
Jim Knapp AKA Jim "Jones"
- Jim Knapp AKA Jim "Jones", was found to not have fathered a child for whom he was paying child support after a 12 year battle in the California court system.
- Sixteen months after his divorce, Richard Parker, a Florida resident, discovered the child he was paying support for was not his via DNA testing. Florida justices ruled 7-0 against him, stating that Parker must continue to pay $1,200 a month in child support because he had missed the one-year post divorce deadline for filing his lawsuit. His court-ordered payments would total more than $200,000 over 15 years to support a child she had with another man.
Steve Barreras
- In New Mexico, Steve Barreras was forced to pay a total of $20,000 for a daughter that never existed. In August 1999, Steve Barreras and Viola Trevino divorced, with Viola later claiming to be pregnant with Steve's child. This was in spite of the fact that Barreras had a vasectomy in 1998 and claimed that Trevino had tubal ligation in 1978. Trevino fabricated a daughter named "Stephanie Renee", who Trevino claimed was born on September 3, 1999, and obtained a baptismal certificate, birth certificate, Medicare card and Social Security card for the fictitious girl. Mr. Barreras' adult daughter, Eve Barreras, assisted her mother in the scam by filing a fraudulent birth certificate for the phantom daughter with Vital Statistics while she worked at St. Joseph's Northeast Hospital. In 2002, Trevino was able to persuade a court to order Steve to pay child support for the fabricated daughter, by falsifying DNA evidence. When the judge demanded to see Trevino's daughter in December 2004, she went to a local mall where she persuaded a grandmother and her 2 year old granddaughter that they were "going to go see Santa Claus", but instead went to the courthouse with the 2 year old girl and attempted to pass her off before the judge as her own. Mr. Barreras, the paternity fraud victim, successfully sued blood laboratory Mobile Blood Services for their role in the DNA hoax. The DNA came from adult daughter Eve Barreras with help of lab employee Pamela Flores. Viola Trevino was sentenced to 16 months in a federal prison in Arizona for claiming the "girl" on tax returns. Trevino owes the IRS over $2200 for the fraud and Barreras $26,000 in child support and lawyer's fees. In November 2007, Trevino was supposed to answer state charges that include kidnapping, fraud, and perjury, but disappeared. A warrant was issued for Trevino, who could face another 45 years in prison. She was arrested days later. In August 2008, Trevino plead guilty to thirteen of the 24 counts against her. The deal means she could spend 21 years in prison. She was sentenced by State District Judge Albert "Pat" Murdoch 21 years in November 2008 on charges of fraud and perjury, with 15 years suspended, leaving her to serve 6 years. In January 2009, Trevino's sentence was reduced to four years (time served plus one year), but would serve the suspended 15 years if she violated probation.
Other Cases
- A South Korean man won compensation for pain and suffering damages of $42,380 when his wife had another man's baby and committed paternity fraud. Reported June, 2004 in Associated Press, USA
- In the UK on April 2007 a stockbroker was awarded £22,400 in damages. The judge, Sir John Blofeld, said he had been unable to accept the evidence of the woman, known only as Ms B, who is now 46 and a mother of two, and said she had made repeated "fraudulent representations" to Mr A over the child's paternity.
See also
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