NPR in Ohio Sends Misleading Tweet
In promoting presumed 50/50, an Ohio station claims women get sole custody all the time.
Late last week, a Tweet caught my eye.
Equal and shared parenting- sometimes referred to as the 50/50 presumption- is a favorite of the father’s rights movement.
As such, it’s no surprise that in the tweet they stated, “Currently, courts will often default to granting sole custody to the mother.”
I asked the station for a comment and here is the response.
The tweet reads: “Currently, courts will often default to granting sole custody to the mother.”
Which is accurate.
The station declined to explain further. The law certainly does not favor the mother in Ohio.
While I haven’t done that many cases out of Ohio, in the two I remember, it was the father who got sole custody.
In Molly Green’s case, he got sole custody after credible evidence of child molestation was ignored. I also did this story on Julie Goffstein- whose son sent her a text message from Stoneman Douglas School during the school shooting- Goffstein hadn’t heard from her son in years and he had been moved to Florida.
I found one site which provided statistics and found that fathers get 23.7% of the custody time in Ohio.
According to data from the Census Bureau, fathers had physical custody in 19.6% of the cases- or mothers got physical custody more than 80% of the time.
On the flip side, a study first done by the courts in Massachusetts found that fathers get physical custody 70% of the time when it’s contested- meaning it goes to trial.
Joan Meier found something similar.
That second number is important because while women overwhelmingly do get physical custody, those are often arrangements the parties settle on themselves.
When the court decides, the fathers usually win.
Of course, none of this answers how often women get sole custody in Ohio: what the tweet implied.
Given that there is about 11.68 million people in Ohio, I’d say there’s a good chance that women get sole custody “often”, depending on how “often” is defined. Men probably also “often” get sole custody but the tweet only applied to women.
The tweet is meant to suggest that women have an unfair bias in child custody, which is an outdated view, not bound in current reality.
That view is used by the father’s rights movement to push 50/50 custody as the standard- a one size fits all standard.
It’s very likely that this view was fed to the station in Ohio and like most media they shut down when they were called out on it.
Below, check out the debate I had on 50/50 custody.
The pendulum has swung back, the courts are now giving custody to the fathers. In one of my podcasts someone had said that for years the mothers had been getting custody but now the judges feel they should start giving custody to the fathers under any circumstance