Insult to Injury

A man in Michigan claims he was forced into sex by an older woman, against his will, when he was still a minor. That's bad.

Fifteen years later, a court has determined that he's the father of her child, and a court has ordered him to pay child support. That's really bad.

A man who claims he was seduced and exploited in his early teens by an older, married woman must pay child support to the state for the illegitimate son he gave her, the Michigan Court of Appeals decided in a precedent-setting Macomb County case this week.

[The man], now 29, was allegedly 14 years old when lured into sexual relations in with [the woman], then 21. Four years ago, she and her husband...got divorced in New York. Testing determined that the child she bore in 1989 wasn't [her husband's].

Now, an appeals court ruling says [the birth father] must pay child support, even though he was under age and claims he didn't consent to sex.

"(C)hild support is to provide for the needs of the child; it is awarded without regard to the fault of either of the parents," a majority of the three-judge panel on the case ruled. "The (lower) court therefore erred by refusing to order child support because [the birth father] was technically the victim of an uncharged act of criminal sexual conduct."

Shire contended in court, and Macomb County Chief Circuit Judge Peter J. Maceroni agreed, that if [he] is the father, then the son was conceived by a criminal act on [her] part and the mother should not be allowed to profit from it. The Court of Appeals reversed the lower court ruling, however, and said child support must be decided by the interests of the child and not the parents.

This perverse ruling would probably be made by a court here in Newfoundland, or any other jurisdiction where the "best interest of the child" is the overriding factor in family law matters, for a similar fact situation. (Section 37(1) of this province's Family Law Act says "every parent has an obligation, to the extent that the parent is capable of doing so, to provide support for his or her child". Unless the child was adopted by another family, thereby stripping the birth parents of their parental obligations, I can't think of any exceptions.)

What I want to know is, how did this woman's husband, who presumably raised the child he thought was his for a decade, get out of paying any support? Canadian courts have applied the doctrine of in loco parentis - literally, "in the place of a parent" - in situations where a person has raised a child he or she did not actually help concieve, and I'd be very surprised if there was no similar doctrine in Michigan. If either "father" has to provide child support, it should be him. (As for the mother, if she really did what she is alleged to have done, she deserves jail time.)

Update: one of the parties involved in this matter advises that the names of all parties involved were subject to a publication ban, and in accordance with his wishes I have removed all names.

Posted by damian at February 25, 2004 11:29 AM