Putting a Price on the Right to Visit Your Kid

Picture, if you can, the following scenario:

You’re a divorced father who’s been laid off and has taken a lower-paying job or for some other legitimate reason can no longer meet your child-support obligations.

Now you’re afraid you won’t be permitted to exercise visitation with your kids--or perhaps this has already happened.

What do you do?

Unfortunately, according to Bob Berton, director of United Fathers in Van Nuys, the scenario is more than just hypothetical.

With the depressed economy and accompanying job layoffs, Berton says his office--which assists fathers with custody, visitation, support and paternity issues--receives as many as 800 phone calls a month. Many of them, he adds, are from fathers struggling with child support and visitation issues in Ventura County, since United Fathers has no office in this area.

Some of the callers, Berton concedes, “are just trying to get out of paying” child support.

But others--the majority, he says--really do not know what to do.

“Every Sunday, I have at least 20 fathers in my office, from as far away as San Luis Obsipo and Santa Barbara, and also a lot from Ventura County,” he says.

“Once they are unemployed or laid off, a lot of times the mother says, ‘No money, no kids.’ And a lot of working fathers are having trouble, too.

“The problem for a lot of them,” Berton says, “is that if they can’t afford child support and they can’t afford the gas money to go see their kids, they also sure don’t have money to hire a lawyer.”

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So what’s the answer?

For starters, says Oxnard family-law attorney Edward Matisoff, many fathers are unaware of their legal rights--as well as their legal obligations.

Child-support payments and visitation orders are separate legal issues, Matisoff says, and one is not dependent on the other.

“What that means is that, even if he doesn’t pay, the mother would be violating the court order--and she could be held in contempt of court--if she denies visitation,” Matisoff says.

But that, he adds, doesn’t let fathers off the hook.

“If he has the ability to pay, he must,” Matisoff says. “The MasterCard payment and the Penney’s bill can’t be prioritized over child support.

“But even if he truly can’t pay, unless the father goes back into court and modifies the support agreement--which a lot of them simply don’t do--the order continues to run as before. The monthly amount owed remains the same, and becomes a debt.”

A debt, it should be added, that is not viewed very kindly in Ventura County.

Last month, investigators for the district attorney’s office arrested six men, and four others turned themselves in, after they failed to pay child support.

Dist. Atty. Michael Bradbury announced that others who do not meet their child-support obligations will be targeted in future roundups.

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Out-of-work or financially strapped fathers may feel as though they’re in a classic Catch-22 situation. Luckily, though, they are not. Several legal clinics throughout the county--including clinics in Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks and Moorpark--can assist people with family-law matters.

Notable is the one offered by the Ventura County Bar Assn. in conjunction with the Ventura College of Law.

Once a week, law students in their final year of study offer their services under the supervision of law professors. This is different from clinics that provide assistance through paralegals, who can help with necessary paperwork but cannot give legal advice. The service is also free.

“Attorneys charge so much nowadays, and there are no pro-bono family-law attorneys in Ventura County that we know of,” says Lidia Almaguer of the county bar association.

“That’s fairly unusual for a county, and we’re trying very hard right now to get a pro-bono program going,” she says.

“In the meantime, this program is probably the next-best thing. The students don’t go into court with them, but they do show them what they need to do. They tell them what to expect.”

For a lot of fathers out there who don’t know where to turn, it’s at least a start.