Clever Little GirlInfluenced by how my father has always viewed children, I have for a very long time been of the opinion that babies and children are easily the most wildly underestimated group of people in Western society. Heck, I find the term "infantilize" mildly offensive because children are in my experience often naïve, frequently childish, but rarely "infantile" in the way that term is often used. (And if they are, it is almost always because parents or other people with influence overthem are pushing them in that direction so the children conform to their skewed view of what a child should be like.)
Now consider the following
situation as it presents itself in our entrance hall, and how
the cutest baby ever to munch on a piece of apple before she really should has dealt with it and in the process totally surprised her parents: We've got a big mirror in our entrance hall, and dangling on a spring directly before that mirror, in a height so that Maja can easily grab it while perched on my arms, is a wooden toy raven.
We have over the past weeks introduced her to the mirror, and she has been intently looking at her own and my or my wife's mirror images whenever the chance presented itself. The fact that I could hold her in my arms while at the same time being clearly visible in that wodden frame has always somewhat confused her, and only recently has she stopped becoming fussy in front of the mirror. Whenever she sees the raven she will first stare at it, then follow the spring with her eyes up to where it is fastened as if to make sure that the raven still has that strange bouncy thing going that no other toy of hers can do. She'll grab one of its legs, pull it down as far as she can reach, and shake it around in wild abandon while watching herself in the mirror. Then, she'll let it go.
This would normally have spelled the end of her dealings with this toy, because it would swing up and down far too quickly and with far tool large an amplitude for her to follow with her eyes. Three days ago, something in that little brain of hers must have clicked, because after letting the raven go, she would watch
its reflection in the mirror instead, which due to the greater distance and consequentially smaller viewing angle would allow her to follow the bouncing figure with her eyes. So far, so mostly unremarkable. What completely got me was that she would then switch to watching her own reflection and then
use exclusively her reflection and that of the bouncing raven to move her arm and hands to stop the movement of the raven and allow her to grab it again. Only after this was accomplished would she look directly at the raven again.
Now, research tell us that human children will be able to identify themselves in a mirror (mirror self recognition, MSR) at the age of 18 to 24 months, and Maja is barely five and a half months old. Also, this is clearly
not full MSR, as she will still try to grab at the mirror when we hold her sufficiently close to it (categorized as social instead of self-directed behaviour by those who know rather more about such things than I do), and she has of yet not used the mirror in relation to herself in any other way. But equally clearly she
has made a mental connection between herself and the bouncing raven on one side and the reflections of herself and the toy on the other side that allowed her to catch the raven using exclusively the view through the mirror.
Puzzle me this, folks.
Bend over and take it like a man!Recently, two unfortunate aspects of German law got combined in a somewhat surprising way, and the result of this combination was a message that was loud, clear, and utterly injust. Now, injustice in German law is nothing new, really, as witnessed by the fact that approximately half of my state pension will be subject to income tax
twice, once when I'm paying a significant part of my fully taxed income into the pension fund, the other time when the pension gets paid out to me. Both these instances of injustice enrage me beyond words, but the first one even more than the second, because it would have been significantly easier for our justice system to do something about it. It didn't, and now we're stuck with that message, and the message is: Got a penis, pal? Well, you're fucked.
The first of those aspects causing said injustice is the fact that German family law as precticed is incredibly sexist. The bias is pro-women and hence little talked about. I don't want to go into too much detail here, so suffice it to say that
Kramer vs. Kramer is a scenario that is every bit as plausible in Germany as it is in the USA or, say, the UK. Large parts of German family law automatically assume that mom knows best, and furthermore, that mothers will always, unfailingly, and unselfishly do the best for their children without regard to personal gain, while men are suspect of having the tendency to fuck and run, shirking their duties wherever they can. This tendency has gotten vastly better over the last few decades, but it's still there, and it's every bit as fallacious now as it was thirty years ago.
Aspect number two is that while German data protection law is very strict, it is still frequently violated and, more pertinent to the discussion at hand, often used against those whose private data it purports to protect, namely, the average citizen. This, too, deserves a rant all to itself, but not now.
When those two aspects got combined a few weeks ago in a ruling of the highest court in Germany as well as the passing of a new law, DNA paternity tests were ruled illegal in Germany unless the child's mother consents to said test. Now, it should be immediately obvious why that is bad news for husbands who suspect their wives of having cuckolded them. (Two possible scenarios that have become impossible: husband suspects faithful wife of having cuckolded him, has a paternity test done, finds the child is his, and can put his irrational fears to rest; (ex-)husband suspects his (ex-)wife of milking him through child support payments, has a paternity test done, and finds the child isn't his. If it can be shown that his (ex-)wife knew this, she could even conceivably be tried for fraud.) And with even the Ministry of Family, Youth, etc. talking about more than 10 percent of all children in Germany being raised by a father who thinks he's the biological father but really isn't, those scenarios are rather more plausible than one would perhaps think at first.
This isn't all there is to it, though. A father in Germany who wants to contest his parentage of a child through a court faces incredibly high obstacles when trying to actually file a case. German family courts routinely ask for substantial evidence supporting such a case before they even consider taking the matter in hand. This is a good thing in principle to avoid frivolous cases, but the standard for such admissible evidence is unreasonably high: Showing that it is unlikely that he is the father is not enough, neither is actually catching his wife in bed with a lover (though that may be enough for a divorce filing), as long as he also had sex with his wife during the period in question. The father basically has to demonstrate beforehand that he can not possibly be the biological father of the child, e.g. because he was out of country during the time when the child was conceived.
A DNA paternity test would probably have been sufficiently substantial evidence to start a court case contesting the man's parentage of the child, but by having been declared illegal unless the woman agrees to it, that road has been more or less closed, especially as the wife's lack of consent to such a test is very specifically ruled
not to be sufficient evidence for such a case!
The reasoning behind that law and court ruling is worth looking into as well. For one thing, the fact that child support payments can be substantial, and that the mother could therefore have potentially selfish reasons to deny a DNA paternity test because it might cut her out of a substantial part of her income has been completely dismissed.
Also, the reason why exactly these tests will be illegal is said to be data protection interests of the child: genetic samples for a paternity tests can be used to, and by their nature in fact do, reveal personal information about the child, so by German data protection law, the child has to consent to the test. As long as the child is unable to consent, e.g. because the child is too young, that decision will be made be those who have custody. So far so good. In any but the most severe cases (e.g. life-and-death decisions or other situations with severe risk of harm to the child, organ donation after a child's death), consent by just one custodian is enough. Notwithstanding the fact that every child has the right to know who their parents are, a DNA paternity test has been judged such a severe danger to the
good of the children that consent from both parents is necessary.
After there was an uproar of protest from father support organisations and family councelors/psychologists, some verbiage issued forth from the Family Ministry about how they promised to think about lowering the legal barriers for DNA paternity tests in the future, e.g. by making it easier to contest parentage in court and to get through such means a court order for a test. That sure would be nice, and it would also go a long way in placating me and others, but I'm definitely not holding my breath.
