Arrested on Father's Day weekend Gina Pellegrino, a real estate broker in her late 30s who has worked with COPS for about three years and now heads the San Diego chapter, sounds almost tearful talking about her boyfriend's efforts to remain an active father to his son, now 11. You have no idea how hard it is to maintain a relationship with a child on one weekend a month. My boyfriend was very upset, but he's an adult, he can get over it. The one that really got hurt was the boy. To choose that weekend to arrest the father was just evil.
Some women feel wounded by anti- father bias in more ways than one.
She and her sister lived with their mother, who McNeely says was an emotionally unstable alcoholic. McNeely believes she could have been spared much of this trauma if the system hadn't been corrupted by a bias for mothers. In 1990, McNeely married a divorced father of two, who she believes unfairly lost custody of his two children. Both she and her husband went to law school and co-founded a fathers' rights group. Not all the women who fight for fathers' rights have personal connections to divorced dads.