| [Edit]
The Fathers' rights movement is a stream in the men's movement, it emerged in the 1970s as a loose social movement providing a network of interest groups, primarily in western countries. It is primarily interested with family law and gender issues affecting biological fathers, such as, child custody after divorce, child support, and paternity determinations. The movement is particularly strong in the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, Italy, United States, New Zealand and Australia. The movement received international press coverage following the formation and high profile style activism of the Fathers 4 Justice group in the UK.
It is related to the men's rights movement and informed by masculism and some participants see it as a corollary to the women's rights and children's rights movements. Its advocates see the movement's encouragement of shared parenting as complementary to, and not at odds with, equity feminism's goal of more equal parenting involvement by both parents contrary to the belief that only women possess a strong parental instinct (that is a Maternal bond).
The fathers' rights movement arose with changes in both the law and in societal attitudes, including:
The introduction of no-fault divorce in the 1960s, resulting in a rise in divorce rates throughout the world.
The increasing social acceptance and prevalence of single parent households. The number of single parent (particularly war widow) households increased after the Second World War, and more recently increased social welfare and income support arrangements became more generally available.
Fathers' rights campaigners argue that their own and their children's rights and best interests are breached, they cite research to argue that even after separation and divorce that children gain critical mental and emotional health benefits from continuing quality involvement by their father. Fathers' rights activists state that it is destructive to deny children the right to know and be cared for by both parents when both are available.
Critics of fathers' rights groups claim that they are anti-women and harmful to children involved in custody cases as they argue that women lack power in the existing patriarchal systems, including family law. Fathers rights activists claims thats is the oposite , family law is feminist, matriarchal, and women win almost all the cases as official figures proves, and as been declared by judges and others governamental sources.
top
Supporters
In the 1980s Parents Without Rights was formed by scientists at Kennedy Space Center. In the 1990s, the Million Dads March Network was formed in Topeka, Kansas, United States.
Supporters include divorced (and subsequently widowed) Live Aid founder, Bob Geldof, Irish writer and journalist John Waters and ex-UK Home Secretary David Blunkett.
Waters fought a legal case for access to the daughter he had by rock star Sinéad O'Connor, and highlighted what he saw as injustices in the treatment of men in his weekly column in The Irish Times.
David Blunkett resigned as Home Secretary on 15 December 2004 following attempts to remain in touch with his youngest son, born of a relationship with his ex-mistress. His efforts, which he mentioned in an interview with the BBC , unwittingly made him a champion of the fathers' rights movement. Mr. Blunkett said about his son, "He will want to know not just that his father actually cared enough about him to sacrifice his career, but he will want to know, I hope, that his mother has some regret."
top
Family law, divorce and child support
The Monthly Vital Statistics Report May 21, 1991 (NCHS, 1991), showed that from 1975 to 1988, in families with children present, wives file for divorce in approximately 2/3 of the cases each year. In 1975, 71.4% of the cases were filed by women, and in 1988, 65% were filed by women.
Fathers' rights advocates frequently cite studies [. States whose family law policies, statutes or judicial practice encourage joint custody have shown a greater decline in their divorce rates than those that favor sole custody][.]
top
Application of family law
Due to roles whereas the mother is the primary giver of child-care and the father a stronger commitment to work and providing financially, fathers can be denied what is perceived as a caring role but required to maintain their financial support through child support in continuing pre-existing arrangements in care and income generation. Thus many claim to seek an increased involvement with their children, some to the extent of shared parenting and sole custody. In response to difficulties in achieving satisfactory arrangements a number of those affected men have become involved in the fathers' rights movement.
Critics of the movement have argued that since most men still earn higher incomes, and most mothers stay at home with young children or provide the most care even when working, it makes sense to award primary custody of young children to women more often than to men.
top
Support provided by fathers rights meetings
At the local level, many fathers' rights groups spend a large portion of their time providing support for newly separated fathers. In many cases these groups also campaign for a greater consideration of the rights of grandparents and women (especially step mothers) in second marriages.
Fathers' rights group meetings have an ethos of self-help. Some fathers advocate their own cases with some success, but problems can easily arise at times where self-representation occurs with delays and attempts to address issues outside family law .
top
Main beliefs and goals
Fathers' rights activists typically believe that the application of the law in family courts is biased against men.
top
Family law and the family court
Many Fathers' rights activists assert that the application of family law is Kafkaesque, with secretive in camera hearings and long delays which grant mothers initial custody, then delay final resolution.
Irish singer and political activist Bob Geldof has written on the subject of the extended length of time for family courts to resolve issues:
Shared parenting advocates argue that the family court system is slow and delays endemic. This allows a status quo to be established which many courts are reluctant to later modify. As the process labors on it becomes difficult to alter. Shared parenting advocates argue that this is unfair. It is then deemed in the child’s interest not to break this routine at the cost of losing sight and touch of their father, we must really examine all our assumptions without fear. Then we can move to building a more equitable system benefiting all equally. (from The Real Love that Dare Not Speak its Name: A Sometimes Coherent Rant)
Fathers' rights activists argue that time would be better spent dealing properly with the trauma of the parents' initial separation and allowing the children to maintain their relationships with both parents continuously.
top
The adversarial court system
The adversarial system, such as currently exists in the UK, encourages each parent to identify their fears, real or imagined, about what will affect their children now that the parents have separated. Some hold that when a parent expresses these fears about the other parent in this circumstance, even when fears are unfounded, they can nevertheless be treated as fact. Fathers' rights campaigners believe this system is biased toward believing the mothers' expressed fears. The father must then try to demonstrate that he presents no risk to the children, and that the advantages that he will confer on them are real. Although such considerations can play a part in making compassionate decisions about children in the aftermath of a family break-up, fathers' rights activists believe the law as it currently stands in the UK takes on a wider remit by linking the interests of the child with those of the mother.
Fathers' rights proponents say that in such circumstances, the case can easily become a witch-hunt. Any aggression that the father may have manifested in the past can be claimed as justification for limiting his involvement in his children's upbringing. If he is inexperienced at parenthood, or because this is a first child, the result may be that he is initially not trusted to provide basic care. In one case in the UK in 2003, a judge ruled that it was in a child's "best interests" to have no contact with her father, because such contact caused the mother to feel depressed and anxious. A second judge, Mathew Thorpe, said that while he had "every sympathy" for the father, he could not overturn the original ruling. Lord Justice Thorpe added "It's also a tragedy for the child, who is being denied an ordinary right to know her father and develop understanding, interests and affection with him." .
Many fathers' rights campaigners say they have had experiences that follow a similar pattern, and they are aiming that the law should be changed to prevent situations such as theirs from arising.
Fathers' rights activists further claim the idea of adversarial court cases to resolve family disputes has led to a sub-culture they consider to be completely absurd. They may also question the assumption that it can ever be legitimate for the state to collude in disrupting a loving and natural relationship between a father and his children.
Kevin Thompson, a non-custodial father in Massachusetts, has written a book called "Exposing the Corruption in the Massachusetts Family Courts," which details his journey through a judicial system he feels is "anti-father." The book is highly critical of the judge in his case, Judge Mary McCauley Manzi. Judge Manzi later issued an order restraining the book's distribution, on the grounds that it violated the involved minor's right to privacy. It seems unlikely that Thompson will obey this order, and the book appears to still be available in both print and PDF formats
top
Child custody/residence and parenting time
On child custody, a priority on continuity of care and/or residence leads to primary custody often being awarded to the mother. However the arrangements prior to the relationship breakdown presupposed a number of factors, stereotypically, fathers being the primary breadwinner and mothers the primary carer and presupposed other things such as daily contact between fathers and their children. Currently family law in the U.S. and UK awards primary custody to mothers more often than it does to fathers, reducing many divorced fathers' involvement in their children's lives to the role solely of providing financial support, with minimal parental involvement when the mother demands this.
Fathers' rights argue that children tend to do better if they are nurtured by both parents, they believe children's normal cognitive development (particularly that of very small children) and identity formation are dependent on a level of relationship with traditional significant others, including their father. Longitudinal studies tend to support this.
The argument for shared residency is in conflict with the view that it is generally in the children's best interests to maintain a living situation close to what they knew pre-separation, the "single base" argument. In the increasingly rare situation where the mother was a stay-at-home mother who ended her career to raise children, equal timeshare would require that mother be encouraged to return to the workforce to support her children or that father worked less hours in order to maintain truly "equal" timesharing. Recent research (cf. Flouri and Buchannan) has shown that father involvement is more important to children's welfare than having a single base, and the argument of preserving the status quo prior to the parents splitting can be based in part on how much time the father spent at home with his children before the split, as well as on how much involvement he is able to have in future.
When the two parents have earning's capacities that are unequal, then the lower earning parent can become further disadvantaged in having to provide adequate "equal" housing for their "equal" custodial time without equal means (income) to do so. When remarriage occurs, especially when mothers remarry, it argued by Fathers' rights activists that the mother's household income should be offset against his child support contribution in order to preserve equal living standards in both the children's homes.
In situations where the two parents are willing to parent collaboratively, equal or shared parenting is a distinct advantage for the children, although the Court of Appeal has ruled that this advantage is conferred regardless of the prior level of collaboration between the parents when the perceived unequal distribution of power inherent in the contact model itself contributes to their hostility.
Where clear guidance is provided in a court at the outset regarding outcomes, the result is less hostility and a reduced workload for the courts. Fathers' rights campaigners claim that vested interests in the legal trade are politically operative to preserve lawyers' revenue streams from this type of business. Judicial powers already exist to endeavor to ensure that continuity is maintained in relationships between children and fathers. Interim contact orders can be issued before the establishment of a routine that excludes the father from the children's lives.
top
On abusive relationships, implacable hostility and parental alienation syndrome
Where relationships have become abusive, such abuse often continues even after the partners have separated. Where one or both ex-partners are in an emotional turmoil negotiations to ensure that the children are properly taken care of can be volatile. Where there is implacable hostility, it is claimed, this can manifest itself in a way that affects children, one partner obstructing the children's right to family life in respect of that child's relationship with the other parent and/or extended family. Use of the legal system to this end does occur.
top
Domestic violence
Many domestic violence studies, particularly those based on the Conflict Tactics Scale, conclude men and women are equally violent• and Fathers' rights advocates reject inferences that portray women solely as victims and men solely as perpetrators. The belief that courts fail to prosecute false allegations of domestic violence in divorce and custody disputes is seen to encourage such accusations as a tactic. Thomas Kasper writes in the Illinois Bar Journal, domestic violence measures funded by VAWA readily “become part of the gamesmanship of divorce.” Fathers' rights and men's rights activists seek to better protect real victims of domestic violence by reducing false accusations. Phyllis Schlafly in a September 2006 article "Laughing at Restraining Orders" identifies the misuse of domestic violence injunctions in divorce and child custody disputes and notes the basis for many domestic violence injunctions are absent any physical violence, such as the injunction issued to David Letterman by a woman 2000 miles away, that he had never met, who claimed she was harassed by his subliminal messages to her.
In response to a 2003 government initiative in the UK to reduce domestic violence, fathers' rights campaigners have argued that situations where assault has occurred should be dealt with by traditional courts, and only actual convictions taken into account in child proceedings. Social policy reformers have pointed out that domestic violence can be an insidious phenomenon and that evidence other than that of convictions might also be valid. Fathers' rights campaigners believe that the lowered thresholds for what types of conduct can be construed as violent will be used in child proceedings to make allegations of violence against them on more tenuous grounds than would have been acceptable previously. They note a report called Contact and domestic Violence: the Experts' Court Report by Sturge & Glaser in 2000, which indicates that contact can be denied even when no domestic violence had actually occurred, but where there was fear that it might. The Sturge & Glaser report indicates that it is a risk to allow a parent-child relationship to continue where the application for contact results in stress to the child or child's carer: Proceedings often mean a standstill in the child's development while his or her carer's emotional energies are taken up with the case and the child is only too aware that he or she is the centre of attention and somehow responsible for this and the resulting distress.
top
Issues with language
Some fathers' rights campaigners argue that parenting time should be used indiscriminately to replace contact and residence. It is perceived that there is a stigma associated with treating one parent as resident and the other as non-resident. The term absent parent is felt by many to be particularly pejorative. Other terms which have raised the hackles of fathers' rights activists include single parent family - the preferred term here being single parent household, based on the truth that there are always two parents to a child. Male role model and father figure are other terms which campaigners feel are used as unacceptable euphemisms for father. Some have also called into question the term biological father.
top
In the UK
Fathers 4 Justice in 2003 brought the cause of fathers' rights into the mainstream media for the first time, and as a result new UK legislation was implemented in 2005. Families Need Fathers is a recognized body and regularly provides evidence to parliamentary sub-committees, with one senior Family Court judge noting it was a "key player in the debate about on-going contact and joint residence" .
The family justice system in England and Wales, according to a committee of Members of Parliament on 2 March 2005, gives separated and divorced fathers a raw deal and does not give enough consideration to preserving the relationship between the father and the child.
The Child Support Act is also seen as giving results against the interests of fathers and their children. Pressure from the fathers' movement has influenced the UK Government, which published a draft Children (Contact) and Adoption Bill in February 2005 tat aims to widen judges' powers in dealing with parents who obstruct their ex-partner from seeing their children.
top
Criticism
As with many social movements, some of the strongest criticisms of men's groups come from other groups and activists. Some feminists and pro-feminist men hold that fathers' rights groups seek to entrench patriarchy and oppose the advances made by women in society. They believe that the biases in family law, family courts and under the various child support arrangements in different places either do not exist, or are such that single mothers are not advantaged to the extent stated, especially in the face of sexism, male privilege and power.
Critics, such as Michael Flood of the Australian pro-feminist men's organization XYonline, see the men's rights movement and fathers' rights movement as the most extreme part of the broader men's movement. According to this view, most fathers' rights advocates have joined the movement as the result of negative personal experience during a divorce or custody battle and not genuine concern for children and as fathers. Many advocates do not dispute the former, but argue that this is due to the fact that many men do not realize legal discrimination until after they have experienced it themselves.
top
The use of violent and aggressive tactics
Michael Flood notes abusive strategies undertaken by fathers' rights activists. He notes instances such as when the Australian fathers' rights group the Blackshirts “terrorised recently separated women (and children) in their homes.” wearing “paramilitary uniforms and black masks, the men shouted accusations of sexual misconduct and moral corruption through megaphones and letter-dropped neighbours.” A leader of the Blackshirts was convicted of stalking a divorced mother after he and other men staged demonstrations right outside of her house.
Trish Wilson, writer and freelance journalist, holds that while fathers' rights activists claim they are "only concerned with helping dads see their children", they actually "lobby for presumptive joint custody (a. k. a. shared parenting), seek to reduce protections for battered women" and that they "want laws that would lower their child support obligations".
When US citizen and divorced father Darren Mack allegedly shot and attempted to murder a family court judge and allegedly murdered his estranged wife, Trish Wilson claimed fathers' rights activists “showed their true colors” by having “supported” and “excused” what Mack is alleged to have done. In showing they are not concerned with “children” and “fair outcomes” in court as she alleges, Wilson cited fathers' rights activists such as Randy Dickinson (vice-president of the Coalition of Fathers and Families in New York) who included the story about Darren Mack in a letter to a legislator about fathers' rights. In it he included a quote from John F. Kennedy that, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. "The state police were called when Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver took the message as a threat. Dickinson continued to hold that "they cannot continue to ignore our issues and refuse to provide any relief or accommodation, without encouraging violence from those more inclined to express their frustration and anger in that manner." In an internet newsletter, fathers' rights activist Glenn Sacks said, "Some on the not insubstantial lunatic fringe of the fathers' rights movement see Mack as some sort of freedom fighter."
In a similar instance, Michael Flood notes how a spokesman for The Men’s Confraternity, after a Perth man gassed to death his three children and himself in 1998 after his visitation was shortened by Family Court, voiced (perpetrator was) probably a decent, hard-working man who was pushed too far by the Family Court.
top
See also
Men's movement including:
top
Significant writers
top
Significant activists
Brian Hogan AKA 'Divorce Doctor', Author of 'A Blokes Guide to Family Law' *
top
Parents/Fathers/Childrens rights organizations by nation
Some of the major Parents/Fathers/Children's rights organizations include:
Fathers 4 Justice Israel *
Associação 26-4 , Pais Separados (26-4 Association , named to the 26 days a month children spend with mothers, against 4with fathers)*
top
Research
See List of family separation research articles
top
Books
The Case for Father Custody (1999) ISBN 0-9610864-6-7 Online copy here
Torn Apart: True Stories of Excluded Fathers (2005) by Tim Willis ISBN 1-904977-30-8 *
top
Critical of Fathers rights Movement
top
Notes
top
Further reading on the web
top
Australia
top
Canada
EveryMan http://www.everyman.org/ ( discussing gender issues from the male perspective)
Men's Educational Support Association of Canada http://www.mesacanada.com/
top
Ireland
top
Italy
top
United Kingdom
top
United States of America
In the US, family law is different in each state, and there are a large number of support groups, lobbying organisations and protest groups all over the country.
http://www.fathersrightsinc.com/ A National Fathers Rights Advocacy Org.
Children's Rights Council Works to assure children meaningful and continuing contact with both their parents and extended family regardless of the parents' marital status
Fathers & Families (FAF) Massachusetts-based nonprofit dedicated to advocacy on behalf of every child's right to have both parents.
Million Dads March Information network of all parents'/children's/fathers'/mothers' rights groups focusing upon coordination of events in the USA
|
|
