Tonibella

I'm working on the horrid POV article fathers' rights at the moment. As well as being POV and biased towards the movement, it's also badly written, so it's taking longer than I thought. If you've got any suggestions to make, please do so on my talk page. I'd appreciate suggestions and help. The version here is by no means complete.

Fathers' rights

The fathers' rights movement is a loose network of interest groups who believe that fathers are discriminated against by the courts in family law issues such as child custody after divorce, child support, and paternity determinations, and campaign to change this. The fathers' rights movement is particularly strong in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, Italy, the United States and Australia.

History

The fathers' rights movement has existed since the 1970s. It has its roots in the increasing number of marriages which end in divorce; currently over 50% of all first marriages in the United States end in divorce, and the divorce rate for subsequent marriages is higher. More than half of all these marriages that end in divorce involve children. According to Americans for Divorce Reform, as the divorce rate increased, so did the number of children involved in divorce. "The number of children involved in divorces and annulments stood at 6.3 per 1,000 children under 18 years of age in 1950, and 7.2 in 1960. By 1970 it had increased to 12.5; by 1975, 16.7; by 1980, the rate stood at 17.3, a 175 percent increase from 1950. Since in 1972, one million American children every year have seen their parents divorce. " (Brian Willats, Breaking Up is Easy To Do, available from Michigan Family Forum, citing Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1993.) Thus, whether these divorces are contested or not, the courts may be called upon make judgements about the lives of the children.

Western countries have increasingly provided extra support to single parent families, as they are usually poorer than two-parent families. Lone parenting, once the subject of social stigma, has become increasingly acceptable and has been come to be regarded as providing an adequate upbringing for children. The state benefits and support provided to single mothers can be viewed as making the father's parental role redundant when the parents don't live together. Fathers' rights campaigners oppose this notion and point to research showing that having an involved father brings benefits for children, and that it is generally harmful to deny children the right to know and be cared for by both their parents when both parents are available to provide for the children's needs.

Father's rights advocates argue that the high divorce rate, the reduced stigma attached to lone parent families and increased state support for single parents (usually mothers) mean that fathers have became marginalised. They cite examples where they believe fathers have been outmanoevred in the courts by mothers who no longer wish them to remain involved with their children. This led to the formation of the now-worldwide fathers' rights movement.

Fathers' rights groups

In the US, some of the major fathers' rights organisations include:

• Alliance for Non-Custodial Parents Rights (ANCPR)
• National Congress of Fathers and Children (NCFC)
• The American Congress of Fathers and Children (ACFC)
• The Children's Rights Council (CRC)
• Parents Without Rights
• Million Dads March

In the UK, the best known groups are:

• Fathers 4 Justice
• Families Need Fathers

The most prominent fathers' rights group in Ireland is A-men.

Main beliefs and goals

The grievances of activists for fathers' rights typically stem from a perception that family court judges discriminate against men in granting primary custody of a divorced or separated couple's children to the mother, rather than their preferred default option of making provision for shared residency and care of the children.

Activists within the movement seek to restructure family law, arguing that children benefit from being raised by both parents, and that children should thus be allowed to interact with both parents on a regular basis as of right. Currently family law 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. Although family courts generally do issue decrees that allow fathers to provide some parenting time, many judgements have been criticised for not allowing fathers to be as involved as they would like to be, and the courts criticised for failing to enforce their orders. According to a committee of members of parliament on 2 March 2005, the family justice system in England and Wales gives separated and divorced fathers a raw deal and does not give enough consideration to preserving the relationship between the father and the child [1].

Many fathers have joined the fathers' rights movement after losing touch with their children, or reduced to a role where they feel they cannot be effective parents.

Custody

Fathers' rights activists have been critical of the assumption that the child(ren) of divorced parents should live with one parent and be visited by the other, which they view as "separationist". Fathers' rights activists argue that children tend to do better if they are not placed in such a situation, and that it is unfair to divide children's time between their parents simply because the parents are no longer married. They argue that children's normal cognitive development (particularly that of very small children) and the formation of their identity is dependent upon the existence of a certain level of familiarity with traditional significant others, including their father. Longitudinal studies, such as those done by Dr Eirini Flouri [2] and Dr Ann Buchanan [3] at the University of Oxford, contend that a lack of fathers' involvement in their children's lives leads to increased criminality in males and a higher incidence of depression in females independent of the level of mother involvement.

Critics of the fathers' rights movement have argued that since most men still earn more than women, and most mothers stay at home with young children, it makes sense to award primary custody of children to mothers more often than to fathers. Fathers' rights campaigners argue that this is a sexist generalisation, and that fathers' roles as caregivers have increased considerably during the latter part of the 20th century. Members of the fathers' movement argue that the promotion of shared parenting would reflect these trends.

Domestic violence

Relationships that have ended as a result of actual or alleged domestic violence pose particular problems, as the divorce and family court proceedings can effectively extend the abuse even after the partners have separated.

Fathers' rights activists argue that as domestic violence is overwhelmingly seen as a crime committed by men against their female partners, mothers can make allegations of domestic violence in order to gain custody of children or to end children's contact with their father, which are believed by the courts. To prevent this, they argue that allegations of assault should be dealt with by traditional courts, and only actual convictions taken into account in child contact proceedings, although social policy experts have pointed out that domestic violence is 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 could be used in child proceedings to make unfounded allegations of violence against them on more tenuous grounds than would have been acceptable previously, and, according to the 2000 report Contact and Domestic Violence: the Experts' Court Report by Sturge & Glaser, contact can be denied even when no domestic violence had actually occurred, but where there was fear that it might.

Some fathers' rights campaigners hold that there is a trend towards falsification of domestic violence claims in child contact cases. However, this is not proved and is controversial. For example, the Domestic Violence Legislation Working Group of Australia have stated that there is no "firm evidence that misuse of the legislation is rampant" and the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics evaluation report of the apprehended violence order (AVO) system concluded that a majority of women taking out AVOs in situations of domestic violence did so genuinely. Furthermore, perjury is punishable in many countries, though perjury in family court cases is very seldom, if ever, followed up by family court judges in the UK, where the police will not usually act in cases of alleged criminal perjury without the consent of the judge in whose court it was alleged to have occurred.

Fathers' rights advocates believe that there there is a discourse being created in which men are intrinsically "unsafe", which can be seen in the qualification always provided by politicians that they were in favour of fathers' rights provided it was safe. They believe that there is a domestic violence "lobby", which uses emotional arguments and encourages women to oppose their children's continued contact with their fathers. However, in a statement to the select committee hearing evidence for the Children and Contact Bill 2005, Dame Butler-Sloss indicated that she had not heard, having asked the UK family judges, of a case where safety was an issue in a case of contact denial by the mother.

Fathers' rights groups also oppose what they see as "sexist" presumptions about domestic violence, that is is usually perpetrated by men against their female partners. They cite statistics from Canada which contend that step-fathers are more likely to kill their step-children than fathers to kill their own children, thus indicating that it may be less safe to leave children with the mother.

Parental alienation

Parental Alienation Syndrome refers to a situation where it is alleged that one parent has caused the child to express hatred toward the other parent. Since, in the UK, the Children Act requires that the views of the child need to be made known to the court, fathers' rights campaigners claim that mothers sometimes attempt to influence a child against their father and that this then supports the mother's case in court to end the child's contact with the father. The existence of a syndrome (as opposed to a set of behavioiurs) called Parental Alienation Syndrome is disputed:

Lady Elizabeth Butler Sloss, President of the family division (the top UK family court judge), stated (in Re L, V, M, H (Contact: Domestic Violence) [2002] 2 FLR 334 at 351):

There is, of course, no doubt that some parents, particularly mothers, are responsible for alienating their children from their fathers without good reason and thereby creating this sometimes insoluble problem. That unhappy state of affairs, well known in family courts, is a long way from a recognised syndrome requiring mental health professionals to play an expert role.

However, fathers' rights campaigners argue that whatever the condition is called, the impact of this form of emotional abuse should be recognised in court.

Contact, parenting time and shared residency

In the UK, it is generally believed that it is in the children's best interests to maintain a living situation that comes closest to what they have already known, the "single base" argument, which most often involves the mother remining in the former family home with primary responsibility for the children, whilst the father has contact rights. Certainly, this contact model has been that most usually adopted and pursued by the courts. Fathers' rights activists acknowledge that a system that gives one parent the opportunity (but not the obligation) to remain involved in the children's lives after separation might suit some situations (perhaps where the father's circumstances do not permit him to provide a full range of care for his children), but they argue that this model does not suit all cases, and that shared residency agreements or orders should become the norm. These are becoming more common since the D v D case; there are even, as in at least one case in the US, examples where an order has been made which means that children should remain in the family home and the parents should alternate their presence there.

Recent research cited by the fathers' rights movement (cf. Flouri and Buchannan) contends that the involvement of a father is more important to chilren's welfare than having a single base. They also believe that any decision should be in part based 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.

Criticisms of the family court process

Fathers' rights activists have a number of criticisms of the family court process:

• Fathers' rights activists believe that the disadvantage they experience is hidden because family court judgments are not open to public scrutiny, in order to protect children. A full analysis of facts about family law is made difficult by the in camera rule that prohibits any reporting [4] of family law cases in England, Wales, Ireland and Australia. Fathers' rights advocates argue that there would be better protection against what they see as abuses if family court judgements could be published in an anonymised fashion, as is allowed in Scotland, which operates under a different family law system.

• Fathers' rights activists believe that family court judges are biased against them, in contrary to the view held by the general public which believes that in the rare exceptions when a ruling drastically affecting a child's life must be made, it is made by a high-minded, impartial judge. Additionally, family court judges are often seen by activists as not acknowledging the contribution made by a working father.

• Fathers' rights activists believe that the current adversarial family court system, dubbed winner takes all, such as exists in the UK, is biased towards the mother, whose fears may be taken as fact. Fathers must then try to demonstrate that they present no risk to the children, and that continued contact will be of benefit to the children. Although such considerations can play a part in making compassionate decisions about children in the aftermath of a family break-up, fathers' rights activists argue that the law as it currently stands in the UK implicitly links the interests of the child with those of the mother. In a case in the UK in 1999 (RE K (Contact: Mother's Anxiety) [1999] 2 FLR 703) the father of a six-year-old was granted permission by a court to see his child, but the mother indicated that she was distressed and fearful about this contact. This distress was apparent to the child, who felt guilty about seeing his father, so the court ordered that the father should no longer have contact with the child. 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 is claimed to be treated as justification for limiting his involvement in his children's upbringing. If he is inexperienced at parenting, the result may be that he is initially not trusted to provide basic care.

• Fathers' rights activists argue that the fmaily court system is excessively slow and cumbersome, resulting in unnecessarily long separations occurring between fathers and children during and after lengthy periods of court hearings. They argue that this time would be better spent dealing with the trauma of the parents' initial separation and allowing the children to maintain their relationships with both parents.

The effect of separation from children on fathers

Fathers' rights campaigners consistently point to the higher rate of suicide amongst fathers who are forcibly separated from their children.

Support for estranged fathers

At a local level, many fathers' rights groups provide support for newly separated fathers, many of whom may be highly distraught and even suicidal. These feelings are caused by missing their children; uncertainty, sometimes over long periods, about what the outcome will be; the loss of a family home and their decreased future income. In many cases these groups also campaign for a greater consideration towards grandparents and women in second marriages.

In the UK, some resources are provided by the government to support continued contact. When agreement can't be reached about a father being with his children in his home, courts frequently order that fathers can only see their children at contact centres, which provide a neutral location where supervised parenting time can occur on specified occasions. Such centres are intended to be transitional, though where mutual or unilateral hostilities between parents persist, moving on from the use of contact centres can require further court appearances. Fathers' rights campaigners argue that shortages of places at contact centres are used as reasons to prevent them seeing their children and that frequently the only reason given for using a contact centre in those cases is that the mother demands it. Rather than devoting funds to extend the network of contact centres, some fathers' rights campaigners argue that contact centres should only be used for a specific small minority of cases, such as where there are health reasons why the father cannot care for his children unaided.

Achievements of the fathers' rights movements in the UK

Some fathers' rights advocates believe that it is the judiciary rather than government who have the greatest power to bring about change. Some organisations, such as FNF, have advised members to act as a litigant in person and to work towards shared residency court orders, which is claimed to have changed judicial attitudes.

For a many years father's rights groups were largely ignored by the mainstream media and by governments. However, in the UK, the advent of Fathers 4 Justice in 2003 brought the cause into the mainstream media for the first time, and they have since attracted much attention.

Fathers' rights advocates have achieved some limited political success; for example, the ideas of Families Need Fathers were included in the Adoption and Children Act 2002 regarding the automatic granting of parental responsibility to fathers when their name appears on a child's birth certificate. Although the 2005 Children and Contact Bill addresses some of the concerns of Fathers For Justice, it remains to be seen whether attempting to influence legislation and providing evidence to Select Committees are more effective tactics than performing publicity stunts. Research into effective means of changing environment law in the US suggests that direct action can be significantly more effective than traditional political lobbying at being heard. F4J achieved its main objective of bringing to the issues to the public's attention and creating concern that fathers were being treated unfairly in child contact proceedings.

Fathers' rights campaigners are optimistic that the government must now be seen to be actually doing something to addresss public concern. Whilst government ministers have long denied that there is a problem, Lord Filkin [5], the family justice minister, announced at the beginning of April 2004 that there would be a green paper outlining proposals intended to improve the methods used to settle child custody disputes [6]. See 2004 Green Paper. The November 2004 Queen's Speech before Parliament said:

My Government believes that the welfare of children is paramount. Draft legislation will be published to safeguard the welfare of children in circumstances of parental separation and inter-country adoption.

Some MPs are also beginning to take notice of the fathers' rights movement. There was a debate on the topic of Family Justice on 13 December 2004 in the House of Commons. [7]. The motion was:

That this House agrees that on the separation of parents, priority should be given to the interests of the children; believes that it is in the best interests of all children for both parents to be fully involved in their upbringing and hence that separated parents should each have a legal presumption of reasonable contact with their children, except where a child's safety would be at risk, so that children are able to benefit from being parented by both their parents, as well as from contact with any grandparents and extended family members able and willing to play a role in their upbringing; regrets the Government's opposition to such a legal presumption, which will lead to yet more children being denied access to both their parents and their extended families; views with concern the Government's failure to implement the Early Intervention Project; and calls on the Government to replace the legal term 'contact' with 'parenting time', to introduce a legal presumption of co-parenting and to introduce early intervention in parental separation, with court-backed mediation and guidelines on parenting-time.

This motion was, however, defeated by 283 votes to 168.

Achievements of the fathers' rights movements in the US

In 1998, Florida State Representative Randy Ball (R - Titusville) introduced reform legislation that was written by NASA's Dr. Peter Wilson of Parents Without Rights. Working in conjunction with the National Congress of Fathers and Children, Representative Ball successfully worked to pass the 1998 Visitation Reform Act.

Supporters of the fathers' rights movement

Supporters of the fathers' rights movement include divorced (and subsequently widowed) Live Aid founder, Bob Geldof and Irish writer and journalist John Waters. 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. In the UK, the Home Secretary, David Blunkett's resignation on 15 December 2004, following his attempts to remain in touch with his youngest son, and the response of his ex-partner, which he mentioned in an interview with the BBC [8], have 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."

Opposition to fathers' rights movements

There is little worldwide co-ordinated opposition to the fathers' rights movement; however many children's, women's and domestic violence support groups, as well as some trade unions, have expressed concern about their aims and tactics.

This concern is generally focused on four aspects:

• that bias against fathers in family law does not exist
• intimidation of family law professionals
• the seeming denial of the extent and impact of domestic violence on women and children
• an emphasis on fathers' "rights" at the expense of the rights of children and the responsibilities of parents
• an over-emphasis on the "traditional" family, which sometimes manifests in anti-feminism, misogyny, homophobia and stigma towards other styles of family

Bias against fathers in family law does not exist

Opponents of fathers' rights groups challenge the premise of such groups that there is bias in the family law system against fathers. That there is no bias in family courts was upheld by the House of Commons Constitutional Affairs Committee in 2004. [9] Instead they point out that most of the decisions of family law courts reflect the status quo, where children live with the mother, and that courts are unlikely to upset this relationship except in extreme circumstances.

Intimidation of family law professionals

In the UK, the tactics of some fathers' rights groups and some individuals have included bullying and intimidating CAFCASS (family court) staff, as reported in the national press. Spate of hoax bombs hits family courts NAPO, the union representing family court staff, compiled a dossier detailing the abuse they claim that their members have suffered at the hands of fathers' rights groups, including being sent fake letter bombs and hate mail, having rotting meat put through an office letter box and being subjected to verbal abuse. "In one of the worst incidents — for which nobody has claimed responsibility — a solicitor found her car engine and headlights doused in petrol, which could have exploded when she started the engine." [10] The general secretary of NAPO said in her spech to the Napo conference in 2004 "CAFCASS members have during the year had to put up with more than their fair share of stress and abuse as a result of the antics of militant fathers’ groups." [11]

Family court judges and lawyers have also been intimidated, with angry fathers' rights advocates picketing their homes, invading their offices and launching email campaigns against them. [12]

Denial of the extent and impact of domestic violence on women and children

Fathers' rights advocates question the impact of domestic violence on women and children, arguing that women can use allegations of domestic violence to prevent men gaining custody or contact with their children. [13]

The effect of fathers' rights campaigns have been to put pressure on the family courts to grant contact even where it may not be safe to do so, putting more vulnerable women and children at risk, acording to the chief executives of Women’s Aid and Refuge and the police. [14] The Newham Domestic Violence Project says that “when mothers try to protect their children from abusive fathers, they are often viewed by the courts and welfare professionals not as protective, but as obstructive, manipulative and irrationally ‘implacably hostile’." [15]

In 2003, 67,000 contact orders were granted and contact was refused in only 601 cases, less than 1%. [16] As The Guardian points out, “in 1998, only 3 per cent of fathers’ applications for contact orders were refused. By 2001 this had dropped to 1.3 per cent - that is 713, a figure which barely covers the number of men who murdered their wives and schedule one offenders (child abusers)”. [17]

Anti-fathers' rights activists often also point to the number of prominent fathers' rights advocates who, although claiming to represent blameless wronged fathers, were themselves perpetrators of domestic violence. "Former wives and girlfriends who spoke to the Guardian described relationship break ups involving domestic violence, being forced to live in refuges and incidents in which their children witnessed frightening aggression by their fathers." [18] "Williams, a 36-year-old nurse, knows from experience the picture painted by militant men’s groups can sometimes be far from the truth. Her ex-husband is a member of one - and in her view, he forfeited his ‘right’ of access when he drove the family out of the house to a women’s refuge. (The police had warned her that, if she didn’t leave soon, she’d leave in a box.)" [19] There are further examples of this. [20]

Fathers' rights versus childen's rights

Opponents of the fathers' rights movement argue that the emphasis on fathers' rights undermines the presumption that the most important considerations should be what is best for the child.

Criticism of shared parenting

Fathers' rights advocacy of “shared parenting”, a euphemism for joint custody, presumes that the interests of the child are inevitably best served by a presumption of a 50-50 split of their time between both parents. However, this has been challenged by Trish Wilson who says “Joint custody has been shown to be detrimental to children who are exposed to conflict between their parents. Joint custody also asks a lot of children. Many of them cannot handle the shunting back and forth between homes very well. They also must keep track of which home they are to be in on a given day, which is stressful for them. They lose track of their friends, and their extracurricular activities suffer when parents pay too much attention to when the children are to be with them.” [21]

Emphasis on the "traditional" family

Fathers' rights advocates believe that the breakdown in the traditional family and traditional gender roles, where the woman is the homemaker and the man goes out to work, are the causes of social problems. "The legacy of the family breakdown and the fragmentation of parent/child relationships is all around us. Teenage crime, drug taking, truancy and general delinquency… The UK has the second highest rate of young offending in Western Europe. Is it coincidence that the explosion in young offending has happened under a government that is systematically denying thousands of children ‘contact’ with their fathers?" [22]

Opponents of the fathers' rights movement point to evidence showing that there is no link between single parent families and crime. [23]