Father's Rights-Nurturing the life and love of a child

The Fathers' rights movement is a stream in the men's movement primarily interested with family law and gender bias issues as it affects biological fathers. Historically related to the men's rights movement and to masculism, its advocates see it as a necessary corollary to the women's rights and children's rights movements. It emerged in the 1970s as a loose social movement providing a network of interest groups, primarily in western countries, established to campaign for equal treatment by the courts in issues 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 and Australia.

The fathers' rights movement received international press coverage following the formation and high profile style activism of the now defunct Fathers 4 Justice group in the UK.

Supporters

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."

Background

A contemporary controversy is around the status of the traditional western nuclear family of father, mother and their children. Has the nuclear family declined to the point that its social function of raising children can be met in other family or care arrangements? Particularly where social support and social security is available can single parents effectively undertake that task? This particularly relates to the historical situation where after divorce the mother had care, child custody and control of the divorced or separated couples' children with alimony sometimes being paid by the father where the couple had been married. The father's rights movement is generally viewed as the confluent result of a number of 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 entry of women into the public sphere, a situation which has upturned traditional gender roles which view women as primarily domestic in nature.
The increasing social acceptance of single parents and their increased proportion of all families.
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.
The increasing entry of women into the public sphere, a situation which has upturned traditional gender roles which view women as primarily domestic in nature.

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. Fathers' rights campaigners argue that their own and their children's rights and best interests are breached, they cite extensive 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. Father's 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.

Marriage breakdown, family law, divorce and child support

Many first marriages in the United States now end in divorce, and the divorce rate for subsequent marriages is higher than that of first marriages. More than half of marriages that end in divorce involve children. Thus the courts may be called upon to determine aspects of the relationships of these children to their parents. Many couples resolve these issues without recourse to the courts, however where this does not occur for whatever reason the courts apply family law in making their decisions.

According to "Americans for Divorce Reform", as the divorce rate soared, 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.)

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 (perceived as being ousted from their children's lives, or reduced to a role where they cannot be effective parents) a number of those affected men have become involved in the fathers' rights movement.

These delays can result in unnecessarily long separations occurring between fathers and children during and after lengthy periods of court hearings. Father's rights activists argue that 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.

On 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.

On 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 U.K. 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 needs to be seen against the view that it is generally in the children's best interest to maintain for the children a living situation that comes closest to what the children have already known, 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 is argued by Father's 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 (see A v A) 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.

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. However, the legal system is poorly suited to nurturing human relationships.

Domestic violence

A government initiative was started in the UK in 2003 to reduce the incidence of 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. It will be of interest to observe developments, particularly now since the working definition of domestic violence in certain countries, including the UK, requires neither that actual physical violence has occurred nor indeed that any violence has been proven in a criminal court. Since it is acknowledged that domestic violence can be perpetrated by either party, observers are keen to see how relationship dynamics will be interpreted when assessed against the domestic violence paradigm. 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. Fears about the system held by some fathers are deeper rooted even than this, because a report called Contact and Domestic Violence: the Experts' Court Report by Sturge & Glaser in 2000 indicates that contact can be denied even when no domestic violence had actually occurred, but where there was fear that it might. It is such recommendations that venal lawyers can latch upon and which father's rights campaigners feel will lead to even more good dads being driven away from their children. But it gets worse, 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 career: Proceedings often mean a standstill in the child's development while his or her career'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. In other words, going to court to obtain parenting time with one's children can be used as a reason to deny it.

Criticism

As with many social movements, some of the strongest criticisms of men's groups come from other groups and activist. Some feminists or 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 men's 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.

The fathers' rights movement is at times equated with the masculist movement, but although there is some overlap, large parts of both movements reject this equation.

Violent and aggressive tactics

Michael Flood notes the abusive strategies undertaken by certain father’s rights activists. He notes instances such as when the Australian father’s 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 father’s 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". She notes, however, she does not believe they are representative of most fathers in divorce cases. When US citizen and father’s rights activist Darren Mack allegedly shot and attempted to murder a family court judge and allegedly murdered his estranged wife after being ordered joint-custody of his child, Trish Wilson claimed father’s 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, she cited father’s 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 father’s 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 it 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." She noted other messages, such as one from the forum StandOurGround that "I applaud these kinds of actions. Men and Fathers are at war with their respective governments. If the ‘enemy’ is to sit up and take notice, there must be casualties.” 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

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