14 June 2005 at 12:02 am
Okay, so there’s been a mini-explosion of comments below at the first F4J post, so I thought I’d reprise why I detest them and their fathers’ rights crusade.
But first, from one professional campaigner to another, kudos to F4J for a magnificent media campaign and an imaginative conceit - fathers as superheroes. Shame about the cause.
I’m glad F4J has imploded because:
1. Their campaigns are based on a bogus claim to be standing up for their “rights”. Rights campaigns are powerful, and, to use a word of the moment, they resonate with a large section of the population who are prepared to support the campaigns of underprivileged groups claiming what is rightfully theirs. As such, framing their cause as one of “rights” is savvy. But, in the end, it’s not about the “rights” of the father or even of the parents, but about the welfare of the child. In most cases the mother has been the primary caregiver of the children, and courts believe she should continue in that capacity, which is why mothers most often get sole custody. It is not due to bias against fathers in court. (On a side point, bias toward women by any court is hard for me to believe, knowing the figures of women who are raped, the tiny number that go on to report that rape, how they are subsequently treated throughout the criminal justice system and the pitful level of convictions for rape). Most mothers want their children to have contact with the children’s fathers, and would only try to stop contact with them if they are worrie about the children’s welfare. But, as the Newham Domestic Violence Project says, “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’.” (source)
2. If there’s a rights based argument here, it’s the right of women to live a life free from violence and controlling behaviour and the fear of violence and controlling behaviour, and the right of children not to be subject to or witness violence and controlling behaviour. F4J and their advocates and offshoots belittle and question the impact of domestic violence on women and children - just see the comments below.
Just for the record (all stats available here):
- The 2001/02 British Crime Survey (BCS) found that there were an estimated 635,000 incidents of domestic violence in England and Wales. 81% of the victims were women. Domestic violence incidents also made up nearly 22% of all violent incidents reported by participants in the BCS. (Home Office, July 2002).
- In “Routes to Safety” 76% of separated women suffered post-separation violence. Of these women:
o 76% were subjected to continued verbal and emotional abuse
o 41% were subjected to serious threats towards themselves or their children
o 23% were subjected to physical violence
o 6% were subjected to sexual violence
o 36% stated that this violence was ongoing
In addition to this, more than half of those with post-separation child contact arrangements with an abusive ex-partner continued to have serious, ongoing problems with this contact (Humphreys & Thiara, 2002).
- In 1999 a survey of 130 abused parents found that 76% of the 148 children ordered by the courts to have contact with their estranged parent were said to have been abused in the following ways during visits: 10% were sexually abused; 15% were physically assaulted; 26% were abducted or involved in an abduction attempt: 36% were neglected during contact, and 62% suffered emotional harm. Most of these children were under the age of 5 (Radford, Sayer & AMICA, 1999.)
- In their response to the consultation paper on “Contact between Children and Violent Parents”, the Association of Chief Officers of Probation stated that information received from local Family Court Welfare Services suggests that domestic violence is present in almost 50% of cases, where a welfare report is ordered. (Association of Chief Officers of Probation, 1999).
- In a survey of refuge services, Women’s Aid found that 48% of the service providers stated that adequate safety measures are not being taken to ensure the safety of the child and the resident parent before, during and after contact. In five cases involving children on the Child Protection Register or Schedule 1 offenders, unsupervised contact was granted (Saunders, 2001).
Oh, and if you believe the myth that men are just as likely to be victims of domestic violence as women:
- A 2002 report on research conducted with male respondents to the Scottish Crime Survey 2000 found that men were less likely to have been repeat victims of domestic assault, less likely to be seriously injured and less likely to report feeling fearful in their own homes. The survey retraced men who were counted as victims in the Scottish Crime Survey and found that a majority of the men who said that they were victims of domestic violence, were also perpetrators of violence (13 of 22). A significant number of the men re-interviewed (13 out of 46) later said they had actually never experienced any form of domestic abuse. (Scottish Executive Central Research Unit, 2002).
3. The effect of F4J’s campaign has 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. See the comments from the chief executives of Women’s Aid and Refuge (who should know, as together they run the National Domestic Violence helpline which received 250,000 calls in 2003-04) ) and from the police here.
4. The “problem”, if there is one, is far smaller than groups like F4J would have us believe. In 2003, 67,000 contact orders were granted and contact was refused in only 601 cases, less than 1% (source). 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)”. You have to ask, if so few cases were resolved with no contact granted, just what the parents in the cases where contact had been refused had done to deserve being refused contact…
5. One size demonstrably doesn’t fit all, so advocacy of “shared parenting”, a euphemism for joint custody, presumes that the best interests of the child are inevitably best served by a presumption of a 50-50 split of their time between both parents. Surely there should be as many solutions to custody disagreements as there are families involved in them? Trish Wilson has more detail on this: “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.”
6. I believe that the advances of feminism - no fault divorce, challenges to traditional gender roles, an end to acceptance of violence against women, ending the stigma of lone parenting and having children outside marriage - are good things. Do we really want to return to the days of women trapped in loveless or violent marriages, sent to homes for fallen women and stigmatised for bearing illegitimate children? The inference is that F4J and their fellow travellers do: “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? “
Yet we know that there is no link between single parent families and crime - “studies have shown repeatedly a consistent relationship between juvenile delinquency and large family size, marital disharmony, alcohol abuse in parents and overall social deprivation. A consistent relationship has also been shown with delayed reading age, below average scores on intelligence and achievement tests, conduct disorder of childhood and parental aggressive behaviour.” For a really extreme view of the problems that feminism has visited on fathers, see Justice for Fathers UK.
7. F4J’s tactics include bullying and intimidating CAFCASS (family court) staff.
See “Spate of hoax bombs hits family courts” and “Fathers ‘terrorise’ lawyers“: “A dossier compiled by the union representing family court staff shows its members have been sent fake letter bombs and hate mail, had rotting meat put through an office letter box and been 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.”
8. The activists of F4J are hypocrites, as they clearly do not themselves embody the “wronged fathers” they claim to represent. See here: “While prominent members of the group defend these tactics, the truth behind many of the cases they publicise is more complex than their slogans suggest. 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.“
And here: “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.)”
So, that’s my case. If you’re interested, a couple of other bloggers have been posting on this subject too. Trish Wilson is the authority on the subject - see her blog here, Volsunga has a great blog here and last November Dead Men Left blogged here .
Oh, and just to get a few things clear. I was brought up by a father (and a mother) that I love very much, I value the men in my family and my life, and calling me a feminazi isn’t likely to win me over to your case (ditto homophobia).
