Fathers' Rights Movement In The UK Leading Groups

The fathers' rights movement in the UK consists of a number of diverse pressure groups, ranging from charities (whose activities are regulated by the Charity Commission), self-help groups and civil disobedience activists, who started to obtain wide publicity in 2003. The movement's origin can be traced to 1974 when Families Need Fathers (FNF) was founded. At the local level, many activists spend much time providing support for newly separated fathers, most of whom are highly distraught. Although accused of being sexist by some uninformed and ostensibly politically correct commentators, these groups also campaign for better treatment for excluded mothers, women in second marriages and grandparents - all of whom suffer discrimination in respect of contact with their (grand)child(ren).

1 Leading groups

2 Fathers rights issues

There are a number of issues which drive the participants in the father's rights' movement:

3 Political lobbying

Whilst the line taken by government ministers for a long time has been one of denial that there is a problem, with no plans for new legislation, Lord FilkinThe Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) is a United Kingdom government department. Its creation was announced on 12 June 2003 with the intention of replacing the Lord Chancellor's Department. It is primarily responsible for reforms to the Constitu[1], the family justice minister announced at the beginning of April 2004 that there will be a green paperA Green Paper is a tentative report of British government proposals without any commitment to action. Green papers may result in the production of a white paper. outlining proposals intended to improve the methods used to settle child custody disputes[2]. This has now been published [3] with the title Parental Separation: Children’s Needs and Parents’ Responsibilities, but it does not seriously address the fundamental issues, particularly the courts' generation of inter-parental conflict by making it necessary to have adversarial proceedings.

In the Queen's Speech at the Opening of Parliament on 27th November 2004, Her Majesty said [4]:

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.

Hitherto, it has been observed that reform was being steered down a side-line, with ministers such as Rosie WintertonRosalie Winterton (born August 10, 1958) is an English politician, and Labour Party member of Parliament for Doncaster Central. She became an MP in the 1997 election, having previously been head of John Prescott's office. She entered government in 2001 at arguing that the law was flexible enough to allow decisions to be left to the judiciary, and the judges such as Judge Wall arguing that if change is required it is up to the legislators.

Experienced lobbyists are aware that it is a common strategy for politicians to set up working groups to keep people talking indefinitely while nothing is done. Fathers' rights activists now wait to see what this draft legislation will contain.

3.1 Legal issues

The new system in the UK whereby the amount of child support that, in the vast majority of cases, the father pays, is acknowledged to be less fair than the old because it has ceased to take into account the other household's income. This is justified on the grounds that it saves administrative cost for the government agency concerned.

There are issues to do with the non-enforcement of Contact Orders - orders made by family court judges which oblige the so-called resident recalcitrant parent (usually the mother) to let the children spend some time with their dad. Such orders are not required if the mother is cooperative about letting the children see their dad, but generally speaking no action is taken if such an order is made and she flouts it.

The main issue, however, is to do with the adversarial nature of the system, in which most parents are dissatisfied, according to a UK government report published in 2004, and the only winners are lawyers.

3.2 A brief history of recent reform

In 2001 Mr Justice Wall (now Lord Justice) chaired a Children Act Sub-Committee (known as CASC). They reported in March 2002 in a document called "Making Contact Work". It called for "urgent reform". It was a sort of Hutton Inquiry of family law reform. It is well known that Wall LJ was very vexed when nothing at all appeared to happen for over two years.

The Facilitation and Enforcement stakeholder group was however created to discuss the CASC report. The impression formed by many involved in this group was that the government had no true appetite for reform, and just hoped the problem would go away.

Fathers 4 Justice have had remarkable success in bringing the whole subject to the nation's attention at a bottom-up grass-roots level, and the fathers' stories they relate have appalled many people. For example, a father was accused of sexually abusing his two daughters. The psychiatrist expert witness declared that the father had done no such thing, but the children believed they had been so abused and recommended that the father play no further part in their lives. That recommendation was upheld by the family court. No redress was made to the apalling emotional abuse that had led the children to hold this belief.

An activist called Oliver Cyriax has run conferences promoting early intervention . These were attended by high ranking members of the judiciary, including from overseas, where schemes that promote retaining both parents' involvement in childcare, but leave the courts as last resort, have been successful - notably in Florida and California. There is an alliance made up of senior members of the Solicitors Family Law Association (SFLA), Family Law Bar Association (FLBA), Hamish Cameron (the child psychiatrist with the President's ear), Fathers Direct and the campaigning charity Families Need Fathers. President of the UK Family Division of the courts Dame Butler Sloss has said she supports this plan.

Fathers' Rights campaigners urgently want an "Early Interventions Pilot Plan" to test and develop compulsory mediation and parenting plans, etc. backed up by a strict enforcement regime.

3.3 Green Paper

In July 2004 the UK Government published a Green Paper [5]in response to the two year old Making Contact Work document, and the more recent Child Contact Survey [6]. Only the year before, the Government had been indicating that no legislative changes in this area were planned, so this is a turnaround whose timing is generally felt to be the result of the efforts of fathers' rights activists. The Women's Aid response to this paper [7] contains the following: We believe that legislation is still required to create a rebuttable presumption in family proceedings legislation that child contact is not awarded unless and until it can be shown to be safe, and that this should be done through a mandatory risk assessment process. The response does not make clear whether this provision is intended to apply to both parents involved in a child residence dispute.

3.4 Party Politics

At the same time, the Tory Party has started making noises that fundamental changes in the law are required [8]. Some observers have expressed regret that this has become a party political issue, but this development goes to the heart of gender politics and could become an important vote swinger at the forthcoming General Election. The Labour Party is seen to support the status quo, reflecting the radical feminist stance taken by CAFCASS's trade union NAPO. This position, originally detailed in NAPO's anti-sexist policy document (which includes the statements: Family Court work is an important opportunity to build on the strengths and the expansion of women's roles and ...to develop policies and strategies which challenge the discrimination against women in contested residence and contact decisions), espouses the view that women in society need to be supported in their decision-making capacity in order to resist the forces of patriarchy. The Opposition stance is that such a policy is against the existing Children Act, which has effectively been hijacked by idealologues in powerful positions in organisations such as CAFCASS, supported widely by Social Services departments. The Fathers Rights' movement has drawn attention to the marginalisation of men in society by this radical feminist tendency, supported by the Government most particularly in the appointment of Margaret Hodge, a well-known denialist [9] and feminist who is a key figure in the ministerial sisterhood, that group of long-standing feminist friends who have managed to network their way into the very heart of government [10].

The Liberal Democrats, the other major UK political party, has framed the issue in terms of domestic violence, but yet has to communicate its ideas widely.

4 "Safety"

One thesis is that children should only remain resident with one parent if it is considered safe to do so; otherwise it is generally better to have both parents involved in bringing up their children. Whilst this might seem to be reasonable, it is unfortunately turned around by some influential politicians to mean that the children should remain exclusively under the control of the mother unless the father can prove that he is "safe", i.e. that he has not had accusations of domestic violence levelled against him. If he has, then he is considered "unsafe" until a finding of fact can be made in his favour, i.e. that the allegations were unfounded.

There is considerable confusion surrounding the issue of "safety" by politicians in the context that is used to deny parental access, particularly as it is a fact that most children's injuries occur in the living room at home, according to statistics published by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), and fewer malicious injuries to children are done by fathers than by mothers, according to an NSPCC report in 2000 called Child Maltreatment in the United Kingdom: A Study of the Prevalence of Child Abuse and Neglect [11], which stated that "most violence occurred at home (78 per cent) with mothers being primarily responsible in 49 per cent of cases and fathers in 40 per cent of cases".

5 Constitutional Affairs Committee

The government in 2004 set up a select committee to look into Family Law in the UK. In relation to the way in which the fathers' rights campaign has been received, the following interchange took place during the taking of oral evidence on Family Justice: The Operation of The Family Courts [12] at the House of Commons on Tuesday 9 November 2004.

Lord Justice Wall: A few years ago I went to address the annual general meeting of Families Need Fathers and I was actually very impressed by the strength of their feelings and their emotions. The message I gave them - and I was not the only one doing it - was that the way to succeed, the way to get into the system, is not to sloganise but actually to get on the committees, get in with government where there is lots going on and people want to consult you, and respond to Making Contact Work. We had an excellent response from Families Need Fathers, part of which we incorporated, and I think Families Need Fathers has become a key player in the debate about on-going contact and joint residence. We make progress with rational argument; we do not make progress by sloganising.

Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss: I cannot meet Fathers4Justice because they are not being sensible. As long as they throw condoms with purple powder and send a double-decker bus with a loudspeaker outside my private house in the West Country there is no point in talking to them; they are not going to talk, they are going to tell me.

Those present included Rt Hon Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss DBE, Rt Hon Lord Justice Wall and Hon Mr Justice Munby, His Honour Judge Meston QC, District Judge Michael Walker and District Judge Nicholas Crichton.

It is worth noting here that what is being "demanded" by F4J and what is being "politely asked for" by Families Need Fathers is one and the same.

5.1 David Blunkett Story

UK Home Secretary David Blunkett was reported in November 2004 to have started a paternity suit against a former lover. The former lover is claiming that the children 'belong' to her and her husband, and wants to make her marriage work without interference from David Blunkett. Mr Blunkett wants to find out, using paternity testing, whether he is in fact the natural father and, if so, to be involved in their lives. The interesting ethical question is whether it is better for the children to be brought up by a married couple, even if the husband turns out not to be their natural father, and effectively to live a lie. Or whether it is better to allow a man with whom the mother once had an affair to remain involved in the children's lives, regardless of how that involvement might affect her present marriage.

Family law precedent in the UK makes it look likely that Mr Blunkett will be unsuccessful in his quest to have a meaningful relationship with his children (if indeed they are his), unless he can get the law changed. In the case of Re H (A Minor)(Parental responsibility), it is reported:

A father was refused contact with his 2-year-old son because the mother's new husband's objection to contact was such that the marriage and the child's welfare would be placed at risk. The Court of Appeal dismissed the father's appeal.

(But see )

6 News updates

Newspapers (most recent first)

Events:

June 2004: Practical Steps to Co-parenting published by SFLA.

7 See also

8 External links

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