The Telegraph: It’s time we recognised that a father’s love is just as important as a mother’s
By Matt O’Connor, Founder, Fathers4Justice
As we approach Father’s Day, it’s refreshing to see the public display of affection between Guy Ritchie and his son Rocco – albeit one expressed in unhappy circumstances.
Both are at the centre of an ongoing court case, with Rocco’s mother, Madonna, having filed papers attempting to force him to live with her in the United States. Rocco currently lives with his father in England – an arrangement we are led to believe he wishes to continue.
The case is courting attention because of the high profile nature of those involved. But on a more fundamental level, it’s noteworthy because we aren’t accustomed to seeing things this way around. Normally, it is the father fighting for access to his child, not vice versa.
As a society, we often forget that a father’s love is just as precious and just as important as a mother’s. And we also overlook the sheer tragedy that any family – be they famous or not – have to battle to resolve their problems in a secretive, abusive and failing family justice system that is not fit for purpose.
Fathers4Justice have long argued that courts are for criminals, not families. Our adversarial family justice system is predicated on conflict: to prove who the best parent is, you must prove who is the worst.
It is legalised cage fighting for parents in which there are no winners, only losers. And the people who lose the most? The children, who nearly always become detached from the half of their family on their father’s side.
Every week, we receive hundreds of enquiries from desperate dads who have been cruelly separated from their children in the family courts. Some enquiries are from celebrities, many of whom are left stunned by the treatment meted out to them by judges from behind closed doors, despite spending vast sums of money on expensive legal representation. Others are from dads who simply can’t get their head around the confusing complexities of divorce law.
The primary problem is that there is no presumption of shared parenting in British family law – and nowhere is it written that fathers must see their children, despite the countless studies that prove the value of a dad in a child’s upbringing. Courts residing over divorce cases habitually decide that children abide with their mothers, leaving the father to feed off the scraps of frequently meagre ‘contact hours’.
Even then, the man is left swimming upstream. The same courts that happily send mothers to jail for not sending their children to school are oddly resistant to the idea of prosecuting someone for not adhering to contact orders. Put simply, the custodian (normally the woman) can effectively cut her other half out completely.
Since 2001, Fathers4Justice has been campaigning to end the cancer of family breakdown and fatherlessness and the devastating impact this has on children, families and society as a whole. It’s a situation that costs the country £49 billion every year, according to the Centre for Social Justice, and has left 3.8 million children living in fatherless homes – that is 1 in 3 children living without a dad (Office for National Statistics).
The only way we can end the pain and heartbreak of fathers and families is to ensure children retain the love and support of their dads through shared parenting in the event their parents separate. Shared parenting is responsible parenting: it will lead to better outcomes for our children, our families and our country.
But we can’t do this on our own.
We need the support of fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers and grandparents. We need every part of society to come together as part of a grand coalition for shared parenting.
104 MPs from all parties in the last Parliament backed our Early Day Motion supporting our campaign, with prominent backers to shared parenting including Nigel Farage.
But most importantly, this is a campaign of love, not hate. No parent should use his or her child as a weapon. Children deserve the best of both their parents, not the worst.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/no-one-wins-in-britains-broken-family-justice-system/
