C C Smale Family Lawyer

“If evil appears in the form of light, benifecence, loyalty and renewal, if it conforms with historical necessity and social justice, then this, if is understood staightforwardly, is a clear additional proof of its abysmal wickedness.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1943)

As my blog progresses, more and more my posts are aimed at men who find much wrong with family law.

I am not so interested in the experiences of women in the family courts as I am in the experiences of men. The law is fundamentally on women’s side.

The systematic separation, by mothers, of children from those fathers who wish to play a part in their lives is a million times worse than the behaviour of individual men who, as we are told, “walk away” from families.

The lie that is the domestic violence industry is more evil than the violent male individuals who are caught by it, because it is a lie which is systematic and lets off most of the real abusers.

When I state that I am in favour of intact, two-parent families it puts me at risk of being considered a bigot or a Daily Mail reader.

If you suspect I also have a religious agenda, I will gladly admit my outlook which is that, on the whole, I think religion is a good thing rather than a bad thing.

The thing that marriage did before it became meaningless was this; it tied fathers to families. Feminists don’t want to understand this. Their standard objection is based on some 1950s or 60s notion of housewifely oppression where husbands had the presumed privilege of working to provide for wives and children. You wouldn’t want to go back to those days any more than you want to go back to an era of Bakelite telephones that you have to wait six months to get installed, would you?

The great thing about denigrating two parent families is the knowledge that when the relationships lose their appeal one or both parties can move on somewhere else.

But it follows as a matter of simple logic that the children of those relationships lose contact with parents. Complaining that fathers make themselves absent in those circumstances is irrelevant. The sure consequence of widespread family breakdown is absent parents; usually fathers.

This is where the State steps in. Government regulates the time parents are allowed with children and it provides for such children by means of welfare benefits and enforced child support all backed up by the courts, police and prisons.

By the way, it doesn’t only apply where there are children. Divorce and relationship breakdown provide a feast of State power in all cases, regulating the financial and property affairs of individuals, couples and families.

I tend not to write much on my blog about so-called shared parenting. The idea of shared parenting is mostly a sticking plaster to cover up what is, mostly, rotten.

Yesterday’s judgment of the Lord Chief Justice concerning child abduction is very interesting.

He dismissed appeals of two fathers against long prison sentences for abduction of their children to Pakistan, judging that the charges of kidnapping (an offence which can carry a sentence of up to life imprisonment) were appropriate in such cases.

In doing so he recognized that to deprive a child of a relationship with the other parent is “an offence of unspeakable cruelty”.

Who would disagree with a word of that?

Anyway, here is where I am sceptical: Abduction of children is not uniquely committed by fathers. Mothers do it too. Also consider that the courts on a fairly frequent basis give permission to mothers to relocate to foreign countries despite the opposition of fathers.

And furthermore consider the frequency with which mothers alienate children from fathers where the courts appear unwilling to impose any sanction at all, never mind a long prison sentence. I know that this doesn’t necessarily mean abduction abroad (although it sometimes does) – the point is that a child alienated in this country might as well in practical terms be one taken to the other side of the world.

The failure to enforce sanctions against mothers in those circumstances is always justified supposedly on the principle that the paramount consideration is the welfare of the child. On what basis does it apply in the cases of these two fathers yesterday but not in many thousands of others? Perhaps when we read the full report it will be clearer.

So, can we take it, as a general principal, that depriving a child’s relationship with the other parent is an offence of unspeakable cruelty which deserves sanctions against it?

Or does it apply only to the relatively limited number of cases of fathers abducting children abroad?

You may think this is a bit off topic but for a long time I have felt that the family court system could not be considered in isolation from a more general picture of female privilege.

This is the reason why I have been hesitant in my blog to focus on certain isolated “fathers rights” issues such as shared parenting, Parental Alienation Syndrome, domestic violence against men and female Borderline Personality Disorder.

Anyway I sat down at my keyboard today and identified some themes.

The first one is New Age religion. Although it is called “new” age this mumbo-jumbo is very old hat with origins long pre-dating Christianity. Marilyn French claimed to identify goddess worship from communities of over ten thousand years ago (and up to over three million years ago). Many prominent feminists have been obsessed with this kind of cult. I think in any event it accounts for a lot of the “pussy worship” that society has suffered from, probably for hundreds of years.

The second is Cultural Marxism. Marxism is about conflict between social classes. The original ideas posited by Marx and Engels included that the family was a unit of capitalist exploitation in which women were instruments of production. It was an economic theory which envisaged the downfall of capitalism and when this did not happen early in the 20th Century Cultural Marxists (most notably of the Frankfurt School) re-worked the theory, criticizing the cultural basis of civilization – art, literature, music etc.) in order to destroy social institutions. Cultural Marxism is very divisive as it extends notions of class conflict into every aspect of human life.

The third is Postmodernism. In particular this is the idea that the things we take to be reality are only “social constructs”. For example, the discoveries of science are not due to any laws of nature but they reflect only the interests of the scientists investigating them and history, so called, reflects only the interests of the people who write it. Feminists claim that if the dominant powers in society had been something other than masculine ones we would have much nicer conceptions of science and logic.

I don’t necessarily suggest that the above three things are the only account of feminism but to my mind they give broad and fairly reliable account of the phenomenon. The reason I think all three have been so conducive to a major worldwide movement is that they rationalize a feeling of eternal virtue of womanhood which is easily sellable both to women themselves and to men who seek female approval.

I note that both (Official) Fathers4Justice and Real Fathers For Justice have tweeted and commented on Christopher Booker’s article in today’s Telegraph.

I think I should remind you that this is the woman Christopher Booker, Ian Josephs and John Hemming are supporting.

The “injustices” supposedly highlighted by Christopher Booker have absolutely nothing to do with the rights of fathers.

I recall from over 40 years ago, as a child, the aggressive fund-raising tactics of the NSPCC. Their representatives visited our primary school. They convinced us that, even if we thought our own families were nice ones, other children’s families had Daddys who were bad to them. It was pretty scary and to make us feel better about it they gave us robust egg-shaped money boxes with a secure seal and we got badges according to how much of our spare pocket money we had put into them by the end of term.

The fundamental idea behind Feminism is that what is accepted as “truth” is imposed by the institutions and practices and power structures of society and those are predominantly male (or “patriarchal”) ones. The very idea of male and female identity is, according to feminism, “constructed” socially rather than by, say, biology, and is maintained by male violence or the threat of it.

That is pretty much the essence of feminism and when you realise it is so you also understand why it is that feminists are so obsessed by domestic violence and yet ignore any suggestion that men could possibly be victims of it. Bring into this line of thinking the idea that children are damaged by family life and by violence which is essentially and only ever male.

Now you understand the basis of the Refuge / NSPCC report entitled “Meeting the Needs of Children Living with Domestic Violence in London”!

The picture on the cover of the report is a clue to the content. It is a child’s drawing. The home is pink. The man is a big monster – and is reminiscent of the image the NSPCC sold to me about bad men when I was a child.

If you had any doubt that the NSPCC is a feminist organisation ten minutes of internet research of the names of the authors would tell you that among them, for example, Lorraine Radford is the author of the book “Mothering through Domestic Violence”. Ruth Atkins is “a former head of psychological services” at Refuge who takes “A Feminist View of Domestic Violence”. Jane Ellis would appear to be a researcher the Centre for the Study of Safety and Wellbeing (SWELL) at the University of Warwick where their interests include “Theorising Gender and Violence”, “The impact of Violence on Women and Children” and “Men, Masculinity and Gendered Violence”.

So it would be hardly surprising to expect that the conclusion of the report is that children are forced into contact with violent fathers, would it?

The document is over 200 pages long I haven’t had too much chance to read it but if I find the time over the next few days I will. A quick glance however indicated that it takes the view that abusers are only male (although I don’t think even their own statistics justify that claim). The only references to fathers or men I have seen in the report so far are as perpetrators of violence and the only victims are mothers and children.

Can I just say?.. I am getting a bit sick of this. A woman avoids a jail sentence today in the UK for biting off a man’s scrotum but never in a million years would a man avoid jail for sexually mutilating a woman.

Today is the anniversary of the end of World War 1 and I keep being told of the “people” who died in that conflict. And asked to remember the 345 UK military “personnel” killed in the Afghan conflict. But by “personnel” what they mostly mean is men.

Now I don’t necessarily have an issue with commemorating two UK women soldiers who died along with the total of 343 men. Two dead women is two too many but it is 341 less too many than the number of dead men.

If, say hypothetically, two out of every 345 victims of domestic violence were men and 343 were women and therefore you said domestic violence was a men’s and women’s issue I could – at a stretch – start to buy into this way of thinking.

As a man I find myself time after time reminding myself that I am a human being. My death doesn’t count. My ball being bitten off wouldn’t count. What I really contribute to my children by way of somehow enriching their lives counts less that what money I pay towards them.

It annoys me no end that I find myself having to remind myself time after time that I am a man and I am a human being.

I am not enthusiastic about the Supreme Court’s judgement in Kernott-v-Jones.

When I wrote about the case a year and a half ago I made a point that it was a cautionary tale showing that the law relating to cohabitation and property could leave people in uncertainty as to what their entitlement would be on relationship breakdown. The Supreme Court has now overturned the decision and I make a rather different observation.

At the time the Court of Appeal had ruled that when the jointly owned property was sold in 2008, Leonard Kernott, who had moved out in 1993 when the relationship broke down, was still entitled to his fifty percent share of the proceeds.

A further appeal was made, this time by Patricia Jones, to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court’s long awaited decision is to give her ninety percent of the sale proceeds. I think it is what many people would have expected.

As you would expect, complexities of Trust Law, and particularly the concept of “Constructive Trusts” are, for what its worth, discussed in some depth by the Supreme Court Judges. They then go on to come to the arbitrary view, which is rather unlikely in my opinion, that when Mr. Kernott moved out there would have been a common intention by both of them that he would have no interest in any future increase in his property’s value.

I think that in the end the decision comes down to the rather simple matter that Mr. Kernott can be portrayed as a man who walked out on his family and I expect this will be the way it will be in the mainstream media. This is the reason why the judgement seems to me to have been sadly predictable.

The full report here.

The first thing that strikes me about the Bar Council’s  “Manifesto For Family Justice” is that it is sexist.

It is said to represent “an alliance of organisations which represent the rights and needs of women, children and families and victims of domestic abuse”. A number of organisations’ names are put to the document including Gingerbread and Women’s Aid.

I have enough experience in this area not to expect the interests of men to be mentioned. The reality I suggest is that (as on the Titanic) the interests of “women and children” really means the interests of women.

The brevity of the “Manifesto” makes it easy to read. Of the three main points in the Manifesto the first and third relate to the  government’s proposed restrictions on legal aid. The second relates to the requirement to refer most cases to family mediation.

I have set out my views on legal aid previously in this blog, including this one:

I do not accept the arguments which relate to the problems caused by litigants in person. If litigants in person slow up the legal system or cause problems with court hearings then the thing is that the courts deal with litigants in person anyway. You might as well say that they should all have legal aid! One of the points which is made, of children being cross examined in court by their alleged abuser, is just dishonest and scaremongering.

Whilst I accept that the manifesto makes a reasonable point about family mediation not being a solution to a large number of cases, I think the mediation issue will turn out to be a bit of a red herring once it is widely realised that for such cases as are indeed unsuitable it means additional cost and delay and relies on willing participants.

In an article in today’s Mail, presumably intended to be sympathetic to the issue of suicide in young men, a psychologist called David Trickey claims that suicide “is one of the few things that men do better than women”.

The truth is that there are quite a lot of things that men do better than women – it is easy to think of some – running the hundred metres for example.

David Trickey is spouting feminist orthodoxy which says that anything men achieve is at the expense of women – otherwise women would be equal or superior. On the other hand if men have problems the problem is.. erm.. men!