C C Smale Family Lawyer

Since I posted this a few days ago I have seen a commentary here.

Judges, in my experience, have refused to allow mention of the words “Parental Alienation Syndrome” in their courts. I expect this is a thing of the past following this case. They will not be able to deny it any more.

The commentary is worth analysing as it demonstrates what non-custodial parents are up against and the control that custodial parents have.

“As a result of the failure to secure a normal relationship with the father and the high level of parental conflict (the child) had suffered emotional harm.”

The child, now twelve, refused to speak to the father and put his hands over his ears during contact with the father. He says he may consider seeing his father after his GCSEs.

Let’s apportion blame where it is due – seeing as the court found that the father was blameless. Call this child emotionally distressed if you want, which is what he undoubtedly is. More significantly, this is one spoilt child and one mother who has caused serious long term problems yet untold. Credit to the father; I find it extraordinary that he didn’t walk away a long time ago; another “dead beat dad”!

I have not posted anything on this website for a while.

I am supportive of men’s and fathers’ rights, which is something I have tried to express in some of the things I write.

A number of people have contacted me to say to say they are distrusting of the idea that any solicitor could work on the part of men under what they see as a corrupt system. Fathers4Justice, for example, discourage fathers from using a solicitor at all. I have also been contacted by someone who considers family law and those who practice it to be “Satanic” and I can promise that person that I took your point seriously and I read up on the things you emailed me and I thought about them for the past two weeks.

I think Celia Walden is mistaken in this article in the Telegraph in thinking that Cristiano Ronaldo commissioning a woman to be a surrogate mother for his baby is an act of vanity.

I know nothing about the law in Portugal, nor in America where apparently the surrogate mother lives. Nor do we appear to be told anything about what Cristiano Ronaldo’s girlfriend, Irina Shayk makes of it all. Ronaldo himself has said little about it.

Women have had the controlling hand in reproduction for forty years or so. For financial reasons planned single motherhood is all too common, while fathers in their naivety disappear from their children’s lives.

I am not particularly a fan of football as such and therefore I don’t care too much one way or the other about these football players, however in this I think Ronaldo has shown quite a lot of wisdom. Congratulations to him.

Things will get tougher, not easier – for a while, at least.

Over the years there have been a number of developments in law and in society which have devalued men /  fathers. The 1996 Family Law Act is routinely used to exclude men from the family home. The 2000 Case of Re L V M H is regularly misused, to exclude children from fathers. The Police and Social Services and maybe your “friends” will take the woman’s side.

As a man, you are seen as as a threat to women and children by virtue of the fact that you are a man.

To some extent, those of us who represent fathers have found CAFCASS to be helpful because at least CAFCASS objectively considered the objections of mothers and saw through those objections which were weak and balanced them with the benefits to children of having a relationship with both parents.

Now listen to this.

CAFCASS are taking up to a year to produce reports and with public spending due to be cut by 25% one would not expect this situation to improve. It is already getting worse and I predict that with the situation as it is CAFCASS will stop producing reports at all.

157 Courts are earmarked for closure around the country.

These things will not help you. Don’t moan about it though because we are wasting our time moaning. (Yes, there are some new proposals from the new coalition government which are encouraging but don’t be relying on that right now.)

Now, more than ever you need to understand the way Family Law works and as a father you need a Lawyer who will fight your case  and who understands the system.

I wrote a few days ago about the government’s proposed change to the law to give grandparents rights to see grandchildren. The reality is that it does no such thing – all it does is it removes the requirement to obtain the permission of the court before you can apply for court orders. As permission is always given to Grandparents any so-called “change” to the law is purely technical

Fathers rights organisations, the most high profile being Fathers4Justice, seek changes to the law which they see as making the law fairer.

One such proposed change is a “presumption of shared parenting”. I disagree. There already is such a presumption as the 1989 Children Act is pretty much gender neutral. A second proposed change is to make the “secret”  family courts more open to the media. I think this is reasonable in principal but who is going to report on anything other than the celebrity cases?

In considering “shared parenting”, who is this supposed to benefit? The most likely beneficiaries are those families who can choose to arrange their lifestyles that way. It will not benefit fathers whose work takes them away from home, nor their children.

Tweaking the law in these ways will not make any difference for just as long as women, and particularly- mothers, are indulged by a culture of entitlement and victimhood.

Allegations of violence, sexual abuse and deviant behaviour are routine in the family courts. By “routine” I mean they are made in most cases and they are made for tactical reasons. The most spurious allegations will be taken seriously and they take months or years to investigate.

Any advocate of fathers’, or grandparents’ rights needs to understand this – any tweaks in the law will be defeated until we understand the truth about domestic abuse and child abuse allegations. Your child’s mother only needs to make an allegation about you and your relationship with your child is stopped – shared parenting or not!

Here are a few observations – they are from personal observation but if anyone wants to comment, posting some statistics we could have a proper debate:

• Mothers kill their children more than fathers do.
• Mothers physically assault their children more than fathers do.
• Women are more abusive than men, mentally and physically.
• More women die at the hands of their partners than women do but it evens itself out if one takes into account women who get someone else to kill the male partner – if you take into account suicides there are more male than female fatalities from domestic abuse.
• Women who abuse men are incredibly unlikely to be arrested or convicted of any offence. Sentences for any such offences, including murder are likely to be harsher for men than for women.
• There is far more sympathy for female than male victims. I posted on here a few days ago in connection with the fact that in Scotland £3,500 was spent in supporting female victims of abuse for every £1 spent on supporting men.
• There is an entitlement / victimhood culture which is sold to women. “No blame”. “You are not responsible”. Even womens’ rights organisations who proclaim this know it is a lie and in private they will tell you this. This is why women keep going back to abusive men.

Why has this man had so many marriage proposals?

My challenge here is to fathers’ rights organisations to acknowledge the real issues and stop trying to tweak the law. If this gets one of you to stop disrupting the traffic and take off your Spiderman outfit – let me know.

I just watched the second part of the BBC Fatherhood Season programmes.

Great viewing.

Wow!  I’ve just been watching the first programme in the BBC Fatherhood season.

One part featured a father who’d been away at war for three years. He came home for a week’s leave to children who were thrilled to see him. He died a week after returning to the front and there is a daughter who will remember him forever.

Think about it. Three years without seeing your parent but no contact centres, no attachment issues, no CAFCASS and no Mum’s new boyfriend getting in the way. No drama, no psychology.

This bit of negative publicity in connection with the World Cup did not surprise me when I read it last week. The report on the same theme in our local paper, The Lancashire Telegraph yesterday prompts me to make some comment on my website. It is a piece of oportunism which jumps on the immense popularity of the World Cup to push the dubious message that men cannot be trusted to behave and that women need to be wary.

Publicity of domestic violence which acknowledges that men are often victims is rare. (The headline in the Lancashire Telegraph newspaper which does not appear in the online version is “Wife-beaters crackdown”.) It is significant that the definition of domestic violence as accepted by most women’s organisations as well as by the home office includes a lot of things which are nothing like “wife beating”. This means that if you act in some way that someone could possibly perceive as being controlling you are guilty of domestic “violence” or domestic “abuse”.

Questioning the usual rhetoric

A lot of money is spent on so called “support” for abused women. The reality is that much of the rhetoric is easy to say but empty of meaning. The message so often repeated that “domestic violence is never acceptable and it will never be tolerated” is repeated by the same people who applaud Tiger Woods’ wife for attacking him with a golf club because of his infidelity.

Many women repeatedly return to abusive relationships for sex. Many move from one abusive relationship to another. This happens no matter how many hundreds or thousands of pounds worth of support they are given and no matter how many times they are told they are “not to blame”.

We are told how “domestic violence destroys lives and tears families apart”, which is undoubtedly true but I am sceptical that the agenda is really about the protection of families. (My own opinion is that sexual unfaithfulness damages families more).

On the contrary, there is very little support given to men who are either abused by their partners or who are unjustly accused of being abusive.

Representing men – often an uphill battle

As a solicitor, when representing men I know that it will often be an uphill battle. It is men and not women who are removed from the home if the police are called to an incident. If a man raises his hand to a woman who then decides to call the police it is likely to get the man locked up and – if he is a father – risks him not seeing his child without a battle. This is the case regardless of the behaviour of the mother. Some of the very powerful protections available to women both in the civil and criminal courts are almost never granted to men.

It is a big injustice for any person whether a man or a woman who leaves a relationship and is forced to leave their children with the other partner or hand over their home or property to the other partner. (By the way, although the point of this post is to highlight the challenges in representing men’s rights, I think I should also mention that women who find themselves as non-custodial parents sometimes get the least support of all.)

The fact that men’s rights are met with less sympathy than those of women is a genuine challenge. Men, rather than women all too often have to defend themselves against the allegation that they are a risk and it is men rather than women who lose out on a relationship with their child because of this perception. If we as solicitors are going to represent men effectively we have to be prepared to fight against against this.