C C Smale Family Lawyer

I read that the majority of Britain’s “problem families”, some of whom are blamed for last summers riots, are fatherless. This is according to “official” research.

So guess what? It is the fault of fathers!

Eric Pickles, the Communities and Local Government Secretary said, “The absence of a father figure is a huge problem and often the fathers who are present have severe drug and alcohol addictions and are not working”.

But blaming absent or drug and alcohol addicted fathers is no more to the point than blaming absent or drug and alcohol addicted mothers. The fault is with a culture and a legal system that excludes fathers.

Mothers who choose to exclude a father from a child’s life put their child at a disadvantage. It is not just in “problem families” but families in general.

Yes, I do know there are children of single mothers grow up to be fine and successful people in the same way that, presumably, plenty of babies born to mothers who smoke during pregnancy grow up to be reasonably healthy.

Incidentally, I strongly suspect that of those children and families, the children and families with mothers who actively choose to bring up children without fathers have exceptionally high incidences of problems.

It is fashionable to say that children are better off having divorced, separated or barely acquainted parents than with unhappily married ones but it is a piece of selective-thinking born of left wing sociology.

And talk of  ”father figures” is all very well but what it really comes down to is not “father figures” but (biological) “fathers”. But that would be the subject of another post.

When it comes to what fathers can contribute to their children the Communities and Local Government Secretary wants to “work toward a situation where the fathers in these families provide stability, which means getting them back into work so they can bring in money and be a positive role model to their children”.

Again this no more addresses a real issue than to say that mothers ought to get off their backsides and do the same.

In a post-feminist era men have got to demand to be seen as something other than cash machines and workhorses. I don’t all that much condone runaway fathers or drug or alcohol addicted ones but I understand their situation far more than the government does.

There is an article in today’s Guardian which makes the claim that there is no systematic bias against fathers in family courts.

One point I keep hearing from people who resist change in the family court system is that “Only 10 percent of separated families go to court about contact”. Rather than proving that the remaining ninety percent represent the norm which are amicable and without major problem. the ten percent are at court because, in financial terms, they can. The majority of fathers who lose contact do so in the knowledge that the court is not affordable and expectation of the prospect of justice being too remote.

Contrary to claims that the majority of applicants for contact obtain contact the reality is that no records are kept as to the level of contact that is kept up after a court case finishes. The lack of any such records almost certainly hides very low rates of contact being maintained between fathers and children after the court process ends.

The systematic bias against fathers in the Family Court System is obvious from any objective viewpoint. Take for example most common scenario – the mother leaves taking the children with her. It happens time after time and mothers get away with it. Fathers do not.

“Child protection” issues are cited as a reason against a presumption of shared parenting. But the protection is only ever considered in relation to the parent seeking contact and nearly always the father – never the custodial parent / mother.

Fathers whose children reside with “high conflict” mothers are forced to maintain contact with the mother if they wish to see their child. Yet the courts use any sign of non-co-operation to reduce or stop contact.

Mothers and fathers are held to different standards, mothers failures to care adequately for their children leading to all manner of support from welfare services whereas, the merest suggestion of a deficiency in fathers’ parenting leads to denial of contact unless and until he can resolve the issue. (In case after case in my experience, it is the father who has held the family together but then is excluded from his children after separation).

I find much of the challenge in obtaining contact for fathers is searching for sops or concessions to meet often irrational demands of mothers. Contact centres. No meeting new partners. Keep a “communications book”. Don’t say this or that to the children. Requirements to undertake assessments, alcohol testing or whatever. Financial demands eg. for travel costs. (Oddly enough none of the custodial fathers I have ever come across has claimed child support from the mother and many leave the child benefit and tax credits with the mother. This is even more so in shared residence arrangements.)

What is going on with the Daily Mail?

Remarkably, our favourite newspaper and the one with the world’s biggest online readership has carried a number of articles in the past month or so highlighting male victims of female domestic abusers.

What I find particularly telling is the reaction to the articles in the readers’ comments and the red and green arrows for voting the comments up and down. Overall it suggests that people really are no longer buying into the notion that women are always just innocent victims of men.

It is difficult to disentangle the results of various studies as to the extent of domestic violence but I suggest a credible place to start would be the British Crime Survey which indicates that men are victims of domestic violence in about one third of cases but there is variation when you look at particular kinds of incidents.

The overwhelmingly feminist Domestic Violence industry pretty much dismisses the idea of female violence. A significant outcome of this is that allegations against men are used to prevent fathers having contact with their children. Fathers who leave relationships can do nothing about their children remaining with abusive and violent mothers.

It is a point Paul touched on in a recent comment on this blog. In the context of family law it is likely to be pointless for a man to allege violence against a woman even if he had grounds for doing so and even if the violence was serious. To do so even puts him at risk of being removed from his home or family.

Recent Daily Mail Articles here. 1 2 3 4 5

“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 balls 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.