F4J Rights or Responsibilities?
The breakdown of a family is tragic, and fathers should have rights, but Fathers 4 Justice overlooks the responsibilities that a father has.
Pre-meditated law-breaking, violence and disruption may gain media attention, but it casts a shadow over fatherhood.
The F4J website talks of fighting for their children, but I wonder how proud are the children of those fathers making court appearances, or shown on television and in newspapers?
I sympathise with the reasoning and motivation but the methods are abhorrant. A father who is happy to exhibit a violent and ararchistic character is perhaps better kept away from those he claims to love.
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November 19th, 2004 at 8:34 am
Whilst I have sympathy with some of the aims of F4J for the tiny minority of fathers genuinely denied contact, these are such a tiny minority that it makes the protests look like a storm in a teacup. As a member of One Parent Families, and Gingerbread, the vast majority of lone parents in those groups – we have both male and female lone parents – are struggling silently for two reasons:
1. to actually get an absent parent to bother to turn up on court appointed access (accounts for around 40% of the lone parents I have spoken to) or
2. being threatened with jail for not sending their child on contact with someone who has abused or neglected the child on previous occasions (40%).
That is out of the people I have spoken to in those groups, which I would estimate comprises of about 2500 lone parents. So, considerably higher is the amount of children being forced on contact with someone who has abused them. I know, because I have been fighting for 5 years for the same reason. My kids have told CAFCASS about abuse, neglect (backed up by evidence from police, social services, battered wives’ home, nd still courts decide to send them, and I can get jailed if I don’t send them – and since their dad has PR, he would get the children while I was in jail, leading to more abuse. So I can’t afford to protest about my kids’ safety because it will cost… yep, it will cost my kids’ safety. Sadly, the more people I talk to, the more I find people in the same boat – both lone mums and lone dads threatened with prison – even with police reports, social services report as evidence to back up their claims, all recommending no contact at all for the children’s safety.
As has been said, there is no transparency in the family court system. CAFCASS makes a report, you can’t discuss it with anyone except your solicitor even if the report is the biggest stitch-up ever! You can’t talk to anyone about the amount of lies your ex might put in there, or cry with the Samaritans about the recommendations because you can be jailed for contempt! Where is the justice in that? My ex made allegations that were proven to be false, and yet he was still given contact with the children. Even worse, CAFCASS and the family court only take account of the wishes of children roughly over the age of 10, or in full charge of their mental capacities. This leaves mentally handicapped children and those under 10 unable to have their views taken into account. They can be ignored and denied from seeing a father they may love, or, more often, being forced into seeing their father who may have neglected, physically abused, or sexually abused them.
Until the family court system starts properly listening to the children in this, and looking at EVIDENCE instead of taking notice of which parent tells the most convincing lies (and remember, an abuser or paedophile is invariably a very good liar, almost undetectable), then the family court welfare is not worth a stuff.
I have no respect for a system which forces mine and hundreds of thousands of kids into misery every year, particularly those like mine who are suffering verbal abuse, neglect and physical abuse on contact and being threatened with jail for not adhering to a court order which someone who has never met my children, has decided against my children’s wishes. There has to be a better way, and there should be one put in place urgently, because the emotional damage the current system is doing to children is like a timebomb waiting to go off.
November 20th, 2004 at 12:23 am
See One Parent Families and Gingerbread web sites.