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FATHERS’ RIGHTS

Fathers’ rights groups began to proliferate in Australia after the passing of the Family Law Reform Act of 1995, which was the first set of reforms to encourage shared parental responsibility and endorse the child’s right to have contact with both parents. The new law stopped short of endorsing the idea that children should spend equal time living with both parents, instead encouraging parents to remain involved in their children’s lives whether they lived with them or not. It also recognised that contact with a parent might need to be limited if it placed the child’s safety at risk.

Supporters of fathers’ rights, however, widely interpreted the Act as mandating shared residence, not just shared responsibility. When they discovered it didn’t, they mounted angry attacks on the law and the Family Court, claiming to be victims of discrimination. Non-resident parents, most of them fathers, also used the legislation to mount an endless stream of contravention claims against their former partners. In 2000, a three-year study of the 1995 reforms by researchers at the University of Sydney observed that the number of contravention applications had almost doubled in the first year of the new legislation and continued to rise year on year, reaching almost 2000 in 1999/2000. Almost two-thirds of these applications were dismissed as being trivial or without merit.

The same study concluded that the reforms had failed. They had not encouraged cooperative parenting, but instead had ‘created greater scope for an abusive non-resident parent to harass or interfere in the life of the child’s primary caregiver by challenging her decisions and choices’. The report drew on written judgments as well as interviews with judges, solicitors, parents and counsellors, observing that the Act had widely been interpreted as strengthening fathers’ rights, even at the expense of concern for children’s rights.

The basic problem is that shared parenting requires a great deal of communication and cooperation. It can’t succeed when courts impose it on bitterly divided couples. Most separated couples reach amicable arrangements about their children away from the courts. Only about 5 to 7 per cent go to final hearings before a judge, federal magistrate or judicial registrar, but this group includes a considerable proportion of angry, dangerous and violent fathers. As a lawyer who was interviewed put it, ‘I don’t think the amendments have affected “reasonable” people very much at all. I think they have aggravated the aggressive and antisocial behaviour of others – perhaps as a result of disappointment of unrealistic expectations.’

Aggressive and antisocial fathers were furious when they didn’t get the orders they wanted. It is irrelevant that many did not file their documents or even attend the court hearings. They were not going to have a court order imposed on them. They wanted their power back. Marriage and family were private, and they would never accept that a court had power to make orders over them.

One of the myths promoted by the angry men’s groups is that mothers are just as violent as fathers. There’s a problem with this argument, as Michael Flood pointed out in his 2006 essay ‘Violence against women and men in Australia’: the great majority of the violence inflicted on men isn’t by female partners or ex-partners but by other men, and this violence is more likely to occur in public places rather than in the home.

Flood argues that the fathers’ rights movement’s attention to domestic violence against men isn’t motivated by a genuine concern for male victimisation, but by political agendas concerning family law, child custody and divorce. The movement seeks to erode the protections available to victims of domestic violence and to bolster the rights and freedoms of alleged perpetrators, and this harms female and male victims of domestic violence alike. These groups ignore the mounting toll of violence against males by other men, many of whom are strangers.

I acknowledge that there are many constructive men’s groups whose members challenge the attitudes of angry, controlling fathers. I also acknowledge that women can be violent. They can be terrible parents. But even in relationships where there is regular interpersonal conflict, it isn’t true to say that women are as violent as men. Household and crime surveys, police statistics and hospital data all show that perpetrators of adult violence within the family are most likely to be male and victims are most likely to be female. I somehow doubt that the sophisticated security systems in the Family Court buildings were installed to protect judicial officers from violent mothers.

The internet has given angry men a chance to vent their aggression. In 2009, journalist Jill Singer wrote an article in a newspaper arguing that women were still being treated as second-class citizens. As Adele Horin commented in the Sydney Morning Herald, the ‘avalanche of online hate mail that greeted this gentle critique was truly breathtaking’. Writing anonymously, male commentators called Singer a ‘FEMBOT’ and told her to get back to the kitchen or to cleaning toilets. One wrote, ‘Men will always dominate women. Just accept it and your life will go along much smoother.’

The organised fathers’ rights groups also have a big presence on the internet, which has given them new ways of putting pressure on government. They have become vigilant and vocal. As their anger against the 1995 reforms gathered, they set out to drown the government in submissions to effect a change in the legislation. They convinced many legislators and some naive members of the public that they were victims of a biased system in which women were free to fabricate allegations of domestic violence and child abuse.

When the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Family and Community Affairs launched an inquiry into child custody arrangements for separated families in 2003, it was swamped with more than 1700 submissions. Over the last few years I’ve found time to read many of these submissions about the need to change the law. I remain puzzled at the overwhelming rage and dissatisfaction being peddled as a widespread community view, which went far beyond what I’d encountered in all the years I worked in the family law system listening to the people appearing before the court.

Many of the submissions were simply handwritten letters, often with little substance, but others had the distinct look of an organised mail-out. I know that some politicians letterboxed their constituents, encouraging them to air complaints. When the legislation was passed, I asked my local federal parliamentarian why our politicians had caved in. She said that they’d felt burdened by the number of submissions and the power of the men’s groups. So the legislation changed to appease an angry minority.

The fathers’ rights groups supported their claims with dodgy research from all kinds of sources. Defying statistics, the Lone Fathers’ Association asserted more than once that men were as likely to be victims of violence within the family as women. Another widely publicised claim was that boys from mother-headed families were fourteen times as likely to commit rape as those who grew up with both parents. As Michael Flood pointed out in his submission, the evidence for this claim was simply bogus.

The Shared Parenting Council of Australia was influential in bringing about the change in legislation. In their long submission to the government, the council alleged that children who grew up away from their biological fathers in mother-headed households were responsible for every conceivable social ill. They argued that the Family Court’s preference for issuing sole custody orders had promoted the rise of single-parent households, as a result of which ‘our society is starting to crumble’. They also took the opportunity to criticise ‘professional feminists’ and suggest that feminist literature ‘serves not only to incite hatred towards the common man and devalue the role of fathers, but undermine the very belief in healthy hetero-sexual relationships’. But why are they afraid of a theory that supports the equality of women in all aspects of public and private life? They use the very word ‘feminism’ to conjure up the image of vindictive, hateful women.

A similar line was advanced by Ed Dabrowski of the SPCA in a statement seeking nomination for the Senate in Western Australia in 2007. He attacked ‘radical leftist feminist ideologies that seek to disempower and disenfranchise men from fatherhood’ and com-pared the Family Court to the Nazi processing centres that sent Jewish civilians to concentration camps during the war.

The Shared Parenting Council’s home page quotes Arthur Schopenhauer: ‘All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.’ When I did a little research on Schopenhauer, I found a famous essay in which he argued that the fundamental defect of the female character was a lack of a sense of justice. As the weaker sex, women rely on cunning: hence their ineradicable tendency to tell lies. He goes on to say that women are guilty of perjury far more often than men and question whether they ought to be allowed to take an oath at all. It’s a revealing choice of author to quote on the home page of the council that boasts of changing the Family Law Act in Australia.

Ultimately, there’s no point trying to drive a wedge between the sexes. Single fathers and mothers have successfully raised families on their own with perfectly well-adjusted children. High achievers such as Bill Clinton, Kevin Rudd and Barack Obama all came from single-parent families. It isn’t single parenting that’s the problem, but bad parenting of any kind. The battle for a safer world free of violence against women and children must be fought together. It isn’t a gender issue but a basic human right. Men are women’s children. They are our sons, fathers, brothers, boyfriends and husbands, just as we are their daughters, mothers, sisters, girlfriends and wives.