14: Excluding the Family -- The state as the real absent father

The separate worlds of men and women are starkly apparent in so many ways, but nowhere more so than in the determination to keep men out of the family. Here follows an astounding tale of intransigence and deception that is impossible to explain without what we know of the evolved differences between the sexes and what they entail. More superficially, sense can be made of this only in terms of an entirely woman-centred, anti-male and anti-family politics that stems from ‘cultural Marxism’ underpinned by evolved ‘folk prejudice’ against (lower-status) men.

The family and the domestic sphere around it is regarded as being firmly within woman’s separate world, even more - much more - strongly than the workplace is regarded as the separate world of men. Of all the rights abuses systematically directed against men, the worst is the unwarranted obstruction from playing their natural part in the lives of their biological children, by denying the basic human and civil right to contact (apart for the barest minimum). This is at root justified through refusing to recognise that men have a strong affiliation to and bond with their own children which a step-father does not have. This most blatant denial of human nature lasts only until the issue of money arises. Entirely regardless of circumstances, it’s the biological father and not the ‘social’ male parent who must support the child financially.

Imposed on men are non-negotiable and often unreasonable financial demands for child support, even in respect of a child that resulted from a one-night-stand when, more than ever, fertility is controlled by women. (The man very likely will have no knowledge of the woman’s contraceptive use, and may well not be told the truth if he asks; and the passion of the encounter is likely to mean that the issue of condom use is waived or not even broached.) There is also the unfairness to men of divorce settlements, and the policies of the government that actively encourage the dissolution of relationships. This is in not so much by financially penalising couples as encouraging single parenthood with huge subsidies.

Guy Harrison, a member of the Fathers 4 Justice group, climbs up on the roof of Westminster Hall to display a banner reading ‘Does Blair Care?’

This is all in the face of overwhelming evidence of the positive social outcomes of marriage for children and the negative outcomes on average for any other arrangement, with a single-parent household shown to be the worst possible milieu of all for a child to start in life (even controlling for income and other variables concerned with disadvantage). The evidence for this is so readily available that it is unnecessary for me to set it out here, though I will be dealing with an aspect that has had little discussion. Despite repeated requests to various government departments and agencies for any research to show that a non-shared parenting model is in any way preferable, none has ever been forthcoming. This is because there isn‘t any. Sometimes it’s claimed that marriage merely correlates with positive outcomes - ignoring the fact that other variables that could have produced positive outcomes have been controlled for.

As much as destroying the family is central to PC politics, it will never succeed because the family is the natural social unit we have evolved to live within. Three in four children remain in intact families even today.

The same legal abuses regarding contact with children are evident across the developed world, yet there has been no serious attempt at reform, or even to recognise that there is a grave injustice. This is despite the millions of people devastated by it, and some of the most effective news-grabbing stunts in pressure-group campaigning history by Fathers 4 Justice (such as the prime minister’s question time and Buckingham Palace stunts). The very different reaction to this campaign by ordinary people, compared with how most of the media and the political classes saw it, yet again shows a yawning reality gap. Even celebrity endorsement was ineffective: witness the revelations in 2003 by Bob Geldof of the ridiculous obstacles in his custody battles against an obviously unsuitable mother in the form of Paula Yates. Although Saint Bob received a sympathetic portrayal and huge publicity, the revelations in no sense heralded a sea change in opinion within the political classes.

Bribing couples to split up

There is no longer any dispute that Britain is the lone-parent capital of the world, partly - if not largely - because of government bribes for women to eschew having a partner. With a six-fold multiplier of effective net earnings to £30 an hour, the sums at stake are so huge that this anti-social engineering must be a main or the main factor in the decision not to start or to continue living together for hundreds of thousands of people. Single parenthood is now a major career option for any woman, let alone just for the underclass.

The issue of heavy financial discrimination against fathers and the two-parent family was put into stark relief by a 2007 report by the former Labour minister for welfare reform, Frank Field. He did the following calculations: In 2007, a single parent with two children under eleven, working part-time (sixteen hours a week) on the minimum wage, receives in total after tax credits, £487 per week net. For this same single parent to recouple or revert to the status quo ante and have a man living with her, she and her man between them would have to work 120 hours a week to achieve the same income. That is the equivalent of both of them working a full-time job plus more than three days a week of a second job. This is not only impossible but illegal under the working time directive.

This tax-credit subsidy of single parenthood was introduced in 1998, making a single parent who had never worked as well-off, to the nearest pound per person, as married or co-habiting couples on average earnings (as was pointed out in the Centre for Policy Studies report, The Price of Parenting). Tax credits are massive welfare benefits in disguise, and the very reverse of Bill Clinton’s reforms of time-limiting benefits that have so successfully cut US welfare dependency (literally in half).

Leaving aside the cost to the taxpayer of such overwhelming financial support, there is a clear effect of paying benefits to single parents. In all countries across Europe, for every thousand Euros increase in annual benefits, the number of single parents rises two percent. No government has ever tried to argue that changes in tax rates don’t affect behaviour. Financial support, even at the high levels single parents now enjoy, is of course not alwaysa sufficient spur to family breakdown; but it’sa necessary one. When support is not there, then the problem tends to disappear fast, as has now been found in the USA.

The mess we are in arises from a wilful blindness to the most basic reality that it takes both a mother and a father to raise children; and not just the one to provide most of the care, the other most of the resources. Both are needed to provide complementary, but very different parenting to produce a well-adjusted child who will grow into a responsible adult with a window on the separate worlds of the sexes. A father is the conduit to the wider world, and the domain of men, and of how reliable it is. Without a father, the government has to step in to pay enormous sums to deal with the long-term consequences (children growing into dysfunctional adults), but more immediately to pay benefits and/or tax credits. All out of the pockets primarily of the fathers who properly planned to provide for their own children through households supported by working (not to mention all of the men who would like to start a family but don’t earn enough).

A woman now has the choice of not bothering with any kind of relationship, and moving straight into lone motherhood. Or she can establish a relationship and bear a child and then, for no particular reason, simply walk out on - or throw out (using an ‘ouster’ order) - the man who has been providing for her. If the partnership had progressed to marriage, then she can abuse her former partner by imposing on him for maintenance, as well as imposing on the rest of the working population. Divorce is overwhelmingly female initiated, and not because women fare worse than men in marriage: quite the reverse. Marriage is a trap for the male, albeit a benign one in many ways. A man is far more likely to be obliged to be the main or sole provider, to be ‘controlled’ by his partner, and the victim of domestic violence (see chapter ten), albeit that marriage generally ‘protects’ partners from this. Research shows that marriage is a cultural codification not of a supposed male monopolisation of female reproduction but of a sexual division of labour whereby paternal investment ensures that the female need for reliable support for her children and herself is met (Winking, 2007). Men enter marriage because they can secure a more attractive partner by offering reliability; women trading this off against male status. But as a marriage progresses, the wife’s ‘mate value’ falls - precipitously so - whereas the husband’s rises. So it is usually the wife’s position in a marriage more than a husband‘s that is precarious, and her comparative lack of ‘worth’ that may turn the marriage into a sham. The wife has the choice of either continuing under the husband’s protective umbrella or to ‘cash in her chips’, as it were - though ‘the chips’ are very much her husband‘s. She wins either way.

The ideology leading to this feat of social engineering is that somehow children are a collective social asset, yet having children is the natural, but perfectly selfish, desire of most women. In important ways this corresponds to the desire in men - equally natural, but perfectly selfish - to have sex with an endless stream of different partners. Societies try to stop the latter, but now not only allow the former, but encourage it through payment extracted from others: mainly men.

The one thing the world does not lack is people. Women need no encouragement to have children, and the less encouragement they’re given then the more likely are the children they have to be wanted, loved, and well-adjusted as adults - so that they are not actually deleterious to society. Population, even leaving out the consequences of direct immigration, is still increasing: the supposed decline in birth rate is an illusion caused by the ongoing shift to later childbearing by an entire age cohort of women. Using the measure of ‘cohort fertility’, fertility in the UK is at near replacement level. Population decline would be of enormous benefit to all those millions who are currently deprived of work merely because they are over-fifty or even over-forty, and would make it easier to force into work the large numbers of idle younger people. The children of single parents - as research overwhelmingly demonstrates - are much more likely to be social problems and cost the taxpayer further expense; not least when they perpetuate the cycle and become single mothers or feckless fathers who in turn themselves become strangers to their own children.

Why continue to pay women to create social breakdown? It makes less sense than it would to pay men to visit prostitutes to further their corresponding natural inclinations. Nobody in their right mind would suggest such a thing, of course; but the social implications would be incomparably more benign than subsidising women to have children.

Having children is the most obvious personal asset anyone could have; and those who are childless, and especially those who are single and who may be unable to form a partnership, are the truly disadvantaged in any society. The principal attraction that women feel for men is status, and this most easily translates into earnings. Men who earn so little that they are unattractive to most or to nearly all women, form the most disadvantaged subgroup in our own, as in any, society. Yet as a proportion of their income, they more than anyone are forced to pay to provide for single parenthood. They are literally bankrolling a lifestyle for the very women who would not have them in the first place.

The answer to this problem is simple and twofold: require single parents to meet the same conditions as unemployed people, and revoke no-fault divorce and place all of the financial obligation on a parent who simply walks out, or invents a reason to throw out the other. This is the policy put forward by the think-tank CIVITAS and some new small parties across the political spectrum. The long-converged consensus of the main political parties (always fearful of the floating voter), is the direct opposite of what needs to be done.

Exposing the pro-wife bias of family courts

In his ground-breaking 2005 book, Institutional Injustice, Martin Mears, former president of the Law Society, criticised in the strongest terms the family courts regarding child contact and divorce cases. He sees prejudice and unfairness as so routine and entrenched that it’s an institutional making of legislation by the back door, according to the ‘meal-ticket-for-life’ principle for mothers and (ex-)wives. (Supposed) equality and nondiscrimination are guiding principles, despite their being nowhere in the legislation, yet the application of justice ‘would not be recognisable as such to anyone else’. In his summary Mears particularly points up the problem of divorce settlements:

There is a deep pro-wife bias, with every single presumption in her favour - the most egregious being that every wife’s contribution to the marriage is deemed to be equal to that of the husband even when plainly the contrary is true. This means that a party who has repudiated all the obligations of the marriage can claim the financial benefits accruing from it to the same extent as if he or she had behaved impeccably.

Mears makes four recommendations for reform: fully binding pre- and post-nuptial agreements (which the courts already uphold but only when they feel like it); leaving out assets owned before the marriage; disallowing maintenance to any party whose conduct has effectively repudiated the marriage; and recognising in fact as well as in principle the right of a child to maintain maximum contact with both parents.

Taking part in a discussion on BBC Woman’s Hour, in January 2006, the first point Mears made was a pre-emptive one to head off the usual line that all is in the interests of the child. It’s not just fathers and (ex-)husbands who had a serious grievance, Mears insisted, but ‘children get an extremely raw deal as well’. A deputy district judge participating in the discussion threw in the standard challenge that the unfairness was only to a minority and the rich, but Mears was having none of it. The rich were privileged in being able to press their claims as far as the Court of Appeal, giving them ostensibly the chance of justice that to most people was firmly denied; but endless court action in any case nearly always denied it. Mears put out a challenge: ‘You’d have great difficulty in finding any lay person who’s been through the divorce courts praising the system....The whole system is characterised by folly, bias, expense and injustice.’ He laid into the family court judiciary for ignoring the law and making it up as they went along, abusing their wide leeway for discretion. Most tellingly, he cited the best known family judge, Lord Justice Thorpe, who:

said that he required authority for the proposition that a child had the right to maximum contact with both parents. Now that is an extraordinary thing, the most senior judge regarding that as a contentious point, and that’s an excellent example of the attitude of the courts.

How we got here, Mears suggests, is not a little to do with the privileged upbringing of most judges, where children were more or less entirely in the mother‘s domain, and were hardly seen by the father once they were sent to public school. A once-a-fortnight contact arrangement can appear appropriate to someone with this odd background. At the same time, judges take fully on board new nostrums - no matter how stupid - because the nature of the establishment as with any social group is solidarity; conforming to whatever prevails. It’s no contradiction for a judge to hold both old elitist views alongside the products of ‘cultural Marxism’. The partiality of (male) judges in favour of women should also be seen in the context of the natural, biologically-derived, male chivalry towards the ‘gentle’ sex.

There is a combination of appalling delays and

the court’s failure to get to grips with the mother’s groundless allegations (and) defiance of its orders, and the court’s failure to ensure its own orders....A flabby judicial response encourages the defaulting parents to believe that court orders can be ignored with impunity.

It seems that there is always flight from awkward conflict: ‘the characteristic judicial response when difficulties with contact emerged: reduce the amount of contact and replace unsupervised with supervised contact’. In other words, the mother is rewarded for her obstruction. This frequently, indeed normally, results in such a derisory award of contact that: ‘It is hard to see the value of ‘contact’ of this kind either to the parent or the child. It is more reminiscent of visiting time at the local hospital or prison.’

A major strand through Mears’ book is the myth of the interests of the child:

Time and again the courts have emphasised that their overriding concern is for the welfare of the child; the interests of the parents being a peripheral factor (if indeed it is a factor at all). They have also declared repeatedly that parental contact is the child’s right. If anyone doubted it, the emigration cases provide overwhelming evidence that what courts actually do is very different from what they say. Where there is a conflict between the interests of the child and those of the mother, the reality is that it is those of the mother which nearly always prevail.

Such a conflict of interest exists whenever the mother wants it to be, so in practice the court always accedes to whatever the mother demands, entirely regardless of any other considerations. Anything the father requests, no matter how much this may be in the interests of the child, will often be considered essentially the opposite of what is in the interests of the mother, so may actually serve to worsen the outcome for the father! The predictable outcome is very low or effectively nil contact awarded to the father, in particular where the mother has found a new partner.

The emigration cases Mears points to are a series of Court of Appeal decisions allowing mothers to move abroad with their children in almost any circumstances. He sees the interests of the child being an ‘afterthought’; that it was tacitly assumed that the child ‘somehow belonged’ to the custodial parent, and had no say, on the assumption that children take readily to a new step-parent. A fundamental fallacy of the system is that it insists that there is no essential difference between a biological and a stepparent, when of course there is no comparison. Given the invariable siding with the mother, then the step-father is favoured by the court as being the male the mother has decided currently to be with. Mears cites cases where the mother is allowed to emigrate even though the Court Welfare Officer had reported that likely emotional damage to a child would ensue from being uprooted from a stable environment and/or losing contact with the father. Mothers have threatened to leave the children behind - thereby demonstrating that they care less about their children than their new boyfriends - and still their wishes have been granted. In the judgement of Payne-v-Payne (2001) it is stated that ‘the move would be in the child’s best interests because it would make her mother happy’.

Confirming the judiciary’s position, the president (at that time) of the Family Division, Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, actually stated in a 2001 conference speech that to put the mother‘s interests first is to put the child’s interests first: ‘the protection of the primary carer for the benefit of the child is of primary importance.’

Only female bad behaviour is irrelevant in divorce

If the family court makes an unholy mess of child contact, Mears argues that it makes at least as big a mess of conduct in divorce cases. The case of Clark-v-Clark 1999 was an extreme but classic example of not taking the wife’s conduct into account. The marriage had never been consummated and clearly Mrs Clark had married an old man for his fortune. She had stopped any pretence from the start of the reception, banishing her husband from the home, virtually imprisoning him, fleecing him of hundreds of thousands of pounds - some of it to spend on the younger man she took as a lover. Finally, she put her husband in a geriatric home and then contested a generous financial settlement. The judge concluded: ‘however much the wife can be criticised, it would be harsh in the extreme to leave her with nothing.’ The legal profession tries to make out that such absurdity occurs only in big money cases, but Mears squashes this:

It must not be thought that Clark was a maverick case. On the contrary, it was merely one in a long and continuing series of imbecilities. The excesses were not inevitable. The jurisdiction of the courts is derived from Section 25 of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973....(but) judges like Lord Denning have regarded Section 25 as giving the courts an almost unlimited discretion, though plainly this was not Parliament’s intention.

In the very year the Act came into being, there was consternation over a comment by Denning (in the case of Wachtel):

[T]he court should not reduce its order for financial provision merely because of what was formerly regarded as guilt or blame. To do so would be to impose a fine for supposed misbehaviour in the course of an unhappy married life.

Mears takes the word ‘supposed’ here to imply that there could be no such behaviour that was real and caused the breakdown. Despite subsequent cases that contradicted Denning, this became the orthodox position, and public outrage led in 1984 to a conduct provision being inserted into the 1973 act, and also a provision for ‘clean break’ settlements wherever possible, but this made not the slightest difference. The president of the Family Division insisted that the law was already being implemented in the way that parliament had intended. This focused the problem because, as Mears emphasises: ‘A claim for continuing support is an entirely different matter. In that case behaviour ought to have the highest relevance.’

Don’t get mad. Get Everything.

Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn and Diane Keaton in The First Wives Club (1996)

Even the most appalling, indeed seriously criminal, behaviour does not lead to the termination of maintenance. Famously, in Hall-v-Hall (1984) a wife actually stabbed her estranged husband in the stomach and was convicted of assault, but this led only to a reduction in maintenance, upheld in the Court of Appeal! It’s by no means clear that even if she had killed him, that maintenance would have been ended. Lord Justice Balcombe, in dismissing an appeal by a woman who had actually hired a hit man to kill her ex-husband, said that: ‘It is not every homicide or attempted homicide, by a wife of a husband which necessarily involves a financial penalty.’

The absurdity of all this is made much worse when you consider the argument the other way round: what if the husband is claiming against the wife? The law is quite clear that either party has a right to claim from the other. It should not surprise you that, yes indeed, the issue of conduct does apply in cases where maintenance from a wife to a husband is at issue. And here ‘conduct’ goes way beyond any possible rational conception. In Kay-v-Kay (1990) an unemployed man was refused maintenance from his well-salaried wife because, despite an accepted diagnosis of a personality disorder as the reason he was out of work, the judge said that this had been ‘brought about to an extent by his own conduct’. The judge taking an inappropriate moral position on male unemployment is one thing; but all this concerned his worklessness, and had nothing whatsoever to do with his conduct within the marriage!

Another man found himself in a similar situation (Whiting-v-Whiting, 1988), except that he had been made redundant and was applying to have his maintenance obligation discharged. The court was having none of it:

It cannot be assumed that the wife’s independence will necessarily continue indefinitely. Everything turns on her good health and employment. If redundancy or bad health were to intervene, her present good earnings might cease prematurely.

This was precisely what had happened to the applicant, but no man is ever discharged from payment on such grounds. This thinking continues the meal-ticket-for-life unfairness that was never intended by parliament in the 1973 act, and was expressly addressed in the 1984 amendment. Even after a long separation and when the woman is in secure cohabitation, maintenance cannot be ended (eg, Hepburn-v-Hepburn, 1989, where the judge reasoned that he should not ‘pressurise an ex-wife to regularise her position with the other man so that he would assume a husband‘s obligation to her’.)

The prize for most astounding injustice in this context goes to Lord Justice Nourse, who actually increased maintenance in respect of a child an ex-wife conceived with another man. It’s hard to decide who was the more audacious: the woman for having the cheek to apply to the court, or the numbskull judge. The judge in this case (Fisher-v-Fisher, 1989) actually stated that the ‘general proposition’ that this was unjust was not sustainable! It is to be feared just what principle of justice is sustainable in UK law.

There is an underlying assumption that somehow a wife automatically makes a contribution to the marriage on a par with that of the husband, yet there is no feasible case that a wife fulfilling her natural desire to have a child and therefore acquiring a benefit, in any way corresponds to a husband’s contribution of going out to work and therefore sustaining a cost. (A woman’s lifestyle today as mother/home-maker is essentially a natural one and as it has always been, whereas men’s world of work is completely removed from their natural role as hunters as it was in hunter-gatherer societies, being far more time-consuming, regimented, alienating and in most ways more onerous - even compared to male life in agricultural societies.) In the high-profile cases that hit the news, the divorcing couple are usually so wealthy that the wife had never had to do any housework and was relieved of any childcare she did not actively want to perform. So in terms of a contribution that incurred any cost, hers was nil. Mears explains:

Section 25 itself requires the court to take into account the wife’s contribution ‘by looking after the home or caring for the family’. No-one has ever argued that this contribution should be minimised. But neither should it be maximised to the extent that in itself it would justify an equal division of assets.

There is an entirely novel notion nowhere present in law of ‘legitimate expectation’, and family courts detest the raising of misconduct issues regarding the wife that would undermine this. Yet reliance is placed on a husband’s alleged misconduct to support claims for inflated awards. For the non-rich, the impact of this bizarre turn of the law is the unfairness over the disposal of the matrimonial home. Following the 1984 amendments, it did become usual for those husbands without the income to provide significant continuing maintenance to be allowed a clean break, but only by forfeiting most of the equity in the matrimonial home. And this despite a continuing maintenance order in respect of children.

At the end of his persistent tirade, the former president of the Law Society is not hopeful of any swift change that will reinstate justice:

It is the culture which needs changing. That takes time, although eventually the wheel will turn - particularly under the impact of sustained and vigorous criticism. Even very senior judges now pay lip-service to the right of a child to maintain close contact with its father (although, as the emigration cases show, it is only lip-service). This unfortunately is an area of law where legislative intervention by Parliament can have only a limited role.

How parliament was undermined: The disaster of the Child Support Act

Shared parenting (i.e., not what the family court dispenses) was the express intention of parliament when the Children Act was passed in 1989. Supposedly, out went the notion of ‘custody’ with one parent, and in came the ‘parental responsibility’ of both; promoted through ‘residence orders’ to get rid of the assumption that only the mother was fit, good, and responsible. It was to mimic, we were told, the success of ‘joint custody’ schemes in California, New Zealand and Australia. These schemes turned out to have a common flaw in being open to hijacking by those politically motivated to bring about the reverse of what was intended; not least governments, which have a major fiscal reason to insist that shared/equal parenting should not be the norm. In the UK version, it was all for nothing in any case, because the Act contained fatal internal contradictions that actually made matters worse in forcing former partners apart by calling one the ‘parent with care’ and the other the ‘absent parent’, thereby destroying the child’s right to two parents. This was in order to suit the purposes of the Child Support Agency (CSA). The collection of money from fathers, to offset the rapidly-escalating costs to the state of single parenthood, would have been hindered if it wasn’t easy to distinguish between the cash cow and the cow, as it were.

So the Children Act, in being made to fit the purposes of not just the family court but also the CSA, was a hopeless compromise (ditto the subsequent 1991 Child Support Act). The entire purpose of the Act was then comprehensively undermined by the legislation’s ‘guidance notes’. As at other government departments, officers at the CSA consult day-to-day not the legislation, but the notes produced to interpret it. One sentence proved key: ‘It is not expected that (a residence order) will become a common form of order because most children will need the stability of a single home.’

This one line meant that men were once again relegated from the status of parent to visitor; the very state of affairs that the Children Act was passed in order to counter. The intention may well have been merely to clarify that a 50/50 sharing of residence was not an objective but a symbolic starting point. But it was a Trojan horse that allowed an interpretation that was the very opposite of the thinking behind the Act: that any sort of significant residence with the father was to be rare. At one stroke the Children Act turned into an instrument to deprive fathers, on any pretext or none, of the bulk of contact they would normally enjoy with their own children whenever a dispute over contact arose.

For a long time everyone thought that the 1989 Children Act was fine, and it was regularly cited as what everyone should be reminded of to counter the increasing bias against fathers. Without being able to see the guidance notes, people missed that the Act had been retrospectively nobbled. The penny had still to drop outside fathers’ activist groups, and was only dawning on sections of the government itself in late 2005, as I will explain. People also still didn’t see that the Children Act was the basis of the CSA as well as contact disputes.

The CSA has had an enormous impact on the outcomes of separation, effectively setting the parameters of the family court. Before the Children Act and the CSA, separating married partners took their particular circumstances to court, but après CSA, the ordinary courts have proved powerless. Judgements made by courts in the past - ‘clean break’ settlements, even legally drawn and witnessed statements of intent made before marriage - are retrospectively declared void. The CSA can cancel court orders without even being required to tell the father or the court. Detachment of earnings orders are made over which magistrates have no jurisdiction at all. Maintenance payments can be massive and can last until the youngest child is nineteen.

*  *  *

It’s worth going back a decade and examining the CSA and how it operated, because the CSA being bound up with the family court means that only by viewing the two as part of the same government project can the debacle as a whole be explained.

The abolition of the CSA was announced in 2006, but this is merely the body, not the principles. The principles remain in the ‘Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission’ that will replace it, eventually. Of course, the never-ending poor performance in not getting support payments to mothers was and is always in the news; never the greater injustice of a high volume of unreasonable, inflexible, unjustifiable or mistaken payment demands to men, who are at the same time being denied any meaningful contact with the very children the CSA demands that they pay for. If the issue of child contact does surface in the news, then it’s often one of the ten percent of cases where the mother is the ‘absent parent’.

The appalling impact of the CSA was brought to light in 1996 by Professor Jonathan Bradshaw, director of social policy research at the University of York. The Act betrays a straight absence of morality, as Bradshaw protested to the Commons all-party select committee on the Child Support Act:

The attempt in the Act to separate the whole issue of contact from that of financial support is doomed to failure. Fathers just cannot understand why one agency of government insists that they pay child support when another agency of government fails to protect their rights to have contact with their children.

This is of course a core reason why millions of fathers are angry. Second:

While (fathers) agree that they have a financial obligation to their children, their understanding of fairness leaves them outraged at the spousal (carer’s) element in the formula, particularly if they think that the caring parent was responsible for the breakdown of the relationship.

Even more fundamentally there was:

an increasing proportion of fathers who had never been in a ‘living together relationship’ when they conceived a child. Some of these relationships were very casual, or at least tenuous. The obligation of fatherhood in these circumstances is, to say the least, contentious. The assertion of biological liability in the Child Support Act, in the absence of any social relationship, has created some fundamental problems that we are only beginning to consider. Getting a girl pregnant can now be a form of entrapment.

Clear cases of entrapment are now showing up, so that in the USA there is a major political movement concerning ‘paternity fraud’, and a battle between an intransigent Supreme Court and state jurisdictions. Bradshaw’s conclusion is that, as with its sisters across the world that have superseded a system of decision between ex-partners at some form of adjudication, the Act is literally unenforceable. Like the poll tax, it jeopardises the consent people give to be ruled.

It’s hard to imagine how a report could be more critical of government legislation. Any one of Bradshaw’s three moral objections was by itself an infringement of men’s basic civil rights. Taken together they are almost incredible. Of course, apart from those men who become an actual CSA case, all men are at risk of becoming subject to the CSA. The legislation is an immoral interference with men’s right to pursue happiness and to enjoy family life, by usurping it in favour of forcing his support of what could not be considered any kind of intention to begin family life.

‘Getting a girl pregnant can now be a form of entrapment’, Professor Jonathan Bradshaw, director of social policy research at the University of York.

The problem created by ignoring the casualness of a relationship is the most insidious, and Bradshaw draws particular attention to it.

Young men are, as ever, becoming fathers without their knowledge and - if they did know - without any rights to influence whether a pregnancy is aborted. Many very young men are being locked into a financial relationship, often without any prospect of a social one, for up to 16 years - 16 years during which they might otherwise have become effective social and biological fathers; socially useful rather than disenfranchised and bloody-minded men....The behavioural consequences of the act have been quite extraordinary: fewer fathers in employment, many more ‘absent and untraceable’, fewer in contact with their children, less informal financial support of children, fewer taking on new partners, more new partnerships breaking down, and so on.

The CSA provoked massive hostility from fathers, who typically were paying out 40% of their net income, with low earners paying more like 75%. Many were reduced to below dole levels, making honest work impossible; driving men instead to claim benefits. Sequestration at this level made a nonsense of the notion that the CSA was about child support: it was really about offsetting the cost to the state of the single-parent households it had itself been instrumental in creating; most of the cost of which is in respect of not the child but the mother. Astonishingly, reduced allowances punished men if they went on to try to support another woman (and her children) by effectively raising his maintenance payments. The clear presumption was that the father was the guilty party in the splitting of the family, and that any subsequent life is somehow the spoils of this (despite 80-90% of divorces being initiated by wives).

An artificial polarisation was caused by the CSA’s insistance on dealing only with the ‘parent with care’, despite the courts having previously often awarded joint custody. Then there was the unjust rule that the father, stigmatised as the ‘absent parent’, could get no reduction in maintenance unless his children stayed over more than 103 nights per year. This is of course a key basis for the risibly-low contact awarded. It ensures that in only a small minority of cases does the Treasury get less than the full amount from fathers to offset benefits payments.

The in-trays of MPs were full of fathers’ complaints and the CSA backlogs became unmanageable, so the Treasury stepped in to try to increase revenue by simplifying assessment to a formula that took into account no individual circumstances at all. The result was that from 2002 the situation for those on low incomes actually got worse. The move bought off the articulate, vociferous and organised middle-class activists, who then focused on the still greater injustice of the prevention of contact.

The CSA was the means by which fathers were made to pay for their own oppression (reminding one of the Chinese government policy of charging the families of executed prisoners for the cost of the bullet), but the family courts were the main locus of that oppression. This was shown in stark relief when in 2003, to enforce new anti-truancy measures, judges found no difficulty in jailing mothers who repeatedly failed to ensure that their children attended school. Yet it’s the impact of depriving children of their mothers that is cited as the reason why mothers who flouted contact orders could not be jailed.

Reproductive rights only when its not through sex: prejudice exposed by crazy law

A man’s liability to pay child support is always assumed, because the woman who claims a man is a father is always believed. If he contests, he is made to pay for a DNA test, and the guilt of men who refuse a DNA test is assumed on the basis of the hearsay evidence of a woman or simply by adverse inference. As an example of the clearly unjust imposition of this ruling, there was a case of a ‘Mr F’ who had had a drunken office frolic with a married women. The defence offered was that since the woman was married at the time, then there was a presumption that the husband was the father and not ‘Mr F’. Clear evidence was therefore required to rebut this, but the judge relied on the 1993 Children (Admissibility of Hearsay Evidence) Order.

The ludicrous line that men must carry the financial burden entirely regardless of the circumstances, even runs to compassionate sperm donation, as Andy Bathie (and some years before, a Manchester man) found out when he helped a lesbian couple he knew to start a family. Presumably, the same would apply to a man who visits a prostitute, in the event of the prostitute deciding to conceive and have his baby. Even though the very purpose of prostitution is explicitly to substitute payment for any subsequent liability, the state, in cahoots with the prostitute, could exact ongoing payment through entrapping a client. It’s only a matter of time before a case arises.

Of those men who take a CSA DNA test, one in six are found not to be the father (on figures up to 2005). This is most probably the tip of the iceberg, because most men who had suspicions will have already tested their child privately, and a result proving non-paternity would enable them to confront the mother, who would then not have the option of subsequently naming him to the CSA. Also, most of those women whose paternity fraud was still unknown to their ex-partner would not name them to the CSA, because this would reveal the secret and entail loss of any informal support they could otherwise expect. CSA rules make it easy for a woman to avoid naming a father in such circumstances; by simply falsely citing threat of violence. Couples with any sense make private arrangements and avoid entanglement with the CSA. This is not least because women are often better off accepting informal support from their ex-partners than receiving CSA payment, only for it to be offset against benefits.

Women trick men into becoming fathers all the time. A 2004 poll for That’s Life! magazine showed that 42% of women say they would lie about contraception so as to get pregnant, no matter what they knew their partner would feel; and US research estimates that a million American men annually are saddled with fathering babies they did not want. In 1972, Elliott Philip looked at several hundred families in South-East England and concluded that a staggering 30% of the children could not have been fathered by the mother’s husband. British medical students are taught that the ‘non-paternity’ rate is 10-15%. The Family Planning Association and others have researched the deliberate (or absent-mindedly unconsciously-on-purpose) ineffective use of contraception - colloquially known as ‘oopsing’ - and shown that women use contraceptives less reliably the more casual the sexual encounter (Eisenman, 2003). This is through an unconscious psychology to try to conceive in those circumstances rather than in the context of the stable relationship (for the reasons explained in chapter eleven). There are also the very many cases where women have intentionally deceived.

‘Paternity fraud’ has become a hot topic in the US, where court cases have been hitting the news for several years. The ‘best interests of the child’ test was still resulting in men being told by judges they must continue to pay child support, even in the most bizarre cases. The classic paternity-fraud case is that of a woman taking the semen from a condom a man used for sex with her, and then inserting it into herself to get pregnant. Far from an ‘urban myth’, this is an actual scenario that has faced US courts, and the men have lost! There has even been a case where the condom used for impregnation was from sex between the man and another woman. Women who conceal pregnancy to deny paternal rights and then sue for child support a decade later, or women who statutorily rape boys, or women who con their husbands that a baby is his when it is not: all real cases where child support was determined still to be payable. So men are replying by suing, and in 2005 courts began to allow men to do this and to appeal against previously-lost cases.

Gary Robinson in Florida is suing his former employer, Jackie Gallagher-Smith, who had seduced him and got pregnant. He knew she was married and had not considered the possibility that a married woman would want to have his child, but her husband was infertile. Robinson objects to being ‘an unwitting sperm donor’, claiming fraud and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Richard Phillips in Illinois is suing Sharon Irons for secretly keeping his semen after having oral sex and then using it to get pregnant. He only found out two years later when Irons went to court for child support. In 2005, an appeal court ruled that Irons ‘deceitfully engaged in sexual acts, which no reasonable person would expect could result in pregnancy’, but also pointed out that the sperm was a gift, and as such Phillips had relinquished control of it. This is clearly in error because in fellatio the woman takes the man’s sperm: it was theft. Whatever the outcome of this case, it must only be a matter of time before the absurdity of ‘sperm theft’ is stamped upon. The position at the moment is that of a dam held back by ‘the best interests of the child’ concept, which is proxy for ‘the best interests of the state’ in not paying child support. It only takes one case to successfully assert the rights of the deceived man for the dam wall to break.

*  *  *

Everything changes when in place of natural sex, conception is by artificial means. In IVF, the law states that a man’s written consent is required for a woman to use his sperm for procreation. The same applies to the implantation of stored embryos. Two cases came to appeal courts in 2003, brought by women who wished to use the frozen embryos they had conceived with their former partners’ sperm before receiving treatment for cancer which would render them infertile. They argued that following their treatment this was the only chance they had to become mothers, and that the law as it stood infringed their rights. These men argued that they no longer wished to be fathers now that their relationships with the women had ended. The court sided with the men and upheld the law.

After a concerted media campaign, the law had been waived for Diane Blood when she argued that her deceased husband, Steven, had said in front of witnesses that he wished to become a father posthumously; albeit he had not written anything down. In the wake of this, there was another attempt by women with embryos in storage that had been fertilised by ex-partners no longer willing to have a child. Lots of sympathy from the media, with the pleas of these women widely aired. Nevertheless, explicitly, by virtue of the legal framework of necessary mutual agreement to have the embryo unfrozen, the decision to donate was not a decision to conceive. The judiciary and medical ethics experts remained correctly unbudged in insisting that men could not be co-opted against their will to set up a family. This was upheld in early 2006 when the European Court of Human Rights declined to back Natalie Evans after she failed to get the House of Lords to hear her case. Most but by no means all of the commentariat supported the decision. Several maintained that what was the woman’s last chance to have a natural child trumped all other considerations, and that the law should be changed to make donation of sperm an irrevocable commitment to fertilisation, irrespective of changing circumstances and consequences. However, not a few pointed out that supporting the woman would invite a corresponding right of men to have a say in abortion - and, I would add, invites a comparison to the consent of women in sex regarding the rape law. This, and not men’s rights, is at the bottom of why the law was upheld.

It’s a mockery that the law should be so rigorous in these contexts but so startlingly absent in the everyday world where millions of men are daily deprived of the right to withhold consent to starting a family. Normally, a man has no ‘right to choose’ in any sense whatsoever; having no legal right even to know, let alone be consulted, that he is or is about to be a father or the co-producer of a foetus that has been or is soon to be wilfully destroyed, with or without any good reason. Only if sex is reduced to masturbation into donor name-tagged sperm vials for a registered fertility clinic does a man have a legal ‘right to choose’, and the woman forfeits her privilege of telling him any story, true or false, about contraception she is/ isn’t using, the abortion she is/isn’t having or would/wouldn’t have; and that there is/isn’t another man who is/isn’t the real father.

A man does not necessarily even have the right to know if he is the father of any child that his partner claims is his. Helena Kennedy, chair of the Human Genetics Commission, had recommended a change in the law so that a man would not be able to take a mouth swab of his own (putative) child’s DNA unless he got the mother’s permission! This is the most amazing example of the ‘best interests of the child’ principle clearly masquerading as the best interests of the mother. The law that came into effect in September 2006 does not go as far as Kennedy wanted, and allows either parent to take a sample for DNA testing. But, crucially, this excludes any putative father who does not have parental rights, so there is still a major civil-rights abuse. Often the genetic father will not have parental rights yet the step-father will have.

Issues over testing will soon be rendered history by proper male contraception; surrounding which are politics that reveal the root of all of the bizarre law and practice to do with parenting. There is real hostility to males taking control of their own fertility. Gynaecology professor Elsimar Coutinho relates:

some years ago I presented a paper on the male pill at a world conference. Afterwards, women, mainly feminists, came up and said they were against me. They protested that they had won the battle to decide when they got pregnant and I was handing that over to men.

With widespread use of sophisticated male contraceptives, the presumption of paternity in court could no longer stand up, and men would be free of the risk of CSA intervention following extra-pair sex or sex with a regular partner ahead of an unanticipated break-up. Any freeing of the male from the constraints of his sex role is seen as a ‘disempowerment’ of the female, instead of the belated gift of control to men over the consequences of their natural sexuality.

Failed attempts to reform the administration of the family courts

I’ve looked at how over-chivalrous judges, compliant with the dominant PC culture, have utilised or inserted holes in the law behind the back of parliament; but a real core of the problem is with those who write the ill-considered reports on which the judges act. An attempt was made to reform the Family Courts Service by reorganisation as CAFCASS, the Family Court Advisory Service, but it has proved worse than futile in the face of comprehensively incompetent, deliberately obstructive and extreme-feminist Child Welfare Reporters. Most of these are ex-probation officers (or ex-social workers) with no training of any kind (just one in seven get any training, and that is for a mere two days). Their union, NAPO, takes an extreme prejudiced stance on the issue of domestic violence, loosely defining it as ‘physical, sexual, emotional, mental or economic abuse’; and actively ‘challenges the assumptions that after separation or divorce, contact with the perpetrator is beneficial to children’. This is the classic defining down of a phenomenon so that it falsely applies to almost everyone, in the service of the bigotry that domestic violence is ubiquitous male behaviour; that it’s a major reason for relationship breakdown; and that men generically are fundamentally bad parents (just as men are supposedly bad people by virtue of their being the supposed oppressive side of ‘patriarchy’). This is made possible by the facility in the Child Support Act for women to claim ‘harm or undue distress’, giving carte blanche to cite anything as ‘domestic violence’ - not least any manifestation of the mother’s emotional feelings attending her malicious denial to a father his basic civil and human right of being involved in the life of his child. What compounds this is the attitude, as enshrined in the CSA guidance, that ‘the “parent with care” should be believed’. Nothing has to be proved according to any standard of proof in the enforced secrecy of the family courts. All men are deemed to commit domestic violence by default simply by being a family member. This removes any need to make plausible, let alone prove, that in any individual case domestic violence has been perpetrated. It’s a truly evil tyranny, and all is now encapsulated by CAFCASS itself in 2005, in its published Domestic Violence Assessment Policy.

The serious problems with CAFCASS have been evident for years. Its chairman, Anthony Hewson, finding obstruction at every turn, resigned in 2003, not long after being appointed. This prompted the then minister for constitutional affairs, Lord Falconer, and Margaret Hodge, the then (beleaguered) minister for children, both to call for the resignation of the entire CAFCASS board. What is needed, of course, is the complete dismantling of the current system; the dismissal of the entire management for serious misconduct, the banishment of NAPO from the workplace on the grounds of demonstrable hatred towards men, and all staff required to re-apply for position. A training manual - which CAFCASS was supposed to have produced but had failed to do so - needs to be compiled urgently and to include a zero tolerance attitude not to mythical notions about domestic violence, but to sex hate towards men. Recruitment should be aimed at the wider community and not at those from the legal arena such as probation officers (who would bring an inappropriate adversarial stance), nor from the realm of social work, which would bring an unacceptable extreme feminist perspective.

To try to combat CAFCASS, a consortium has been formed: the Coalition of Equal Parenting headed by the Equal Parenting Council. Its president, Tony Coe, delivered a damning appraisal of CAFCASS to the parliamentary select committee investigating it in 2003, in the wake of the condemnatory report by the Lord Chancellor, Making Contact Work. Coe reiterated that CAFCASS officers routinely discriminate against nonresident parents, and aid and abet hostile resident parents. The very concept of shared parenting was ‘foreign thinking’ to most of them, he claims. Yet family court judges rely heavily on their recommendations:

They are not experts. It is impossible to discern in most cases any sound methodology or knowledge base by reference to which officers have arrived at their conclusions. This is because they have no methodology or training in the role they are supposed to be fulfilling; nor are they required to support their recommendations by reference to any research data. Even their factual findings are frequently wrong or loaded in favour of one parent....On the whole they merely report what children told them at a particular point in time in a given set of circumstances. Worse, they do not have a clue when to involve an external expert.

With less training than traffic wardens, Coe likened the belief of CAFCASS officers that their role was merely to write reports and not to do anything to support contact, to that of a fire brigade that turned up only to write a report of how the building was being consumed by fire. There is no evaluation of outcomes, by any measure; not even seeking feedback from parents about what they thought of the service:

Their conclusions are based on nothing more than their personal biases. In our experience, perversely, many CAFCASS officers believe that a nonresident parent can only continue as a parent if the resident parent is prepared to co-operate....Many have never once made a recommendation for a shared residence order. Many do not even know what the term means.

CAFCASS merely pretended to go through consultation. When he met Hewson, Coe found him dismayed that all the consultation documents presaging the formation of CAFCASS had never reached him. And still the submissions made by stakeholders before CAFCASS came into existence remain not only unanswered but unread, having been blocked by senior officers intent on maintaining the status quo. The rot of the previous regime remained in the new organisation from top to bottom. Hewson was shocked to find out from Coe that the promised complaints procedure was never installed by his own senior officers. Complaints are still: ‘fobbed off, usually on the basis that you can only raise them in court...(but) family court judges have made plain that they are not interested in entertaining complaints against CAFCASS’.

The Equal Parenting Council’s policy statement calls for a legal presumption of shared parenting, so that parenting is divided between fit parents on an equitable (not necessarily equal) basis. To decide that one parent was unfit, the burden of proof must be on others, including the other parent, to prove why contact should be restricted. The policy statement notes the failure of government to explain why it opposes this position, despite the strong all-party support for legal shared parenting; and tackles head-on the main excuse for the status quo:

It is argued that shared parenting cannot work when parents are in conflict. But conflict can be easily created by one parent being unreasonable. It takes two people to reach agreement, but only one to be unreasonable. Our system’s current approach means that one parent can deny shared parenting simply by creating conflict. But rewarding conflict is not in the best interests of children who need both their parents....Our family justice system must be made to face up to the fact that there are parents who are hell-bent on excluding the other parent from their children’s lives.

The problem of the degree of contact is not so much with the small percentage of fathers who are denied contact completely. This is how CAFCASS and the Department for Constitutional Affairs like misrepresenting the problem. Though this is in itself a major human rights issue and affects many fathers who have done nothing to deserve such appalling treatment, it’s the overwhelmingly greater number of fathers who for no reason have all but nominal contact withheld from them that is the main issue. The very small minority affected by total denial of contact is an obfuscatory line that the DCA and CAFCASS took via the report by the House of Commons constitutional affairs committee on family courts in March 2005.They cited that the grounds for complete denial of contact was usually domestic violence - though of course CAFCASS does not go into what was done if anything to establish the veracity of any such accusations, nor of the mildness or severity of the supposed violence, whether or not it was reciprocal, or if actually the violence was from the mother with the father being the victim. The report did not even address the great bulk of the problem - that is the systematic restriction of contact to the point where it’s so small that it’s neither reasonable nor meaningful, and as good as complete denial. And this is just an aspect of a range of abuse by family courts. As Coe complains:

Courts all too often fail to make any contact order - or they make it too late....or they order it to be supervised (or subject to unnatural conditions) - or they water down the ordered contact instead of requiring the blocking parent to comply!

A frequent decision by the family court - to allow just two hours contact a fortnight - is tantamount to zero access. Neither reasonable nor meaningful, it’s a compact by family court staff with mothers to alienate fathers from their own children. Sometimes defended as reducing the complication of life after the end of a relationship, there is no thought to the damage done to the children, and instead merely the exercise of a nasty selfishness. There is no real prospect of an enduring father-child relationship on such nominal time together. A family court contact order of this kind is transparently a punishment and an invitation to regard it as a provocation. Sure enough, as soon as a father acts on this, a pretext can be found to further restrict or even deny any contact. If, on the other hand, a father tries to get the court to increase his contact time, not only can years of action be fruitless, but the very act of insisting on rights can be deemed the sort of unreasonable behaviour on which courts decide to further restrict father-child contact. The courts are not interested in upholding the father’s rights; only what is ‘in the best interests of the child’, narrowly conceived to exclude even the general evidence that children thrive and avoid damage when they have two natural parents instead of just one. Though this evidence is no longer in any dispute, it’s not provided in even the most rudimentary education of the judiciary and CAFCASS staff. Evidence is only admissible if it’s in respect of the particular case, and the father is left with the impossible burden of trying to prove that the individual circumstances of himself and his child could be changed to the benefit of the child. As Lord (Freddy) Howe explained in the House of Lords, this is a reversal of the burden of proof and an impossible burden to shoulder.

The problem is that the father should need to show any reason to have proper contact with his child, when ‘reasonable’ or ‘meaningful’ contact was intended in the Children Act. Just as it was rescinded by a government circular, it can be reversed back again without primary legislation. Case law cannot be relied upon, because all this says is merely that there should not be no contact at all (without good reason); but this means that almost all contact can be stopped without any good reason whatsoever. A further problem is that there is no overall view except case by case. ‘Every case is different’ is the mantra from the family courts behind which unfairness hides through illogically taking this to mean that there cannot be any presumption of entitlement to reasonable contact.

The killing of children in the family is more by mothers

Another bogus argument that is used to try to bolster the travesty of negligible contact for fathers, is that children are somehow uniquely at risk from them, when in fact natural fathers are the very people children have least to fear - less in fact than their own mothers. Women’s Aid published a report in 2005 supposedly looking into child deaths at the hands of their fathers who had been given contact orders, and the equally misandrist NSPCC used this to run anti-male advertisements.

In the decade 1994 to 2004, supposedly twenty-nine children met their deaths in these circumstances, but after several attempts to get the NSPCC to reveal their source, the charity finally admitted that there were in fact five. We know (from Home Office figures in 2002) that there are between fifty and fifty-five child deaths at the hands of biological parents annually, so child deaths in the context of contact situations are under one percent, which is less than the proportion of biological fathers who have contact arrangements.

On the face of it, culpability for murder of their own children is roughly the same by biological fathers and mothers (55% and 45% respectively) but this does not take account of ‘sudden infant deaths’ (SIDs), which total almost as many as murders by both parents combined, of which conservatively 10% are regarded as ‘covert homicides’, and almost all these are attributed to mothers. There is a further under-count of ‘covert homicides’ that are not registered as SIDS; covert methods being the usual mode of women. So in total, mothers are actually considerably more culpable than are fathers.

The danger from male figures is mostly in the form of step-fathers. Large-scale research projects have shown a 50 to 100 times greater likelihood of child murder by a step-father than a genetic father. This is nothing to do with an inherent problem of child homicide in men, but because by far the most common step-parent is male - women are the resident parent in nine out of ten times after a break-up.

This greatly increased risk of child death is actually caused by the very failure of the family courts system to abide by the natural justice of equal parenting, and the entire thrust of government policy that encourages and facilitates family breakdown. These same failures have also not a little to do with the much rarer deaths of children at the hands of despairing, access-denied biological fathers (where, typically, such fathers also kill themselves). Mothers are more culpable, and single mothers are proportionately considerably greater killers of their own children than are married or even cohabiting mothers, as reflected in the six-fold preponderance of single over married mothers in the SIDs figures.

Government deliberately cocks up and covers up

The government’s subterfuge was found out in November 2005. The Bill to introduce the Child (Contact) and Adoption Act - the act that was supposed to begin sorting out the mess - was revealed as a complete farce during its first reading. The Department for Education and Science (DfES - for some bizarre reason the implementing department) seemingly had only just realised that there was no presumption of ‘reasonable’ and/or ‘meaningful’ contact. The DfES seemingly had not bothered to check. Without this underpinning, none of the provisions of the new bill would be operable. The government is culpable at a high level. The ministerial-authored foreword to the green paper begins:

The current way in which the Courts intervene in contact disputes does not work well. This is the opinion of both Government and the senior judiciary....After separation, both parents should have responsibility for, and a meaningful relationship with, their children, so long as it is safe. This is the view of most people in our society. And it is the current legal position.

The Labour peer, Lord Adonis, speaking in the Lords declared:

We fully support the position established in case law that children normally benefit from a meaningful relationship with both parents following separation, so long as it is safe and in the child’s best interests.

This would be news to everyone involved in the family courts, and everyone who has ever enquired about this.

Lord (Freddy) Howe performed a brilliant forensic dissection in the House of Lords, pointing out that there is no case law regarding a presumptive entitlement to ‘reasonable’ or ‘meaningful’ contact. Rather, case law is in respect of merely ‘contact’. The only principle established by case law is that there has to be good reason for a complete absence of contact. Irrespective of this, it’s held that every case is different, and so case law cannot be applicable. The impact of this is a de facto reversal of the burden of proof. Therefore there needs to be inserted into the Children Act the word ‘reasonable’.

The government’s apparent mistake in not being aware of the absence of any stipulation of ‘reasonable’ or ‘meaningful’ contact in law, meant that two years of work by civil servants had been an utter waste of time. However, the remedy was simple enough, as Lord Howe clearly explained. The opposition parties were amused to oblige by tabling amendments to insert the simple words ‘reasonable’ and/or ‘meaningful’ into the new bill. But the government actually attacked the proposed amendments. It didn’t want the law changed after all. This remained the position when the bill was fully debated in June 2006.

Baroness Ashton of the Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) was now agitating that the Children Act is, or should be, based on no presumption of contact at all. The DCA is where the bill originated but the DfES was where it was torpedoed, just as had been an earlier project based on ‘reasonable contact’ for compulsory mediation called ‘Early Interventions’. The DfES has been the Government’s clandestine executioner of moves that would remedy the scandal regarding contact it feels obliged to table but essential to kill off.

The government in the guise of the Treasury may well imagine it has potentially much to lose by anything that moves towards shared parenting; so concepts of ‘reasonable’ contact and compulsory mediation had to be negated. It’s one thing having a huge and growing population of indolent single parents, the vast cost of which to the taxpayer is only partly offset by payments from fathers. But what if overnight a law was passed that could potentially double the single parent population, through enabling and fuelling a trend quite independent of the rapid growth of single parenthood already underway? This is what could happen by fathers also becoming single parents through shared parenting. Just as mostly female single parents are now supported in all sorts of ways, the taxpayer would be faced with dealing with their male partners on an equal footing. This is the government’s nightmare. Instead of one ex-partner dependent on the state and the other contributing taxes, it can be envisaged that in its place would be two dependents on the state and nobody contributing anything.

This is why it has taken until only very recently for the jobseekers’ allowance rules to be successfully challenged over the payment of single-person supplements to a man who parents 50% of the time. On 21 December 2004, Eugen Hockenjos won his seven-year battle with a House of Lords ruling that as a parent with a joint residence order, he was entitled to jobseeker’s dependants’ allowances for the children; notwithstanding that the mother had the child benefit payments and that he cared for the children less than 50% of the time. (The government had refused to split child benefit payments between parents on the flimsy argument that the antiquated computer system couldn’t handle it.) The government’s argument that sex discrimination could be justified was summed up by Lord Justice Ward as ‘grotesque’.

Of course, most men would not give up work and nor would most restrict work to just sixteen hours to take advantage of the tax credit rules. Most men do not want to share parenting 50/50. Most will want to continue working full-time. The government’s fears are explicable though by its believing its own rhetoric about the supposed essential similarity of the sexes. The sexes are not similar, and the fears of the government are grossly exaggerated.

The government may also fear linking parental responsibility in the form of paying child support benefits with parental rights in the form of actually having proper contact with the children, in respect of which child support is being paid. Making explicit the injustice that exists may well lead to many more angry fathers refusing to pay their child support, but this would be a prelude to sorting out the whole mess that would then remove the excuses or good reason to withhold child support payment. The government might then also make some real effort to sort out the ridiculous incompetence of the child support system, instead of the cosmetic exercise of abolishing the CSA and getting heavy on the collection side. Without looking into the inflexibility and injustices to fathers, this serves to compound still further the sense of grievance that fathers have, so it will be counter-productive insofar as it will spur efforts to avoid not only paying but co-operation in the first place.

Parts of government are intent on frustrating contact through the ruse of exploiting its conditionality: ‘as long as it is safe and in the best interest of the child’ through an almost default assumption of male domestic violence. With the widening of definitions of DV - even extending to mere witnessing of argument - and the failure to test the veracity of accusations; then any change in the Children’s Act alone will not change the current state of affairs. So even if the other problems - mothers not complying with contact orders, and the family court refusing to enforce its own orders - are addressed; there would still be a hurdle to vault even if the new bill had been passed in any meaningful form. All this will achieve is the ever-brighter illumination of the hatred towards men that underlies the impasse that can run its course only for so long.

The joint residence principle

That sex discrimination was being systematically applied against men was thrown into sharp relief in 2005, with the milestone case of a lesbian couple. Based on the past and current performance of the family courts, it’s clear that they are guided by the principle not only that one parent has exclusive residence with the child; but also that that parent must be female. What then, if both parties are female?

A lesbian non-resident parent was awarded shared parental rights with her lesbian ex. With no male in the scenario, the default asserted itself that the female was the deserving party, irrespective of her circumstances or her conduct. Women are regarded as by definition fully-fit parents, so when two female parents are at odds in a family court, then the decision is to exactly divide residency without any examination of the worthiness of either. In total contrast, men are by default considered unfit parents unless it can be shown otherwise. Nowhere is the hatred of men in the family court seen as starkly, albeit indirectly, as in this lesbian case.

Michael Cox was jailed in 2007 for refusing ‘absent parent’ status (he divides parenting 50/50 with his former wife.

The issue is whether all couples should be treated as the lesbian couple was. Split-down-the-middle parenting would usually be impractical; inconsistent with the fact that women as mothers naturally are and want to be the primary carers of children. A father provides a necessary complementary role that is quite different, and bound up with his providing for both mother and child that takes up much of his time, precluding his availability for parenting to the same extent as the mother. A 50/50 divide of residence must be the starting point of discussion, but the ratio can then slide, usually towards the mother, according to what is practically possible given the work commitments of both parties. There has to be default equitability given that some mothers are clearly unfit parents, and currently a significant proportion - one in ten - single parents are men. Many men are marginalised at work and could sensibly take on a large share of parenting time; but the male ex-spouse needs to earn a surplus income if he is to attract a new partner. Men usually are trapped into working full-time.

The man from a broken family is faced with working full-time to provide himself with little more than a subsistence income, despite the fact that in the great majority of cases the broken family is not of his making. Why should he work for the woman who broke up his family? It might well be a rational choice to give up full-time work to mix part-time work and parenting and claim tax credits. But he’s not offered the choice. Even after the recent landmark case of a successful challenge to the DWP to pay single-parent supplements just mentioned, the government has gone to the Lords to try to get it reversed. The government’s contemptible attitude is exemplified by the jailing in 2007 of Michael Cox, who refuses to pay child support on the grounds that he is in no way an ‘absent parent’, dividing, as he does, parenting of his children exactly 50/50 with his ex-wife. When she pleaded with the court that the children needed her ex-husband to care for them whilst she was at work, Cox was freed, pending a judicial review.

The fair situation would be just as the Coxes have worked out: that both parents work part-time and split the parenting. Although this goes against the natural differences between mothers and fathers, increasingly such an arrangement will appeal to men on low incomes, given the financial cushion of tax credits and the increasingly unfulfilling nature of the work that for most is all that is available. Not only should men have this option as a right, but correspondingly, women should have the obligation to pull their weight financially, with the same rules regarding benefits as all other unemployed. Research has shown that childcare is not an obstacle to part-time working, even for a mother with pre-school-age children. If the father is mixing working and childcare, and thereby relieving the mother of up to half the burden of childcare, then why should the mother be exempted from having to work?

Clearly, the state has a fiscal objection to any notion of shared parenting, because it would take the focus of fathers away from total work commitment, and threaten its tax base. Even if the time freed up for the mother was taken up with work, two people working part-time doesn’t usually add up to anywhere near the tax take from one person working full-time. This is a short-sighted view by the Treasury though; as well as serious discrimination against men. In the longer term it would serve to dissuade women from dissolving relationships, and most men in any case would not avail themselves of the option - especially the higher earners, who provide the bulk of taxes. The overall problem of broken families would recede still more if this approach was widened to take out the pernicious complication of incentives at the time that divorce and custody arrangements are being settled. It’s because there are significant things to contend that often there is rancour - avoiding this appears to be part of the thinking behind the default assumption of sole custody. But the territory for acrimony merely shifts to the issue of dividing assets, so a similar unfairness has to rule here too: a default assumption that the carer gets the house plus half of everything.

Men have been prevented from effectively challenging this by the solidarity of lawyers in persuading their male clients that it’s pointless to fight. But the logic is now unravelling. There is acrimony from both sides: from the men because of the breathtaking unfairness, and from the women to try to ensure that the unfairness is maintained in their favour. So there is now a pandemic of women making false allegations of domestic violence, actively encouraged by CAFCASS and Women’s Aid staff. This undermines the argument that trying to make the process fairer will lead to more acrimony. On the contrary, if everyone knows that there are fair rules and that not playing fair will probably be found out by testing claims to a proper standard of proof, and false allegations will be severely punished; then the incentives to behave acrimoniously will be removed. In time everyone will be keen to avoid going to court at all.

The problem then shifts back to the divorce itself. Given that in effect no real fault has to be shown to initiate separation - the concept of fault is in name only and serves only to provide a procedural delay - then to get the lion’s share of the subsequent proceeds, a fault can be merely invented. Nothing so serious as abuse need be falsely accused, but this sets the stage. Abuse allegations may then be asserted, first to try to skew the dividing of assets, and then in a contact dispute. But what if instead of a de facto no-fault assumption, the very cause of the separation had to be determined? What if one of the parties is more culpable, and this had a direct bearing on subsequent division of spoils and custody issues? Fairly quickly, the level of relationship breakdown would reduce as people try harder to keep their marriages and cohabitations together, because no party is going to gain much from pushing for separation unless he or she is genuinely aggrieved.

Although thoroughgoing no-fault divorce was to have been brought in with an act in 1996, these provisions have never been activated because pilot studies found them to be unworkable. Nevertheless, divorce is effectively no-fault because of the grounds of ‘unreasonable conduct’, which can mean anything. Conduct then plays a part in unfairness in divorce settlements. According to section 25 of the 1973 Matrimonial Causes Act, the judge can indeed take conduct into account, but case law has evolved to the point that rarely is it considered. When it is, it’s usually financial misconduct: nearly always deemed to be the husband unreasonably (but understandably) disposing of assets. As Mears highlights, conduct by the wife, no matter how bad, is almost never considered.

Divorce settlements are supposedly to provide for the children of the marriage, and only to this end is accommodation and caretaking income provided for the ex-wife. Supposedly. Actually, there is no practical means of separating provision for children from that for the wife. The notion of continuing for the children the lifestyle enjoyed during the married years exacerbated this. Over time, the pretence was more or less dropped, but then in effect resurrected when the Lords judgment in White-v-White set the precedent of the wife’s entitlement to 50% of everything, including even the future earned income of the ex-husband and any inheritance. With the situation still that pre-nuptial agreements are not enforceable in British courts, this makes the situation for men impossible.

*  *  *

Delving into the recent history of the debacle over contact and child support, does not on its own - without understanding the separate worlds of the sexes and the disadvantage of most men inherent in all societies - tell us why the most basic rights have disappeared. What on earth has happened legally to the right of men to father their own children? What has happened to the right of children to be parented by both their biological parents? And what has happened to the right of people generally to live a family life, unhindered by the state? All this despite a long list of relevant European conventions and laws to which Britain is signatory.

There is no legal origin of where/when/why all of this started. It’s a warning for all time of what can happen when a prejudice propels enough people into positions where they can exercise it, and they disregard the spirit and bend the letter of the law until it bears no resemblance at all to what most of those who made the law thought they had enacted. It’s also a warning that worthy, abstract principles written down as rights offer no protection for citizens from the most unimaginable abuses against them by and through their own government. Professor Jonathan Bradshaw in talking about the CSA warned a decade ago that government: ‘has jeopardised the consent to be ruled of a very large number of people.’ With government determined not to fix a problem of this magnitude, and instead to continue to make it ever worse... sooner or later there will be true hell to pay.

Summary

That the domestic domain is part of the separate world of women and not men, is shown by the systematic obstruction of men from playing their natural part in the lives of their own children through derisory contact orders. This is a failure to recognise that men have a strong bond with their own children, which a step-father does not have. The reality is not ignored when it comes to child support payments. The only sense that can be made of this is an entirely anti-family, and more fundamentally anti-male, politics.

Women as single parents are very much financially better off than many households that include a full-time worker. This huge distortion has been engineered by big increases in benefit payments masquerading as tax credits. This is the major driver of the rapidly increased prevalence of single parenting.

In both divorce and contact, the judiciary act not according to the law but according to their own natural pro-female prejudice, mutually reinforced by the new establishment of militant PC. This has become standard practice and yields a limitless absurdity of judgements, which are transparently anti-male when cases come to light where the scenario is the same but the sexes are reversed. The ‘best interests of the child’ mantra is a fig-leaf to hide what is actually the ‘best interests of the mother’, as revealed in emigration cases.

There is no limit to the bad conduct of women - even attempted murder of the ex-husband - that will still result in an unfair financial settlement imposed by the court on the husband. The high-profile cases are not special but typical of the reality at all financial levels: a 50/50 division of assets despite no such principle in statute law. Women in the breadwinner role are not imposed on, yet when male breadwinners experience financial hardship, then no allowance is made. The attitudes are so entrenched that changes in the law will not remedy the injustice.

The intentions of politicians to address the problem of fathers being squeezed out of their own families by a perversion of the law, was sabotaged by guidance notes that overturned the legislation. Then the Treasury imperative of distinguishing between a financial provider and a receiver, led to the abandonment of any idea of joint parenting in favour of polarisation between the ‘parent with care’ and the ‘absent parent’.

The root of this manifest injustice in prejudice is readily seen when you contrast the complete absence of reproductive rights in natural sex, that are asserted with the full weight of the law when conception is unnatural, as in IVF or embryo implantation.

Apart from the judiciary, the other reservoir of attitudinal problems is in those who prepare the reports on which family-court judges act. So deep-seated is anti-male prejudice here, that any attempt at reform has been blatantly obstructed from within. In particular, this is where the notion of all men being domestically violent manifests, as a basis for denial of all but the bare minimum of contact to men generally, irrespective of any accusation against them.

To support the political abuse of fathers, the myth has emerged that fathers are mostly responsible for what murders there are in families, but data strongly suggests that not only are mothers more responsible, but where males are responsible they are far more likely to be step-fathers: the very males brought into the family to replace the biological fathers. This would be obvious to anyone not blinded by polemic: people care for their genetic children, and those of others far less; and mothers are the people who spend most time with their children.

Pretending not to know that it was the absence of the word ‘reasonable’ in the law regarding contact that allowed the wholesale circumvention of the law, the government deliberately orchestrated a useless bill to become law. The Children and Adoption Act fails to address any substantive problems.

That a profound discrimination against men is in operation is crystal clear in cases where, instead of a woman and a man, two women are the parties. Now the law suddenly becomes all too equitable. In a custody dispute between lesbians, uniquely-shared parenting is the outcome. Yet the principle of joint residence should not mean an invariable 50/50 split; just the assumption at the outset which can then be skewed according to arguments made by both parties and practical exigencies.