We’ve already done a piece on this story, but an article in the Daily Mail today (link below) has provided more details. Can anyone with an ounce of humanity seriously doubt that the denial of fathers’ access to their children, at the behest of malicious mothers, is a driver of the statistic that three times more British men than women commit suicide? Surely not.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2524892/My-ending-anguish–father-rights.html
I once said in a speech that the family law system was ‘broken’. A man in the audience – he’d been involved for some years with Fathers for Justice – later pointed out I was mistaken, the family law system works in precisely the way it’s designed to work, to give complete power to mothers, and none to fathers. It’s an emotional assault on fathers and their children. It’s BARBARIC.
Kate Winslet has also clearly stated she is not if favour of children being with the father. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/fathers4justice-target-kate-winslet-advertising-2938009. The article clearly supports her over the fathers4justice that maybe naively thought using her as an example would help their cause.
As the case illustrates; the courts may well make decisions on contact but are unable or unwilling to enforce these orders. A particular issue is actually giving courts sanctions that they will apply if their orders are broken. At it’s root is assumptions of saintliness of mothers and assumptions that the interests of children are inseparable from their mothers. Result that even when courts make orders for contact these are really reliant on good will from mothers as the courts don’t have sanctions that they apply to mothers if they break an order, A case of quite clear injustice.
I agree, I’d say the family law system is “rigged”, not “broken”.
Reblogged this on Children's Rights.
Thanks David.
Reblogged this on Los españoles se merecen saberlo, por la Paz y la verdadera Igualdad en España!.
There is a very simple truth associated with contact disputes 12th October 2005
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldhansrd/vo051012/text/51012-44.htm
Earl Howe: There is a very simple truth associated with contact disputes. It is that if both parties to the dispute are content with the amount of contact that they have with the child, there is no longer any dispute. Contact disputes are about one thing and one thing only: the amount of time that each parent believes that he or she should have with the child. That simple truth has somehow got submerged during the drafting of this Bill. What we needed in the Bill—what everyone thought we were going to get when the Green Paper was published—was measures designed to facilitate contact; measures that would put right the deficiencies of court settlements under the current system, deficiencies which the Government acknowledged in their Green Paper. What we have in Clause 1 are not measures that will facilitate contact, but rather measures that will serve only to defer contact. The so-called contact activities for which the clause provides are not contact; they are things that the court says you have to do before you are allowed contact. That idea, with great respect to the Minister, will do nothing to help sort out the one and only question at issue between two parents in this situation: how much time should each of them be allowed to have with the child? It completely misses the point.
Clause 1 is a blind alley, and the Government have got themselves into it because of a muddle about the current law and how the law operates in practice. Instead of acknowledging, as they originally did, that the system was not working and needed mending, they are now saying that the basis on which the courts operate is all right and that it does not need changing.
The Minister has repeatedly maintained that case law safeguards the principle of the two-parent model—that is to say, the principle that children normally benefit from a meaningful relationship with both parents following separation, unless good reasons can be shown why that should not happen. In other words, the Government say that there is already a presumption of meaningful relations or meaningful contact enshrined in case law. But when it is put to them, as it was yesterday, that this presumption should be mirrored in statute, they say “Oh no; we do not like the idea of a presumption of reasonable contact actually appearing in the Children Act”. Their position is thus contradictory. And the muddle of this position is compounded by their belief that the present law is all right. The present law is not all right because it cannot prevent thousands of blameless and loving parents being granted next to no contact with their children for no material or good reason.