Just angry dads?
Many issues of major importance to children, government policy on family law and the machinations of an archaic and secretive family court system fail to be given any importance or air time by Britain’s media or press. Perhaps this is because they don’t make good headlines or because it would take real interest, care and time to truly look at the issues surrounding the family court system, and the devastation caused by its decisions. It would also take a great deal of guts and determination by those involved in the media to withstand the pressure exerted upon those who try to lift the lid on a system, which requires such a radical overhaul, a fact acknowledged even by many of those who work within it.
Whenever any article concerning the loss of contact between a child and one of its parents, appears in the media, there is usually some focus on, or hint towards the fact that there must be no smoke without fire, or they are just ‘angry dads,’ fighting to see their children (which to some shows they aren’t responsible enough to see them anyway). But even a cursory look at some of the issues involved shows that there is far more to the story than meets the eye, and reducing the story to just ‘another load of angry dads’ helps to retain an outmoded, outdated view that helps to perpetuate the crimes committed by the terrifying family law system in this country, under the guise of justice.
A much publicised misconception regarding child contact issues is that, a bunch of dads have been stopped from seeing their kids because they aren’t good dads anyway and must have done something really wrong for the court to have stopped contact. The issues involved within that misconception will be given close scrutiny within this forum, but it is now time for people to realise that, whatever the intricacies of the individual case, or the injustices of an entire family law system, it is far from true that only ‘those angry dads’ denied contact with their children, suffer.
First and foremost hundreds of thousands of children suffer in this country as a direct result of a system which has seen them denied the right to see their non-resident parent, often for the simple (and also complicated) reason, that the resident parent doesn’t want them to have any sort of relationship with their other parent. The child’s feelings on the matter are often given little importance, and though the criteria for the making of this decision is always said to be based upon ‘the child’s best interests’, (which incidentally does recognise that a child should, where safe, have contact with both of its parents), it rarely delivers this if the resident parent digs their heels and breaks court ordered contact orders or forces the non-resident parent to jump through hoops for small scraps of haphazard contact. In fact in reality it fails to consider the child’s long-term best interests or well-being at all and more often attempts to appease the resident parent and stop their continued abuse of their child when contact occurs.
Another popularly held belief is that this loss of contact occurs only between the child and its father but there are many cases where it is the mother who is denied any contact with their child, again as a result of the actions of the resident parent, in this case the father. The issue is certainly not gender specific, although it must be said that more fathers are affected by the loss of contact with their child than mothers.
But loss of contact, whichever the parent is, does not stop there. When the child is denied contact with its non-resident parent it will also be forced into a position where it loses contact with that parents family as well. At one fell swoop it will lose not only its mother or father but also its aunties, uncles, cousins, grandmother and grandfather and if it has any half-brothers or sisters from the non-residential parents new relationship, or has had a relationship with step-brothers or sisters brought into the family when all was going well, it will be denied those too.
One half of the child’s family will be wiped out a stroke as a reality of the Judge’s decision to stop contact between itself and one of its parents.
Can this really be in the best interests of the child, and if the issue is just about ‘angry dads’ how are so many people affected and so many lives devastated as a direct result of this government policy and family law system? How can we expect these children to grow up well-balanced, happy individuals when we have allowed and condoned the wholesale decimation of half of their entire family?
