We choose to go to the Moon
We must never underestimate the magnitude of the task we’ve set ourselves, along with all the other family law reform groups. The barrage of opponents we’re up against is formidable, daunting even.
Business Interests
Make no mistake, family law in the UK is big business worth hundreds of millions of pounds a year. Tens of thousands of solicitors, barristers, judges, experts and other legal hangers-on make a very nice living at the expense of our children, their parents and extended families. They see no reason to change a system which serves them nicely, thank you very much. We have to show they’ve been wrong for years, make them admit it, and make them change. Most of them will oppose us every step of the way. But we have to take them on.
New Labour
This Labour Government has determinedly aligned itself against meaningful reform of family law – seemingly going against the ideas in it’s own 2004 Green Paper – and have, most bizarrely, even opposed their own recent proposals for reform in the House of Lords. We can only guess at the reasons for this of course, theories abound and there’s probably some truth in most of them.
The Labour Party prefers to sidestep issues of children’s rights because, I believe, it’s too nervous to directly take on it’s Political Correctness and feminist lobbies. These decree men as dangerous creatures too unsafe to approach a child unless properly supervised by a woman. Even if not unsafe for children, men are still potential domestic violence perpetrators, just waiting to unleash their latent anger on any unsuspecting women and child in their lives – even if they don’t realise it.
The creeds of feminist and PC dogma have together strangled the Labour Party’s capacity for rational debate. Terrified that properly addressing the arguments might lead to its own self-destruction – like a 1950s robot faced with a logic problem it cannot solve; “It does not compute, it does not compute, arghh...” – New Labour simply denies there is a real problem, or pretends at worst a little tweaking of a so-near-perfect system is all that it will take.
This Government would be happy for us to bury our heads in the sand for a few more generations in the hope that, somehow, everything will turn out alright. But how many more children’s lives do they think should be sacrificed to avoid anyone admitting they have been wrong? The sad fact is, that New Labour is too intellectually dishonest and feeble-minded to tackle any issue unless they can’t possibly avoid it. We have to take this Government on and force them to recognise and address the problems.
Society’s Attitudes
It is the predominant view that children should be cared for principally by their mother, especially in the early years. Of course, there are good biological reasons for some of this; pregnancy, breast feeding and birth to cite the most unequivocal. However, it’s now common for fathers to largely share the burden of childcare more or less equally with the mother – although the state still doesn’t provide equal opportunities for paternity leave as it does for mothers.
I think most couples nowadays, would happily accept that both of them are equally important in the upbringing and care of their children. This doesn’t mean to say that their roles are precisely equal as in the same of course, the distribution of roles between the sexes is still fairly universal in that predominantly the father goes out to work and the mother looks after the child. Exactly how normal couples balance their roles is for them to decide, however, it doesn’t mean they do not have equal value in the upbringing of their child just because one of them happens to do 60% of the child care.
Personally, I believe that, on the whole, children do need their mothers more than their fathers during the early months. In a normally balanced parenting relationship this small difference is acknowledged and can even be taken advantage of.
Unfortunately, if a mother wishes to exclude a father for any reason, regardless of the value of the father to the welfare of the child, then her lifestyle choice will be supported by the courts and by society in general. This, I believe is the major and fundamental weakness in the entire process.
It is simply not acknowledged that – any small advantage there may be in a child having preferential access to its mother – is vastly outweighed by the fact that any mother wishing to do this to her child is exhibiting abnormal parenting behaviour, she is being allowed and encouraged to harm her child by excluding the other parent.
It’s this simple lack of respect for children that reveals the moral bankruptcy and complete failure of the British family law system.
It can be argued that, as the courts are just reflecting society’s values, they perhaps should not take all the blame for their actions? I don’t accept this view, after all, judges and CAFCASS officers willingly promote themselves as the experts at the front-line of family law. They are charged with, and responsible for, protecting children and putting their interests first. It is just not good enough for them to complacently accept that the general, uninformed view is the one they should uphold.
A big job ahead of us
So we have to change society’s attitudes to child-care as well as change the way the judiciary reflects them. A lot, of course, for anyone to achieve!
Even though we know the difficulties facing us make it hard to reach our goals, we choose to take them on in any case. Before this decade is out, we will make the issues of children maintaining contact with normal parents an unavoidable and key election issue for all political parties.
We do not choose to do these things because they are easy, we choose to do them because they are right.
We choose to go to the Moon.
