Stop Evicting Fathers from Families
Almost every survey on the family that has been carried out in the UK shows very clearly that father absence in the family is the root cause of most of our ills in society. So why is it still happening? There are various reasons:
Divorce. This was made very easy during the last half of the twentieth century when feminism held sway; consequently today when a couple falls out there’s often a divorce, three quarters of which are initiated by the wife. A husband then finds he has to cope with a divorce he didn’t want and didn’t ask for.
Very often in all ends up in a secret family court where judges take the view that children should always be brought up by their mothers, even when children request to live with their fathers. CAFCASS officers, mainly women, write reports generally vilifying the husband in the case, and the judge rubber-stamps their report handing over the children to the wife despite the fact that he is supposed to take “the best interests of the child” into consideration.
Those who write the reports, by the way, are usually probation officers who have had no training in the job they are doing, but are mainly used to dealing with criminals. Anyone who has read their union’s alleged “Anti-sexism report” will be filled with horror as I was when I read it. It is one of the most blatant, anti-men and sexist documents it has ever been my misfortune to read.
Because the family courts in the UK are held in secret, the judges are free to get away with this farce and children are routinely separated from the love of their father and, in many cases the love of one set of grandparents.
The father is then “assessed” and is told he will have to pay a large amount of money in maintenance for his children until they complete their education. In some cases the judge makes an order for the father to have regular contact with his children. This can prove very expensive for some fathers, especially when the mother moves away from the area to another part of the country and sometimes even abroad.
Some mothers, in an attempt to punish their ex-husbands do all they can to prevent him seeing his children, despite the court order to the contrary. When this happens the court takes a very lenient view of this contempt of court and only occasionally acts against an intransigent mother. Rarely are any sent to prison as other people are in contempt cases.
Many in the media imply that, if a father is not seeing his children, it is always his fault and he is termed “an absent Dad” or in America a “deadbeat Dad”; this despite the fact that he might have spent many years and thousands of pounds fighting to see the children he loves. The true term should, of course, be “an excluded Dad”.
Single parent families. Children can end up with only one parent for a variety of reasons. The saddest of all is the death of one of their parents but a close second is as a result of divorce. The third is when a woman chooses to have a child without a father living with her or when a father gets a woman pregnant and then abandons her.
Professor Daniel Amneus, in his excellent book “The Garbage Generation” makes some pointed comments on the female-headed family:
“If we are to deal meaningfully with crime, what must be seen is its relationship with the female-headed family. Most criminals come from female-headed families. Most gang members come from female-headed families. Most addicts come from female-headed families. Most rapists come from female-headed families. Most educational failures come from female-headed families. Every presidential assassin before Hinckley came from a female-headed family or one in which he had an impossibly bad relationship with his father. Most illegitimate births occur to females who themselves grew up in female-headed families.
If we are to deal meaningfully with crime, what we must do is reduce the number of female-headed families; what we must do is prevent the divorce courts from expelling half of society’s fathers from their homes; what we must do is terminate a welfare system which displaces millions of men from the principal male role, that of family-provider. What we must do is make the father the head of the family.”
In so many countries, survey after survey has proved beyond any shadow of doubt, that when children are deprived of their fathers they suffer more ill health, they do less well in school, are less sociable and more criminally inclined. As David Popenoe says in his book “Life Without Father”:
“The negative consequences of fatherlessness are all around us. They affect children, women and men. Evidence indicating damage to children has accumulated in near tidal-wave proportions. Fatherless children experience significantly more physical, emotional and behavioral problems than do children growing up in intact families.”
To sum up I can do no better than to quote from the “Dads Now” website where they say:
“There is only one answer to this problem. ‘We must now grant to fathers the same right to be in the family as we have granted to women in the workplace.’”
