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Batman Rooftop Protest
London, 21 October 2003

Two men dressed as Batman and Robin are holding a rooftop protest at the Royal Courts of Justice in central London over the treatment of fathers in the family courts.

Campaigners Jolly Stanesby, from Ivybridge, Devon, and Eddie Goreckwi, from Romford, Essex, climbed onto the roof of the building on The Strand just after 0400 BST on Tuesday.

Group spokesman Glen Poole said the men were a new group called “the caped crusaders for justice”.

He said they were hoping to draw attention to the group’s campaign to ensure divorced fathers were given proper access to their children.

The protesters had scaled the side of the court building in The Strand at just after 4am.

The men intended to remain on top of the Royal Courts of Justice for a week and had taken food, clothes and bedding with them, he added.

A Scotland Yard spokesman confirmed that two men dressed as Batman and Robin were on the roof of the courts.

“We are monitoring the situation and trying to persuade them to come down,” he said.

Comment by fathercare:

Until recently wronged fathers sincerely believed they could seek changes by resorting to letter writing. This has proven a vain hope in bringing about change.

Many more wasted their large amounts of their savings and wages (and we are talking 6 figure sums) fervently hoping justice would be performed in courts that are closed to the public and whose proceedings are very secret. This latest protest highlights that the mood amongst disempowered fathers has irreversibly turned.

The intense mood of outrage that moderate fathers leaders had cautioned about to counterparts in Lord Chancellor's committees two years ago, has turned into ever more daring acts of civil disobedience protest against the court system, against lawyers and against other father cut-off organisations .

The government and its civil service advisors recently offered some
cosmetic changes and a few new faces, but the crisis surrounding father issues is now too deep. To recover the situation the price tag the Government will now have to pay to buy peace may prove politically beyond them. Whether to provide extra funding to tame father groups that teach fathers how to act as if fatherhood is about being are mere Sunday McDad is no longer an issue.
That window of opportunity has now closed

Without wholesale revolution in how fathers get treated in courts, and how fathers get treated in the field of social security and tax benefits, the civil rights spirit that government inaction released will not disappear.

The injustices have been occurring for so long in our divorce courts that today, children made fatherless by courts a decade or more ago, have grown up and are joining in the protests. Too many got hurt in the past.

There will be no more rest for those who politically ignore politicised fathers. Fatherhood today means nothing less than full human and civil rights in law; in the practice of the law; and in getting access to all forms of assistance irrespective of a parent's gender.



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