Comment
by Fathercare.org :- |
Until
recently excluded fathers sincerely believed they could
seek changes by resorting
to letter writing. This approach has proven a vain hope
in bringing about change. Acting as gentlemen gets excluded
fathers nowhere.
Over the last 25 years many fathers also wasted large amounts of their savings
and wages (and we are talking 6 figure sums) fervently hoping to attain justice
in
courts
where the public is banned, where the press is forbidden to enter, where
so-called 'CAFCASS'
child welfare 'experts' remain untrained and ideologically contaminated.
It is
official Government policy that the reality of Family Court proceedings
must be excluded from public scrutiny, by threatening
fathers with charges of imprisonable
contempt were they to talk in public about what passes in these secret courts.
The
ongoing wave of protests highlights that
the mood
amongst disempowered fathers has irreversibly turned, and that we
are witnessing a new phase in how fathers fight for the right to be a
father to their children.
The classic Government response
of merely
providing a few hundred thousand pounds of extra funding
to tame father groups (to teach fathers
how
to act as
if
fatherhood
is about
being
a mere Sunday McDad) is
no longer working. That window of opportunity has closed. The Government's
favourite poodle organisation, FNF, is haemorrhaging members to the
pro-active Fathers-4-Justice group.
The
every other weekend 'turn up at mummies house to take children to McDonald's'
(if she lets you) form of fatherhood is now on the trash heap of history.
Fathers are demanding adequate time to be real parents to their
children (commensurate with the time mothers are given),
and they are willing to go to prison if that is what
it takes
to make Government
change its tune.
The intense mood of outrage about father cut-off policies
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 key father
cut-off organisations.
The government and its civil service advisers recently offered
some cosmetic changes and
a few new faces (Lord Filkin was seconded from the Northern
Ireland Peace negotiations), 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. Government may even drive despairing fathers into terrorism.
In the meantime Government demonstrates its whimsical
approach by promising to consult
rock-stars about what to do.
It is self-evident that without
wholesale revolution in how excluded fathers gain access
to the media, get treated in courts, and
get treated in the field of the social
security and tax systems, the civil rights spirit
that government inaction released will not disappear.
Institutional
oppression of fathers saw men like Conrad being
sentenced to 84 days for texting his son on his 5th birthday
- (he served
42 days
in
the Scrubs Prison), while doing nothing to mothers who
break court orders that were meant to
let children
keep their fathers. Conrad is not the only man who was
imprisoned for wanting to be a father. Mark Harris was
thrown into jail for 6 months for
waving HELLO to
his children
from
across
the
road, and he was sentenced to several more months in
jail for giving a birthday present to
his child.
The injustices in the Family
Courts have been occurring for so long that
today,
children made fatherless by courts a decade or more ago,
have grown up and are joining in the protests. Grandparents
who were denied loving their grandchildren because of
the anti-father policies
of Family courts are also willing to
break laws or get arrested in order to create a future
where children are no longer held hostage to anti-father
social policy. Too many
got hurt in the past.
There will be no rest
for those who politically ignore politicised fathers,
grandparents and their friends.
Fatherhood today has
become political: it 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 sex.
Englishmen once gave their
lives so that the Union Flag could fly over mudhuts in
villages in Third World countries. Let's hope that
government listens when the grandchildren of these gallant
men
now vow:
"We will be
fathers - we will destroy
all obstacles
put in our paths!"
fathercare.org
04 Sept 2003 |
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