I hold no authority in any father’s rights organisation, although I wish to write to you about father’s rights, or more accurately parental rights.
When your child tells you they no longer wish to see you it is very hard to persuade the courts to assist you in maintaining contact with them. Everyone wants to do what is best for children, or what they believe is best, and if the child seems happy to be denying one parent any involvement in their lives, then it is understandable that a lot of people will go along with that. However very few of those people will have experienced exclusion from their own children, so probably cannot understand the situation from our point of view.
When you try to argue for continued contact with your child it is so easy for those opposing you to criticise your attributes or behaviour as a parent. It is like trying to prove a negative, if your child is against contact how can you prove you are not a bad father or that contact with you is in their interests?
It follows doesn’t it that if I cared for my child well, or in conjunction with my ex. we cared for her so well that he or she then becomes independent enough to do without me, the non-resident parent, then I am more likely to lose out under the current system. Parents doing their job less satisfactorily might not be so dispensable, because the children will probably be more immature. Add to all this the fact that the law categorically refuses to allow the interests of the parents themselves to be taken into consideration, (apart from where they might affect the child’s interests), and you will start to see why injustice is so prevalent in our family law system.
It is unjust that one loving parent becomes totally excluded from their child’s life, really because of the hostility of their ex. rather than any difficulty between them and the child, who we seek to protect. Our ex.’s have sometimes become adept at the art of deception, learnt or honed whilst they were forming their new relationships behind our backs, if this is what destroyed the marriage in the end. They will always be able to argue they did everything for the best interests of their child, or they can say they believed excluding you was what the child wanted, regardless of the truly selfish nature of their actions.
A rebuttable legal presumption in favour of contact for all decent parents is the measure many of us in the fathers/parental rights movement seek. It has been introduced in other countries and considered by our government too, as can been seen from the note* below.
I hope you would support that call on behalf of the Church of England.
Many thanks for taking the trouble to read my letter.
Yours sincerely,
Graham Goodfellow
* Child contact with non-resident parents, by Joan Hunt with Ceridwen Roberts, University of Oxford
Department of Social Policy and Social Work, January 2004.
Should the law be changed to include a statutory presumption of contact?
Many countries do have this. Indeed it would already be the case here had the government implemented section 11(4) of the Family Law Act 1996, which declared:
‘the general principle that, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the welfare of the child will be best served by: (i) his having regular contact with those who have parental responsibility for him’ and (ii) the maintenance of as good a continuing relationship with his parents as possible’.