- Fathers in Law
- By Catharine Lumby
- The Bulletin
- 02/07/2003 Make a Comment
- Contributed by: admin ( 75 articles in 2003 )
Catharine Lumby examines the myths surrounding divorce, joint custody and the Family Court.
Spokesman for the Lone Fathers Association, Barry Williams, is on the record as saying that the statistics on family violence relied on by the Family Court and legal experts are wrong. He knows this because his ex-wife once threw a frozen chook at him.
Very few couples whose marriages break down wind up in the Family Court. Astoundingly, the vast majority of ex-couples - married or de facto - manage to settleissues of property and child custody in an amicable way.
But those who do wind up in court are often at the end of their collective tethers. Many of them are propelled to court by intractable conflicts or, worse, by episodes of domestic violence or child abuse. Given the mental state in which many couples arrive at the Family Court, it's not surprising that some litigants leave feeling highly aggrieved.
Family law - or, more accurately, the law regulating marriage and divorce - is one of the most contentious areas of law on the books. But it's critical to remember that the intense controversy surrounding it is fuelled by the vocal criticisms of a tiny minority of the millions of Australians who've been through a relationship breakdown. And it's a tiny minority overwhelmingly made up of men.
Of course, to someone like Barry Williams, it's obvious why men constitute the majority of critics of the Family Law Act and the Family Court - both discriminate cruelly against blokes.
Certainly, it's a line of argument which has caught the ear of our prime minister. But as Regina Graycar, professor of law at the University of Sydney, points out, it's not one based on evidence or even logic. An expert and Harvard graduate with more than two decades of experience in the field, Graycar says she's amazed at how often public debate in the field is reduced to the level of "stories about frozen chooks".
Fathers' rights groups, she says, have been tremendously successful at gaining the ear of senior politicians. And yet their major claims have no empirical support. Peer-reviewed literature in the field, for instance, shows that the Family Court makes custody orders (in contested cases) in favour of fathers at twice the rate of those made by consent.
Yet evidence or no evidence, the prime minister has announced a parliamentary inquiry to investigate "what other factors should be taken into account in deciding the respective time each parent should spend with their children after a separation". Translation: Howard is very interested in a proposal to introduce joint custody as the default setting in custody battles.
On the face of it, any proposal that sees fathers spending more time with their children is a good one. Certainly, shared parenting is a goal feminists have pushed for decades on the basis that it's not only good for children and for men, it's good for women too.
But is greater parenting equality really what this proposal is all about? Scratch beneath the surface of Howard's rhetoric, and much of what is said by fathers' rights groups, and it becomes clear that the real agenda is about reasserting a patriarchal model of the family, not replacing it with a contemporary one.
Uppermost in Howard's mind, as he told parliament, is the concern that "far too many boys are growing up without proper male role models". It's a concern which distinctly echoes the rationale behind Howard's opposition to lesbians and single women accessing fertility services. The only "proper" family in Howard's view is a heterosexual nuclear one.
A gloves-off version of the conservative view of the Family Law Act can be found in News Weekly, a journal published by the National Civic Council, originally founded by B.A. Santamaria. A recent article makes it clear that Lionel Murphy has never been forgiven for kicking fault out of divorce. As the unnamed author writes: "The marriage 'contract' is not worth the paper it is written on, permitting one spouse to walk out arbitrarily, but still forcing the other to pay for the upkeep of the other spouse and children."
The subtext is clear. No-fault divorce made it easier for women to walk out on men. It substantially lessened the power men had to keep women in unhappy marriages.
And we know it is still overwhelmingly women who end marriages - and, ironically, in the context of this debate over family law, many of them do it because they resent being saddled with the lion's share of the childcare and the domestic work.
If shared parenting is really what Howard wants, then he will get buckets of support from women across the ideological spectrum. But shared parenting has to begin well before a custody battle begins. Real shared parenting will never become common until there's widespread acceptance that men and women are equally capable of providing hands-on childcare.
Spokesman for the Lone Fathers Association, Barry Williams, is on the record as saying that the statistics on family violence relied on by the Family Court and legal experts are wrong. He knows this because his ex-wife once threw a frozen chook at him.
Very few couples whose marriages break down wind up in the Family Court. Astoundingly, the vast majority of ex-couples - married or de facto - manage to settleissues of property and child custody in an amicable way.
But those who do wind up in court are often at the end of their collective tethers. Many of them are propelled to court by intractable conflicts or, worse, by episodes of domestic violence or child abuse. Given the mental state in which many couples arrive at the Family Court, it's not surprising that some litigants leave feeling highly aggrieved.
Family law - or, more accurately, the law regulating marriage and divorce - is one of the most contentious areas of law on the books. But it's critical to remember that the intense controversy surrounding it is fuelled by the vocal criticisms of a tiny minority of the millions of Australians who've been through a relationship breakdown. And it's a tiny minority overwhelmingly made up of men.
Of course, to someone like Barry Williams, it's obvious why men constitute the majority of critics of the Family Law Act and the Family Court - both discriminate cruelly against blokes.
Certainly, it's a line of argument which has caught the ear of our prime minister. But as Regina Graycar, professor of law at the University of Sydney, points out, it's not one based on evidence or even logic. An expert and Harvard graduate with more than two decades of experience in the field, Graycar says she's amazed at how often public debate in the field is reduced to the level of "stories about frozen chooks".
Fathers' rights groups, she says, have been tremendously successful at gaining the ear of senior politicians. And yet their major claims have no empirical support. Peer-reviewed literature in the field, for instance, shows that the Family Court makes custody orders (in contested cases) in favour of fathers at twice the rate of those made by consent.
Yet evidence or no evidence, the prime minister has announced a parliamentary inquiry to investigate "what other factors should be taken into account in deciding the respective time each parent should spend with their children after a separation". Translation: Howard is very interested in a proposal to introduce joint custody as the default setting in custody battles.
On the face of it, any proposal that sees fathers spending more time with their children is a good one. Certainly, shared parenting is a goal feminists have pushed for decades on the basis that it's not only good for children and for men, it's good for women too.
But is greater parenting equality really what this proposal is all about? Scratch beneath the surface of Howard's rhetoric, and much of what is said by fathers' rights groups, and it becomes clear that the real agenda is about reasserting a patriarchal model of the family, not replacing it with a contemporary one.
Uppermost in Howard's mind, as he told parliament, is the concern that "far too many boys are growing up without proper male role models". It's a concern which distinctly echoes the rationale behind Howard's opposition to lesbians and single women accessing fertility services. The only "proper" family in Howard's view is a heterosexual nuclear one.
A gloves-off version of the conservative view of the Family Law Act can be found in News Weekly, a journal published by the National Civic Council, originally founded by B.A. Santamaria. A recent article makes it clear that Lionel Murphy has never been forgiven for kicking fault out of divorce. As the unnamed author writes: "The marriage 'contract' is not worth the paper it is written on, permitting one spouse to walk out arbitrarily, but still forcing the other to pay for the upkeep of the other spouse and children."
The subtext is clear. No-fault divorce made it easier for women to walk out on men. It substantially lessened the power men had to keep women in unhappy marriages.
And we know it is still overwhelmingly women who end marriages - and, ironically, in the context of this debate over family law, many of them do it because they resent being saddled with the lion's share of the childcare and the domestic work.
If shared parenting is really what Howard wants, then he will get buckets of support from women across the ideological spectrum. But shared parenting has to begin well before a custody battle begins. Real shared parenting will never become common until there's widespread acceptance that men and women are equally capable of providing hands-on childcare.
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