Here is an example from Britain, which talks about the sickening reality of courts forcing mothers to take children to see fathers who have abused them.
It begins:
Young children dragged kicking and screaming to visit their abusive fathers and mothers threatened with prison if they don't comply ... It's a world away from the image of wronged dads that the campaign group Fathers4Justice implanted in the public mind. Yet, as Decca Aitkenhead discovers, it's the harrowing reality for many families riven by violence or sexual abuse
(Found via PAR-L list)
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Despite so-called "fathers' rights" rhetoric about men being treated unfairly by family court, the legal system and the political system continue to refuse to really deal with the endemic violence of men against women and children.
To be fair, these are two separate issues.
(1) Father's rights to visitation.
(2) Women and children's rights to be protected from abusive men.
Women and children should not be forced into a continued relationship with an abusive partner / father.
But, to claim that "father's rights" is rhetoric because of the existence of abusive men is irresponsible.
But parts of the legislative agenda of groups that mask their male supremacist agenda in the language of "fathers' rights" in effect opposes or reduces measures that protect children (and, in a broader sense, women) from male violence. If such groups want to get past being accused of rhetoric, they need to change their proposals to take the realities of endemic male violence into account.
Pfew...I wondered if anyone was going to call me on the incautious language in my last comment while I was out of the house!
I should qualify my attribution of intent to the "fathers' rights" movement. Where I think what I said is reasonable is with respect to, for example, certain of such groups that function as part of the broader right-wing movement in the United States. That movement as a whole certainly has as part of its goals an agenda that is, to put it simplistically, anti-woman. However, individual men attracted to "fathers' rights" rhetoric may or may not share that outlook (though all of us, including pro-feminist men, are still complicit in patriarchy, of course). But intent is not really very relevant -- what matters is impact. And as the linked article describes, regardless of why they are pursuing it, elements of that agenda would have a detrimental impact on some women and children.
Father's rights.
That which is used to torment the Mother for decades in the name of equality.
The courts, while adamantly explaining the best interest of the child, send the same children to be further abused and this time WITHOUT the presence of the interfering Mother for protection.
Now ask why they stay?!
I have lived it...makes me sick
He had me in court for a decade for everything he could think of and went to the Psyche ward anytime he was caught breaking the law. Never got charged for any of it, and I tried like hell to get them to stick those charges...not even verbal threatening.
They use the courts to beat us over the head and continue to manipulate and control us for as long as they can.
Nobody should be doing that from either side.....but how do you prevent it?
Nobody is listening to you complain when you have a vested interest in the outcome. I was painted as the spiteful ex. Nobody listened...until he had his rights stripped after he beat her up.
Rights indeed.
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