http://menshealthaustralia.net/files/MHA_Media_Release_FL11.pdf

A father’s day gift from Labor and the Greens: increased fatherlessness

Virtually every major social pathology has been linked to fatherlessness: violent crime, drug and alcohol abuse, truancy, teen pregnancy, suicide – all correlate more strongly to fatherlessness than to any other single factor.

The majority of prisoners, juvenile detention inmates, high school dropouts, pregnant teenagers, adolescent murderers and rapists all come from fatherless homes. The connection is so strong that controlling for fatherlessness erases the relationships between race and crime and between low income and crime.

Many commentators, including the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, have laid the blame for the recent UK riots at least partially on the fact that many of the rioters were raised in homes without their fathers present.

Men’s Health Australia spokesman Greg Andresen said today, “The Labor government is set to pass a bill over the coming weeks that will raise already high levels of fatherlessness to record levels with untold impact not just on vulnerable children denied the right to see their fathers; not just on fathers who will most likely end up depressed and suicidal after being denied the right to see their children; but on the greater fabric of Australian society.”

Mr Andresen went on to say that the Family Law Legislation Amendment (Family Violence and Other Measures) Bill 2011, if passed in its current form, would:

• increase child homicide rates (in NSW child homicide had reduced by almost 50% since the introduction of the soon to be reversed 2006 reforms)
• give an open license to parents – mostly mothers – who wish to fabricate allegations of violence and abuse as a legal strategy to remove fathers from their children’s lives (by removing the penalties available for the court to discourage false allegations)
• facilitate the practice of parental alienation, whereby one parent – mostly mothers – alienates the child(ren) from the other parent (by removing the law’s “friendly parent” provisions)
• facilitate and reward family violence by increasing the serious social abuse of denying children and one of their parents the right to a relationship
• fail to protect children from abuse and neglect by defining only “serious” psychological harm or neglect as being against the law
• increase litigation and costs for separating families and taxpayers (the soon to be reversed 2006 Family Law changes had led to a 20% reduction in litigation).

The message from the Labor/Green government to fathers and children this father’s day is clear: your relationship doesn’t matter. Happy father’s day!

Media contacts:

Sue Price  |  admin@mensrights.com.au |  0409 269 621
Warwick Marsh  |  info@fathersonline.org |  0418 225 212
Greg Andresen  |  media@menshealthaustralia.net |  0403 813 925

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http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=12558&page=0

Fathers Day present from hell

In the lead up to Fathers Day this Sunday I received a call from a grandmother who was in tears because of what her son was going through in the Family Law Court. Her son, she told me, is a devoted dad who loves his child. When his baby was first born he used to push him around the town in a stroller so that mum could get some sleep in between feeds.

Sadly, the mother packed up and left, taking the boy away when he was only one year old. Not only was this father broken hearted, but so was the grandmother. For a period of 18 months he did not see his son because of malicious behaviour on the part of the mother. The whole family was devastated.

Currently this dad sees his son every second weekend and half of the school holidays. But what is saddest is that he struggles to even get that time with his boy. This man is on his fourth set of court orders, but even these are regularly flouted by the mother without impunity. The father and his new partner are at their wits end because this has been going on for 10 years and they no longer know what to do.

The poor grandmother has been watching the proposed Gillard government’s rollback of shared parenting and was wondering if she will ever see her grandson again. She said to me, “It’s no wonder fathers commit suicide because they love their children but the courts are against them, legal aid is against them and now the government is against them”. Sadly I could do little but agree with her. The Senate Committee reported on the Family Law amendment Bill 2011 on the 17 August. It is set down to come into law a few weeks after Fathers Day.

Another story I heard recently from a good friend was that of his stepson, father of a beautiful daughter, who was locked up in Goulburn Gaol for 8 days. His crime? There wasn’t one! The stepson’s partner lodged a complaint 2 weeks after a verbal altercation between them which my friend was a witness to. Neither my friend, nor his stepson were consulted, or a statement requested from either of them, but the police were able to put an innocent father in gaol on the word of a drunken woman. After paying $20,000 in legal fees the matter was thrown out of court, but to this day this young man struggles to be allowed to see his daughter even though he is a very committed dad.

You might think these stories are pretty bad, but it is about to get a whole lot worse. Prime Minister, Julia Gillard’s Green Labor Government is about to enact changes to the Family Law Act that will demonise dads in the court system and deprive even more children of their biological birthright to a father and a mother. This rollback of shared parenting is being brought in under the guise of ‘reducing family violence’.

The New changes will make Family Violence mean anything you want it to mean. It’s called Orwellian doublespeak. In other words if any man was to raise his voice at his wife he could be charged with family violence and put in gaol. That of course would mean that all our parliamentarians would be put in Gaol every question time because raising ones voice is standard procedure. As you can see from the above examples Fathers are still being removed from their children’s lives under the current 2006 moderate Family Law reforms. Why make it worse?

Secondly the new bill removes the friendly parent provision in family law which required a certain level of mediation between couples for the sake of the children which has helped people to come more positive resolutions for the sake of the children.

Thirdly lying in the family court will no longer have any penalty attached to it. In other words you can make as many false accusations as you like and you will never have costs awarded against you. Perjury should be unacceptable in any court. Truth should never be traded for lies.

This is the first time in our history that changes have been made to the Family Law Act without bipartisan approval.

What is even more unusual is that the Gillard Government is sitting on only 27% in the latest Newspoll, the lowest vote for a major party in the history of news polls. Furthermore the Prime Minister is losing men by the bucket load with her dissatisfaction rating amongst men, sitting at 59% compared to 48% for women. This means that men are 23% more dissatisfied with Gillard than women. If Ms Gillard wishes to retain government she must win the men’s vote, not lose it.

In 2007, the Labor Party made history with its promise to introduce Australia’s first ever Men’s Health Policy. I should know, I was one of those who helped put it on the table. Men flocked to the Labor Party. Labor won the election and the men’s vote helped them do it. But here we are in 2011 and the Gillard Government has declared a war on fatherhood and wants to give a diabolical Fathers Day gift to the men of Australia which will bring even more fatherlessness to Australian children.

The detrimental overall effect of this bill will be to introduce even greater levels of violence in the community and in families. The one thing we know about the London riots in the UK is the high level of fatherlessness in the communities most deeply affected.

All the social science data shows that as fatherlessness increases so does violent crime. In a study of neighbourhoods in USA’s Prince George’s County MD every one percent increase in female headed households increased the odds of being murdered by 1.07%. Statistics from the US Texas Department of Corrections show that 85% of youths in prison come from fatherless homes. This is 20 times the national average.

A British study by Sampson & Groves found a direct statistical link between single parenthood and virtually every major type of crime including mugging, violence against strangers, car theft and burglary. A US Criminal Justice & Behavior report shows that 80% of rapists motivated with displaced anger come from fatherless homes.

So what is motivating Ms Gillard to allow the Family Law Court to cut even more fathers out of their children’s lives? Ms Gillard, by her own confession, is a feminist and helped found Emily’s list which is a radical feminist organisation within the Labor party. Radical feminism blames all of society’s problems on oppression by the male patriarchy. Like all popular lies there is always an element of truth contained within it.

Men are the cause of most of the problems, but where radical feminists come unstuck, is that they refuse to admit that men are also a big part of the answer. The father wound runs deep and is overwhelmingly responsible for the increasing levels of pathology reported in modern society. The UK riots being a prime example.

As former prison doctor and psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple said, “British youth leads the Western world in almost all aspects of social pathology…British children are much likelier to have a television in their bedroom than a father living at home… family is not the word for the social arrangements of the people in the areas from which the rioters mainly come.”

As former Opposition Leader Mark Latham said in June 2003 at the release of the 12pt Plan. ” We don’t want a men’s movement that blames women; we want a men’s movement that works with men and women to develop better identity, better relationships, a stronger fathering role in society and to develop win-win outcomes, where as a society across both genders we can make advances and make successful changes.”

So we ask that this Fathers Day, Ms Gillard will return her Fathers Day present of the new Family Law Amendment Bill to the waste bin where it belongs. Our children can do without it. What is needed for woman and men to work together and call an end to the gender war.