Equal shares: rights for fathers or recognition for children?

Abstract

The fathers’ rights movement in England has recently been given a huge boost by the involvement of Bob Geldof who has become their influential mouthpiece in the media and elsewhere. The movement has also diversified and adopted more high profile tactics more akin to those used in Australia and New Zealand. These tactics have challenged family law to adopt a principle of pure equality between mothers and fathers and demands that, on divorce or separation, children should be shared equally. In this paper it is argued that this demand ignores entirely the experiences of children who have lived an ‘equal shares’ arrangement for many years and that it reduces children to passive objects who can have no voice in a system designed only to create equality between adults. It is argued that rather than pushing the principles of family law back towards simplistic notions of equality, what is needed is a policy based on recognition rather than rights.

Implacably Hostile or Appropriately Protective?

“…Whereas knowledge about domestic violence emphasizes the continuing safety needs of women, the dominance of a family values model that promotes shared and cooperative parenting as an ideal form (Smart & Neale, 1999) constructs women as implacably hostile if they resist a process that they feel compromises their own, or their children's, protection (Rhoades, 2002). In the United Kingdom, as elsewhere, a vociferous and influential fathers' movement has couched its objectives in terms of promoting children's welfare but may be more interested in privileging fathers' rights (Jaffe, Lemon, & Poisson, 2003;Rhoades & Boyd, 2004;Smart, 2004). Views about how children's interests should be determined are embedded in these discourses about supposedly dispossessed fathers and alienating mothers.…”

Swedish Parent’s Experiences of Joint Physical Custody

“…This in turn made the parents feel like harming their children. Smart [41] as well as Haugen [42] illustrated how joint custody may cause problems for children who feel they have no logical arguments to oppose the arrangement. The children therefore adopt the adults' decision without arguing.…”

The debate over the joint parental responsibility model in Hong Kong

“…Social work practitioners should facilitate parents to attend to the voices of the children in the negotiation of the parenting plan. It would more likely be in the children's best interests when they have the opportunity to have a say and if their opinions and choices are respected (Haugen 2010;Smart 2004).…”