Fathers and bias in the Family Court

For this he is called “the patron saint of fatherless families”. It is not meant to be a compliment. Obviously, the experts are not producing the results that the father’s rights campaigners want to see, and their results are not correlating with the claims that the reason that children are without their fathers after separation is because the Family Court is guilty of anti-father bias.

It would seem that if the core business of the Family Court is child protection, and the cases involve child abuse that is “real, serious and severe”, then the Family Law Act should be amended to respond to this type of evidence, not the rhetoric of father’s rights. The impact that father’s rights campaigners have had in law “reform” in the court, where the core business is child abuse, is devastating given the types of amendments that have instead created barriers to parents, mostly mothers, who fear for their children’s safety when with the other parent.

So what would one expect of any person who is accused of child abuse and domestic violence to their own family members? Would one expect them to admit that they did these things? Or would the person perhaps claim that they hadn’t done these things and that their former partner is a liar who has “coached” the child to make up allegations?

It seems not only are politicians listening to these men and their supporters, but the Family Court appears to be bending over backwards to try and “look” more pro-father in response to their claims. The fact that the Family Court statistics reveal a very high rate of mental illness of mothers (31 per cent) compared to fathers (2 per cent) in a jurisdiction where child abuse is “real … severe and serious”, in the context of the suspect paradigms that are being invoked (PDF 63KB) is gravely concerning.

The role of the Family Relationship Centres further undermines the argument by fathers’ rights advocates that they represent unimpeachable fathers within the jurisdiction of the Family Court. This is because under law, separating couples must attempt mediation before they can file in the Family Court. The screening process for domestic violence and child protection issues in couples before they can file means that it is more likely (PDF 2.07MB) that those issues will be extant in the cases coming before the Family Court.

This latest decision may reveal that in the effort to present the Family Court as not being “anti-father” what is really happening is that children are not being protected even where there is good evidence that they should be.

This notion is further strengthened by the resignation of a Family Court Judge, Tim Carmody in 2009. The Courier-Mail reported that:

… the onus to apply equal shared parenting orders was part of the reason he resigned from the bench in July. "It created a real crisis for me," Mr Carmody said. "I just couldn't keep doing it." The orders appear to fly in the face of exceptions to the legislation, such as family violence or when equal time with parents is not "reasonably practicable".

A pertinent question could be why did he feel a “crisis”? Aren’t judges supposed to be impartial? Don’t they decide on the evidence and merits of each case? Why resign? Could it be that the Family Court culture is so “father- focused” that there is a strong signal within its judiciary to prioritise decisions in favour of the fathers in these cases? How else can this be explained in a Court that now wants to publish its statistics in an effort, perhaps, to counter “anti-father” bias accusations? How else can these results be occurring in a court that deals heavily in cases of child abuse by a parent, usually a father, that is “real, severe and serious”?

How else can this decision in this latest story be explained? Interestingly, it could be inferred that in its efforts to appear non-biased against fathers, the Family Court has become a dangerous place for the most vulnerable of children - those where child abuse has been perpetrated by their parent, be it father or mother.

The tally in the comments section of the report that a judge on the Family Court has ordered two sisters to have overnight contact with their father indicates that the majority of the general public did not agree with this decision. Of the 186 comments made, 165 did not agree with the decision, ten were in favour, nine did not decide either way, and one stated she just hated humans. This may be good evidence that the decision in this case does not reflect the values and expectations of the Australian general public but the rhetoric of men who want to be seen and have a stake in claiming that they are innocent and “good” but are merely victimised fathers.

On Monday, February 23, 2009, I wrote and warned the Federal Attorney-General that if the Family Law Act was not amended to better respond to this serious problem, there would be more deaths of children when they were forced to see a parent under the order of the Family Court.