Family Court Media!


Family Court Media!, by Terry Bowker


Take your average 9 year old boy, pushbike in high gear and his best mate in tow working his skateboard like there's not a fear in the world to be had and caring little for what society deems he should be. Girls are yuk, dads' his hero, mums' his whole world and snails are cool, life is just as it should be for a 9 year old boy. That was yesterday.

Today this same 9 year old has been convinced he is a perpetrator of domestic violence just waiting to happen, he has been accused of bullying at least one girl in the school yard and he is well aware that boys do not have the same set of rules as girls.

Five years on and half his friends have gone through a divorce and he is on his 3rd girlfriend having found the first either too demanding or too focused on a long-term relationship, he can't decide which. Most of his friends are in the same boat, either having decided it's all too hard or simply just too soon and there are just too many other things they want out of life.

After ten years he is 19, mobile phones are the music of the night and the nearest party is broadcast by relay within minutes. The idea of marriage, children and dream of being a footy star mangled in the previous 3 years by an incredibly insidious set of events. After a year of parties in quick succession and rapid rise in his football career his world collapsed with a single phone call.

At 9 he would never had conceived in his wildest dreams that such devastation could occur, that he would be totally powerless to prevent these events and that there would be few who believe and even fewer willing or able to help. So what could do this?

If you have absorbed the constant media messages over the last 20 years you'd quickly conclude he is the perpetrator of the most highly publicised social crime, without a shred of evidence he would be a woman basher or a rapist, or child molester or one of a dozen other crimes that are instantly recognised, without a conscious thought , as being what only a man would do. But in this case no, he has been accused of being the father of an ex girlfriend's child.

So what's the problem, he's earning a good income and has signed the birth certificate, sees his son every second Sunday and has taken responsibility for his mistake, his mistake as accepted by him after years of social conditioning that he being the male is solely responsible for the events that bough this child into the world.

Well, after 3 attempts in the Family Court, thousands of dollars in legal fees and endless sleepless nights that have resulted in poor performance on the field he is on the brink of giving it all up. He has failed again to obtain a court order for a DNA paternity test requested after discovering he could not be the father but being unable to prove it in order to meet the requirements of the Family Court which would bring about the order for the testing. But that's not all, the judge fearing he may attempt a test by himself has included a restraining order forbidding him to go near the child or the child's mother.

Couldn't happen, think again, it happens and this is based on real events but that's not the unbelievable story.

The real story is, how have our laws, our social attitudes, our basic sense of right and wrong been twisted into an unbelievable grotesque condition that allows any male to be fodder for the whims of the few women who will use the system as an accomplice in her sadistic grab for money and property not otherwise rightfully hers? How too have we condoned this abuse of males and accepted the total lack of consequences for the perpetrators of these crimes?

By saying nothing when media push the constant barrage of negative male messages while insistently pushing out the message that all women and girls are either good or victims of what some male has done to them, again without proof or basis, is our crime. If men don't take responsibility for doing nothing they are part of the problem, as a father to 4 boys and a daughter I see both sides of the coin, good and bad. All these social ills are a human failure not a gender failure, yet this clearly is not the message my children are getting, what about yours?

Positive messages produce positive results, our boys need to know they have a future and that they are not simply a means by which others can profit. Paternity fraud is only one way this occurs, false accusations of rape or sexual abuse have no consequence for the accuser, but can cost a career for the accused, a divorced dad is assumed to be unfit as a parent without question simply because he is the male. He must prove to the Family Court otherwise in order to see his own children, something he does against the odds.

Is this the message that will have our young men thrusting themselves enthusiastically into love, marriage and a secure career?

Prominent men in the media are Australian males' only hope for fair play as part of the social, commercial and political conditioning means advocating for males is wrong and a total vacuum exists when the subject turns to funding.

What do you say?

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Greg, Thank you once again, I know this is different to what you may be used to doing but different is the only way of getting this message out.

....., a little personal background. I have 3 natural children and 2 step children, I am a sole parent to 2 of them and work full-time while fronting committees on Reliable Parents and the Shared Parenting Council of Australia executives. While I am a custodial parent I am still in a position of having to prove to the family court that I am worthy if I want increased contact time with my daughter, (the other boys are older) as the mother has chosen to limit it. I am hopeful that time will change this and mindful that a family court solution if succesful would still take several years and cost more than I can afford.


I started Reliable Parents Inc 2 years ago because I saw the urgency in addressing the longer term issues and couldn't find an organisation that had a clear and balanced sense of equity or able to see beyond the gender issues and beyond their own immediate wants, (and understandibly so given the horrors some are going through on a daily basis). Reliable Parents is made up of primarily bussiness proprietors, proffessionals, mid management, acedemics and boasts a 1/4 its members being women.


Best regards
Terry Bowker
rparents@iinet.net.au

Links:

Official websites

Shared Parenting Council of Australia

Articles

Discrimination in Australian courts, by Giles

During the month of May 2001, by Giles