Stand by Your Manhood (12 page)

Hollywood actor Jason Patric, who’s best known for
The Lost Boys
and
Sleepers,
is locked in a similar battle. He and his ex, Danielle Schreiber, dated for ten years before they split, proving that even the most promising relationship can hit the skids – and, when it does, women can become pawn stars. No, not porn stars – but pawn stars, you know: the type of mother who uses her child as a weapon to enact revenge for a broken heart. Like a pawn in a game. Classy work, ladies.

He too ended up in court trying to see his own son, who lives just ten minutes away from him in LA. In a bid to highlight his situation, he set up a site called Stand Up For Gus, where he detailed the jaw-dropping twists and turns of the story. Unimpressed, she tried to censor it with a gagging order, but he fought back and won – like any decent lad should. Mark Wahlberg, Chris Rock, Chris Evans, Mel Gibson and
Mad Men’
s Jon Hamm all backed the cause in a penalty wall of Men United, which is exactly what we need more of, because these stories aren’t rare. They’re not even few and far between. They happen all over the world, constantly.

According to the Office for National Statistics, one in three youngsters now have no access to their father – which equates to four million children in the UK.

Reassuringly, there’s been some very creative resistance.
If the fathers’ rights movement was once in its Modigliani phase – one of reflection, sadness and alienation – it’s now surely in its Rothko era: bold, modern and surreal. In 2013, 58-year-old Paul Douglas Manning was arrested at London’s National Gallery for affixing a photograph of his son to the canvas of John Constable’s masterpiece
The Hay Wain.
This followed Tim Haries’ arrest for spraying the word ‘Help’ on a Ralph Heimans portrait of the Queen in Westminster Abbey. Not because they’re common vandals, but because they’re crying for help. Desperate times call for desperate measures and all that. They had to break the law to shake the law, which – quite frankly – is the bigger criminal offence. See, if the legal process actually enforced men’s civic rights as they’re paid huge sums to do, there’d be no need for peaceful protests.

Either way, all this is further proof that parenthood is rarely a bronco worth backing. In fact, for many men it’s an old nag that needs shooting. The odds of it crossing the line are atrocious. I doubt William Hill would even take bets on it. Not least because, despite stellar efforts from some really great men and women, the law seems to have remained exactly the same as it was ten, twenty, thirty years ago. Nothing has changed. Right?

‘If you’d asked me that last year I would’ve agreed,’ says Dr Craig Pickering from charity Families Need Fathers.

When I ask him how this will be possible when court orders have less traction than England at a World Cup, he offers a plausible solution. ‘We need similar sanctions to those who won’t pay child support: passports and driving licences confiscated. These things don’t affect the child, but they inconvenience the parent directly. The current government consulted on this and there was quite some optimism, but they stopped mid-way through. We don’t know why.’

Oh.

I put this to Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, who’s the man in charge. My message gets passed to somebody else, who passes it onto somebody else, who passes it onto somebody else. Eventually, the Ministry of Justice tells me: ‘The consultation concluded that we should not introduce further punitive enforcement elements. There are already punishments available.’ Hmm. Perhaps somebody needs to tell them
they don’t
actually
work. Not for fathers or children. The same children who – if they’re lucky – are being raised by random men, whose kids are being raised by other men, whose kids are being raised by other men.

Considering the annual cost of family breakdown is reportedly £44 billion – yep, that’s more than the defence budget – you’d think curing fatherlessness would be a priority for a country haemorrhaging money, but it isn’t. Instead, everybody’s petrified of inadvertently apportioning blame to single mothers –
even though it’s not about them.
Only recently, in a bid to woo the female vote – which is a golden ticket when it comes to the ballot box – David Cameron said deadbeat dads ‘should be looked at like drink drivers’, yet said nothing about the mothers who deliberately steer them off the road. Here we had the head of British government telling men to raise children properly, yet offering a law that actively keeps children and fathers apart as the solution.

Perhaps he should try going through the system to see his children if Sam Cam shacks up with Ed Balls and poisons them against him. It’d be a bit like the BBC’s
Back to the Floor,
except useful.

Then again, this isn’t ignorance – he doesn’t
want
to address it. Rather than face reality, annoy a few female MPs and co-ordinate with Fathers 4 Justice to improve the law, he’d prefer to kiss politically correct ass. To date,
despite the epidemic of fatherlessness, F4J have always been excluded from state committee meetings on shared parenting, irrespective of the fact that they’re the UK’s biggest authority on the matter.

Whether we’re talking about those in front or behind the camera, Hollywood doesn’t help fathers. Admittedly, thousands of years of war and violence haven’t done us any favours. Men have long been considered aggressors and threats to the safety of children, rightly or wrongly, but let’s be honest: women aren’t perfect parents either. Fucking up is a human trait, not a male defect. In fact, in the last few years, the highest-profile culprits of child abuse have been mothers. There’s the infamous Karen Matthews, Amanda Hutton – whose son’s mummified body was found two years after he died – and, of course, Baby P’s Tracey Connelly.

‘There is absolutely
no
magic ingredient women have when it comes to being parents,’ says Adrienne Burgess from the Fatherhood Institute.

Off the top of my head I can cite
Men Behaving Badly, Shameless, Last of the Summer Wine, The Simpsons, Peppa Pig, Two and a Half Men, Everybody Loves Raymond
and
Friends
as examples, plus, for the sake of a classic childhood reference,
Three Men and a Baby,
which, BTW, was the highest-grossing box office hit of 1987. Oh, how we laughed at those docile dads.

Getting her political priorities mixed up, actress Helen Mirren chided 007 director Sam Mendes at the Empire awards for having the audacity to list his role models as Paul Thomas Anderson, François Truffaut, Martin Scorsese and Ingmar Bergman. The problem? They were all blokes. This, she said, was sexist. Male role models are bad unless accompanied by oestrogen. Yet she says nothing about the likes of Kate Winslet, Sam’s ex-wife, who famously told
Vogue
magazine: ‘None of this 50/50 time with the mums and dads – my children live with me; that is it.’

Then there’s Halle Berry, who tried to take her daughter away from her father, Gabriel Aubry, by relocating to
France – relocation, relocation, relocation being a common tactic in this situation. Yet, it was she who chose to have a child with him in the first place. She who made all the big decisions about whether to continue with the pregnancy. She who had opportunities to opt out at any time. He didn’t. Meanwhile, single-parent organisations like Gingerbread – supported by children’s author J. K. Rowling of all people – casually dismiss studies which suggest a lack of male role models at home increases the likelihood of crime and mental illness.

This is despite a study conducted by Oxford University which followed nearly 20,000 children from 1958 and found those with a father were far less likely to break the law or suffer from psychological issues. Young boys with involved fathers also performed better at school. Meanwhile, Dr Paul Ramchandani of Imperial College London found that ‘disengaged and remote father–child interactions as early as the third month of life’ predict behaviour problems in children when they are older.

Granted, this isn’t conclusive, of course. But, even if this was just an elaborate hoax to make people feel sorry for fathers, surely we could all agree that needlessly removing men from families would at least make
some
boys feel like shit
some
of the time? The logic is simple – not having a father leaves a hole in the soul. A void that kids frequently fill with drugs, alcohol or intimacy. This might
not sit well in the feminist family framework, but sometimes the truth is a bitch.

In 2012 British substance misuse charity Addaction published a report that proved father deficit to be absolutely real – causing anger, self-loathing, addiction and identity issues. Specifically, it saw young men compensate with a ‘counterfeit masculinity’ of strength, anger and violence – often combined with sexual prowess. Meanwhile, young women ‘act out a skewed version of femininity which prioritises the use of sex and relationships with men above all else’.

Cruelly, this creates the cycle all over again because boys of fifteen often jump into bed with a girl without a nagging, ball-tightening paranoia that she’ll get pregnant. And here’s the bit nobody else will admit: loads of girls
do
want to get pregnant. They get a free house, FFS! I’d get pregnant for a free house!

The Trust for the Study of Adolescence recently proved that scores of teenage girls are
deliberately
becoming young mothers as a career move because, with both the state and father contributing, it offers more guaranteed security than a job. Even thirteen-year-old girls admitted this, which might explain why Britain has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe, at an annual governmental cost of nearly £63 million.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean that women are to blame
for manipulating the system because they’re female. They do so because they can. The set-up encourages them to take advantage, like journalists at a free bar. Likewise, if men held all the aces, we’d do the same. Which is why the solution must be gender-neutral.

Perhaps if law-makers continue to ignore this they should offer some other alternatives. Maybe men could be allowed to have a financial abortion from a child they didn’t pre-consent to. In a specified time period – say, legal abortion guidelines – men could be allowed to formally relinquish all monetary obligations, rights and responsibilities if duped into daddydom. The woman still wants to proceed? Fine, that’s her choice. But not on his salary.

Controversial? Yes. But overnight we’d see fewer acts of conception by deception. I once knew a girl who was so desperate to have a baby she went on dating sites to fuck men – but only after piercing their condoms with a pin. She now has a two-year-old child and the father, who was reduced to the role of donor and walking cash-point, barely gets a look-in (but pays hundreds every month).

Then there are those who sleep with minors, get pregnant and demand child support FROM A CHILD. In 1993 a thirteen-year-old Kansas boy impregnated his seventeen-year-old babysitter, but the Supreme Court ruled that he was liable for maintenance. Apparently,
the financial aid was for the resulting baby, not the rapist, so that’s OK.

A similar case is County of San Luis Obispo v. Nathaniel J. in California, which saw a 34-year-old woman seduce a fifteen-year-old boy, get pregnant and demand child support. The courts upheld her claim, which essentially ruled that a male victim of statutory rape should be forced into financial slavery if a baby results from the crime.

Thankfully, and perhaps most compellingly, one of the people pushing hardest for change is herself a woman – Nadine O’Connor is the campaign director at Fathers 4 Justice. I know what you’re thinking: why on earth would a woman want that gig? After all, no matter how liberated women have become in recent years, the partnership remains an unlikely one.

It turns out she had her own personal experience of what men frequently endure in family law courts. The mother of two went through her own custody battle with her ex-partner, which clocked up twenty-five judges, seventy hearings, fifty-four criminal allegations, forty-five court orders and over £120,000 in legal bills.

‘I went to the first F4J meeting with my dad,’ she says.

This is something Guy’s wife, Emily, can surely relate to. She’s never met her stepdaughter and, as a result, has become her own surprise advocate for the cause. This wasn’t the expected fate for a woman of her pedigree.

‘I was very much a lady of the establishment,’ she explains.