NZ: Home Truths; The Cruelty of our Family Law
Home Truths
By Greg Knight
The Weekend Sun, Tauranga, Bay Of Plenty, New Zealand
20 February 2004 Issue: 176
The Cruelty of our Family Law
A few weeks ago I read an article written by Sir Bob Geldof, and published in The Sun newspaper in England. (Sir Bob Geldof was the man who brought us the very first Live Aid concerts to support underprivileged and starving children.) Now that Christmas is over, I think this is a subject that needs to be aired and debated. I am sure that many people will be moved by this story, as it sounds very familiar to the stories of many New Zealand men.
???For those divorced men with children, Christmas is a travesty, a repulsive contradiction of a family holiday, of a loving celebration, of a special children???s time.
These are the men who will be forced to be alone without their babies, who will commit suicide most frequently at this time of year in an age when male suicides are already 300 per cent greater than women???s.
These are men who, in the eyes of what is sickeningly called Family Law, committed the greatest crime ??? of being divorced.
And men, as everyone knows, are monsters, feckless, abusive, aggressive, thuggish, incapable of such a hugely complex task of giving love and patience, cooking baked beans or giving a bath, doing homework or combing hair and reading stories.
It???s a miracle any of us got here at all, us all having had dads and everything.
Yet there will be many fathers forbidden by the savagery of our laws to be with their children, standing broken, as I have, outside their old homes, the keys still in their pockets, weeping and whispering goodnight as they watch each child???s bedroom light switch off before turning away, maddened with grief, to the pointlessness of another lonely day.
What have we become? In whose name is this brutality done?
Who are they who do this and why do they not account to us, the people? What unthinking fools perpetrated these unlawful laws?
How is it in a child???s interest to remove him from his Dad and why? Two people fall from love and one, though having done no wrong, is semi-criminalised and punished by having his children removed from him for ever (for childhood is never recoverable).
The extremity of Family Law is bewildering, for having your children taken away from you is only one slight degree better than them taking away your freedom.
And yet you are not a criminal, nor have you done any wrong.
These same people assume that women make better parents ??? that a mother???s love is better, more important than a father???s. That somehow it???s bearable for a man to be parted from his children but not a woman.
Why? These assumptions and prejudices are not simply outdated but plain wrong, dangerous and damaging.
You only have to listen to the language that the law uses when it gets involved in our private lives. It???s meant to be neutral but it is cold, deadening and hopeless. In fact it becomes heartbreaking, hurtful, rage-inducing. I cannot even say the words.
A huge emptiness would well in my stomach, a deep loathing for those who would deign to tell me they would ALLOW me ACCESS to my children ??? those I loved above all, those I created, those who gave meaning to everything I did, those who were the very best of us two and the absolute physical manifestation of our once blinding love.
I cannot begin to describe the pain of being handed a note that allows you access to your children, sanctioned by your (still) wife with whom you had made these little things, with whom you had been present at their birth and previously had felt grow and kick and tumble and turn and watched the scans and felt intense manly pride.
Wrestled and played with them, walked them to school, picked them up, made tea with, bathed and dressed, put them to bed, cuddled and lay with in your arms and sang to sleep.
We need a human law. A law that fits the way we live now. A way that reflects the differing versions of family that we have but that still generates love and kindness and compassion.???
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