http://www.politics.co.uk/press-releases/domestic-policy/children/children/nscfc-fathers-told-do-more-your-children-by-government-$467102.htm

Fathers told by Government: do more for your children

By Mike Ellis, Chair, National Society for Children and Family Contact (NSCFC)

February 28, 2007, Politics.co (UK)---Yet again Tony Blair, his education secretary Alan Johnson, and the entire Labour party have refused to address the real issue as to why there are so many absent fathers...which has much more to do with lack of parity in family law than anything else. To merely claim that research suggests--especially in cases where parents are separated--that the father either does not attend parents' evenings, or ends up arguing with his former partner, is a smoke screen behind which the Labour party seeks to hide from facing the reality that it and it alone has been the main destabilizing force behind the breakdown of the traditional family unit, thus resulting in a generation of disenfranchised children.

For far too long and across the board, mothers have been treated as sacrosanct after separation or divorce, with little if any regard being given the need of a father's love in a child’s life. Fathers for their part have been made to feel nothing more than sperm donors by family court judges, whose only concern is what’s in the best interest of the mother and not that of the child and its need to have and be nourished by the paternal side of its family.

Since Mr Johnson used the word 'research' without reference or documentation, let the true research and facts speak for themselves. Statistics obtained from the Home Office show that some one hundred children per day lose partial or complete contact with their fathers after separation or divorce and visa versa. This not because the father is errant, feckless or bad; it's about the one in six who are inhumanely removed from their children's lives by virtue of acrimonious mothers who blatantly refuse to comply with contact orders, and by virtue of judges who refuse to enforce them.

It’s about non-experts in the form of CAFCASS officers--over 80% of whom are women--who write reports in favour of mothers which judges rely on virtually all of the time. It’s about a Social Service system, which from time immemorial has been tainted with lack of expertise, numberless mistakes, and tragic failure.

Mr Johnson points out that almost half of all children from separated families did not see their father once last year. Yet not once does he address the likelihood that were his Government to reform family law with parity in mind, this could be reversed overnight.

As for Tony Blair’s attack on the Unicef report on children’s well-being, his claim that Britain is suffering a social breakdown, and his emphasis on rising income, I say No Mr Blair.

I was saved from a life on the street with a sick mother. I was saved from that by my grandmother, who raised me till I was 13. No, Mr Blair: It was not money I was looking for when a child. It was the innate need and want for love and affection from a paternal and maternal family unit, the right to which is enshrined in Article 8 of the Human Rights Act--namely the Right to Family Life.

Implement this along with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and Britain’s children will be given the opportunity to thrive once again. And with it a much more stable generation will follow. For money is not the answer. Impartial paternal and maternal love most surely is.