13/10/03

Only the Children are Really Punished 

Boris Johnson

Daily Telegraph

We will never know exactly what drove Sharjan Kabir, 39, to stab to death his 10-month-old baby in a Carlisle bakery. But we can safely say one thing about his feelings. They were not directed primarily against the baby. He killed the baby, and yet the baby was not the real object of his violence.

He meant above all to hurt the boy's mother. He meant to hurt her, because they had split up. He wanted to punish her, to spite her, to express his own ungovernable feelings of jealousy and pique.

So he did what so many people - men and women - do in these miserable circumstances. He used the child as a utensil of retribution. "How sweet is the breath of children," says Medea in the tragedy by Euripides. She hugs them. Then she stabs them, as the cruellest possible way of punishing Jason for shacking up with a younger, prettier girl.

She knew what she was doing was mad, and yet she couldn't help herself. The children were her last, best means of getting her own back on her husband, and many modern women, let us face it, are actuated by a version of the same impulse.

They don't necessarily kill or harm the children, though some of them do. They just remove the kids from his presence. In the disaster of their collapsing relationships, they find they have one sovereign right: to stop that man enjoying the physical company of his children, irrespective of whether the little brutes have sweet breath, impetigo, or anything else. The modern tragedy is that the courts allow them to get away with it.

Yesterday, on the way to the Commons, I cycled past a demo in Trafalgar Square, by a movement called Fathers4Justice. A bunch of people were parping out The Dambusters theme tune on top of a double-decker. They had purple balloons and seemed very jaunty.

But, as I looked up, I saw the anguished pale faces of men who have become driven to the point of obsession by the need to vindicate their rights. They are often consumed with hatred for the mother of their children. They are convinced that the law has let them down. They are willing to fight until the last apathetic judge has been strangled with the guts of the last hyper-feminist, men-hating welfare officer; and, while I certainly feel their pain, I am not sure, frankly, that I share all of their objectives.

Some members of Fathers- 4Justice were at the Law Courts yesterday, staging a sit-in. Some of them have been involved in bomb hoaxes. Sometimes, for my money, they sound a bit extreme.

Their patron saint is Bob Geldof, who had such trouble over the custody of his children by the late Paula Yates. Sir Bob is an authority on Africa, and has written at least one imperishable pop song. But when he says, in a new book on fathers' rights, that "there is no evidence for a maternal instinct", one feels he is over-egging his case.

Nor do I think it axiomatic, as do Fathers4Justice, that men should be entitled to 50 per cent access to their children in the event of separation or divorce.

There are two objections: first, that it is probably in the interests of the child to have one address that they broadly call home, rather than ping-ponging to and fro; and that is why English law has been historically sensible to award "residence" to one person, almost always the mother, since that seems to reflect some kind of biological reality.

My second objection is that, if you accord all men the automatic right to see the child for 50 per cent of the time after a separation, then you must surely presuppose a male duty, in happier times, to change 50 per cent of the nappies, wipe up 50 per cent of the lunch, pour out 50 per cent of the Sma milk formula and generally rally round in a way that does not (yet) correspond to the reality of British child-rearing.

There seems, in short, to be an implicit super-feminism in the demands of these Fathers4Justice boys. That may suit many men, but by no means all. You can call me sexist on this point, but there is nothing more sexist than sex, and it is still a more or less invincible fact of nature that women have babies and men do not.

But if Fathers4Justice are maximalist in their demands, it is because they are maximalist out of desperation. What they really want is reasonable access to their children, and in far too many cases that is denied in circumstances bordering on the demented.

As a means of punishing the father, and barring him from his babes, the mother can trump up virtually any charge she wants. "He stresses me out," she says. Very well, says the court: access forbidden; and there follows an access hearing that takes months, while the guy has his nose up against the window pane.

It would be reassuring to think that the courts were starting to take account of the distress of these men, who massed in London yesterday, and who appear in MPs' surgeries, and whose numbers are evidently increasing.

Alas, it would appear that the judges have yet to grasp their duty. The other day, Lord Justice Thorpe, head of the Court of Appeal in the Family Division, refused a father access to his four-year-old on precisely the feeble ground that we have just discussed: that dad's presence kind of freaked out mum. If the Fathers4Justice lobby is right, that kind of judicial spinelessness is replicated across the country.

The judges sometimes say that they can see the problem, but that they need a lead from Parliament. That is a cop-out. The law is clear. The duty of the court is to the child. It should be obvious to the judges that children should not be irrationally used by one parent to inflict pain on the other; because that is in no child's interest.

Boris Johnson is MP for Henley and editor of The Spectator