Michael Fox & fathers ‘rights’ to murder: when will the family court stop prioritising men’s feelings over women and children’s lives?

This tired old trope about men being discriminated against in the family court is very out-dated commentary. Yet it is still being used as a vehicle of entitlement for men seeking to re-access the power that has been disrupted through divorce and separation. Since losing the legal right to control women, men have turned their attention to our children in order to extend abusive patterns of behaviour and wield power through the family court. Michael Flood has done some excellent work around this issue which can be found here.

I refer to the latest self-pitying douchebag, Michael Fox,whose sense of entitlement is so grand he felt free to climb the harbour bridge, effectively denying access to an estimated 60 000 people; all so he could hang a banner up to tell the world that he is upset about something.

No doubt the actual details of this case will be out eventually, but on hearing this news on my way to work last Friday I immediately thought “Father’s rights douchebag!” Now it turns out that not only is he just that brand of tosser, but it’s only been a few weeks since he saw his children. My second thought on the story was “Thank goddess he didn’t try to throw his children off the bridge instead” However, according to the link, the police are denying him access to the children after a house owned by him, and in which his former partner and a child were inside, caught fire. Smelling any rodents yet? A fire just happened… to occur…hmm.

This relates to Fab Libber’s post from the day of ‘The Wedding’ about the risks involved in het partnerships and all the women who just happen to die after leaving violent scumbags – not that I am accusing Fox of being a violent scumbag – not yet.

Now when was it that these father’s “rights” groups started getting vocal about their entitlement and their puerile resentment of the family court? Oh yeah! It was after the introduction of the Child Support Agency. After they had to pay! Yet shamelessly, these men continue to frame their personal privilege issues as being to do with children’s human rights. “Kids first” says Fox from his public platform, and doesn’t that sound heroic? Who isn’t going to give him some attention if his message is about saving the children? But hang on a sec; is it all children we need to be saving? No! These guys don’t go and protest the rights of child refugees when we lock them in detention centres, do they? Or child labourers. Or children who are trafficked into the pornstitution industry. Or children who are homeless. Are they taking up the cause of children generally and calling for children’s voices to be heard in decision-making processes that impact their lives? No! The only children they are concerned with are the ones that were birthed by the women who they see as their own personal property. The ones they can legally use to punish their former partners. They use adultist constructions of children’s “best interests” to project their own perspectives onto them. They literally appropriate their children’s interests for their personal agendas of hate and vengeance. They are actually anti-children’s rights. They co-opt the issue of children’s rights purely out of self-interest.

I think what a lot of these MRA’s fail to notice is that most feminists grew up in households dominated by a male control freak, and we understand the way power works to subordinate women and children, purely through our lived experience. This is why we snort so derisively when the sad daddy brigade start pleading for sympathy. They are totally in denial about their own behaviours. I think it’s also why they receive so little support from mainstream men. Their emotional antics not only violate codes of masculinity, but they threaten functionalist ideals about The Family, as well; functionalism being the darling of patriarchy. True functionalists would abandon the tainted family unit and focus attention on establishing another one. Anecdotally, this is what a lot of guys seem to do. They get a new partner and focus all their resources and attention on any children she has. They identify with whatever new unit they happen to be being serviced in, and enjoying that head of the household status in. It’s not emotional attachment to their biological children that drives these guys; it’s the attachment to a power status.

It is suspect that men suddenly over-identify with the parental role after divorce/separation but not so much before. Capitalism relies on women’s biological circumstances and exploitable labour. This includes child-bearing/raising. The raising part involves being on-call twenty four seven to project-manage another human being’s entire life. This job can take fifteen or twenty years to complete; or it can go on forever. It involves work that ranges from physical menial labour to highly-skilled. There is no pay. No accrued sick or annual leave entitlements, no penalty rates, no super, no industrial relations representation, and it means jack shit on a resume. This caring work, like most of the work that gets done on planet patriarchy, is overwhelmingly performed by women. Women don’t necessarily choose this job; often it chooses them; and patriarchy likes it that way. Social policy and political discourse around the issue of motherhood as a moral obligation for women, endures; patriarchal constructions and State appropriation of motherhood, still impact on women and restrict their freedom to approach this role in their own way, or not at all.

This is why it comes as no big surprise to reasonably thought-ordered people that when het partnerships end, a child’s primary attachment is to a woman. However, this socially-coerced role gets twisted around when men lose access to their personal carer. Men see the fact of children’s primary attachment as an issue of sex discrimination. What a lot of people don’t realise is that the majority of divorces are handled outside of the family court. Of the cases that do go to court, the majority involve dometic violence/abuse, which is the whole reason they go to court (and the reason she left him in the first place!). Perps can’t deal with an amicable separation and a parenting arrangement that works out best for kids. Mothers are forced through the court process, usually to try to get some protection from further abuse. This is a huge feminist issue right now because it is very rare for perpetrators of abuse to be granted no access to children. If a mother tries to fight this she risks him being granted even more access or even full custody. I know mums who put up with receiving no child support, just because asking for it would mean going back to court. The family court system is designed by and for men and their entitlement. The “friendly parent” provisions amended into the Family Law Act in 2006 have worked particularly in men’s favour, allowing them to maintain abusive patterns of behaviour – and you, John Howard, you have blood on your hands now.

Some men become so outraged by having their power disrupted even a little, that they step up the abuse a few notches. This is why the immediate post-separation period is such a risky time for women and children. This is usually when men kill us; which is why I find it highly suspicious that Michael Fox’s house should just happen to catch fire when it did, and that police are denying him access to his children. The lengths he has gone to in demonstrating his entitlement could be an indication of the entitlement he felt within the family home. If he is comfortable to publicly interrupt the lives of thousands, what was he getting up to behind closed doors? If he’ll do that after a few weeks, what will he be capable of doing after a few months or a year? Was he capitalising on the death of Darcey Freeman whose “loving father” threw her off a bridge? Was he passing his former partner a public note? “Bridge skills – I got ‘em – look out bitch!”

I hope we don’t have to find out.

Also, check out this far superior to mine analysis of motherhood at a totally awesome new radical feminist collective blog.