Pelican,

The Family Court makes decisions about a child, but will not make any subsequent visits to see if the child is being well looked after.

This has now lead to very high levels of child abuse in single parent families, mainly in the form of child neglect.

By not making subsequent visits to see if the child is being properly looked after, the Family Court is actually operating well outside of Risk Management legislation.

As an allegory, if a doctor makes a decision about a patient, but never checks the patient to see if their decision were correct, then the doctor could be charged, because they had not exercised sufficient duty of care.

So in effect, most of the decisions previously made by the Family Court could be declared null and void, because the Family Court has been operating outside of Risk Management legislation since the time the Family Court was first formed.

"The Family Court judge found Bill's ex-wife to be violent, untruthful, lacking moral values and responsible for the psychological and emotional abuse of her children - but still gave her custody of the two girls, now aged 9 and 11, because they had become estranged from their father."

That is why I love OLO. You get the complete story.

Pelican

"The point you are missing is that it should be about the best interests of the children unpopular that ideal is in the modern day."

It sounds very proper, but the best interests of the child effectively means the interests of the parent with most custody, generally the mother. Once they get the kids (often by bogus DV or child abuse claims), they can act however they want, without any consequence, because punishing her might disadvantage the kids.

Happy

"He rests his case" without having proved anything. The points that he made do nothing to weaken the case made by father's groups.

No-one here is unconcerned by the possibility that children will be abused. Many men just get upset by the assumption that protecting kids means keeping them from their fathers. Hence the quoting of statistics that prove otherwise.

Many people are hardline on protecting kids for as long as it appears that men will pay most of the cost. Once men start talking about how we could look at the risks of having kids with single mums and stepdads, it is amazing how quickly this hardline stance seems to disappear.

It's painfully obvious that the Family Court system is sadly out of touch with reality. Within itself, it is a reflection of political correctness. Accountable to nobody and a total reactionary force that seems to think it knows all about "the best interest of the child". In reality it cares not a jot about the children it effortlessly strips of loving fathers. I would go as far as to suggest that it is a dishonest and biased organisation which is run by misinformed individuals who at one stage or another were all family court lawyers or barristers. They rise up to their own level of incompetence. In fact, there is one well known magistrate who drinks in the local hotels around by the Family Court and regularly falls off the stool intoxicated beyond help. If this behaviour is meant as an example to the rest of society, then god help us all!

Stev <" Setting a standard that deviates from shared parenting denies millions of innocent children meaningful contact with a non-custodial parent (mostly at this time their fathers)."

I wasn't suggesting the Family Court should 'deviate' from shared parenting Stev. I was suggesting that it should not start with a 50/50 shared custody arrangement as a sort of prerequisite for the kids of warring parents. Each case should be handled on it's own merit.

Were there really 'millions' of kids who were denied meaningful contact with their Fathers after marital breakdowns before the equal custody laws were brought in? I don't think so.

Did we have less tragedies concerning the parents and children affected by family court decisions after the new laws came in? I don't think so.

The truth is that most families work out their own arrangements for the good of their children. Those that called in the lawyers and courts were in the minority, and the children of those warring parents were never going to do it easy, no matter what the courts said.

I am not against men or fathers at all, as I know some wonderful men and fathers.
At the end of the day, if men are good to their children and love them unconditionally, no matter what their mothers say or do, these kids will grow up one day and think for themselves and love their fathers.

I have been a psychiatric case worker for almost 25yrs,taking hundreds of case histories and counselling acute as well as chronic mental health cases,and I can tell you that the stats in ref to abuse and perpetrators in these comments comes from very narrow and
misleading data. The main perpetrators of sexual,physical and emotional abuse comes from the immediate family group.The women report almost universally that their immediate male relatives have been the offenders and that only a few of these ever told any one about it,so none of these women will ever appear on you data ,Stev!
Of the men ,the majority were subjected to abuse from other men ...teachers,priests, fathers, uncles and yes one even said his sister and again they were never reported, try getting your stats from groups who look after the fallout from these abusers...1 in 3 women/girls will be sexually abused in their life time and most in their childhood and the stats are less for men/boys but climbing higher year by year...so start quoting the real facts and not just the self serving ones .

samiam:"my anecdote's better than your statistics anyday, so there"

Thus neatly encapsulating the problem with this article and with the discussion about shared care.