Fathers and children
From Dr Stephen Baskerville Sir: Griffin Stone's excellent piece ('When your wife kidnaps your child', 24 August) on child-stealing from fathers implies that it is a British problem. In fact, it is rampant throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. Countries with such traditional family morality as Japan and India are experiencing epidemics of maternal childsnatching, which is invariably rewarded by courts.
How American lawyers could be shocked at the actions of British courts is perplexing. In virtually every American jurisdiction, fathers are losing not only their children but their homes, their life savings, future earnings, and freedom through divorces for which they gave neither consent nor grounds. The US attorney-general recently announced mass arrests of fathers. In Canada, special domestic-violence courts remove fathers from their homes, confiscate their property and jail them with no semblance of due process. Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the US now have sky-rocketing suicide rates among divorced fathers, as does Britain.
Mr Stone also tends to downplay his plight by attributing it to judicial 'inertia and defeatism'. In fact, it reveals perhaps one of the most dangerous trends in politics today: the use of children as political weapons. It often seems as if family courts, operating in unaccountable secrecy, reward child-stealing because it extends the power and reach of the state and the earnings of its operatives. It allows the state to achieve one of its most coveted and dangerous ambitions: to control the private lives of its citizens. Once the father is eliminated, state officials administer the family and the personal life of every member. Family courts recognise no private sphere of life.
Involuntary divorce is not a phenomenon; it is a regime — a marvellously self-perpetuating political machine that allows for the infinite expansion of government power. By removing fathers, the state creates a host of problems for itself to solve — the problems now brutally familiar as the products of father absence: child poverty, child abuse, juvenile crime, drug abuse, and much more.
There is nothing baffling about Mr Stone's ordeal. It represents a direct assault, ideologically driven and bureaucratically enforced, on the family and the social foundation of civilisation itself.
Stephen Baskerville
Howard University, Washington DC
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