By Catherine King
Recently there has been some debate over the controversial father’s rights movement. Some see the movement as a legitimate issue that needs to be addressed. Others see the fight for fathers’ rights to be a backlash against feminism.
The father’s rights movement is bringing to light some of the unfair policies regarding parental rights of fathers in our country. Usually when custody of a child is being fought over, the courts will side with the mother, and see the father as uninterested and unreliable. Since child rearing is usually seen as women’s work, mothers are most likely to decide on when a father can visit their child, if at all. This becomes even more common with men who don’t live with the mother of their child and men who are unmarried. In South Carolina, mothers can give their child up for adoption without having to inform the father about any of their decisions. This leaves men with little room to raise their children or be a part of their child’s life at all.
Christopher Emanuel wrote in a New York Times article about his struggle for custody and how he had to sign up for a father’s online registry to be informed when his child was put for adoption. He says, “Fathers should have equal rights to the birth mother when it comes to deciding about adoption. Even with the fairly obscure father registry, the law assumes men aren’t interested in children.”
On the other side of this debate are some women who feel that the father’s rights movement is an attack on women’s equality. These women see the movement as a way to challenge womens’ accusations of domestic violence; that the movement is a way for men to attack victims of domestic violence by accusing victims of lying to make the father seem unfit for parenting and for the mother to gain custody of their child.
According to an article in The New York Times written by Kelly Behre, “Many fathers’ rights activists argue that women perpetuate as much, if not more, violence against intimate partners and that most domestic violence is mutual, ignoring or discounting all research to the contrary.” Behre also points out that many fathers in the father movement groups have “even lobbied against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.”
The movement also sometimes seems to disregard the separation of work at home between the genders; ignoring the fact that most women are expected to raise children and are seen as bad mothers for not being the main caregiver.
There may be some truth to both sides of the story. However, many fathers are still left in the dark when it comes to deciding their child’s future, no matter how much they want to be involved. The real issue seems to be that unmarried men are being placed in a stereotype, that they are uninterested in their children, before they even make it to a court. This is setting men up for failure and since most men who are unmarried and have a child live in lower income areas, they have no way to even afford the court costs to fight for custody.
The father’s right movement is an ongoing battle to find a balance that gives men a fair fight for custody while still allowing room for women’s equality. Acknowledging that child rearing is not only the mother’s responsibility and that men deserve to be involved in their child’s life may be the first step, but there is still a ways to go.