Child’s best interest is one of the famous mantra of the family court, which is prevailing in child guardianship proceedings today, yet its enlightenment by the family court or judges is often subjective and its meaning is still ambiguous. Moreover, the laws regarding child custody vary from state to state leaving no uniform legal position regarding what is in the best interest of the child. Some states have a preference and presumption towards joint custody while others do not. Some states are amending its law to adopt a preference and assumption for joint custody while others are amending its law to allow joint custody only when the parents agree to it.

Most people think women automatically "get the children" after divorce, and that fathers, as a result, are awfully discriminated against. This isn't, and has never been, the case. Once women didn't stand a chance; now, their destiny is in the hands of the courts.

The family law courts are the only courts where a judge's prudence rules supreme. Prudence is necessary, so the thinking goes, because all families, even unhappy ones, are different. Each judicial decision is meant to be a unique, tailored solution to a set of unique family problems. This is the theory. The reality is that quite arbitrary principles are adopted, and then rejected, as one fashion succeeds another.

In many cases children were being taken away from their mothers for questionable reasons. One woman lost custody of her two children because they weren't wearing seatbelts when they were driven to their father.

The wind is in their sails. Fathers for Justice skillfully play the media with their claims of large membership and threats of more demonstrations. They have benefitted from Bob Geldof's advocacy of the issue; last summer he published an essay raging against the family law courts.

Most damaging of all, they find a amenable audience among the rightwing press, which devotes pages and pages to the horrors of the "nasty", "scheming" mothers who stand between fathers and their beloved children. Throw in a few statistics on the appalling rate of fathers who maintain contact after divorce (67% of fathers see their kids less than once a fortnight) plus a diatribe against the family law court's institutional bias towards women, and the story looks shockingly convincing. This is, of course, a grossly misleading presentation of the facts. Let's put in a bit of context: the vast majority of custody/access cases are worked out by the parents themselves, and simply rubber-stamped by the courts. In a tiny minority of cases, fathers are refused contact: in 2001 it was 713 cases out of 55,000 in the family courts. There are a few truly dreadful cases where one or other parent, or both, fight all the way and use their children's welfare to destroy their ex-partners' lives. But it is not simply mothers who do this; fathers use the courts just as often to stalk ex-partners.

The unbearably delicate task for the judges in such situations is to keep away from the court being used as a weapon in a revenge mission. All the more reason why it is intolerable to target the judges’ society has tasked with this judgment of Solomon; their job is difficult enough, given the cruelty of some relationship breakdowns.

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