What Fathers For Justice wants is a change in the law to give fathers a right to see their children and a presumption of 50/50 split of custody. But this would mean putting parents' rights before those of the children. As they say, a few hard cases make bad law. The difficult dilemma the courts occasionally face is whether the acknowledged advantage of the child maintaining contact with the father is greater than the disadvantage triggered by contact in that particular case. At what point does the parental conflict over arranging contact outweigh the benefit of seeing the parent? It can be a very close call.

What Fathers for Justice and its media allies (who tip quickly into outright misogynists) choose to ignore is that a significant number of these hard cases include conjugal violence and sexual abuse. One study found that after separation, 38% of parents with custody reported violence or the threat of violence from their ex-partners. Mothers complain of family law courts which rule that contact must be maintained even when there has been physical or sexual abuse of the child. No gender is the winner or loser in this battle.

The most misleading argument is to conflate a few of the poor cases with the huge percentage of fathers who lose contact (estimates vary from one third to half). The vast majority do not do so because of obstacle by the mothers. Research shows that fathers are less likely to keep in touch if they have subsequently had more children, if they never lived with the mother in the first place, if they don't live close to and so on. There are dozens of reasons, not a law system that discriminates against dads.

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