Legacy Media’s War on Dads (And What to Do About It)

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If you’re ever unfortunate enough to find yourself embroiled in a legal dispute over the right to parent your own children, then it is commonly understood that your sex may be a significant determining factor in the ultimate outcome of your case.

In both the UK and America, fathers lose roughly 95% of all disputed child custody cases, many are denied the right to any contact with their children whatsoever, and, in a recent survey, 70% of participating fathers said they were ‘very dissatisfied’ by their experience in British family courts.

In the UK, roughly 80% of all contact court order applications are made by fathers, so one might have expected the journalist leading Channel 4’s recent investigation into the secretive Family Court system to have talked to at least a few of them.

But, then again...

Perhaps predictably, Channel 4’s Torn Apart: Family Courts Uncovered turned out to be less of a serious investigation into “what is really going on behind closed doors in family courts” and more of a feminist propaganda piece, perfectly timed to have maximum impact on the Home Office’s public consultation of the draft Domestic abuse: statutory guidance framework that courts across England and Wales will eventually be required to follow.

And so, incredibly, not one single father was featured during the one-hour long documentary, which was broadcast by the channel in July.  As one Family Law Barrister with over twenty years experience put it: 

“How you can produce something like that and not speak to a single father is just incredible. But clearly, they didn’t want to do that because it would have distracted from the purity of the narrative that they were pushing.”

Worse still, all eight of the custody or contact cases considered by the programme involved mothers who alleged that the father of their children was unfit to parent on the basis that they were either (again alleged) perpetrators of domestic abuse, rapists, or, in one case, a convicted paedophile.

Taken at face value, one might reasonably assume that at least some of those cases involved very nasty men indeed. Nevertheless, given the thousands upon thousands of cases that go before the courts every year, those featured can hardly be described as a representative sample. On the contrary, they are perhaps the best examples of a cynical kind of cherry-picking designed to put the stink on dads, this side of Women’s Aid’s highly influential 19 Child Homicides report.

For the uninitiated, this 2016 report was commissioned by the self-identifying ‘Women Only’ charity to launch their ongoing ‘Child First’ campaign which calls on the Government to “put an end to avoidable child deaths as a result of unsafe contact with dangerous perpetrators of domestic violence, and to ensure that children are always put at the heart of contact decisions made by the family courts.” The authors of the report trawled 10 years of serious case reviews by child protection authorities in order to identify a carefully curated dozen cases of fathers killing their children whilst on ‘contact’ visits. Just two months before its publication, a mother, resident in one of the ‘women only’ charity’s own refuges, stabbed to death her two young daughters. Needless to say, this tragedy failed to feature in Women’s Aid’s subsequent campaign narrative which was seemingly designed to cynically and spuriously justify calls for further restrictions to be placed on fathers being granted contact with their children.

The report’s fraudulent nature was expertly unpicked by William Collins. The author of The Empathy Gap, Collins’s methodical 332 Child Homicides report revealed that a more complete examination of the same evidence base used by Women’s Aid showed that mothers are responsible for more deaths of children than fathers and male partners combined. Incidentally, Collins had the decency to emphasise that it would, of course, be ridiculous to conclude that mothers, in general, are dangerous to their children. His point, however, posited that such grim cases represent the extremes of society and are entirely uncharacteristic of society as a whole. Consequently, Collins argues, the exploitation of the deaths of children to lobby for changes to court practices is a highly questionable pursuit.

Perhaps not coincidentally, one of the authors of the Nineteen Child Homicides report featured heavily in Channel Four’s heavily loaded narrative about the goings-on in UK family courts. As my analysis of the documentary has revealed, technically fathers weren’t even the primary target of this particular propaganda piece. More specifically, its purpose was to question and undermine the credibility of people who claim to be victims of parental alienation. Parental alienation occurs when a child’s resistance or hostility towards one parent is not justified and is the result of psychological manipulation by the other parent. Within the family court system, fathers are significantly more likely to report this problem. However, it is important to note that mothers can experience the phenomenon too, and of course, for every alienated father, there will usually be at least one female family member who suffers too, be they grandmothers, aunties, sisters, or a new partner. Disgracefully, in the pursuit of the very particular political narrative that just happened to particularly put the stink on dads, those women were also thrown under the bus by the self-identifying ‘women led’ production company responsible for the documentary.

In the days that followed the broadcast of Torn Apart: Family Courts Uncovered, over 550 people took the time and effort to write and complain to the UK’s communications regulator OFCOM broadly about the misrepresentation of fathers in family courts. More recently, I submitted a summary of my research which set out five separate ways that the documentary clearly appears to have transgressed OFCOM’s broadcasting code. Amongst many other things, this included testimony from two family law barristers and an attachment psychologist with direct experience of the Family Court’s instructed ‘child removals’. Their commentary indicates that the headline-grabbing depiction of a midnight police removal of children from their mother was grossly misrepresented, misleading, or, more plainly, “absolute nonsense.”

On that basis alone, it’s hard to believe that OFCOM won’t eventually make a finding against Channel 4. But, then again, I am an eternal optimist.

Channel 4 have responded to the complaints by claiming that one of the very first people they filmed an interview with was in fact a father, fighting for access to his child. However, according to the broadcaster, they were ultimately unable to feature his story due to a concern that to do so might risk a breach of Section 12 of the Administration of Justice Act - a claim that strikes me as less than convincing when you consider that in the final production they were prepared to take exactly such a risk in order to tell the stories of four separate mothers all bound by the exact same reporting restrictions. Incidentally, the father who didn’t make the final cut claimed that his interview was not conducted by Louise Tickle, the programme’s presenter, unlike those that are still available for all to watch via Channel 4’s video on demand service. But, then again, we do now know that Louise Tickle did talk to at least one father during an investigation process that apparently lasted “two years.”

Nick Langford, a former researcher for the fathers’ rights organisation Fathers for Justice, has subsequently confirmed that she interviewed him as part of her research. Langford recalled that, at the time of the interview, he found Tickle to be “open minded and sympathetic” to the plight of fathers but, having watched the documentary, he now believes that this was “clearly just an act,” concluding:

“She took advantage of the secrecy of the family courts to present a distorted, one sided and misleading narrative which cannot be addressed or countered. In my view that propagates the very evils she professed to challenge.”

We also know that Ms Tickle is entirely aware of the “terrible experiences that fathers often have in family courts.” We know this because, in a leaked recording, she can be heard claiming that the documentary was commissioned on the basis that she had personally received “many, many” emails from men and women describing, “in quite extreme terms,” the terrible times they have had in family courts and that many of the fathers (and their partners) also talked about their experiences of parental alienation.

Having listened to the recording, I would describe Louise Tickle’s journalistic approach to at least have the appearance of being “open minded and sympathetic” to the plight of fathers. But, then again, now having watched her documentary, I’m comforted by the fact that she can also be heard acknowledging that: “We’re regulated by OFCOM and we have to be fair and balanced.” So, if OFCOM eventually does decide to investigate, then at least she can’t claim to have been unaware of their rules around accuracy, impartiality, and offense. I say that is if they decide to investigate, particularly in light of Louise Tickle’s recent claim that OFCOM have yet to contact Channel 4 to discuss the complaints levelled at the show. Seemingly, these things take a surprising amount of time, although, optimistically, OFCOM have at least confirmed that “the complaints about a programme broadcast four months ago” do at least “remain under assessment” (we know this because I took the time to ask them).

All of which brings me to my advice about what you can do about the legacy media’s portrayal of fathers and, for that matter, the many other examples of mendacity, misinformation, and misjustice that the Lotus Eaters report about every single week - complain.

It’s not pretty. Individually, complaints tend to be pretty ineffective. They take time, energy, and persistence, and yet, complaints, like paper cuts, can still collectively combine to squeeze enough blood into the water that the cynical sharks of yellow journalism simply can’t resist. And, for all intents and purposes, the bad reviews that they signal boost can often lead to positive change. I’m not suggesting that you write to OFCOM and complain that it’s taking them so long to investigate some relatively blatant transgressions of their broadcasting code (although, by all means, feel free to do just that). But, if you have been personally touched by the types of injustice and double standards that you have read about here, or are simply sick of seeing people you can relate to treated unfairly, then seriously, do something, and, when I say this, I’m especially addressing any men who might be reading this, which judging by the Lotus Eaters’ demographics, means there is a good chance that this will include you.

While it’s not necessarily true that women complain more about unsatisfactory customer experiences, when it comes to matters concerning equality between the sexes, I think few would disagree that their complaints are much more easily heard and, indeed, more frequently signal boosted by legacy media. Men who speak out in this area also face admonishment, shaming and smear tactics, so it can be extremely difficult to build enough momentum to effectively bring about positive change in areas such as this. Meanwhile, the charity Families Need Fathers report that they receive very little active support from fathers who haven’t already found themselves in a situation where they actively need their help. Dads, however, do tend to be extremely busy working to support their family, so please don’t interpret this as some sort of guilt trip. My point is that those 554 complaints to OFCOM may ultimately turn into one of those all too rare occasions where legacy media’s war on dads gets properly called out. But, then again, although I’m an eternal optimist, I’m also not an idiot, so I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

In essence, the more we constructively and calmly complain to the right people about the things that matter to us most, the more likely it is that we can collectively help to bring about the sort of positive change that we want to see. Therefore, my suggestion is that, once you’ve finished reading this, you take a moment to write to your elected representative about the one thing that currently troubles you the most. Let’s face it, in this ‘stunning’ and increasingly ‘brave’ new world that we all live in, you probably won’t find yourself short of options. Keep your letter short and sweet, and it’s a task that should only take you ten or so minutes to complete.

And then, apart from a polite, off the shelf reply, your elected representative will most likely do absolutely nothing about your particular concern. 

That being said, they will at least make a mental note of it and if they start to see enough similarly themed correspondence filling up their inbox, they might just conclude that if they don’t start doing something about the obvious elephants in the room, then perhaps the next guy on the ballot ticket will. And then maybe, just maybe, you might just find yourself becoming part of exactly the type of change that you want to see.

Brian Drury aka: The Glass Blind Spot

Brian is the creator and curator of content for The Glass Blind Spot, a project pointing at structural and attitudinal barriers impacting on the implementation and protection of equitable human rights for boys and men.