Monday, 15 August 2011. The Family Practice Press notices with interest that Prime Minister David Cameron quotes a figure of 100,000 ‘deeply broken and troubled families’ in the U.K. in the Sunday Times. That is the figure the Family Practice Press team quoted to his predecessors in 1996. Those 100,000 families have produced an estimated 300,000 troubled children, now teenagers, whose actions we are witnessing today. A survey by National Geographic showed that elephant pups who lost their father, became rogue elephants when in their teens, the same applies here.
When I launched ‘Saving The Situation,’ a book to help families in trouble to solve problems within marriage, the Foreword was written by the late Baroness Lucy Faithful, the pioneer of the Guardian ad Litem system for children in Courts. She came up to the launch of the book in London aged 96. When she heard the brief given by me about the reasons for the launch, she arranged an immediate meeting with the then Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay, stating that, “Even I didn’t know how bad the situation was.”
We met with the Lord Chancellor and expressed our concerns over many issues of Family Law, particularly the non-recognition of battered husbands and the use of draconian ‘Ousters’ to remove men from their homes and thus their families, often using false and inaccurate information, when in fact the perpetrator of the violence was the woman.
A survey carried out by Dr. Malcolm George in 1994 put the male/female perpetrator at 60:40, not the 70:30 often quoted by lawyers and the Police.
This led to a number of men, including myself, being excluded from their homes when in fact the wife/mother was the violent party. What was of more concern was that when the cases came to Court, the violence by the woman had been often removed, ‘By Consent,’ without the knowledge or permission of the man/husband/father. Thus, the information regarding violent woman was not being released to society for the NHS and others to see.
Those children left without a father to protect them were then subject to years of abuse. When the alimony money ran out they had to go out onto the street and rob and beg. Who gets locked up? We have seen it with our own eyes this week, the children!
We heard Ian Duncan Smith talking on Today about using the Police as ‘father substitutes,’ it appeared infer that fathers left voluntarily!
It will take a whole generation to heal the wounds inflicted on these children and their children, but, until the Family Law system in this country undergoes a complete sea change with reforms that we have been recommending for years being implemented, the rioting and gang culture will continue.
Divorce does solve problems; these must be solved within the family unit with both parents being assessed. The dated notion that the ‘mother is the main carer’ does not help the children. If, as has been shown on numerous occasions, that the mother’s problems are hidden form the Court or marginalised, not only does she not get help but the children, whose care she holds, also become dysfunctional and escape to the streets to rob or disrupt.
There is no substitute for a father figure, marginalizing that marginalizes the family.
For Further Information contact:
Julian Nettlefold
Family Practice Press
Mobile: +44 077689 54766
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