After years of campaigning, fathers' rights are finally being taken seriously by the politicians. But how much of it is down to the high-profile antics of Batman and Robin? Simon Hattenstone meets the men behind the movement
Saturday October 29, 2005
The Guardian - For Original Story Click Here
In June this year, newspapers reported a split in the pressure group Fathers 4 Justice. The split was as comical as it was inevitable. The breakaway group announced that it was to be known as Real Fathers for Justice, apparently oblivious to the IRA connotation. It soon found itself on the defensive, having to explain that it had no intention of resorting to bombing campaigns in its attempt to gain greater contact rights for fathers separated from their children.
Perhaps, for old-time campaigners such as Jim Parton at Families Need Fathers, the astonishing thing was that the split was deemed newsworthy in the first place. FNF had spent 30 years trying to flog stories to newspapers - about the unfairness of the family court system, dads denied access, dads in despair - with little luck. They were widely regarded as whingers, bad dads, dodgy reactionaries who wanted to strip women of their rights. In short, fathers were not sexy.
Then along came Matt O'Connor and F4J. O'Connor's group was as loud and brash as he was. The marketing/design executive had been a member of Families Need Fathers, and had decided there was little point in whispering about fathers' plights. F4J members would be prepared to go to prison for their cause. They would demand attention rather than plead for it.
And so they did.
Over the past three years, they have shouted the odds from a Buckingham Palace window ledge, from Westminster - where they flour-bombed the prime minister, from York Minster, Tower Bridge, the London Eye. Before long, every F4J stunt became national - then international - news. Time magazine ran a cover story on F4J and, suddenly, the then children's minister, Margaret Hodge, wanted to be seen on Newsnight with O'Connor debating the F4J proposal of 50-50 contact as the norm.
Jim Parton looked on in amazement. "We'd had three decades of failure, we were unfashionable and demoralised and there was so much infighting. Then Matt O'Connor started F4J and, no question, made a big impact. At times I've been very envious. My telephone stopped ringing. I wasn't getting gigs on 5 Live or Breakfast News any more."
Parton says that part of the problem was that his organisation had been marginalised by the liberal establishment. "What we were doing was seen as politically incorrect among the Polly Toynbees of this world. Look, if you've been excluded from seeing your child you get angry. We all had issues with a woman, and in some cases people generalised that to women more broadly. But 96% of our guys are just normal. Our drive is not misogyny, it is love for our children."
Parton got involved with FNF in 1992 after he split up with his Japanese wife. "There was no trouble over access for 10 years, but I wanted more. I didn't see why I should walk on eggshells to see my own son, with whom I got on incredibly well. I didn't see why I should have to return him at 6pm and get a solicitor's letter if he was five minutes late." Eventually, he says, his wife returned to Japan and refused all access to his son, who is now 18.
While FNF is quick to acknowledge the achievements of F4J, it is less generous about another rival group, Fathers Direct. Parton suggests conspiratorially that it could almost have been a spoiler. "Patricia Hewitt was at the centre of their core funding - it came from the Department of Trade and Industry." Why would the government have bothered to set up a spoiler organisation?
"Well, if there's a respected, well-funded fathers' organisation, the media would turn to them rather than us."
Jack O'Sullivan, co-founder of Fathers Direct, says this is untrue. For starters, the funding came from the Home Office. Second, Fathers Direct never saw itself as in competition with groups that focused on separated fathers. "The key thing to understanding the fathers' movement in Britain is that it is actually a huge social change. Forget organisations, the fathers' movement is millions of men living their lives in a different way to their own fathers. The organisations are peripheral to that." He bombards me with data to prove his point.
"In a typical family, men are doing one third of childcare of the under-fives. Longitudinal studies over 35 years show the key impact fathers have on children's lives: better educational achievement when dad's involved and better social skills, lower rates of criminality, improved mental health for kids who have a close relationship with the father. Girls who have a good relationship with their father are more likely to make a successful life-long relationship with men."
O'Sullivan talks about the need to make alliances with any number of organisations - women's groups, children's charities, the Equal Opportunities Commission. So have they made an alliance with F4J? "No," he says tersely. "Fathers Direct would not be an ally of F4J. We have two objections. First, their style of campaigning fractures the alliance for change." What does that mean? "The key alliance isn't of men together, it's of men, women and children. F4J has expressed the pain of separated partners, but because it has allowed itself to be seen as an angry movement against women, it has alienated potential allies."
The second objection, O'Sullivan says, is that Fathers Direct believes F4J's legislative programme is flawed. "They want to enshrine fathers' rights [to contact with their children] in law. We think the law is fine, the problem is it's not being put into practice. The law says, after separation the best interests of the child should be served, and the state is demonstrably failing children after separation. So the system doesn't work, but the answer isn't enshrined in fathers' rights."
But it is F4J that captured the public imagination. Parton is delighted that F4J has moved fathers' rights up the political agenda, but is also slightly bitter. "They have accelerated the process of reform. Now something is going through in the children's bill that will make enforcement of contact orders work better. But it's pathetic that politicians only start to listen when men dress in superhero costumes."
The better known that F4J became, the closer the media scrutinised its members, notably O'Connor. They soon found dirt to dish. It was revealed that O'Connor had a drink problem and had been a bad husband - something he now freely admits. "I was a lousy husband, absolutely diabolical. I had a penchant for women, for hell-raising, for cocktail bars. I was totally selfish." It's typical O'Connor that, even when saying how appalling his excesses were, it sounds like a boast. After he split up with his wife Sophie, he says he had eight women on the go at one time.
He has not always been reliable about his facts. In the first article O'Connor wrote for the London Evening Standard about F4J in 2003, he claimed that 40% of dads who apply for access every year are denied. In fact, only 713 fathers were refused contact with their children in 2001, while 55,000 were granted it (although many were granted limited contact that they were unhappy with). Other revelations were even more damaging - there were F4J members with restraining orders against them, with convictions for domestic violence, men who had not bothered to see their children even in their allotted contact time.
After larging it in London, O'Connor now lives in a 13th-century cottage in rural Suffolk. At times, he says, running F4J is like running the Samaritans - desperate men phone him through the night. He talks about his sacrifice and pain, the time and money he has put into F4J. What seems to have hurt him most in the F4J civil war is the allegation that he has siphoned off the organisation's money for his own personal gain. "Nothing could be further from the truth. I have - hello - my own design company, and it's very successful thank you very much." If it is so thankless, why does he stick with F4J? He says he is desperate to see the law changed so that fathers get 50-50 access, and admits he does rather enjoy the attention, the notoriety, it brings him.
O'Connor says it was inevitable that F4J would have problematic members. "It is a fucking bitterly corrosive experience and it twists you and it fucks you up and profoundly changes you. I was lucky 'cos I had closure and found peace outside the court system." O'Connor is now on good terms with his ex-wife, has access to his children and has a new girlfriend who is expecting his third child.
Why has he made so many enemies within the group? "There's a huge amount of envy," he says. "Some of the men are jealous that I have access to my children." And then there is his autocratic style of leadership. "I am a total dictator. But in the way that Wellington was a dictator or Churchill was. You've got to have authority and discipline."
As with so many dictators, his problem has been dissent in the ranks. The rebels claimed that F4J had become lazy and conservative, so they quit to form a group that was true to the original ideal.
Meanwhile, O'Connor claimed that the behaviour of some of his members had been intolerable, and that they had been purged from the group. Certainly, F4J has been at the centre of a number of negative news stories. Allegations of racism and misogyny were made against a coordinator of one home counties branch of F4J - O'Connor later expelled him from the group. It was also revealed that members Jason Hatch (the original Batman) and David Pyke had accepted £500 from a woman called Ruth George after promising to publicise her fight over a medical complaint - though she has since been paid back by O'Connor.
"What I find really morally abhorrent is when people start stealing shit, and when people start taking money off pensioners," O'Connor says, "and when people are racist and misogynist, and then you go, 'You know what? Fucking take it.' Honestly, if I thought the whole organisation was like that ... " But he does not believe the whole organisation is like that, and is convinced the split will allow F4J to reposition itself. "Politically, the useful thing that has happened is we can say the nasty guys are out. Now what I need to do is enforce the integrity of what we're about after the purge."
Jim Parton of Families Need Fathers says: "Matt's been made to look respectable by Real FforJ, and every terrorist wants to turn statesman."
O'Connor agrees with that assessment. "I am doing a bit of Gerry Adams stuff, yeah. I'm trying to clean up my act and get my people under control." For O'Connor the time has come to slip out of the superhero outfits and into suits to meet with politicians.
Exactly, says Jeff Skinner, spokesman for Real FforJ. "I think old F4J has gone soft." He asks why F4J were so quiet when the general election was held, then he provides his own answer - they have sold out.
"Hopefully, we can learn from mistakes they made and become a stronger group by not making the same errors twice. We would hope over a short period of time that we would swallow the old group up."
How many members of Real FforJ are there? "Oh, it's very difficult to put a number on it," Skinner says sheepishly. "The honest answer is hardly any because we've just launched a membership drive."
The fathers' movement is facing a crunch time. While F4J undoubtedly seized the headlines, what has it actually achieved? Attitudes may have shifted, politicians are listening, but the only substantial legal change for fathers has been the right to six months' paternity leave - which was never on F4J's agenda in the first place. Over the past few months, there have been various actions (invading the Big Brother studio, scaling Westminster, marching through London with beds to campaign for overnight staying contact between children and fathers after separation) but the stunts seem stale. Meanwhile, almost imperceptibly, Jack O'Sullivan's woolly New Labourish fathering ideals have become mainstream.
Back in Suffolk, O'Connor is talking about the future. He is sure that post-purge, F4J is on the verge of achieving political credibility and a change in the law. But he does not see F4J as a lifelong project. He is talking about establishing a new political party and a possible alliance with the gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, a campaigning hero of his, and the Countryside Alliance. "What I want to do is create something where we're defending people's basic civil liberties. Protecting liberties of the people in this country with a written constitution. Our way of life is under attack."
And then there is the autobiography, and the movie of his life. He isn't joking. He has just sold his life story to Buena Vista for a biopic. This, he says, will hopefully be his reward for all the hours he has put into F4J.
Skinner at Real FforJ says O'Connor has been talking about the biopic for years. "It's no secret that he always wanted to sell his story for a film, and it would make a fantastic film." But he doubts whether it is going to happen in the immediate future. "The only way you can sell it as a film is if you've got a happy ending; if you achieve what you set out to achieve. And Matt O'Connor hasn't managed to do that. He hasn't managed to get the law changed."
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