Defunct Newspapers Journals TV channels Websites Other Congressional caucuses Economics Gun rights Identity politics Nativist Religion Watchdog groups Youth/student groups Miscellaneous Other The fathers' rights movement is a social movement whose members are primarily interested in issues related to family law, including child custody and child support, that affect fathers and their children.
[8][failed verification] It emerged in the West from the 1960s onwards as part of the men's movement with organizations such as Families Need Fathers, which originated in the 1970s.
[9][10] In the late twentieth century, the growth of the internet permitted wider discussion, publicity and activism about issues of interest to fathers' rights activists.
[4][15][18][page needed] Two studies of fathers' rights groups in North America found that fifteen percent of their members were women.
[1] The fathers' rights movement is considered to be a part of the broader manosphere, a set of Internet forums promoting masculinity along with opposition to feminism.
[40] Legal scholar Richard Collier writes that fathers' rights activists often base their arguments for reform on "anecdotal evidence and assertion" rather than "evidence-backed research", and argues that implementing their proposed changes to the law "may have potentially deleterious consequences" for mothers and children.
[42][43][44] Collier links such negative views of women with ideas of a crisis of masculinity within the broader men's movement, often in tandem with "virulent" anti-feminism.
He also states that divorce provides advantages for women such as automatic custody of the children and financial benefits in the form of child support payments.
[48] Members of the FR movement also state that family courts are slow to help fathers enforce their parental rights,[49][50] and are expensive and time-consuming.
[47] He also claims that employees and activists within the courts support and benefit from the separation of children from their parents[52] and that family law today represents civil rights abuses and intrusive perversion of government power.
[54][42] Collier writes that fathers' rights activists "misread the gendered nature of law's regulation of shared parenting historically".
[56][57] They call for laws creating a rebuttable presumption of 50/50 shared custody after divorce or separation, so that children would spend equal time with each parent unless there were reasons against it.
[8] Members of the fathers' rights movement and their critics disagree about the correlation of negative developmental outcomes for children to sole custody situations.
[63] On the other hand, Professor Craig Hart states that although the consequences of poverty and having a single parent are interrelated, each is a risk factor with independent effects on children,[64] and Silverstein and Auerbach state that the negative outcomes for children in sole custody situations correlate more strongly to "fatherlessness" than to any other variable including poverty.
[69] Members of the fathers' rights movement including Ned Holstein state that a rebuttable presumption of shared parenting is supported by a majority of citizens.
[54] The National Organization For Women also questions the motives of those promoting shared parenting, noting that it would result in substantial decreases in or termination of child support payments.
[84][85] Activists state that the current guidelines are arbitrary, provide mothers with financial incentives to divorce, and leave fathers with little discretionary income to enjoy with the children during their parenting time.
[84] Stephen Baskerville states that it is often difficult for fathers in financial hardship or who take on a larger caregiving role with their children to have their child support payments lowered.
[42][43][91] Supporters of the fathers' rights movement assert that some women make false claims of domestic violence, sexual or child abuse in order to gain an upper hand in divorce, custody disputes and/or prevent fathers from seeing their children, and they state that lawyers advise women to make such claims.
[102] Stephen Baskerville states that laws establishing no-fault divorce can be seen as one of the boldest social experiments in modern history that have effectively ended marriage as a legal contract.
[103] He states that it is not possible to form a binding agreement to create a family, adding that government officials can, at the request of one spouse, end a marriage over the objection of the other.
[104] Baskerville states that fault has entered through the back door in the form of child custody hearings, and that the forcibly divorced spouse ("defendant") is presumed guilty.
[105] Similarly, other members of the fathers' rights movement believe that men fail to get appropriate recognition of their innocence as a result of no-fault divorce.
[109] Members of the fathers' rights movement state that modern divorce involves government officials invading parents' private lives, evicting people from their homes, seizing their property, and taking away their children.