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The UK’s review of child custody laws and the family law courts continues the country’s long-term discrimination against fathers and children.

Here’s a summary of the interim report to the Family Justice Review Panel that’s the first of three legislative updates in this post (Family Law Week).

Fathers’ rights advocates had understood the Tory part of the coalition government to have promised, prior to the election that showed Labor the door, to guarantee fathers contact with their children post-divorce in a major child custody law shake-up.  But that, as they say, was then and this is now.

Now there is no mention of fathers’ equal access to their children or any pretense of gender equality in the document on child custody reforms.  It seems that when it comes to fathers’ rights in family courts or children’s rights to meaningful relationships with their dads, nothing will change.

And it should come as no surprise that it’s all couched in the language of the best interests of children.  Never mind that children do better post-divorce with two parents in their lives.  Never mind that mothers commit twice the abuse and neglect of children that fathers do.  Never mind that children don’t want to  lose one parent in the divorce process due to the Court’s obsession with sole child custody outcomes.  Never mind that studies show that children want and need both parents in their lives post-divorce.  And never mind that the current child custody system accomplishes the opposite by effectively separating children from their fathers.

No, that’s all rational and fact-based and therefore has no place in the British government’s interim report on the Family Justice system.  As far as the government is concerned, the status quo sole maternal child custody edict regarding fathers and children is just fine, thank you.

The only exception to that sole maternal child custody rule is that the report spcifically mentions that non-custodial parents (90% of whom are fathers) can have their “visitation” satisfied via Skype.  “Just send the checks regularly and view your kid for 10 minutes on your computer screen.  That’s all the fathering you need to do and all your child needs.”  Such is the message to dads from the interim report.

Remember, it’s all apparently in the best interests of the children.

The report makes some good recommendations about technical matters such as unifying the court system and ensuring that a single judge hears a divorce case from start to finish.  Those are good enough ideas that one is left wondering why they haven’t been implemented earlier.

But the bottom line for dads is that, beyond the money they provide, they’re still considered of no importance by the British family court system, and the Court’s will still be required to place children as a standard in a maternal sole child custody arrangement.

Here’s an entertaining article about a fathers’ rights advocate accosting Justice Secretary Ken Clarke in his driveway with some very pertinent questions about the interim report (Telegraph, 7/3/11).

”How come, Mr Clarke, it states quite clearly in that review that fathers will not be given equal or shared rights over their children?

”Isn’t that against the law, Mr Clarke, gender discrimination?”

Strange, he didn’t get an answer.

Less blatant but still noteworthy is this attorney’s website informing us that, in Indiana, it will now be considered child abuse for a child to witness a domestic violence incident.  Any parent so doing will be entitled to only supervised child custody contact with the child and will have to complete a “batterer’s intervention” program.

What this inane law fails to consider is the obvious inequity when Domestic Abuse is initiated by the mother. In such cases, the outcome will no doubt be the same, that being that the child will be denied contact with the father. Again, we somehow end up with a sole maternal child custody outcome. How convenient.

Indiana law for both paternity (I.C. § 31-14-14-15) and dissolution actions (I.C. § 31-17-2-8.3) currently creates a rebuttable presumption that the court shall order a noncustodial parent’s parenting time to be supervised if the noncustodial parent has been convicted of a domestic or family violence crime and said crime was witnessed or heard by the child.   A new subsection will be added to both the paternity and dissolution laws on July 1, 2011.  The new subsections will state that the court may require the noncustodial parent to complete a batterer’s intervention program certified by the Indiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence as a condition of granting the noncustodial parent unsupervised parenting time.

What’s the Indiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence?  Well, it’s an organization that, if it recognizes female-on-male violence at all, it doesn’t let on about it.  It also fingers the “patriarchy” as the primary culprit in causing domestic violence.

So it doesn’t take too much imagination to figure out what the coalition’s concept of “batterer intervention” must be.  “Batterers” will learn that any affront to one’s wife or partner is considered “battering;” men have the power in intimate relationships; men learn from early childhood that it’s OK to hit a woman if it maintains their power in a relationship; the only way to undo the above is to remake society so that “feminine” values predominate over “masculine” ones; non-violence is one of those “feminine” values, and that child custody remains in the firm grip of mothers.

So it’s the law in the State of Indiana that any man who is found, on whatever evidence, to have committed some form of DV, regardless of how slight, must now “learn” the above.  The fact that none of the above is true seems to be of no concern to the state legislature.

Australia, a nation which has up to recently led the world on promoting Shared Parenting child custody arrangements via its 2006 Shared Parenting laws, will soon take a huge step backwards by dismantling these shared parenting child custody laws and replacing them with the “Family Violence bill”. This bill has broadened the definition of domestic violence to also include events that ‘have not occurred’, but that the alleged victim has subjectively perceived as having occurred.

For instance, if a father talks on the phone to a friend and laughs, as innocent and innocuous as this laugh may be, if the mother however ‘perceives’ this laugh to be about her and represent a threat to her wellbeing, regardless of how irrational that belief may be, the Courts will be instructed to consider this innocent laugh as ‘Domestic Violence’, and as a result deny the father meaningful child custody contact, and potentially any contact at all with his children.

This bizarre bill is taking the presumption of guilt against men found in all western countries in matters of domestic violence, to a new even more dangerous level, doing away with the presumption of innocence altogether, and replacing it with a presumption that is nigh impossible to defend against, no matter how much proof one has.

Finally we come here to Ohio in which the budget crunch has gotten so bad that they’re actually giving men behind on child support a slight break (NECN, 6/29/11).  Very slight.  This summary tells us that those men can now be sentenced to “community control, such as halfway houses instead of prison time.”

Well, thank heaven for small favors.  It’s too bad that entirely sensible change in the law was brought about by a desire to save money, but at least it’s now the law.  Now child support obligors can stay out of jail and look for work instead of being in the one place in which it’s impossible to provide the support their child needs.

Overall, it seems that the Western world has taken a huge backward leap in child custody laws, in an attempt to thwart the progressive changes occurring in every household when it comes to parental care. Where once child custody decisions were based on which parent spent the majority of time parenting prior to separation, as households change, laws have also changed to ensure that fathers continue to be denied meaningful contact with their children.

This should poor water over the concept that child custody outcomes have traditionally been based on a child best interests. Child custody matters never were and unfortunately for the time being, will continue not to be about a child’s best interests.