The rise of fathers’ rights groups in Australia is obviously causing great concern among feminist academics, prompting the production of a 50 page critique paper about the groups.
The paper, “Fathers’ Rights Groups in Australia and their Engagement with Issues in Family Law”, was written by by Miranda Kaye and Julia Tolmie, feminist lecturers at the Faculty of Law, Sydney University. It was published in the Australian Journal of Family Law in 1998.
Kaye and Tolmie interviewed father’s / men’s rights groups under false pretenses and supported their paper’s feminist conclusions with selective content from some submissions provided to government inquiries.
Kaye and Tolmie displayed their lack of impartiality in their paper’s lead-in paragraph by featuring one of the most objectionable statements every made by Alistair Nicholson, the Chief Justice of the Family Court. Nicholson publicly accused those who disagreed with his views on the practices of the Family Court, mostly men, of being “discontented litigants, sometimes obviously dysfunctional”.
Day: 1 January 1998
Fathers’ Rights Groups in Australia and their Engagement with Issues in Family Law
There is a constant and persistent view pursued by people who are often discontented litigants sometimes obviously dysfunctional, that the court is in some sense designed by anti-family groups to destroy the institution of the family in society… An unfortunate concomitant of this approach is that some people and some politicians with limited knowledge of the issues involved, tend to latch on to such dysfunctional persons for apparent political gain. This has the further unfortunate effect of empowering such persons to feel that their behaviour is not only acceptable but is the subject of sympathy and approval by politicians and government. It is all too often the experience of this court that its most persistent critics have behaved in a way which cannot stand up to public scrutiny, particularly in relation to issues of violence against women and children. Such persons, who often espouse the rights of fathers, do very little for their cause