Over 1 million Australian children are living without their fathers. The legislation underpinning both the family court system and the child support scheme have been a major factor contributing to the present crisis of fatherlessness (and male suicide) in this country.

It is worth noting that research studies indicate that divorce following the loss of meaningful contact with children is a major factor of male suicide. The death rate in Australia amongst child-support payers is almost double the rate of males who do not have administrative child support assessments.

Contrary to popular belief, child support payments have nothing to do with irresponsible fathers abandoning their children. Developed in the late 1980s to outset the jurisdiction of the courts, the nation’s child support scheme was largely driven by the need to ensure that private transfers of money from fathers to mothers reduced the burden of the state in terms of welfare expenditure.

According to Patrick Parkinson, one of the nation’s leading family law academics, the support scheme provides ‘perverse incentives … for primary caregivers to resist children spending more time with the other parent to avoid a reduction in the child support obligation’. As far as possible, he adds, these perverse incentives must be avoided ‘and legislative policies in these areas should be in harmony rather than conflict’.

Many women today can contemplate divorce with greater confidence that the financial benefits might outweigh the losses. For men, by contrast, a particular cause of dismay has been the imminent loss of contact with children they have loved, protected, and helped raise.

A common scenario is where the wife leaves, taking the children with her – and sometimes all the furniture too. These deserting wives get custody of the children, most of the value of the family house, and the child support agency ensures that the victimized husbands pay support for children they rarely see.

Another familiar scenario is where the husband is required to pay the mortgage charges but also forced to leave the family home immediately and pay rent for a separate residence for himself. As noted by Dr Barry Maley, a family policy expert:

His marriage and its expectations have been destroyed, he has largely lost his children, lost his home and a large part of his income. His prospects of mending his shattered and impoverished life, re-partnering, and perhaps having other children, are minimal.

One can hear the testimony of countless husbands whose wives have run off and been awarded sole custody of children, while they are expected to pay child support and sometimes even spouse maintenance.

There is a clear link between the child support scheme and attempts to eradicate the relationship between children and fathers. These fathers are paying support through the government yet remain alienated from their children.

Given that child support is calculated on the number of nights children spend with fathers, a moral hazard is created that can tempt a primary carer to withhold access for the basest of reasons, money.

One seldom hears about the plight of innocent fathers who have been completely alienated from their children. This often happens in combination with malicious allegations of domestic violence. Of course, not everyone who applies for a family violence restraining order is necessarily a genuine victim, just as not everyone who is subject to such order is necessarily the perpetrator.

Rob Tiller, a Perth-based counsellor, thus reminds us of the male suicide epidemic currently taking place in Australia, where young, middle-aged, and senior men are killing themselves at a rate of 42 per week. This increase in male suicide, he says, is at least partially due to relationship breakdown and parental alienation, coupled with poorer support among divorced males.

According to research by the Australian Institute of Suicide Research and Prevention, almost half of all the suicides by Australian men are directly linked to family court disputes, including child custody and other pending legal matters.

When marriages fail, ‘men are less likely to be awarded full custody of their children, more likely to be displaced from the family home, and have less access to their children’. This means the loss of personal identity, social status, and respect. Adding to loneliness and the natural isolation of so many men in their mid-life, these are significant causes the high risk of male suicide. As noted by Bettina Arndt AM:

There is solid evidence that the major cause of suicide in this country is not mental health problems but rather the toll taken by family break-up, where fathers often face mighty battles trying to stay part of their children’s lives, up against a biased family law system which fails to enforce contact orders, and often facing false violence allegations which are now routinely used to gain advantage in family court battles.

It is, therefore, undeniable that divorce followed by the loss of assess to children has a strong net effect on mortality from suicide, but only among men. Amongst women, there is no statistically significant differentials in the risk of suicide by marital status categories.

This leads to an important question: ‘Why are divorced men killing themselves?’ Augustine Kpsowa, a sociology professor at the University of California-Riverside, offers this explanation:

There seems to be an implicit assumption that the bond between a woman and her children is stronger than that between a man and his children. As a consequence, in a divorce settlement, custody of children is more likely to be given to the wife. In the end, the father loses not only his marriage, but his children.

The result may be anger at the court system, especially in situations wherein the husband feels betrayed because it was the wife that initiated the divorce, or because the courts virtually gave away everything that was previously owned by the ex-husband or the now defunct household to the former wife.

Events could spiral into resentment (toward the spouse and “the system”), bitterness, anxiety, and depression, reduced self-esteem, and a sense of “life not worth living”. As depression and poor mental health are known markers of suicide risk, it may well be that one of the fundamental reasons for the observed association between divorce and suicide in men is the impact of post-divorce (court-sanctioned) “arrangements”.

Suicide is now the number one killer of Australian men under the age of 44. There is little doubt that unilateral divorce and a court system perceived to favour women with the custody of children and the family home (even where these men are unemployed and have nowhere else to go) are significant factors in the suicide of a great number of Australian men.

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Prof. Augusto Zimmermann is head of law at Sheridan Institute of Higher Education, in Perth, Western Australia. He is also a former member of the Law Reform Commission in Western Australia and a former associate dean (research) at Murdoch University, School of Law. During his time at Murdoch, Professor Zimmermann was awarded the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research, in 2012. 

Professor Zimmermann will be one of the speakers at “Restoring the Presumption of Innocence”, a conference to be held in Sydney on August 31, 2024. Details at https://www.presumptionofinnocence.au/