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If you’re going to complain about the family justice system, get your facts right

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It’s a seemingly innocuous sub-section of the Children Act, and one that you could easily overlook. I am referring to section 2(4) which states:

“The rule of law that a father is the natural guardian of his legitimate child is abolished.”

I accept that to many people the meaning of this may not be clear. However, just because you don’t know the meaning of something doesn’t entitle you to give it a meaning of your own.

It seems that some people believe that section 2(4) removes certain rights from parents, and of course from fathers in particular. However, section 2(4) is not part of some conspiracy against parents, or fathers.

I came across this misunderstanding on Twitter the other day, but a quick search of Google will show that this is not the first time that it has been raised.

To find the meaning behind the sub-section we have to undertake a short history lesson, beginning with the concept of ‘guardianship’. ‘Guardianship’ was actually a term still in use when I began practising in the early 1980s. In fact, the primary piece of legislation dealing with arrangements for children prior to the Children Act 1989 was called the Guardianship of Minors Act 1971. However, our history lesson begins long before 1971.

Guardianship actually had its origins in the feudal system, with early guardians being largely concerned with the property of a child heir. However, as described in a 1985 Law Commission Working Paper, the purpose of guardianship was to change:

“The institution of guardianship was originally of concern only to those who had property. It began as a lucrative incident of feudal tenure and developed as a means of safe-guarding a family’s property and securing its transmission from one generation to another. Subsequently it became the instrument for maintaining the authority of the father over the upbringing of his children.”

As most people will be aware, until modern times our family law favoured husbands and fathers and guardianship was part of that thankfully bygone system. Hence the law recognised the father as the children’s “natural” guardian (the word “natural” seems to have been used simply because it was the term used for an earlier form of guardianship relating to the heir apparent). The effect of natural guardianship was that the father alone had control over the person, education, religion and marriage of his children, until they reached the ‘age of discretion’ and in some respects up to the age of twenty one. While the father was alive the mother had no claims as natural guardian, and was originally in no better position than a stranger.

However, during the nineteenth century the mother was given limited rights in relation to custody and access, and those rights were expanded in the twentieth century, culminating in the Guardianship Act 1973, which stated that the mother’s rights and authority were the same as the law allowed the father.

However, despite those changes the rule of (common) law that the father was the sole natural guardian of his legitimate children was never abolished. Accordingly, when in 1988 the Law Commission carried out a review of child law, guardianship and custody, it recommended that the rule finally be abolished. That recommendation, along with most of the others made by the Commission, was included in the Children Act.

So it can be seen that section 2(4) had nothing to do with removing rights from fathers. It was simply giving effect to a change that had long-since taken place in practice. I suppose it could in a sense be taken to be part of a process of removing rights from parents, but the whole concept of ‘rights’ was being replaced anyway by the concept of ‘responsibilities’. Hence the introduction by the Children Act of ‘parental responsibility’, an idea that now underlines our entire system of child law.

Accordingly, if you are a fathers’ rights activist eagerly seeking evidence of the fact that the system is biased against you, section 2(4) of the Children Act is not the place to look.

The blog team at Stowe is a group of writers based across our family law offices who share their advice on the wellbeing and emotional aspects of divorce or separation from personal experience. As well as pieces from our family law solicitors, guest contributors also regularly contribute to share their knowledge.

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Comments(6)

  1. Brian says:

    Parental responsibility (CA 1989 S 2 & S 3) – a futile academic exercise in law which provides no recourse to empower a parent in practice whom is not the primary carer – and recourse in law via the courts, I’ll remind readers is the option of last resort – not the first! Depriving parents whom are not primary carers of any meaningful input into a dependent child’s upbringing by an obdurate and implacably hostile primary carer in a judicial institution obsessed with trying to be a forum and beacon for “collaborative” law when, by historic design (for good reason), is adversarial in origin and has developed sufficient liberal apathy to a point that family courts do not have the stomach to enforce any orders for which it seals under CAP! Removing guardianship may not be the reason “for the fact the system is biased”, removing it did little to help when the tools placed in it’s stead are inadequate or the artisan empowered with those tools lack the will to use them. King Solomon when dealing with a custody dispute expediently used the correct approach and method to determine with whom the “welfare of the child” could be best entrusted, although I dare say King Solomon had deliberately made an erroneous judgment before immediately setting it aside with an appeal decision based on the reaction of the real mother. Guardianship, albeit obsolescent before CA 1989, possibly could have become the tool of last resort without having to change living arrangements for the parent whom is not the primary carer to resolve disputes without enforcement. When CA 1989 was written, it was not envisaged that the now amended terms “residence” and “contact” would cause such conflict by the lay person’s erroneous perception of what those terms, particularly ‘residence’ inferred. Little has changed since the terms were amended where recalcitrant parents enters the courtroom with their ‘god given’ unilateral and unequal rights.

  2. Peeved says:

    One only has to be a male living under the auspices of family law to recognise, that the system is biased in the majority against you. Taking cash off us is the only thing the system cares about. Our relationship with our chidlren? Forget it? Our ability to look after and feed ourselves, once the CSA has had its bit? Forget it. The system is a disgrace. Fathers should go in contempt of the family justice system on a wholesale basis. – and the word ‘justice’ should be removed from it.

    • Xanthus Mills says:

      The old law made the father the head of the family which is the natural law of nature.

      The new law makes the mother head of the family which opposes the law of nature.

      You say the law was originally biased towards fathers but now it’s reversed and only mothers have primary parent responsibilities that it isn’t biased.

      There’s definitely a conspiracy and a war on masculinity.

      • Ameenur Rasheed says:

        The war is not just againt masculinity but it is a barbaric madness and anarchism to destroy our natural familly system and to have a corrup and distorted industrial and mechanised family in place where children will have no full view of a family rather a mass of people!

      • Gelli says:

        Actually neither the mother nor the father have any rights or power that these courts recognise, they have usurped the position of both and by fraud they have done so, natural law is prior to legislative regulation and therefore can not be abolished by it, honed and codified maybe but never abolished, That particular section of the 1989 Children Act is the most absurd piece of legislative mischief ever allowed to pass, granting mothers privileges which is what they are is not effected by usurping natural rights, it was an injustice of the courts of old that damaged mothers and now we are to believe that the solution is to damage the fathers as well, as for the children we don’t really fall for that bluster about their interests coming first do we. The real motive is control over infants by the state so that property can be usurped and the indoctrination of children closely controlled by the corporation, any other reason given is provable fraud. Welcome to communism, your family became a public institution and the lawyers are cleaning up.

  3. Reggie Cyde says:

    Its reassuring to read these comments, its good to know people are waking up to the insidious nature of statism.

    The modus operandi of the progressive strategy is to deconstruct any and all resistance to power and profit.

    In this case, it’s about the interruption of the transmission of culture, knowledge and wisdom between father and child. Where once family was all and the sovereignty of the individual family was paramount, now it is all geared to the collective commune.

    Our legal system, once the envy of the world, has been subverted by cultural Marxism. In this case, Cafcass.

    The Long March through the institutions continues…. but it will be brought to an abrupt halt.

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