by Tony Rucinski, Coalition for Marriage
Dr Bruce Newsome is a political scientist, a former policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, and a father. He has spent years investigating the injustices of the UK family court system and has written extensively on fathers’ rights. He sat down with me this week to explain what is happening to parental rights in Britain and what needs to change. I would urge you to watch the full interview here.
Newsome’s starting point is blunt. Family law in Britain, he says, “attracts very little attention, and this infuriates me”. The injustices are real and documented. The statutes, he explains, “do not recognise any rights for fathers or mothers in particular”. Instead, the law “sets up the inherently antagonistic position that one parent is… a primary carer and the other parent is a secondary carer” – a framework that in practice overwhelmingly disadvantages fathers.
The consequence, as Newsome spells out, is “not just a chronic problem of children growing up without parents, it’s children growing up without fathers”. That has “particular consequences such as propensity to crime, particularly for boys, and particular propensity to drop out of school”. Data drawn from the Millennium Cohort Study shows that by the age of 14, 46% of children in Britain are not living with both natural parents. Almost a quarter of families with dependent children are now headed by a single parent.