PRELIMINARIES
The new report from the Cheltenham Group, an association 'fighting for the family' in the old sense of the term, does two things.
First, it gives chapter and verse to the precise mechanisms through which the legal system itself has been wilfully and consciously used to destroy the institution of marriage, against the clear letter of the law and Parliament's stated intentions. It does so in a way that gives everyone the chance to check through their local library whether the Cheltenham Group is right or not in its facts and interpretations.
Only with last year's Family Law Act was marriage abandoned as a life-long commitment that could be terminated only if the innocent party consented to the termination in the event of serious misconduct of the guilty party. But the report shows, with incontrovertible evidence, that for twenty years before and more, men had been the victims of a court system that increasingly acted on what can ever only be a legal fiction, that in marriage breakdown neither party could be 'at fault' (or both parties were always equally at fault) and therefore the law would only act on the assumption of 'no fault'. The principle and terminology were both lifted straight out of motor-car insurance. The sole idea in both fields is to save everybody - everybody except the innocent party - argument, trouble and expense.
Secondly, it documents a series of case studies. By the nature of things, the individual reader cannot check on the harrowing stories the fathers report in convincing detail. We hear only their version and their side. But from what they say, one thing is quite certain. If to be a conscientious and committed husband and father was today even vaguely politically correct, both parts of the report would be at the top of every 'fearless campaigning' journalist's list of truly sensational scandals of the second half of the twentieth century to be exposed; of manipulating professionals to be brought to book; and of widespread and deep-seated individual tragedies, many of them too late now to be corrected, to be at least and at last recognized for the shameful injustices they were and remain.
Norman Dennis, 15 February 1997
Formerly Reader in Social Studies,
Guest Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies,
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
This book is about what really happens in divorce. As I write this preface I have on my desk a newspaper cutting from The Times of 31 August 1996. It describes how a popular teacher of 44 killed himself because he could not cope with his wife having taken his four children aged between five and ten to go and live with a work colleague - her lover. The coroner’s verdict was "Quite clearly his life fell apart because, after 17 years of happy marriage, his wife formed a close relationship with a work colleague".
In truth, why this distressed man’s life "fell apart", and that of his children, was because this selfish and uncaring woman was fully supported by a corrupt legal process in what she was doing. The husband faced nothing but a life of grief and anguish seeing some strange man bringing up his children, while he probably at the same time faced the loss of his home and most of his life savings, and would also be faced with a CSA demand of several hundreds of pounds a month to pay into this "reconstituted family". He would have no hope of restarting a family life and had little to live for. His wife is morally no better than a murderess and the lawyers supporting her no better than accessories to this contemptible act.
An isolated incident you might think - a strange and accidental occurrence that hardly ever happens you might think. If you do think this, you might be forgiven because you, like the rest of the population, have been subjected to stream after stream of false argument, distorted logic, and misinformation that has been spawned by the divorce law reformers, i.e. the Law Commission, their tame academics, and the social work and legal professionals, over the past three decades. Why this has happened is that in 1965 the Law Commission was set up to ‘advise’ the Lord Chancellor on law reform. This body has powerful links with practicing legal and social work professionals, university legal departments, research funding bodies and, most importantly, the Lord Chancellor’s office. The full implications of this have hardly been recognised even by the Government, who, as we have seen in the passage of the Family Law Bill, have been reduced to little more than mouthpieces for their rhetoric. Neither are the implications recognised by Parliament or the public. The control of family law has been effectively handed over lock, stock and barrel to a tiny but very influential group of individuals underpinned by an intellectual culture which is libertarian and feminist in its value system - that is underpinned by values that are laissez-faire with regard to social conduct, and are anti-family and anti-men.
It is therefore hardly surprising that, in the course of the three decades of the Law Commission’s existence, the divorce courts have abandoned any consideration of matrimonial obligations in their dealings, and opted for divorce on unilateral demand coupled with custody settlements based on biology, i.e. automatically in the mother’s favour, and financial settlements based purely on the ‘needs’ of the new family unit. Thus the only legitimate family unit now recognised by the State is not the married family unit of father, mother and their children, united by a permanent commitment to fidelity, but the mother and her children, and whoever she cares to live with from time to time. The father, who may be excluded at the whim of the mother and the agencies of the State, has been reduced to no more than an economic provider.
The UK is renowned as the divorce capital of Europe - having the highest divorce rate, rising 50%, of any other European country. In the USA at the present time over 30% of children do not live with their natural fathers, and this is set to rise to 50% by the turn of the century. The Government and the law reformers wash their hands of the matter claiming that the causes lie "deep in the fabric of society", and that all the law does is to cope with an unhappy but inevitable state of affairs. This is a quite untenable position. It is blatantly obvious to anyone having the slightest knowledge of what goes on in divorce that the law is the most powerful of motivators of marriage breakdown, and this book provides evidence of this. At the time of writing this book the Family Law Act 1996 has recently been passed with the full support of Parliament and the Churches, despite the fact that this Act consolidates and formally recognises these destructive practices which serve to abolish marriage in all but name. This abolition provides the main engine to what is fast becoming "state engineered matrilineal society".
During our campaigning against the Family Law Bill, we became shocked at the appalling degree of ignorance that exists regarding the impact of the law of families, and in particular on fathers and on their children. This book is a brave and noble attempt to remedy this ignorance. In the fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes the populace were conned into behaving as if what was patently absurd and false was in fact true. They all followed like sheep - not having the guts to stand up and declare that the emperor had no clothes on at all. It took a young child, who was too young and naïve to be corrupted, to ‘tell it as it was’ - that "the emperor had no clothes on at all". So will it be with divorce law. It just needs for some influential person - a politician or Church leader - to have the guts to stand up and declare that what is going on in the divorce courts is an abomination against humanity and must be stopped. If this can only happen I am convinced that, on looking back, people will be as shocked about what is going on as we were about burning witches and as puzzled as to how this could possibly come about.
This book is unique in that it does not retreat into distanced abstraction - it very much tells it as it is. It is based on the detail of the real corruption and human misery that lies behind the acceptable facade of rhetoric created by the reformers and demonstrates, shockingly, that The Times case mentioned at the beginning is not an isolated incident but represents merely the tip of an iceberg of squalid corruption and suffering that is relentlessly destroying individual lives and eating away at the fabric of society. I urge you to read it - and then act.
John Campion, Midhurst, 17 September 1996
Creating this book has not been an easy task. If we were to include the underpinning study and preparatory effort required, in terms of the study of matrimonial law, dealing with individual cases, the analysis of the national situation, and the group meetings which preceded the direct work on the book, we begin to understand the scale of the effort. It took many people several years.
The Cheltenham Group first met in April 1994. Out of the initial meetings the idea for this book developed. In early 1995, the idea of a comprehensive survey of divorced men was considered, and in July 1995, the survey of members of the largest UK group, Families Need Fathers (FNF), was completed.
Planning for this book involved several meetings, most involving overnight stays. Correspondence involved mail, phone, fax and email. Writing involved many hours at a PC. Proof reading involved further meetings and further correspondence.
Thanks are due to all those members of FNF who gave their time completing the questionnaire, and to those other individuals who committed their personal story to written narrative when asked to do so.
The direct work on preparation of the book is attributed : to John Campion for the design of the questionnaire, and arranging its distribution and collection; to Barry Worrall for the selection and categorisation of the case study narratives, and for the written text and final drafting; to Brian Ross of the Reform Group for his generous assistance in the computer preparation of the narratives, and his employees Debbie Bridges for organising and especially Tracey for the typing; to Sue Secker for taking responsibility for the considerable task of numerical analysis of the survey results; to Mark Thomas and Robert Whiston, both for their invaluable ideas and contributions to the text, as well as the use of their facilities for meetings and accommodation; to someone, who requests to remain anonymous, for verification of the legal detail; to Chris Mabbott for computer expertise and facilities for imaging the questionnaire into the computer edition. Finally I thank John Campion for leading the project, for his encouragement, and most importantly for keeping us all heading in the right direction.
But it has not been merely the physical effort that has made creating this book difficult. It has been being confronted with a massive and continuing tide of human misery, that one is helpless to mitigate, that has been so debilitating. More than one of the contributors has been moved to tears on occasions. But, as always with human stories, there have been positive aspects. We have been constantly humbled and awestruck at the maturity and stoicism of the authors, and their dogged determination to stay in touch with their children under the most difficult, distressing and provocative of circumstances.
Men get a bad press in our degenerate culture, and are portrayed constantly as violent, uncaring wife beaters and child abusers. We hope that this book will go some way to removing this image. The men portrayed in these pages deserve medals rather than condemnation and are truly the heroes of our age. We salute them.
This book reports the process and consequence of divorce, from the perspective of the impact on men, and fathers and their children. It hence provides an overview, that marriage has been effectively destroyed as a legal institution; it does this through a description of the most significant aspects of the process and consequence of divorce.
The overview is that the legal institution of marriage has been destroyed during the period 1948-1976, but without the public or Parliament being aware. This has been achieved by case law decisions which have misinterpreted the then existing written law and Parliament’s intentions, and through serious malpractices of judges, solicitors, barristers and court welfare officers. The impact of this has fallen almost exclusively on men and fathers, most of whom have been innocent of any substantive wrongdoing. A secondary impact has been indirectly on their children. There have been no effective remedies available from the responsible authorities within the United Kingdom for these men and fathers. In fact the remedies to these problems are being obstructed, and International Human Rights Laws are now being addressed.
The case law established in this way has now been incorporated into statute with the Family Law Act 1996, together with other changes which are most likely to further impact innocent men and fathers adversely.
The most significant aspects of both process and consequence are identified. The processes in divorce, with the frequent malpractices, are detailed and illustrated with extracts from case studies. The consequences of this for individuals are described, and illustrated again with case studies.
Approximately 150 case studies, in the men’s own words, are provided in annexes. These case studies have been categorised into the major aspects of both process and consequence, to demonstrate the consistency of the readily available anecdotal evidence about each aspect identified.
Comprehensive statistics are provided in an annex to quantify both the scale of the malpractices and their effects. The statistics indicate that approximately 100,000 men and fathers unjustly have their lives seriously damaged each year. Probabilities are derived from the statistics about the outcomes of marriage and fatherhood. Extrapolations of the probabilities onto the population of married men and fathers give the scale of the outcomes in terms of yearly figures and on those currently married. These extrapolations should forewarn young men of the likely outcome of any plans they may have for marriage and fatherhood.
Recommendations are : that matrimonial law should be restored; that the individual should readily be able to determine his rights and responsibilities, and that these should not be varied during the individual’s marriage; and that constitutional law be amended to provide appropriate controls and to prevent further corruption.
With Reference to a Synopsis for Young Men
The Cheltenham Group have produced a book which presents the same material as The Emperor’s New Clothes but in an informal style and addressed to the general public and to young men in particular.
This book includes a selection of extracts from the case studies, and all the most significant statistics in chart form. The material is hence reduced to approximately 70 pages intended for an A5 sized volume, and at a lower price than the present report.
The book is titled Marriage and Fatherhood : Important Information for Young Men [20].