The following points are being currently being circulated for discussion by the Fatherhood Foundation. Reproduced here with permission.

1. There are poor or no statistics on issues and outcomes from the Family Court. This hinders discussion of issues. This needs to be remedied to enable greater accountability and transparency. Men’s organisations need to be consulted about what data needs to be collected. E.g. initiated counselling, initiated separation, suicides, deaths from accidents while in FC proceedings, terminated counselling, custodial care proportions etc.
2. Fathers are important. There have been several decades of negativity about fathers and many fathers and professionals do not see the importance of fathers. Considerable headway has been made on this issue. People now need to better understand why fathers are important. Many well meaning social services believe fathers are important but do not know why. Understanding by FC services and providers as to why fathers are important is core to meeting the needs of fathers and families.
3. Suicide stats. These need to be researched as current stats given by Judge Boshier are not collected well and also stats for death by accident need to be kept separately as many suicides are concealed as accidents.
4. Services specific to men need to be supplied by the FC and integrated into community services for men.
5. The FC should not assume abuse of children if there has been partner abuse. Current tendencies to do this are unwarranted and add to the conflict. Such assumptions are not made for women who have been abusive.
6. If the father has been violent there has been an assumption that boys copy the father’s model of violence on a social modelling theory. This is an assumption and makes no allowance for other factors or dynamics such as the boy responding to mother’s violence, anger of the child at being imposed with adult responsibilities, anger at his lack of access to his father.
7. The majority of men in stopping violence programmes have been under-fathered. This vital element has been ignored. Being complicit in another generation of fatherlessness by policy may be one of the reasons the family violence stats are getting worse.
8. Liable parent contributions need to be paid into a trust fund for the child. US stats indicate that parents who have regular access to non resident children pay their liable parent contribution.
9. Child support needs to be more fair and cater for dual care. Where 40-60% of care is delivered by the other parent no money should change hands.
10. There should be a ‘rebuttable assumption of co-parenting’ as a starting point for childcare in separations as a basis for equality and justice.
11. Family violence: The issue of women’s violence needs to be researched and its implications for families catered for. CYFS reports 50-60% of abuse to children is from women. Much of this is excused as stress. Working with male violence in this manner would be unacceptable. There is a double standard in operation.
12. Protection orders ignore female violence. Research indicates that one in three men are abused by their partner, similar to stats for women. Types of abuse are however associated with gender. Men tend to be more physical and women more relational/verbal.
13. Convenience of accusing the male: when officers come to attend a domestic incident there is a convenient predisposition to treat the male as the offending/abusive party so that she can assume care of the children. Research however indicates that women start more conflict in the relationship and can be as violent. There is poor sensitivity to women’s types of abuse: verbal, emotional and relational.
14. There are other types of abuse in families that do not get noticed and trained for by the police. Elder abuse, mother to child, female to male, adolescent to parent are examples. It is inconsistent and damaging to children to have other forms of abuse tolerated while male to female is (rightly) addressed.
15. Accommodation is needed for men who have a 6 day order against them. Judge Boshier has advocated this issue.
16. Current FC programmes have not been researched for effectiveness in the 20 years that they have been provided. Research in the US is clear that Duluth style programmes do not work. Women’s programmes and children’s programmes may also be in this category.
17. A 10 week programme for men in relationships followed by a 10 week couple’s programme may be much more effective. There is a need for programmes that put families back together rather than leaving unhealed wounds and generating a burden on the state through supporting fragments of families separately
18. ‘Disempowerment’ programmes work better than ‘male power and domination’ programmes. The Man Alive programme in west Auckland has better figures than other programmes using this principle.
19. Family Violence Courts may not be delivering just judgements. There are ad hoc reports that men are pleading guilty to charges that they are innocent of out of despair of seeing their children or that they may not otherwise get a just hearing.
20. In depth training is needed to boost awareness of other forms of family violence especially forms of violence undertaken by women. Most FC professionals and police seem unaware of this and practice attitudes prevalent to a pre-90s practice of rationalising and minimising male violence.
21. Fatherhood organisations seek to be continually consulted about the implication of changes made in the FC and thank the review panel for this opportunity.