Blaming the system

When he wrote to me recently requesting that I include a link to Real Fathers for Justice on this blog, 'Toon' (something tells me he's a Newcastle supporter) also mentioned two other websites, one of which was the Equal Parenting Alliance. I've now had a chance to look at this site. The Equal Parenting Alliance is a new UK political party, formed in February 2006, that believes "our shambolic family law system is failing children, failing families, failing parents and putting at overall risk the future of our society it should be helping to secure". The policies of the party include:

• That there should be a legal presumption of reasonable parenting time for children and both parents, in the event of parental separation;
• That a shared residence arrangement should be the normal arrangement when there are two fit, capable parents;
• That there must be a good reason for delaying or preventing contact between a child and parent; and
• That those making maliciously false allegations in a family court should face the charge of perjury.

I certainly agree that there is rarely a good reason to deny a child contact with one of it's parents and that unfortunately all too often contact is opposed for no good reason (although sometimes the parent with the child genuinely but erroneously believes that there is a good reason to deny contact). However, I think that most of the professionals involved in the family courts system will take exception to the allegations by the party that they are "ignorant" or "lazy". I'm sure that there is scope to improve the system, but I wonder whether groups such as this are expecting too much from any system, when the real problem surely lies with the attitude of parents who are using denial of contact as a weapon against their former partners - an attitude that I doubt will change with the threat of criminal proceedings.