Bob Geldof: A lost opportunity to give children their human rights

They have got the title right, but not an awful lot else. "Parental Separation: Children's Needs and Parent's Responsibilities" is what the Government has called the consultative document it issued yesterday on what happens to children when a marriage breaks up.

They have got the title right, but not an awful lot else. "Parental Separation: Children's Needs and Parent's Responsibilities" is what the Government has called the consultative document it issued yesterday on what happens to children when a marriage breaks up.

The Green Paper is a huge disappointment. It makes a lot of fine statements about both parents being needed to bring up their children after divorce. But it offers little that is not already covered by the 1989 Children's Act. The Government's tinkering has failed to address the fundamental injustice at the heart of the present system.

The document speaks about helping parents to resolve disagreements through mediation rather than litigation. It hopes to speed up courtroom appearances. It proposes that one judge should see cases through to the end to ensure continuity. But it does not grasp the nettle of giving parents equal access to their children. And it continues to treat fathers differently to mothers.

The minister responsible, Lord Falconer, rather patronisingly sought to justify this failure yesterday by saying that there could not be an automatic presumption that access should be split between parents, 50:50. "Children cannot be divided like the CD collection," he said.

Such statements are shallow and unhelpful. What is at stake is not the needs of adults, but of children.

Children need fathers. The empirical proof is that children are hugely damaged by having their fathers effectively removed from their day-to-day lives. Indeed, some experts have argued that is, in fact, a form of child abuse to deprive children of their father. What is involved is a human rights issue for the child, something which is recognised in countries like Denmark, Sweden and some US states, where a 50:50 access split is the norm.

The Green Paper enshrines a hoary old belief. Though it announces that the law is gender neutral in intent - which is nonsense, as can be seen from the plain fact that in 93 per cent of cases it is the woman who gets the children - it perpetuates the outdated notion of bread-winning men and child-rearing women. The facts give the lie to this. More than half of the national workforce are women now (51 per cent at the last count). Yet the Green Paper insists that 50:50 access "would not work in practical terms, owing to living arrangements or work commitments".

What this adds up to is a restating of the discredited notion that women are the ones with the emotional intelligence, and that men are restricted to the analytical sphere. Mothers are nurturers, while fathers are feckless, fickle and incapable of emotional engagement with their children. This is the contemporary restatement of the prejudice that branded women as the hysterical sex who could not be given the vote for fear they might have to exercise it at the wrong time of the month. Small wonder that angry fathers used the suffragette colour - purple - for the flour bombs with which they bombarded the Prime Minister.

Ministers say that 90 per cent of parents who split arrange access without recourse to the courts. But that disguises a systemic bias. Many fathers do not resort to the courts because they know that they are unlikely to win, and that a court case will only upset their children and waste their money. That there is a far larger constituency of angry people who want fundamental changes to the law was brought home to me recently when I addressed the annual conference of Townswomen's Guild on the subject of giving fathers more access to their children. Many elderly women spoke in tears at the way the law prevented them from seeing their own grandchildren.

I am not convinced that the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service is the right body to supervise the process of mediation. (The parents are already in litigious mode by the time they enter the court building.) And it's not clear why the Green Paper's proposals for parenting plans should work any better than they have in the past - they have been around since the 1990s and are rarely used.

Nor is it clear why it would work to give courts powers to impose community-based orders, such as voluntary work, on recalcitrant mothers who repeatedly flout the access arrangements the court has imposed. At present, tens of thousands of fathers each spend thousands of pounds trying to enforce court orders which their ex-wives just ignore. Although judges have the power to impose prison sentences for persistent and deliberate breaches. they rarely believe it is in the interests of the child to send a mother to prison. They do, however, send 40 women to jail a year for not paying their TV licence. What price the kids then?

Nor is it clear, in a week when the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary have made such play on boorishness, yob culture and social misbehaviour, why they have missed the clear link between fatherlessness and the explosion in young offending. What was needed was for the Government to send a clear message about the equal, but different, importance of the mother and father in the upbringing of children. They have missed their chance.

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