Has Fathers 4 Justice gone to the dark side with its Crummy Mummy campaign?

The campaign group Fathers 4 Justice has been hitting the headlines throughout 2013, most recently with a “crummy mummy” campaign featuring celebrity mums.

According to the Daily Mail, the campaign features the actresses Katie Holmes, Halle Berry, Kim Basinger and Kate Winslett by “using the Hollywood stars in a series of adverts criticising their childcare arrangements” and accusing “them of denying their children access to their fathers”.

Barbara Ellen in the The Guardian accuses the pressure groups of having a  “crummy strategy” that is “cheap and bullying” and “trashing women” through the “grim intimidation” of a “misogynistic poster campaign” that is “anti-mother”.

Fathers 4 Justice hit back with a blog post accusing Ellen of “offensive stereotyping of dads as ‘deadbeats’” and “smearing Fathers4Justice in pursuit of that newspaper group’s ideologically driven anti-father narrative”.

As a former PR Director of Fathers4Justice and an occasional commentator for The Guardian I feel like a child in a messy divorce and want to yell: “mum, dad, please stop fighting”!

No child should have to take sides in a fight between his or her parents, so I’ll be clear from the outset---I’m not going to take sides with the “anti-father” Guardian or the “anti-mother” Fathers4Justice---because I refuse to be drawn into in a black and white debate about such a vitally colourful issue.

I will, however, talk about the darkness and light that colours our thinking about gender.

When I joined Fathers4Justice in 2003, the campaign used to complain that public policy on fatherhood was based on a rigid belief in “Madonna Mums” and “Demon Dads”. Ten years earlier, Warren Farrell had critiqued feminism in his1993 book The Myth of Male Power by saying it “articulated the shadow side of men and the light side of women but neglected the shadow side of women and the light side of men”.

In 2013, I still frequently say that many of the issues that men are boys face are exacerbated by our cultural belief that “men ARE problems and women HAVE problems”. I believe that if we want to create a gender equal world that it will require us to address both the light side and dark side of men and women with loving equanimity.

As things stand the mainstream gender discourse on gender is still dominated by binary thinking like: “women are good, men are bad”; “women are victims, men are perpetrators”; “girls are sugar and spice and all things nice” while “boys are slugs an snails and puppy dog tails”.

In this context it is inevitable (and at times necessary) that elements of the men’s movement will seek to correct this imbalance by focusing on men’s light side and women’s dark side.

One of the reasons the Fathers4Justice campaign was so successful at capturing the public imagination in 2003 is that it created a new narrative for separated dads that said they weren’t just deadbeat “demon dads” but heroes fighting for justice. Each time a lycra-clad campaigner hit the headlines Fathers4Justice would proudly declare that “every dads is a superhero to his kids”.

By using courageous, humourous and playful stunts---like sticking Batman on Buckingham Palace or chucking a condom full of self-raising flour at Tony Blair (because fatherless kids had to raise themselves)---the campaign brought hugely important issues to the foreground of public consciousness whilst simultaneously highlighting the light side of fatherhood.  

It’s a tactic that changed minds---even at The Guardian, where David Aaronovitch wrote in 2004 that “whatever you think of their tactics”, the dads who threw powder bombs at Tony Blair had “a real case”. Aaronovitch even confessed that this “was not the view I held before I started working on this article….my default setting is one that reads, 'women right, men wrong’”.

I have been closely observing the tone of the national discourse on gender for more than a decade now and I am clear it is shifting---and I am also clear that Fathers4Justice deserves credit for contributing to that shift.

Even Barbara Ellen at The Guardian has changed her tune. In 2008 she wrote:

“It's time for disgruntled, estranged dads to realise that women simply cannot stop men being fathers. Only men can stop men being fathers.”

In her latest piece about Fathers4Justice, however, she confesses: “I would once have rolled my eyes at the thought of separated fathers being given short shrift…..however, I've also heard enough sad stories to realize that things are not always so simple.”

So let's focus for a moment on both the light and dark side of left-wing thinking on fatherhood. As Jack O’Sullivan said in The Guardian last year:

“Labour has never got to grips with the tragedies of separated fatherhood….Labour's key concern in all of this was women and, as a result, it was not interested in championing fathers' rights”.

This left-wing indifference to fathers’ rights is what Fathers4Justice is pointing to when it refers to The Guardian as anti-father---and if you wanted to focus only on the dark side of The Guardian then you could certainly find evidence to make that case. On the light side, it’s also fair to point out that this year’s Guardian/Observer leader for Fathers’ Day said:

“Dad is too often portrayed as a dud. Fathers face a conundrum. If they are present, they are traditionally portrayed as malevolent. If they are absent, they are feckless. At best, when they are putting bread on the table, they are distant……society adapts when lazy stereotypes are challenged….. both parents are vital to a child's wellbeing.”

Does that sound like the words of a newspaper group that is 100% anti-father---of course not, but as Fathers4Justice knows only too well from the way so many of its supporters have been mistreated, if you want to demonize someone you only point at their dark side and ignore the light. 

Even in attacking the Fathers4Justice campaign in The Guardian (and focussing on their dark side) Barbara Ellen said: “few would argue that a genuinely strong, loving, consistent paternal presence isn't crucial to a child's development” before calling on the campaign group to prove “it can be pro-father without being anti-mother”. 

It's clear we have made some significant strides in challenging the constant focus on the masculine dark side while ignoring the masculine light side---and Fathers4Justice has played an important role in this.

And yes there is much, much, much more work to be done to challenge the “man bad, woman good” default setting that too many of us fall into. At the same time, we need to find an effective way of bringing more focus to the feminine dark side.

O Sullivan, writing in The Guardian, is one of the few commentators to try and do this. His approach is to focus on a collective problem—“the matriarchy”---rather than individual women. When referring to the proposed family law reforms of the Coalition Government he sad it was: 

“The first time the state has come forward to challenge matriarchy in the family and its abuses with respect to access to children. We are moving to a better domestic world where paternity, not patriarchy, is supported and, where maternity, not matriarchy, is equally supported.”

It’s an interesting way to frame the problem but is it effective? Well it’s not an argument that others have picked up and run with yet.

In a sense, you could view the Fathers4Justice “Crummy Mummy” campaign as an attempt to solve the same conundrum by “naming and shaming” high profile individual women. The campaign claims that: “in every instance the mothers concerned were complicit in contact denial at one time or another which is a serious human rights violation and an abuse of a child’s right to both parents.”

Contact denial is certainly a serious problem that mostly impacts fathers as the recent case of the father denied a relationship with his daughter despite having 82 court orders in his favour demonstrates.

Women are capable of great acts of darkness. The stories of the Amanda Hutton who starved her son to death 

and Joanna Dennehy who killed three men are just two cases that came to light in the UK this year that prove this point.

But nobody on the political spectrum from The Guardian on the left to the Daily Mail on the right seems particularly convinced that the four celebrities targeted by Fathers4Justice are prime examples of the dark side of femininity. If finding a new and innovative way of highlighting women’s dark side was part of Fathers4Justice’s aim, it seems to have fallen wide of the mark on this occasion (but if getting headlines for the sake of getting headlines was all it was concerned with, then it has succeeded). 

There's no doubt in my mind that we need to keep finding better ways to breakthrough the “man bad women good” narrative that can impact separated fathers so negatively. 

Yes, The Guardian has contributed to that narrative and it has also begun---at times---to promote a more positive discourse about men and fathers. People who campaign for men and fathers (including Fathers4Justice) should stop and take time to acknowledge that, not least because it is a chance to acknowledge that our campaigning work is making a difference.

Where I disagree with Barbara Ellen in The Guardian is in her conclusion that Fathers4Justice needs to learn how “to be pro-father without being anti-mother”. The left (including The Guardian) has not yet learnt how to be pro-women (without being anti-men) and is not in a place to preach to others on the "right way" to do gender advocacy work. 

What we need as a society is to get to a place where we are equally capable of highlighting and addressing the darker sides of both fatherhood and motherhood, which do exist, whilst remaining both pro-mother and pro-father.

The challenge we face is this---people aren’t either light or dark, we are all a combination of many different shades of night and day. Separated dads do suffer from our collective tendency to focus too heavily on the dark side of men, masculinity and fatherhood. 

Einstein is said to have observed: "we can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

If this is true, then I doubt whether the Fathers4Justice tactic of focusing only on the dark side of other people, whether that’s an individual mum like Kate Winslett or an entire newspaper group like The Guardian, is going to bring about the change that separated fathers so desperately need.

I don't pretend to have all the answers---far from it. But if we want separated dads---in all their lightness and darkness---to be treated fairly, equitably and justly---then maybe it starts with those of us who advocate for separated dads treating others as fairly, equitably and justly as we’d like to be treated ourselves. 

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