Text 4. What are fathers for?

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Fatherhood has undergone an extraordinary and messy revolution, the effects of which we are still trying to absorb. So says Richard Collier, law professor, father of one and expert in the changing role of dads.

Sabine Durrant

The Guardian, 3 January 2009

Richard Collier, professor of law at Newcastle University, lives in a quiet part of town in a house full of the normal detritus of family life – books and papers and photographs, a cat asleep on a bed, a rocking horse on the landing, a bowl of wrinkled fruit on the scrubbed pine table. Collier is a tall, freckled man, with a voice so soft it sometimes disappears into a whisper (he has a habit of clearing his throat to get it back). You would imagine that he must possess the attributes of a good father - if you didn't know from talking to him that such language is to be avoided, that there really is no such thing.

Collier, whose interest in masculinity and the family started with a PhD on the subject in the early 1990s, is the co-author of Fragmenting Fatherhood, a “socio-legal study” of the changing role of fathers in society. His main focus, not surprisingly considering his chosen discipline, is the law. But the law, he argues, is symbolic: if you look at it closely - how it has changed, how it is debated – you learn a great deal about changes in fatherhood in a more general sense. The last 10 years, he suggests, have seen a revolution, unprecedented shifts in expectations and attitudes, in a man’s rights and responsibilities towards his children. If the book is called Fragmenting Fatherhood, it is because none of this is clear-cut. Just as the law, struggling to make sense of a world order in which conventional marriage is no longer the defining act, is riddled with contradictions, so society itself isn’t quite sure what to make of its male parents. Fatherhood might have undergone a revolution, but it is a messy one.

The book is academic in its intentions, as is Collier. He is touchingly grateful to be visited – “I can't believe you’ve come all this way”, he keeps saying – and has prepared a lecture on the content of the book. Every time I ask a question, he says, “Can I come back to that?” and scribbles himself a note. He is wary of generalisations, and deals meticulously with the connotations of individual words. Once, for example, when discussing the law’s role in divorce, he refers to “the legal arenas where – I hate to use the word – battles take place”. But his approach, his refusal to be pinned down, reflects the subject itself. “It used to be that the father was the person who was married to the mother. The rights were all in one man - the husband, the genetic father, the social father. He had a horizontal relationship to the child through the mother. Now what we see, with the disintegration of the ideal father as the marital father – as a result of such social realities as non-marital births, genetic families spread across households, same-sex couples, assisted reproduction – is a vertical relationship direct to the child, with an increasing tendency to split a bundle of rights and responsibilities between different men”. “Just like Mamma Mia!” – Collier looks up from his notes, confused for a moment, then he roars with laughter. “Yeah ... Oh ... Is it too late to add a footnote to the book? I could have got a quote from Pierce Brosnan”.

What Mamma Mia! can’t give, of course, is a historical perspective. In the 19th century, Collier records, the traditional Victorian father – the figure of authority within the family – had absolute rights within the law. “You go through the 20th century and this begins to change. The welfare of the child becomes a key idea. There is a move to equalise men and women. In the 1950s, the father follows the traditional breadwinner model. There is a clear-cut division of labour between the sexes. You see it in books, movies. By the 1970s, cracks are beginning to appear. The group Families Need Fathers is formed in 1974. The film Kramer vs Kramer (1979) hits a kind of nerve centre of the debate – what does it mean to be a modern father?”

“By the 1980s and 1990s, with cultural changes around masculinity, you get this idea emerging of the new father – not just a breadwinner, but an increasingly hands-on career. An individual who is – or should be – involved in the upbringing of their child. Sociologists have called this “the move from cash to care.” Since the election of 1997 there has been intensive change; an explosion of interest in fatherhood. If the law is important, so is politics. Fatherhood is a political question. We have seen under Labour a social policy shift based on a particular idea of the family – we call it the “new democratic family”. It’s marked by ideas of citizenship, responsibility, equality. The Civil Partnership Act, same-sex relations, work-life balance, paternal leave, limiting working hours, etc. Family law has increasingly encouraged private settlement in divorce, mediation and access, radiating messages about what good conduct is. These years have been marked by an attempt to promote and engage in a father’s agenda. Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg present themselves as modern fathers; they talk about work-life balance. Sociologists have talked about “a transformation of intimacy”.

Can he imagine Brown changing nappies, though? “I couldn’t comment. But that’s it, exactly. It’s misleading to see it as the rise of the new father, as a progressive thing, everything’s fine. Look around us, it isn’t fine. Some would argue that the father has been displaced from the family. Both views are too simplistic. The issue is marked by tensions and contradictions. People write in the press about fatherhood all the time now, but what really strikes me is that you move from a celebration of fatherhood to a devaluing of fatherhood often in the same pages”.

Collier returns to the law to negotiate this opposition: “It is almost as though we have two views of fatherhood in the law – the pessimistic view, if you like: fathers as a social problem – fathers not being responsible, not caring, not changing. You find this in the context of crime and criminal justice as well as popular discourse – youth crime, antisocial behaviour, the underachievement of boys, the whole issue of men and violence. The other view is optimistic. In the context of, say, family law, fathers are seen as embracing change, playing a positive, active role within the family, and law should remove barriers – flexible working hours etc – to allow them to do that”.

The problem for men, he argues, is that both views have the same stem. “The optimist view is saying that what we need is the new father, we don’t want that old authoritarian figure, that is the past. But the pessimistic view sees the problems as arising from the fact that the fathers aren’t authority figures. The law is also divided on whether it sees fathers as in positions of power – you see that, as we have seen, in debates about family violence – or victims. This idea, which grew in the 80s and 90s through movements such as Fathers 4 Justice, finds its focal point in separation and divorce, in the father who “loses everything”, who is “cut off” from their child. One of the things we try to do in the book is rethink this sort of debate. It’s not helpful for example to look at law in terms of the sex war. It’s much more complicated than that”.

Other tensions lie, Collier continues, in men’s identities as fathers in the confusion between their responsibilities as breadwinners and as careers. “We still have strong assumptions about men as family providers – it’s there in the law in certain assumptions about financial provision. At the same time, we talk the language of care, we expect them to be hands on.

On top of this there are changes in the way we relate to children, an increasing focus on the child. Some sociologists would say children take on a different role in society as adult relations become more fragile. Parenting is also happening in different contexts to before. There are different ideas of parenting – some would say parents are subject to surveillance, to scrutiny. You see Frank Furedi’s work in Paranoid Parenting. In short it’s very difficult for men and women to balance work and family life. There are struggles, economic and otherwise”.

Collier, who was born in London in 1961, has lived in the north-east since he was six months old. His own father was the breadwinner in the household and worked shifts in a factory. “I did a project that involved talking to male city lawyers a while ago. And one thing people said again and again was: “I don’t want to be like my father was”. They were distancing themselves from the generation before. I can’t say that about my dad. He was lovely, wonderful, kind. I have lots of wonderful memories.” Collier himself is in a long-term cohabiting relationship, the sort of relationship the law is struggling to come to terms with. He and his partner have one daughter, who is 12 (“the age when anything your dad does is embarrassing”). At the beginning of the interview, he had said, “I think inevitably when we become academics we try to make sense of things in our own lives”. Has he made sense of the kind of father he is? He crumples. “I am a good father. I am a bad father. The only way ... You do the best you can. You struggle. Academia is strange. It’s a funny job. You haven’t got the nine to six thing, but the downside is no turning off. It’s always with you. I have to guard against that”.

“The thing is”, he continues, “there is no one experience of being a father. Mine will be different from the man's down the street. Fatherhood is mediated by age, ethnicity, biography, experience, economics, life course. It will vary over one father's life. I do wonder sometimes if a lot of this debate is about middle-class fathers who live in certain parts of the country. What about vulnerable fathers? Young fathers? Fathers with disabilities? Black ethnic-minority fathers? We need to be careful how we talk about fathers.

“We are not going to see an end to these kinds of conversations and debates. Pick up the Guardian or the Daily Mail in 10 years and they will still be there. Law gives us messages and signals about what the role of the father should be. Our faith in law to solve these problems is misplaced. There are limits to what law or social policy can do. It is about messy human relationships”.

Reading Comprehension Check

1. Provide your commentary on the changing role of father in modern world.

2. Would you approve of fathers-homemakers? What would be the public opinion to

them in your country?

3. In modern Britain employed fathers are now entitled to at least two weeks’ paternity

leave on the birth of their child. Some employers offer longer or more flexible deals

than the legal minimum, but they cannot go below it. How many fathers actually

make use of their paternity leave? (There is no information in the text. Your personal

opinion is required)

4. Do you believe that fathers are better caretakers? Are they capable of juggling their

career and family responsibilities?

Vicious circle

Economic downturns can signal an upturn in domestic violence, as Baroness Scotland warns today

Joan Smith / Saturday 20 December 2008

You don't have to be poor to experience domestic violence. Plenty of middle-class women, and some men, are beaten and humiliated by their partners, but there's growing evidence that the global recession is making people more vulnerable to physical and mental abuse. This isn't because poverty causes violence in itself, but it does create conditions – a sudden change in circumstances, acute financial problems, loss of self-esteem – in which it's likely to take place.

In an interview in the Guardian today, attorney general Baroness Scotland says she believes domestic violence will become more widespread as the recession deepens – which supports reports from the US, where the effects of the sub-prime crisis began to be felt a while ago, putting families under huge levels of stress. A recent report from Florida suggests that domestic violence refuges in Tampa Bay are struggling to cope with an increase in the numbers of women seeking a safe place to stay. One refuge took in 34 women in October this year, twice as many as the same period last year.

Obviously there is no excuse for domestic violence, and many men who suffer a sudden drop in income or lose their jobs don't take it out on their partners and children. But pre-existing abuse is likely to get worse if a man is angry, depressed and spending more time at home because he no longer has a job. Men who feel insecure often abuse their partners and children to make themselves feel less inadequate, as a recent editorial in the British Medical Journal acknowledged. "Violence is used frequently to resolve a crisis of male identity," it observed.

It also pointed out that poverty increases vulnerability by raising the degree of conflict in relationships, diminishing women's economic power and reducing men's ability to lead what they think of as successful lives. Amnesty International, which has run a high-profile campaign against domestic violence around the world, sees poverty and marginalisation as both causes and consequences of violence against women. Poor women in developing countries find it harder to escape abusive situations, get protection from violent partners or redress from the criminal justice system; this is particularly true when women are illiterate, and live in countries where patriarchal attitudes persist among lawyers and judges.

In the developed world, decades of campaigning by organisations such as Refuge mean that the existence of domestic violence is widely acknowledged. But the impact of the recession on already fraught relationships is only just being recognised; as unemployment and job insecurity affects more families, it's depressing but not surprising that women are becoming scapegoats for their partners' feelings of anger and humiliation.

Job losses are being reported daily and men who have lost their own incomes may resent the fact that their partners are still working, even if they're in minimum wage jobs. Or they may drink to blot out their misery, exacerbating financial problems and making violence more likely. As economic forecasts for the next year get worse, the government needs to alert GPs, teachers and social workers to look for signs of abuse in those families hit hardest by the recession.

Reading comprehension Check

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