The best interests of the child are said to be the compass. But who answers for the lost years, the missed holidays, the financial and psychological exhaustion of a father who is only fighting to see his children?
The best interests of the child are said to be the supreme principle that must guide every decision concerning children. But if they really are the compass… who answers for the years of deprivation? Who answers for a child who grew up away from one of his parents? For the holidays gone by, the missed birthdays, the school successes that were never shared, the illnesses, fears, joys and sorrows lived without one of his parents? Who answers for years that can never be recovered?
Financial… and psychological exhaustion
Very often the father does not just lose daily contact with his children: he enters a long path of material and moral exhaustion. Lawyers' fees, bailiffs' fees, travel, enforcement, complaints, inquiries, endless trips between courts, administrations and police stations… years of effort and expense to preserve a natural right: seeing one's children and taking part in their upbringing.
But the most serious exhaustion is not material. It is psychological and human. How can one live for years without knowing how one's children are? How they study, how they live, whether they are well, whether they need him, whether they still remember him?
A question for society, not a private dispute
The effects of this deprivation do not stop at the father and the child: they touch the whole of society. A father who spends years in the courts loses part of his concentration, his stability and his ability to be productive; his suffering spills over into his professional and social life and into his health. When thousands of fathers are worn down by long conflicts over a right as basic as the bond with their children, it is no longer a private family matter: it is an issue of family stability, economic productivity and social cohesion. Protecting the relationship between a child and both of his parents is an investment in a balanced family and a more stable society.
All the duties… without the rights
How can a father protect, guide and support his children when he is forcibly absent from their daily lives? How can he follow their schooling, detect psychological distress, protect them from neglect or from dropping out? And if the father is deprived of his educational role, sometimes even of the most basic information about his children, why does he go on shouldering every duty of fatherhood while being prevented from exercising a large part of his parental rights and responsibilities? Are the child's best interests served when one parent becomes a mere funder, far from his life?
And conversely: why is non-payment of maintenance treated with swift coercive and enforcement measures, when depriving a child of the bond with a parent can go on for years without comparable protection? Maintenance is a right of the child; is the relationship with his father and mother not one too? And when a refusal to hand over the child or an obstruction of court orders has been judicially established, why is the child's situation not assessed immediately, with provisional measures to restore balance to his family life?
What we propose
Recent international experience shows it: a child does not need a winner and a loser after divorce, nor the exclusion of a parent, nor an endless legal battle. He needs a father and a mother together, and a legal system that protects this right as effectively as it protects his other rights. We call for an approach based on:
- shared parental responsibility;
- shared custody when it is in the child's interests;
- joint legal guardianship;
- the involvement of child psychiatrists and child psychologists in every family case that shapes the child's future;
- the creation of a specialised emergency family court that takes into account the child's psychological and emotional time.
The best interests of the child are not the victory of man over woman or of woman over man: they are the victory of the child. And because a childhood lost among the courts can never be recovered, one question remains: if the child is at the heart of legal protection, how can depriving him of a parent for years fall within his best interests?