I no longer work in the charitable sector and I have long since left the murky world of government family politics and thank heavens say I, as all around us begins the familiar feeding frenzy for new government funding. I had forgotten all about the way in which government funding can cause the most staunch proponents for this or that to switch lanes and if necessary even, swim in the other direction. I had forgotten that those who appear on the outside to be pro shared parenting, can be busily stabbing the very possibility of shared parenting in the back behind the scenes. A la Relate, great winners of government funding to promote collaboration and shared parenting in the last round, who were, at the same time, signing pledges with the coalition against shared parenting that lead to the watering down to almost nothing, of the amendments in the Children Act 1989. As I watch this feeding frenzy begin, knowing as I do that in the charitable sector sitting around the government, it is money that matters most, I wonder whether any of them anywhere will ever get to the place where they really understand why all that money, all those initiatives and all those endless, pointless, steering groups, focus groups, reports, evidence based or otherwise, will only ever end up in exactly the same place. Usually the bin. The reason? The disconnect between the lives those charitable organisations think they are representing and the lives of ordinary people that are really being lived up and down this land. A disconnect so wide that it like living in a parrallel universe. Let the government do what the government does and the charitable sector mirror whatever the government wants to see and hear. It won’t change anything in the real world because the people whose lives are supposed to be changed by all of this, know a secret that those who hold power over them don’t even know exists.
It’s called living.
In the living world people are not divided into good and bad people and men are not born inherently violent and women are not born angels. In the real world, ordinary people get into difficult places and sometimes they fight, sometimes quite violently. This does not automatically mean that the woman is going to be murdered and the man is going to go on and murder every other woman he can get his hands on. In the real world, mothers can be toxic people who inculcate false beliefs in the their children and then run off when the court decides that the child is being harmed and should live mostly with dad. In the real world dads are sometimes fantastic, sometimes hopeless, sometimes prevented from being with their children, sometimes they cannot be bothered with them after separation. In the real world a mother can be good sometimes and pretty useless at others times. In the real world children are precious, vulnerable, strong, angry, helpful, helpless, listened to and not listened to. In the real world, anything can happen and usually does and people do not fit into tick boxes or call standards, or categories or neat little summings up about their behaviours. In the real world people are living lives which are remarkably chaotic and remarkably staid, they face challenges and changes and choose to do what they do with the best tools they can find, where they can find them. Meanwhile in the glass houses of the charitable world, where everyone is ever so busy studying, categorising, projectising, reporting on and focusing on, the lives that they think people live. Anxiety about how to help people out there in the real world runs high. Does that anxiety come from the people they think need help or their own neuroses? Does it come from wanting to help families or wanting to fund their own salaries? Does it come from the heart or from the need to make their margins. Therein lies the disconnect. Therein lies the secret.
Charities sitting around the government are big business – literally so. Their CEO’s are paid more than the Prime Minister in some places and their staff teams are eye wateringly expensive. No wonder then that they have to issue reports that call for more money and, where necessary, reflect back to the government the desperate, dire need to do something about those people who are living ordinary lives. The need to keep big business flowing in the charity sector requires continual crises which need resolving, even though those crises bear little relation to the lives people really live. In the parallel universe where these charities do business, one would be forgiven for thinking that all men are cloaking their emotionally terrorising selves and could at any moment, just like the hooded claw, reveal the truth of who they are. Whilst women are starving and homeless whilst their children walk barefoot in the streets beside them. In this parallel universe, which I sometimes liken to a virtual reality world, the divide between good and bad, positive and negative, men and women is a river which runs like blood between them. It has to. That is how these charities make their money and their margins. By fitting people and the challenges they face into neat boxes with labels on them. If they didn’t how would the government know what to fund?
If only real life were like that.
Government initiatives, however they are configured, funded and delivered, are not the answer because they don’t possess the secret. And the secret is in the relationship. Without a relationship with real people and the real lives that they live, all of the millions that will be poured down the drain by the government will be wasted. And there can be no relationship with real people whilst sitting in a glass house stuffing imaginary people into pre labelled boxes. There will be no change in the outcomes delivered for government by large charities until the fabricated issues, the dreamed up fantasies and the lofty distance is breached by a focus on the relationship between the people served and those who purport to serve them.
I got this in my in box this week from a dad wanting to express all that was wrong with the way he has been treated in a process which has speeded up the alienation of his children from him. It says all that needs to be said.
Do not ostracise a Father from his family, for saying something that could have been avoided with a gentler word. Do not redefine offence so that it can be identified anywhere, even in one’s home, with one’s family, by anyone who chooses on some absent man’s behalf to think it is offensive.
Do not tell me that because I’m a man I cannot have an opinion on how my children,dress, talk, behave and conduct themselves in public.
The one dimensional way that families in our situation are being dealt with is the cause and in turn the reason, behind the fundamental failings in not just this case, but in so many cases of a similar nature. Until there is a more open and broad minded approach adopted and encouraged, not only in the handling of said cases, but also in training and teaching of the Social Workers who deal with them, families such as mine will continue to be failed and neglected by the very system and organisation that has been put in place to help them.
And this, from a mother badly served by a government service run by one of the big charities.
I was treated as if I were a dangerous animal, I half expected to be either locked up or put under house arrest. I felt as if I were a butterfly, pinned to a board and scrutinised, not because of anything I had actually done, but because of what they imagined I must have done. It was the most humiliating experience of my life.
Serving separated families. The secret is in the relationship. If the government wants to do something different, perhaps it is time it invested in building some bridges out of the glass houses and into the real world.
Karen Woodall - Psychotherapist, Writer, Researcher, Trainer 
Reblogged this on The Story of my Twin Boys Oliver and Oscar Ferreira.
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Reblogged this on World4Justice : NOW! Lobby Forum..
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Hi Karen
“The Shared Parenting Consortium” were the somewhat disingenuously christened group that successfully scuppered the passage of the bill through Parliament. The reasons given were utterly spurious and the sudden arrival of new “evidence” from Australia at the 11th hour is a tactic that was successfully engaged by a notorious drug smuggler. New girl, Lisa Nandy pushed the amendments through the commons in a way which was “mistressfull”! She made the more experienced MPs look like a bunch of naughty schoolboys awaiting “correction”.
The consortium was lead by the Coram Centre;
http://www.childrenslegalcentre.com/index.php?page=cooperative_parenting_response
It included the following charities and professional organisations at various times:
Action For Children, Barnado’s, Children’s Rights Alliance, Coram Children’s Legal Centre, Daycare Trust, Family Lives, Family Law Bar Association, Family and Parenting Institute, Gingerbread, NAGALRO, National Children’s Bureau, NSPCC, National Youth Advisory Service, One plus One, Relate, Resolution, Respect, Rights Of Women, Tavistock Centre For Couple Relationships, Women’s Aid, Young Minds UK.
The following academics also lent their names to the various submissions:
Prof. Liz Trinder, Prof. Rosemary Hunter, Joan Hunt, Prof. Anne Barlow, Prof. Nigel Lowe, Dr Rob George, Professor Jane Fortin, Mavis Mclean, Ceridwen Roberts.
According to Gingerbread, as long ago as 2011 fnf teamed up with Gingerbread, Relate, and the Fatherhood Institute to form the “Kids in the Middle” coalition. Gingerbread subsequently used the alliance to add credibility and promote an impression of wide support for their opposition to a presumption in law to shared parenting. This clearly undermines Fnf’s stated support for shared parenting.
http://www.gingerbread.org.uk/file_download.aspx?id=7368
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Yup, that;s it in a nutshell, I wonder how many know the truth of it…that’s called shafting your membership in my view, I have never forgotten it, it is what made me want to leave the charity sector, what made me leave came next, the watering down of all of our work by the DWP to keep the women’s rights groups happy.
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I attended one of these inter charity “focus” groups and I can still remember the shocked look on the Gingerbread members faces as I stated “I do not want to be a Father, I want to be a parent”. The sooner the gender issue is displaced and the heinous (not all) so called charitable institutions stop meddling and supporting/causing/aiding separation of child from parent where it is not needed the better!!
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As an alienated father I do not find this surprising, but sad and frustrating nonetheless.
Recently, I met with my local MP to discuss my terrible experiences with CAMHS, social services and CAFCASS. He was receptive to the idea of promoting the awareness of Parental Alienation, promised to put me in touch with his media team and also to speak with Edward Timpson (Minister for Children) to get current parliamentary view on this topic. In the meantime, he recommended that all those trying to raise awareness of PA and its awful consequences, would do well to join forces and speak with one co-ordinated, influential and effective voice. Could anyone point or recommend such a group/association/person that is gender neutral that could lead the way and to which we could all lend our support? I fear this is the only way we will get heard, and those bridges Karen so eloquently speaks of will stretch out into the real world.
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interesting thought Luke, that there could be a co-ordinated lobbying voice. I have been involved over the past 20 years with various efforts to bring about such a co-ordinated group, there are people who have been lobbying for a long time on this issue who would be interested I think in joining up with others under one umbrella, I would be very happy to put you in touch if you felt it was worth taking somewhere. My experience of lobbying on the matter has been thus far that it is not something that gets very far because the charitable sector around government don’t except PA. Relate for example will not allow their counsellors to use the term PA because it is controversial and could affect women’s rights. Others such as One plus One might accept it but not see it as a serious issue. Tavistock work with PA but don’t call it PA and don’t use standard PA approaches leaving the reunification part of the process untouched. Thus any lobby group would have to be able to a) bring together disparate groups and straddle the differences (mums groups, dads groups, therapy groups, kids groups etc) and b) would have to be able to leap frog over the establishment in the charity sector to circumvent their negativity about it. I would be happy to talk about it though I cannot do much other than support such an initiative from the rear so to speak with case studies and evidence. K
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Hi Karen,
Yes I would be very interested in contacting others who may want to join up under such an umbrella. I appreciate how hard it has been for us all (and continues to be) to get heard, but perhaps with effective leadership and the right membership (men, women, children) all speaking with one voice, we may be able to take it that bit further and reach some sort of tipping point.
If you could put me in touch with the contacts you mention I would be happy to get the ball rolling, and if anyone out else out there knows of suitable contacts, please let me know.
Thanks for your offer of support. It means a lot.
Luke.
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Hi luke, I will do that and will happily join in and support everything you do where I possibly can. K
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Recently turned down a role in the charity sector for the very reasons outlined….just couldn’t be a part of it.
In terms of real lives … they just don’t get it do they?!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Perhaps we should all look to the business sector and rebrand a failed/unrecognised brand (PA) ???
Perhaps take the inspirational Ronseal approach “It does exactly what it says on the tin” …. may I suggest P.P.P. Piss Poor Parenting????
Though that might offend the establishment and do gooder’s etc but hey at least the family might function better when P.P.P is universally acknowledged?
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made me laugh 🙂
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Good, that is the hardest thing to do when you are being put through the mill just to try and be a loving parent 🙂 …. laughter is supposedly the best medicine 🙂
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Men’s rights activist Angry Harry used the metaphor “organism” to explain why government and its various subsets instinctively seeks to preserve itself rather than fix societal problems. I can see his point. In a harmonious society there would be very little for government to do other than maintain the infrastructure.
Sitting round the table, politicians are far removed from the coal face of real relationships. In this parallel universe, important people feel even more important, are compelled to sound authoritative, are inclined towards hubris, derive no satisfaction or reward from fixing problems and keep their own agenda’s tucked firmly up their sleeves.
As US President Ronald Reagan once said, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.
So what is the solution? To find the answer, we need to go to the coal face and look at what ordinary people do. Watch the dumb TV programmes and movies they watch, listen to the satanic music that young people listen to, read the trashy magazines they read and peek at the internet porn that millions are addicted to. This is the poisonous culture that many young people swim in. It is the air they breathe. Government stands back as if it has nothing to do with them. It stands back because it is in the pockets of very rich people. It also stands back because it benefits as society breaks down and more work is created for government to do.
We have been here before. Sir John (Pasha) Glubb wrote an essay titled The Fate of Empires. This concise study of history explains the rise and fall of civilisations and the various stages that they go through. From the information gleaned in this work and other sources it would seem we are almost at the bottom. As we crash and burn the solution will be presented to us, although I doubt anyone will like it.
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