ONE September afternoon, a painter and decorator from Cheltenham in an ill-fitting nylon Batman suit climbed on to the façade of Buckingham Palace, demanding that the courts enforce his rights to see two children he had not seen for five years. Nine months later, Jason Hatch won regular access to the children. Today he believes that the stunt, which prompted a royal security review and established Fathers 4 Justice as one of the oddest protest movements of modern times, paid off.
“For 4½ years I had been getting nowhere at all. When I climbed Buckingham Palace judges were starting to come round to us,” he said. “They are beginning to understand we have feelings too and love the children as much as the mothers do.”
Fathers 4 Justice, which disbanded this week after extremist members reportedly plotted to kidnap Tony Blair’s five-year-old son, were amateurish, angry and extremely annoying. But when historians look back on British society at the start of the third millennium they will accord a small but important chapter to the men in tights: Spiderman climbed Tower Bridge causing gridlock below, Santa Claus closed the Severn crossing, and two men hurled a powder-filled condom at Mr Blair in the Commons.
The caped crusaders succeeded in turning the issue of fathers’ rights from a lost cause into the mother of all battles. Whether this has ultimately benefited divorced and separated fathers is another matter.
Fathers 4 Justice followed the trajectory of many radical, direct-action protest groups. Not for nothing did they call themselves the Suffragents. The cause was not comparable, but like the suffrage campaigners of a century ago, F 4 J used modern shock tactics, provoked widespread public disapproval and suffered bitter internal divisions while drawing attention to genuine injustice.
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Superman, Batman and the others were not superheroes. Many were embroiled in ugly custody battles; some of F 4 J’s antics were more aggressive than amusing. Some members had unsavoury pasts and a few had criminal records. Yet to some extent, F 4 J caught the spirit of the times: they reflected the Zeitgeist, and they changed it.
There is widespread recognition that F 4 J has put fatherhood firmly at the top of the media, legislative and political agenda, but it is also clear that they did not achieve the legal reforms they wanted.
The group was founded three years ago and clambered on to the battlements of public awareness at precisely the moment that modern fatherhood was emerging as a big cultural concern. Mr Blair had become the first new dad in Downing Street since Lord John Russell in the 1850s. Not to be outdone, Gordon Brown will raise the stakes by producing a second bairn in office. David Cameron will shortly become a father for the third time.
Then there was the spectacle of David Blunkett, resigning not over an adulterous affair but over his right to care for the child it had produced. This was not merely a population blip with politicians, like other professionals, having children later. Something had shifted. Fathers were already becoming increasingly involved with their children’s lives and demanding that they be listened to, in what will come to be seen as one of the biggest transformations in contemporary society.
Politicians were becoming fathers at an unprecedented rate, but the issue of fatherhood itself lacked a political voice. Into this vacuum stepped F 4 J, ready to take up the cause on the public stage by pulling a series of attention-grabbing stunts, ranging from the merely irritating to the reckless. In October 2003, Dave Chick (who was not a member of F 4 J, but was supported by the group) clambered up a crane next to Tower Bridge while dressed as Spiderman to highlight his battle to get court orders enforced granting him access to his daughter. He spent six days 145ft up the crane and was accused of costing the taxpayer £5 million in snarled traffic and policing. In December 2004 contact with his daughter was resumed after 21 months.
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“It has taken me risking my life and limb to get something done,” he said.
But as one might expect of an issue so fraught with emotion and conflict, the F 4 J story offers few simple happy endings. Ron Davis was one of two fathers who pelted the Prime Minister with purple flour bombs during Prime Minister’s Questions in May 2004, sparking a national security outcry. Mr Davis, from Worthing, West Sussex, was charged with a public order offence and fined. He has still not seen his daughter since 1998 and has had two brief meetings with his son in the past five years.
“Fathers 4 Justice may not have achieved all it wanted to but there aren’t many people in the country now who don’t know or haven’t heard of Fathers 4 Justice or what we campaign about,” he said.
The genius of the movement, founded in 2003 by Matt O’Connor, a divorced father, lay partly in its very silliness. The sight of grown men humiliating themselves as cartoon characters for the sake of their children somehow detracted from the blokeish militancy.
The protests were widely derided, but also, more quietly, applauded. That ambivalence perhaps reached as far as Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, the president of the High Court Family Division, who said that she would not meet F 4 J members until they stopped their antics. (At one point, a group of militants reportedly planned to snatch a dog belonging to Dame Elizabeth, because she was regarded as upholding laws biased against men.) Yet she also seemed to concede that the protesters had a point, when she admitted that the present family court system was open to valid criticism.
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Jim Parton, of Families Need Fathers, which has campaigned peaceably for fathers’ rights for more than 30 years, conceded that F 4 J had “managed to get people talking about fathers in a way that had not happened before”. “Fathers were always on the back-burner until this group came along. We do not advocate direct action, but it is hard to disapprove of it because it very clearly works,” he said.
F 4 J sank as swiftly as it rose. In an organisation almost entirely peopled by bitter men, clashes led to splits and when the divorce came through it was accompanied by allegations of theft, drunken brawling and sexism. Last June, a breakaway group formed, Real Fathers 4 Justice.
The language of the break-up was reminiscent of every other political protest movement that has split between militants and moderates, from CND and the direct-action Committee of 100 to the Provisional IRA and the Real IRA, after which Real Fathers 4 Justice was plainly (and rather grimly) named.
Mr O’Connor believes that his organisation laid the foundations for radical changes. “We created awareness and stimulated debate about the institutionalised discrimination against fathers in the legal system. But we didn’t get the law changed,” he said. “What we have done is climate change. The debate has started.”
Jack O’Sullivan of Fathers Direct, the fatherhood information charity, points out that the issue of fatherhood presents huge political possibilities. “Now that the extremists have gone, there is a big space again. This is a huge opportunity for someone.”
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As Anthony Douglas, the chief executive of the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, puts it: “Family relationships are moving on even faster than F 4 J and all of us working with families are trying to catch up. The role of men is also changing fast and chaotically and F 4 J was another small window opening out on that.”
For all the flaws within F 4 J, the issue of fatherhood rights and responsibilities has a currency that would have been unimaginable three years ago. That is some achievement for a protest movement whose most enduring symbol is a chubby dad in a Batman suit balancing on a window ledge.
PAST CAMPAIGNS
1950s Anti-nuclear
The CND was formed in 1958 amid widespread fears in Europe of nuclear conflict.
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Outcome Britain has not given up its nuclear weapons
1960s Anti-apartheid
The British anti-apartheid movement began when South African exiles and their supporters began a campaign to boycott South African goods on June 26, 1959
Outcome Nelson Mandela released from jail after 27 years and became President in 1994
1970s Feminism
The first National Women’s Liberation Conference was held in 1971
Outcome Successes include the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act and the 1976 Domestic Violence Act
1980s The miners The National Coal Board announced pit closures in 1984. The miners’ strike ended a year later
Outcome Pit closures in 1992 meant thousands of miners lost their jobs
1990s Poll tax and anti-globalisation The decade began with the poll tax revolt, and ended with a new breed of activists turning their attention to capitalism
Outcome Margaret Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister in November 1990. Anti-globalisation protests continue