Cristina Odone, writing for The Telegraph, has taken aim at absent fathers in a piece titled “London riots: Absent fathers have a lot to answer for.” As an American, I fully expected this development, and it is why I knew that trying to score a political point against feminists with the riots was doomed to failure.
Odone is something of a conservative who has been critical of efforts to portray the rioters as members of a disaffected community, but as a devotee of contemporary Christianity she cannot bring herself to view single mothers as anything but hapless victims.
One of the biggest problems men have had in Western society is that they have been sandwiched between two opposing world-views that demand contradictory roles. On the one hand, there is secular liberalism, which advocates for equality of outcome, and on the other there is the conservative Judeo-Christian point of view, which advocates for men taking greater responsibility and having authority over the family. So while the liberals will push to empower women at the expense of men, conservatives will demand that men fulfill their duty as head of household. It’s a catch-22 that your average guy can’t adequately cope with, and this is what’s behind the increasing trend of fatherlessness.
The danger currently facing British men is that linking the riots to fatherlessness will prompt American-style child support laws, which are brutally enforced without regard to circumstances. There will be more talk about how the riots are a result of broken families and mothers on the dole, and people will start to demand that fathers step up and fulfill their responsibility. This responsibility will, naturally, be reduced to cash. Additionally, the laws will be applied evenly across the country, so men in communities that had nothing to do with the rioting will suddenly find themselves facing the same draconian laws meant to solve big city problems.
In a comment on my previous article concerning the London riots, Keyster made the point that the system we have in the US is essentially applied eugenics, and I agree. Unfortunately, it is a very harsh measure that punishes a lot of perfectly innocent people, the overwhelming majority of whom are men. There is something to be said for holding a guy who sires bastards with various women accountable, but the law is just as harsh on men whose wives simply left them to pursue some fancy. So, in practice, the US child support enforcement system punishes both cads and the merely unfortunate. Typically, the unfortunate end up paying more.
Britain will likely see calls for welfare reform emerge as a consequence of the riots, and men will have to be extra vigilant about preventing the burden of funding the legions of single mothers from falling on fathers. It will be a difficult fight, because politicians will find it both expedient and popular to blame fathers, but there are so many unmarried fathers in the UK at this point that with some effort they can be spurred to take political action to prevent this from occurring. First, they will have to argue that having an absent father is no excuse for mass criminality (the logical conclusion people draw from such an opinion is that the absent fathers are therefore the real criminals), and then they will have to demonstrate that men who have more residential time/visitation with their children offer them not only more guidance and stability, but more financial support as well.
A more humane approach to welfare reform in the UK would be to offer all single women under 40 the option of receiving cash for taking Depo-Provera shots on a quarterly basis, and providing more benefits to households where the father lives with the children than otherwise.
