Campaign by media to bury fathers

For 10 days now there has been a concerted media campaign to bury all fathers with Christopher Crowley

For 10 days now there has been a concerted media campaign to bury all fathers with Christopher Crowley. Almost all coverage has been saturated with anti-father poison and ideological agendas masquerading as concern for child welfare.

The shameless exploitation of the misery of this family for sensationalism and moralising, together with the refusal to face the inconsistencies in the coverage compared to recent episodes in which mothers killed their children, has underlined yet again the urgent need for regulation of the callous monster the Irish media have become.

Even in the more restrained media there were grounds for concern. The double standard relating to fathers and mothers was visible in virtually every report and piece of analysis, right down to the choice of words.

In one of the blackest unconscious ironies I have come across in news reporting, Christopher Crowley was said to have been "holding" his daughter before he killed her. This bleak irony conveyed that, when a father - and only a father - in such circumstance seeks to love his child in the way a father is impelled by nature to do, his embrace becomes a clinch and he a criminal.

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The objective of almost all coverage was to present this case as one in which the potential of the father to endanger his child was not perceived in time. But this very cultural prejudice, with the process it unleashes, was perhaps the chief contributory factor to the deaths of Deirdre and Christopher Crowley.

A society which did not, with its laws and institutions, seek to interfere immorally in the relationships between children and parents would never witness such horrors.

An editorial in this newspaper on the Saturday after the deaths asked whether such events might be avoided if relationships between separated parents were monitored by social workers. It's a fair bet that whoever wrote this never had a social worker come knock on his door.

A friend of mine, a practising social worker, characterises his profession as "the Jesuits of man-hating"; he believes social workers are highly-motivated ideologues, trained to carry out the letter of the feminist agenda.

Here is the core misunderstanding around this issue: that such desperation as occurred in this case arises from conflict in parental relationships, when in fact it arises from the amoral and unjust methods of addressing these conflicts. What the editorial writer was implicitly proposing was more of the approach which all but made inevitable the deaths of Deirdre Crowley and several other children.

The same week as the Crowleys died, an account was published in Magill (of which I am now consulting editor) of how a nine-year-old girl was killed by her drink-driving mother six months after her father had made repeated attempts to persuade his local health board of the urgency of this danger. The board avoided appropriate action. Laura Errity is just as dead as Deirdre Crowley, but our media are too corrupted by ideology to perceive this elementary truth.

Another article in the same edition of the Irish Times, written by Kathyrn Holmquist, suggested that the problem in the Crowley case was that Christopher Crowley had not been "psychiatrically assessed" before being given what is termed "access" to his daughter.

An expert described as "one leading clinical psychologist specialising in child abuse" said: "What seems to have gone wrong is that when the father was granted access, the child was not deemed to be at risk.

"Yet the mental state of the father was obsessive, considering the way he planned the abduction and premeditated the killing, which is evident from the fact he had a gun." This is the kind of nonsense you find in the reports of "expert" witnesses in family proceedings.

When Christopher Crowley obtained "access" (and it appears he saw his daughter by agreement with her mother), there was no evidence of any obsessiveness, nor did he have a gun. The system drives a man over the edge and then says: "There! Didn't we tell you he was dangerous?"

But there was an even more insidious aspect to this so-called expert's ruminations. "In the courts today," he or she was quoted as saying, "when we look at risk, we look at the relationship and love between father and daughter. So a psychiatric assessment was not done." Such an assessment, it was suggested, might have saved Deirdre. So, fathers need to be psychiatrically assessed; mothers do not.

The discussion about family law, such as it has been, has been dominated by the voices of such vested interests, grown fat on the misery of parents and children, seeking to safeguard their own parasitic professions in the name of protecting our children. It is like arms' manufacturers arbitrating in peace talks.

A lawyer on Liveline last week asserted that joint custody was not workable as children needed one primary home. Does a child need one primary home more than he or she needs both parents? Nobody asked.

The truth is that if joint custody became the norm, the family law system would collapse for lack of business as parents would resolve their problems without reference to lawyers and "experts" who would, as a result, have to settle for fewer holidays or smaller swimming pools.

jwaters@irish-times.ie