Custoday, Care and Control : Do Men have Rights in Singapore?

Custoday, Care and Control : Do Men have Rights in Singapore?

• In year 2000, Paul loved his six month old son. On many occasions, he played with his son, bathed his son, fed his son, rocked his son to sleep, even when his wife and domestic helper were on hand to do these chores. One would have expected a very happy wife telling all her envious friends how involved Paul was in child rearing.
• To everyone's surprise, the more Paul was involving himself in his son's baby life, the more angry his wife became. The playfulness was too rough and tumble, the bath not clean enough, the feeding method not hygenic enough, -- and the sleep? Well, the bed had not been child proofed to prevent the baby from falling off! Soon, Paul was fighting with his wife.
• When the heat within the matrimonial home shot up, Paul locked himself in the master bedroom to rock his son to sleep in bed without anyone peeping over  his shoulders at his lack of child proofing techniques. He found his wife knocking furiously at the door. When he did not answer the door, his wife called the police! Paul found the policeman demanding that he should unlock his door. It was one year later that Paul proved to the Family Court that he loved his son (one and a half years old by then) and would not endanger his son. So, back then, the young policeman serving his national service could not distinguish fatherly love from motherly hysterics. Paul had to report to the police station to receive a warning about marital violence.
• After another three months of marital strife, Paul came home to find his wife had left him - with maid and son in tow. His frantic telephone calls to his wife's handphone and his in-laws' telephone went unanswered. His appeal to the police constable for help was met with indifference. Fatherly hysterics cut no ice with national servicemen.

In 1988 the Singapore High Court opined that :  "Thousands of years of human experience has shown that young children are always better off with their natural mothers." This was despite the father being a successful businessman and the mother being a dance hostess. This was also despite the Social Welfare Officer recommending that the father should be granted care and control of the child (click here for Young Children). When motherhood is impressed with such legendary qualities, what chance did fathers like Paul have? In the eyes of the young policeman, fathers were like the lion king in the King's Madness, ever ready to devour the lion cub who strays outside the protection of the lioness.

Motherhood was elevated to stratospheric levels when the Family Court enshrined a self defeating idea -- that if ex-spouses were antagonistic towards each other to the extent that they could not co-operate in making joint decisions on the welfare of their children, the Family Court opted for the extreme solution. And the solution was : give the ex-wife sole custody rights to children and remove any opportunity for ex-husbands to have any say in the major decisions relating to religious, educational and childhood development of their children.

The result was that the Family Court handed to ex-wives the perfect incentive to generate as much disputes and animosity as possible with their ex-husbands knowing that they would reap the benefit of sole custody rights. That was the self-defeating idea that led to many fathers being deprived of custody rights over their children. By this self defeating logic, fathers were held hostage to their ex-wives' whim and fancy.

The fallacy of this approach was that it abdicated the role of the Family Court. The Family Court's role was to protect the interests of the children. One would have thought that it was precisely when ex-spouses could not agree on the religious, educational and childhood development of their children, that the Family Court was needed to adjudicate on where the interests of the children might lie. By relying on antagonism to abdicate their role to the ex-wives, the Family Court had deprived children of a measure of protection under the Women's Charter.

Fortunately, this lapse in logic was corrected in May 2005 when the Court of Appeal ruled that antagonism was not a ground for the Family Court to abdicate its responsibility by giving sole custody rights to ex-wives. Instead, joint custody rights over religious, educational and childhood development issues should be the norm.

• Fast forward ten years and Paul and his ex-wife were still fighting. His ex-wife had signed his son up for 18 to 20 hours of enrichment classes. This was in addition to the 30 hours of school. His nine to ten year old son was weighed down by 48 to 50 hours of lessons per week, ie more than an adult's usual weekly working hours!
  
• Paul was able to apply to the Family Court who directed an Evaluation Report to be prepared by a Court officer to help the Court decide whether the extent of enrichment classes was harming his son.

This was possible precisely because Paul was granted joint custody rights with his ex-wife. Had his ex-wife been granted sole custody rights, Paul would not have had any legal right to apply to Court and his son (and the Family Court) would not have the benefit of expert evaluation on his work load.

• But that was not the end of the problem. In that one year, the school teacher contacted Paul a total of ten times about his nine to ten year old son. His son was un-cooperative with his teachers, fought in class, kicked his maternal grandmother and tore up his tuition worksheet. Paul's ex-wife was finding his son uncontrollable. She sent Paul a message to request his help to discipline his son.

Studies by experts highlighted the importance of father's participation in the development of their children. Children grew up more disciplined and with better educational achievement if they received continuous emotional and developmental support from their fathers : click here for Joint or Sole Custody. Paul's case is not an isolated one. Paul's story illustrates how difficult it is for a mother to handle the raging aggression of a growing boy. Studies by the Family Court of delinquent teenage girls show that similar considerations apply to the sulking rebellion of teenage girls.

The 2005 Court of Appeal decision corrected a fallacy relating to custody rights. It did not address the presumption illustrated by the 1988 High Court preference for motherly care and control. Yet, today's experts recognise the importance of fathers in the development of children into well disciplined and productive adults. Like Paul's story, many fathers in today's world are more involved in child rearing - and quite unlike the lion king in the King's Madness. Today's men are more domesticated -- like the lion cub in the King's Madness.

At least one expert has gone further to suggest that care and control should be transferred to fathers so that children will have more of both parents. Dr Warren Farrell was a three term director of National Organisation for Women in New York. After spending over a decade championing women's rights, he came to the conclusion that promoting the interests of women might have had the unforeseen side effect of undermining the family. The result was that more families were divorced, more children raised in broken homes, more men deprived of access rights and more childhood delinquency. He observed that generally, more ex-wives tended to sabotage access by ex-husbands to their children. By comparison, ex-husbands tended to view access by ex-wives to their children favourably. Based on this, Dr Waren Farrell advocated that where access is sabotaged by ex-wives, care and control should be transferred to ex-husbands so that their children might have more of both parents.

Dr Warren Farrell also noted that children from broken families fared better when their natural parents lived near enough to each other such that the children maintained ties with the same school, friends and activities no matter which parent they stayed with. This begs the question whether old studies highlighting the harmful effect of children having to shuttle between parents in alternating care and control arrangement should be re-evaluated. Perhaps, what was harmful was the severance of children's ties with school, friends and activities in large countries like United States where parents might live in different towns or states, rather than the "shuttling" per se.

This is especially significant in a small island like Singapore where everyone is within miles of each other. No matter which parent is given care and control, children can still attend the same school, contact the same friends and continue with the same activities in Singapore. Where the ex-wife is defeating the access Orders, the Family Court in Singapore should be more open to alternating care and control arrangements between parents, if not to outright transfer of care and control to ex-husbands.


Jonathan Lee