A leading women and girls’ advocate has condemned comments made by a male counterpart that the judicial system makes it difficult for fathers to maintain relationships with their children.
Dr Marsha Hinds Myrie has deemed as “highly irresponsible and inaccurate” statements made by social worker Fabian Sargeant, the head of the Men’s Empowerment Network Support (MENS), that the difficulties men encounter in accessing their children are primarily due to legal battles and systemic issues.
She challenged the notion that the issues plaguing the courts are gender-specific, blaming systemic dysfunctionality touching all genders.
Dr Hinds Myrie told Barbados TODAY: “I think it was Errol Barrow many moons ago who advocated to Black people in Barbados that if they wanted justice, they should stay out of the law courts of Barbados. The law courts in Barbados don’t work in a number of ways, but I can assure you that [they are] not gendered, non-functioning. What I mean by that is that the very issues that were outlined as the issues men face with the courts in Barbados, women also face.
“I don’t think it is a secret in Barbados that there are women who go through financial abuse perpetrated by the State because they’re owed large sums of maintenance monies for children that are not paid into the court or sometimes paid into the court and not redistributed.”
The former head of the National Organisation of Women cited perennial issues, including the inability of mothers to get access to their children and situations where court decisions had dire consequences.
Dr Hinds Myrie further called for a closer look at research, numbers, and experiences, suggesting that assertions regarding mental health fallout and unadjudicated cases were also the lot of women who faced similar challenges, some of whom were living in severe poverty due to lack of support.
“There are several women across Barbados who live under severe and extreme poverty because they are not being supported. If they go to welfare for support, they’re being told to go to the father of the children and this kind of thing,” she said.
Recalling a long-standing promise of a specialised family court since 1996 which has not yet materialised, the activist blamed the lack of political will to address issues affecting families in Barbados.
She declared: “We want to make monuments to families but we don’t have the institutional support that families in Barbados need to thrive and to survive. Let me also say that access and maintenance are the rights of children, they’re not the rights of fathers and they’re not the rights of mothers. Every child under the Convention of the Rights of the Child, and the Human Rights Convention more broadly, has a right to be protected, supported and bonded with both its mother and its father. There is a condition associated with the right though, and that is that the child must come under no harm. No harm must be done to the child when the child is exercising those rights.
“And so, the problem in Barbados is that there is a lacuna in the law…. Although you have access and maintenance, which are rights of the child, in cases that are characterised by intimate partner violence, in the case where there’s violence being perpetrated against the mother of the child – and in many circumstances, the child itself – all the law is silent on how the child is supposed to exercise its right to access safely,” Dr Hinds Myrie added.
Drawing attention to international practices, she criticised the lack of adequate child protection measures, including the absence of supervised access facilities for individuals escaping violent relationships.
“In other jurisdictions, what you have is that the institution responsible for child protection, child care… set up centres, for example, where individuals whose relationships are characterised by violence, they can undergo therapy but they can also get supervised access to children. Whenever this issue comes up in Barbados, the most that we will hear is that childcare officers don’t work on the weekend.
“So it leaves, in some cases, women who have run from situations of violence to then have to go back and take a child or negotiate [the] movement of a child with their abuser. And that is not best practice, because many women die or get further hurt in those situations. So the issue is not an issue that women create. There is also unsafety in it for women as well. And that is why I think the comments were very emotive, but not based in fact or reality.”
Sargeant had said he observed a decline in men’s mental health and ability to function, blaming the judicial system for complicating the challenges fathers face in maintaining relationships with their children. He noted instances where court orders regarding visitation rights were not upheld by the mothers, leaving men frustrated.
“Some of these men go to court and are given orders. Part of the order says they’re supposed to see the children during the weekend or whatever, but when they do go to access it is always an excuse or problem. In most of the situations that we see, men end up on the negative side,” he said. “They experience issues where a lot of mothers are breaking the orders and nothing is being done.”
