Kerre Woodham: Look at the man in the mirror

There are plenty of men who have been genuinely poorly treated by the Family Court. Having ovaries does not make a woman a superior parent.

We've seen far too many cases of woefully inadequate parenting from females to believe that women, by virtue of their biology, are somehow inherently superior as caregivers.

Kids need good men in their lives. And women who deny children their fathers after a relationship break-up because they are bitter and angry and vindictive and want everyone else to hurt as badly as they do, are vicious cows who deserve to be ostracised by their children later in life.

However, the nutters who protest outside the homes of Family Court lawyers and judges are doing all good men a grave disservice. Voicing this opinion on radio incurred the wrath of a number of righteous men. I was a "smug, man hateing (sic) feminazi" who was "a f---ing bitch and a dirty slut". I was, in fact, the reason that this particular man had chosen not to have children.

So I suppose we should all be grateful for small mercies that this abusive, illiterate and nasty man has so far not spread his seed. And really. A man "hateing" feminazi AND a slut? Surely it would be one or the other. Silly, silly man. But this is the type of morons the protestors attract. They claim that they are being driven to desperate measures because they have been deprived of access to their children. They argue that any reasonable person would resort to unreasonable actions should they suddenly have their children wrenched from their lives with no hope of ever seeing them in the near future.

I heard many heartbreaking and entirely plausible stories on talkback this week from men who went to work in the morning as husbands, fathers and providers and came home to find they were on their own. No house, no wife, no kids. No wonder the male suicide rate is so high. When your link with the planet is severed, when your raison d'etre is gone, why bother carrying on?

And yet after one particularly moving story from one of the fathers who'd taken part in the protests last weekend, his mother rang in. She told an entirely different story, one in which her son was a control freak who'd made his wife's life misery and who was only interested in his children as pawns in a greater power game. She said he'd brought private prosecutions against herself, his ex-wife and one of the children. He'd recorded every single phone conversation he'd ever had with anyone over the past 15 years and kept the tapes locked away in a room. Then the man's ex-wife rang, and her story corroborated that of her former mother-in-law.

And to cap it all, the secretary of the Union of Fathers rang to say that the protestors did not have the support of the Union. She claimed it was duplicity on the part of the protestors to carry out their actions under the auspices of the organisation.

So, what do we believe? This is the sort of complicated web of hurt and lies and bitterness that the Family Court has to try and unravel every day. Mercifully only 1 to 2 per cent of custodial cases require a Solomon-like ruling. Most couples are able to understand that the children are the most important people in a break-up, and despite their own pain and sorrow, most parents are able to behave like the adults their children need them to be.

But for the hardliners, the court must decide. And maybe it's not the court's fault that the men are no longer in the lives of their children. Maybe it's not because their wives are evil witches and their children's minds have been poisoned against them. Maybe these men weren't born to the worst parents in the world and maybe all lawyers aren't venal bastards or castrating lesbians out to get them. Maybe it's the men themselves who are the problem. And by daring to suggest that, I have no doubt there's a sewer of abuse coming my way.