Mothers and Fathers on the Line in High Profile Custody Disputes

Mothers and Fathers on the Line in High Profile Custody Disputes

Principal speaker

Professor Vivienne Elizabeth

Custody disputes involving child abductions are extraordinary versions of ‘commonplace stories’ (Rhoades 2002, 73). Arguably, it is their extraordinary character that makes custody abductions such fertile ground for media coverage. Yet the media treatment of custody abductions also grows out of and plays into more general debates over the issue of custody.

Partly as a consequence of a global father’s rights movement, (separated) fathers have been valorized and defined as central to the well-being of children. For this reason, contact between separated fathers and their children is almost inevitably thought to be in a child’s best interests.

In contrast, separated mothers have found themselves demonized and vulnerable to being constructed as ‘implacably hostile’ should they be seen to be undermining the relationships between a biological father and his children.

Drawing on the analysis of two high profile custody abductions in Aotearoa/New Zealand in the mid-2000s, I argue that media constructions of these events simultaneously expressed and furthered the interests of fathers’ rights groups. The fathers at the center of each case were defined as basically good family men who were grappling in various ways with the loss of their children, while the mothers were constructed as the agents of this loss: it was their actions that put the paternal bond in jeopardy.

Thus, I suggest that these fathers operated as poster boys for the fathers’ rights movement; these men exemplified the fathers’ rights version of the good post-separation father.

Bio:

Vivienne Elizabeth is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Auckland. She teaches at both graduate and post-graduate level on gender and violence. Her research interests include gendered identities, gendered violence and familial relationships. In addition, she has been the convenor of an academic women’s writing group, which meshes with her interest in academic identities and practices.


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