Criminal fathers

SOMETHING must be done to help distraught mothers who are unable to collect court-ordered maintenance payments from their divorced or estranged husbands. Quite often, these women are unemployed or work in low-paying jobs and depend on maintenance money to take care of their families which may include several children. They become, in fact, victims of another kind of terrorism when the fathers of their children deliberately refuse to obey the order of the courts and there is no proper sytem of enforcing it.

In our view, this kind of delinquency and the suffering that results from it amount to a serious social problem, one that needs to be vigorously addressed. To begin with, the callous neglect of fathers who not only abandon their families but who also fail to provide for the proper care and nurturing of their children, is a crime that is aggravating the basic destabilisation of our society. Tragically, in such dysfunctional circumstances, it is the children who suffer the most, being deprived of the guidance of a father and the amenities and needs for their proper development. Children growing up in such underprivileged conditions and in the knowledge that they have been deserted by their fathers are more likely to develop anti-social attitudes and become problems, repeating the same kind of cruelties, in later life. In this respect, delinquent fathers, refusing to pay court-ordered maintenance, are a menace to our society. The problem, however, is that it is not easy for the authorities to deal with this kind of gross irresponsibility. The difficulties are typically illustrated in the the plight of a Tobago mother whose story was recounted in yesterday's issue of Newsday. On June 6, she went to the magistrate's court and obtained a warrant for the arrest of the father of her child as the only means of getting him to pay court-ordered maintenance amounting to $800. To date, however, the errant father has not been arrested. The police keep telling her that he could not be located. "But the man is working in Scarborough. He is all over town," she claimed. "The child is suffering, and school is opening just now," she lamented.

The fact that there may be scores of mothers all over our country experiencing the same kind of "terrorism" from the fathers of their children must amount to a kind of social crisis. The problem, however, is almost intractable for several reasons, one being the evasiveness of delinquent fathers who hide from the Police. We have even heard of one spiteful father who abandoned his job and remained unemployed in order to avoid the payment of maintenance for his children. Also, it seems that many police officers either regard this kind of delinquency as a minor matter or actually sympathise with the runaway fathers and make no serious attempt to execute the warrants. According to our report, several affected mothers allege that some collusion seems to exist between the offending fathers and police officers assigned to execute the warrants. Whatever the case, our society cannot afford to condone or encourage that kind of damaging irresponsibility. This is a problem that has become endemic in our society and may well be one of the root causes for the disturbing crime situation our country is now experiencing. Men who father children and start families must not be allowed to abandon them without fulfilling their responsibilities to their offspring. Also, children have a right to proper care and security. We demand that the Police take this matter seriously.