You may have noticed a small notice in the news recently that a protestor threw purple-dyed cornflower at Tony Blair as he was giving a speech in Parliament last week. Glenn Sacks gives us the rest of the story over at ifeminists.net:

The aggrieved father, Ron Davis, and his fellow protester, Guy Harrison, are part of a nonviolent resistance campaign launched by the popular English fathers' rights group Fathers 4 Justice. The group uses purple because purple is the international color of equality. Their purpose is to combat the greatest social injustice in the Anglo-American world today--the way decent, loving fathers are driven out of their children's lives after divorce or separation...

The man in question hadn't seen his daughter for five years, despite promises from Blair earlier this year to investigate the problem.

As the article remarks, we have a similar problem here in the US. Where did we get the idea the father was superfluous to rearing healthy children? All the data I've seen indicates otherwise. It would seem even if we didn't care at all about the concerns of a the father, we should still encourage father/child visitation as being in the best interest of the children.

Sadly, we seem to do the opposite, though I don't know what social theory is being cited to justify that situation.

On the other hand, it seems that courts in Massachusetts are ignoring allegations of abuse when granting access to children:

Researchers interviewed 39 women in 10 of the 12 Massachusetts family court districts. All women had experienced violence from intimate male partners with whom they had children and later battled for their custody.

While the women were chosen based on their dissatisfaction with the court system, Silverman said all possessed documentation of abuse they endured, including police reports, witness affidavits, restraining orders and other things of that nature.

"I think there is a culture (within the court system) that derides these allegations as a tactic in divorce litigation," Silverman said. "They (judges) were judging these documents to be irrelevant. Both judges and court investigators were dismissing multiple violations of restraining orders. It is really shocking," he said.

I agree, but I've also seen undocumented charges of abuse levelled (successfully) as a tactic in custody battle. But the key difference was "undocumented"... I guess in the end, judges do pretty much whatever they want to. Logic, much less the best interests of the child, doesn't seem to always play into it much.