CHILD ACCESS DENIAL INDEX

One of several specific injustices involving children in divorce and separation has been the widespread failure of judges to enforce their own court orders regarding time together by the children and the "non-custodial" or "non-primary-residence" parent. If that parent should refuse to return them to the other parent as specified in the order, all the powers of the court and its agents (notably police) swing into action, regarding the matter as a child abduction. But if the "residential"/"custodial" parent is the one failing to turn the children over to the other parent as ordered, there are rarely any consequences. At least, this has been the standard pattern for a long time; years of lobbying have brought about some reform, and even laws in a few places (Alberta is now one of them) to give child-access orders some teeth--which they should automatically have had all along.

The reasons behind this injustice are transparent. Overwhelmingly, the "non-primary" parents have been the fathers (see CHILD CUSTODY AND ACCESS); and fathers and children have not been seen as important in each other’s lives, except for faceless financial support. A small minority of mothers have found themselves in the cast-off position designed for fathers, and they have suffered equally, however. The sad fact is, unbalanced power tends to be abused. The ultimate solution for most of these injustices is to maintain equal "custodial" rights and responsibilities for the two parents in the first place. But where the rights and responsibilities are not equal, they should at least be equally protected. This is needed for the sake of both the parents and the children. The purpose of this section of POWER ABUSED is to detail the failures—and, hopefully, the successes—of the system in doing that. The general discussions (labels beginning with A) and individual case studies (labels beginning with B) below are meant to reveal the problem graphically in hopes of spurring all the needed reforms.