Men are suffering many hardships at the hands of women. These include denying men the chance to see their children when ordered by the courts to do so and setting up to have them beaten by other men.
“Enough is not being said about the responsibility of women or the fact the courts are still skewed – coming back to the fact that the Maintenance Act says only a single woman can go to the lower courts for maintenance. And it said that in exactly in those words,” said Ralph Boyce, chairman of the Men’s Educational Support Association (MESA).
Boyce said a question was asked at a recent discussion on the Maintenance Act. It related to whether a man still had to pay child support after he went to prison.
“The answer was that he did not go to court for non-payment, he went to court “for disobeying the judicial order to pay”.
“You can’t imprison for debt, but you are sending him [to prison] for disobeying the judicial order to pay. And when he comes out he still has to pay although he has not been working while he was imprisoned.
“So there are many hardships that men are suffering at the hands of women,” said Boyce.
While he could not provide any statistics about the number of men who appeared in court for non-payment of maintenance, he said, however, enough was not being said about the responsibility of women.
He said it seemed the woman had a right to punish the man.
“The other thing is that there is no connection right now in the law between a man seeing his children and actually supporting. They have placed me on a Family Law Council and at one point it did not meet for a year, and now it is meeting every other month, and this is supposed to be the agency that should urgently look at amending the law.
“They are working . . . but they are being too slow on it and the law itself puts men at a disadvantage,” Boyce said.
“The other thing that men have reported to me is that the court says that the man must see the child and the woman puts up a lot of excuses: the child is ill, it is not at home. Men have reported that they see another man holding the child.”
Boyce added that in one case a man was beaten when he went to see his child. (JS)
