Child Support, Divorce, Custody, Access and Government Policies: A Gender-Based Analysis

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

“I am often asked why, as a happily married, never divorced father,
never having paid or received child support, I work on issues of custody
and access. I must give a complex answer. My experiences in advising
many individual cases of single custodial and non-custodial fathers have
lead me to track down existing research and examine government analysis.
Much of the research is good. The analysis is often biased or
incomplete, closer to myth than reality. The policy which results is
based more on mythology or ideology than practicality.”

This poorly written, poorly edited, and poorly researched self-help
book for men who are fighting child-custody battles is primarily a
vehicle for its author to make sweeping negative statements about people
and policies he does not agree with. For example, on page 48 he writes:
“In the family, women are as abusive as men and getting more violent.
... A survey of couples in Calgary, Alberta found that severe
husband-to-wife violence was 4.8% while severe wife-to-husband violence
was 10%.” Typically, the author does not mention the context of the
survey or whether it has any scientific credibility. Furthermore,
unsubstantiated statistics and spelling errors appear frequently
throughout the book.

Quite possibly there are some males who have received raw deals from
Canadian family courts. This book will not help them.