I don't want to dwell on the astonishing variety of nonsense and self-contradiction in this article (The Independent, 1/25/09).  It runs the gamut from outrageous to silly.  In between, though, there are some nuggets worth saving.

The writer, Janet Street-Porter, takes on the issue of paternity fraud by telling us that a defrauded man's response is all "about virility."  She moves on to inform us, without support and indeed as a complete non sequitur that "men have become disposable."  If her article can be said to have a main point, it is that "blood" relations to children aren't important; care is.  She doesn't notice that, earlier in her piece she'd said that,

Paternity fraud is a hot issue, with pressure groups such as Fathers for Life campaigning for compulsory DNA testing of children at birth.

So how can paternity fraud be so vital an issue if the biological relationship of father to child is not?  She seems to miss the fact that it is precisely biology that makes paternity fraud fraudulent. 

Into the bargain, essentially everything she refers to Matt Ridley as saying is a stretcher at best.  The fact is that existing hunter-gather societies that have been studied by anthropologists are hardly monogamous.  His claim that women in those societies were (are) monogamous is flat wrong.  And what Street-Porter hoped to prove by bringing hunter-gather cultures, even imaginary ones like Ridley's, into the conversation on contemporary paternity fraud, I haven't the slightest idea.

Now to the nuggets.  One is that the United Kingdom has apparently had a law for many years making it a crime for a woman to not tell the truth to the Child Support Agency about the paternity of her child.  Another is that no mother has ever been charged under it.  That's true despite the fact that some 19% of their paternity "identifications" have been false.

Of course, to bring a criminal action, the crown would have to prove that a woman either knew or had reason to believe that her identification was incorrect.  That almost certainly explains, at least to an extent, the failure to prosecute.  At the same time, if prosecutors never bring an action, how do they know what a woman did or didn't know about the paternity of her child?

The law applies only to women who are giving information to the Child Support Agency.  That means that they're trying to find the right men to tag with child support.  So it's mostly about single women, not married ones.  And by criminalizing false information about paternity, the law suggests that finding the right father matters.  The failure to prosecute, on the other hand, suggests that it doesn't really matter; pretty much any guy will do.  The main purpose of the law is to connect each child not with its father, but with a male source of funding.

Thanks to Patrick for the heads-up. 

This entry was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2009 at 7:27 pm and is filed under Paternity Fraud, Paternity Issues. You can trackback from your own site.