Is This Sexual Equality ???
Divorced men doomed to life as a cash machine
Graham Mills divorced his wife Maria 15 years ago
The case of a father forced to increase payments to the woman he divorced 15 years ago highlights the systematic bias of the courts, argues Martin Daubney
When Graham Mills divorced his wife, Maria, 15 years ago she was awarded a £230,000 lump sum and £1,100 a month in maintenance to buy a house and look after their son. Mills, the chairman of a successful surveying company, hoped and believed that would be enough.
Last week, however, he became a “paradigm case” for the reform of Britain’s divorce laws. Maria, a beauty therapist, ploughed the money into a series of failed property ventures and now lives in rented accommodation. Their son is 23.
After a long legal battle the Court of Appeal increased her payments to £1,441, an allowance she will enjoy for the rest of her life. Graham said he was angry and frustrated: “I shouldn’t be held responsible . . . It’s grossly unfair . . . The law is wrong.”
His barrister, Philip Cayford QC, said: “How can a woman in this situation after 15 years expect now to be maintained for the next 50?”
Even the judge deemed Graham “reliable, truthful and frank” while stating he was “less impressed with the wife”.
As a campaigner on men’s issues I have been so moved by stories such as Mills’s that last November I co-founded the Men & Boys Coalition. It’s not only about giving these men a voice: their stories also have profound implications for the next generation.
Mills’s case, like many others, poses an uncomfortable question: have we become so convinced that “to be born male is to be born lucky” that we have lost compassion for men facing tremendous difficulty and injustice during divorce?
It’s often claimed that ex-wives can see their former husbands as cash machines, compounding this by stripping them of the human right of fatherhood. This not only flies in the face of equality but can also cause men to question their desire to live. In the past seven years suicides among men aged 45-49 have risen by 40%.
About a quarter of a million people divorce in Britain every year. Growing calls for reform here resonate with many men who feel that the courts are stacked against them.
Geoff Bailey married a woman 20 years his junior in 1997 and happily provided everything for her and their two children, now 15 and 13, until his divorce in 2010. “I wanted the split to be amicable, having heard so many horror stories about fathers never seeing their children again,” says Bailey, an IT manager.
“So I agreed to pretty much anything she wanted. I bought her a £300,000 home and agreed to a £2,000 per month allowance — for life.
“People forget that men are often just as emotionally devastated from divorce as women. Looking back, I was very naive.
“I’ve come to believe that she only sees me as a source of income. Now I’m due a £150,000 lump sum from my pension and my wife will get a substantial amount of that. I’m really resentful: she is working herself. I had thought about going back to court but the Mills case has frightened me. I could lose even more.”
Scott Trout, chief executive of the men’s divorce specialist Cordell & Cordell, believes the divorce process systematically favours women, especially mothers. “Men face significant challenges in divorce, not only fighting stereotypes on the bench as it relates to custody, but also financially when it comes to spousal support,” he says.
“Many laws offer no guidance as to how long men are required to support an ex-spouse, irrespective of the length of the marriage.”
There are some dissenting voices. Lucy Reed, barrister and chairwoman of the Transparency Project — a charity working to make family law clearer — says it appears that Mills was held to account by an “open-ended” maintenance obligation that he had agreed to, yet later wanted to change. “His case is not typical,” she tells me.
“The decision does not necessarily mean that all wives would be entitled to substantial maintenance many years after their divorce. One can understand his frustration, but the law applies to spouses of either gender in exactly the same way.”
Much of the current imbalance stems from the notorious case of Ray Parlour, a former Arsenal footballer who was forced to make an exorbitant, long-lasting settlement in 2004. The case of Parlour v Parlour set a new standard for wives perhaps uncharitably dubbed “gold-diggers”.
In 2004, upon divorcing Karen, Parlour gave her two mortgage-free houses worth more than £1m, £250,000 in cash and an additional £444,000 a year for five years.
To most people that would be more than enough. But in a surprising ruling, he was further ordered to provide her with a third of all his future earnings.
“My divorce made history,” he tells me. “It was a landmark case — the first where future income came into the equation.”
Child custody battles can be even more emotionally crippling. The Families Need Fathers support group claims that the courts are “systematically biased”.
Since his divorce eight years ago, Ed Wilson, a company director, has been to court more than 45 times to secure visitation rights to his nine-year-old daughter, whom he has not seen in almost three years. This has cost him more than £30,000 in legal fees.
There are men who go from having it all — a beautiful life, home and children — to almost nothing. Yet despite this many people have a deep and problematic “empathy gap” when it comes to these cases.
If sons and daughters see their dads as life’s “losers”, what will it say to them about the modern role of manhood? Could it turn them off marriage — or even becoming a parent — altogether?
By giving these men a voice my organisation does the biggest service of all: we give their children hope. And hope, above all, is what Graham Mills needs today.
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