Paternity fraud has become the rallying cry of the Fathers’ Rights Movement. Utilising the radical feminist insight of the 1960s that the personal is political, Fathers’ Rights activists have seized on the experience of a small group of men, who discover through genetic testing that they are biologically unrelated to the children they are parenting, as a paradigm through which we should understand the power balance between the sexes on critical issues of sexuality, reproduction, marriage and divorce. Denied, deceived, humiliated, cheated and used: paternity ‘defrauded’ dads are poster-children for how the Fathers’ Rights Movement sees men in the post-patriarchal world. They are the cause célèbre for men who feel disempowered by current social and legal norms and practice concerning marriage, divorce, sex and reproduction, and want to reassert control.
At the heart of the paternity fraud story are radical—though poorly understood—changes to law and practice governing child support and access arrangements after divorce. The 1970s saw a steep rise in divorce rates and numbers of single women opting to keep their children rather than adopt them out. By 1988 the growth in households headed by single mothers had left large numbers of children living in poverty and the government with a spiralling welfare bill.
Enter the Child Support (Assessment) Act and the Child Support Agency, whose role it was to use freshly minted DNA testing technology to match every child to its biological father’s wallet, thereby ending what one family law specialist called the ‘happy-go-lucky days’ when Australian men could boast that they didn’t even know how many children they had. With power to deduct payments from men’s wages and via the tax system, the Child Support Agency also ended the optional nature of child-support payments by divorced dads. At the heart of the Act was a radical reconfiguration of how Australian society defined fatherhood. With the stroke of a pen—and with only the best interests of ‘taxpayers’ in mind—lawmakers had transformed the age-old definition of father as the mother’s husband to the man whose sperm was implicated in conception. The only exceptions are state and federal laws that exempt sperm donors from the legal rights and responsibilities of parenthood, and allocate it instead to the husband of the woman undertaking IVF.
Cases of misattributed biological paternity—where a man is shown to be biologically unrelated to the child he parents—are an artefact of DNA testing and the new legal