The odious self-pity of Khyra Ishaq’s father cannot obscure the paternal duty that men like him have taken on

I am sorry to take you back to the terrible story of Khyra Ishaq, who died of starvation aged 7 alongside five equally tormented siblings. Her mother and the boyfriend pleaded diminished responsibility, and stand convicted of manslaughter.

Birmingham social workers are examining their failure, neighbours wishing they had intervened. But there is one aspect of this — and other tragedies — too often ignored, perhaps out of delicacy. I want to rip that kindly veil aside for once.

The cruelty and craziness of the two resident adults is terrible, the failure of social work a disgrace. But there is another figure associated with this criminal killing: Khyra Ishaq had a natural father, alive and healthy and fully aware of her existence. His name was Delroy Francis, altered on conversion to Ishaq Abu-Zaire. And his reaction was to bluster about being “let down by the authorities” and threatening “repercussions”.

After the trial he said “it’s been a difficult experience . . . I haven’t seen the pictures, personally, I couldn’t look at them”. Only once did he say that “maybe” he let his children down: the overriding tone is self-pity and blame.

It is something new, this grandstanding by natural fathers in cases where a child has been killed, slowly, over months or years, by a mother and stepfather. Last year we had the father of Baby Peter making a demand for £200,000 “compensation” from Haringey Council for not saving his son, who he actually saw a few days before his death. He blames an overworked public service for being duped by the mother — a woman he once lived with and should know well — and a paediatrician for not noticing the injuries. Yet somehow he does not blame himself for being duped and astonishingly unobservant of his own baby. As for Ishaq Abu-Zaire, he appears to feel that the natural and ancient duties of paternity could be delegated to an unbalanced acquaintance and Birmingham social services, while he swanned off to live in Spain. He had not seen his children for more than a year and says that he knew nothing about the way they were treated.

There is a message to be delivered to men, and it may not be popular. We hear a lot about the injustices visited on fathers over divorce and access: for the record, I am largely on their side and dislike the thoughtless and sentimental favouring of mothers in residency disputes. We also hear a bit about the flailing ineffectiveness of the former Child Support Agency. What we do not often hear is the bald, uncompromising truth that if you father a child, you set up a non-negotiable duty.

Sorry, men, but it really is so. We may live in a shag-happy porno culture, where flings and “hotties” and zipless one-nighters are seen as the norm; we may be liberal about divorce, stepfamilies and serial cohabitation. Some of this is good, some of it bad. But none of it negates biology, or the entry-level ethical fact that when a sexual act creates a human child, that child is as much of a moral burden to its father as to its mother. Unless it is a matter of sperm donation or formal adoption with a clear contract, the man has, at the very least, a duty to monitor the child’s physical safety.

Life is not perfect, and that responsibility may be cruelly hard to carry out. It may be that you never wanted a child and were let down by contraceptive technology or “duped” by the woman. Well, tough. You were there at the conception, you took that risk like a man, so take the consequences. It may be that the mother abandoned you, taking your children, or that you found a new love and needed for mere sanity to move on. It may be that you want to see your child, but the mother puts spiteful barriers in the way; it may be that a stepfather seems to usurp you.

That’s hard, often very unfair. But it doesn’t let you off the basic duty to know that your child is safe.

If the door is barred against you and your letters returned, you have to persevere, using the law if necessary. If you are under suspicion, and only allowed supervised access in a room with a social worker, it is still your duty to accept that humiliation in order to check on the child. If for some reason all this is impossible, the least you can do is to maintain contact with neighbours, grandparents, friends of friends, schools.

Ask the questions. If the child rejects you, angry at its situation or indoctrinated by the mother, once again, tough: you are still the adult so you are not entitled to take umbrage and turn away. You have to insist on your right to know that things are, at least, not physically dangerous. There will always be sudden child killings, out of the blue, but at least you can make sure it is not a long, slow one.

Some estranged fathers do just that, accepting the bond despite all difficulties and aware that a mother’s boyfriend is — according to a criminological survey — 100 times more likely to harm a child than a natural father. A few years ago Courtney Crockett was killed by such a man; it was reported that the natural father anxiously phoned social services days before she died to report bruising. The social worker didn’t ring back: but the father tried. Good for him. Fathers should be protectors. The system doesn’t make it easy for them, and our drippy post-feminist culture prefers to think of men in a family context as part threat, part financial resource.

Most mothers do their best but some are weak, depressed, drugged, or just lovelorn and intimidated by violent boyfriends. Children deserve a progenitor, on their case even if he has to be physically distant.

And yes, men who turn aside from this duty should be looked at askance, stigmatised as dishonest weaklings. Not excused as “babyfathers” or written off as mistakes. If you can’t face the potential responsibility of fatherhood, then get a vasectomy or stay home with a pile of porn mags and a rubber doll. For all our breezy liberalism, sex is more than a game. It is a fount of new, slow-growing, vulnerable human lives.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/libby_purves/article7044594.ece

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