Fathers, trafficking and the importance of marriage

In 2008, Parliament removed a child’s need for a father from fertility law. Clinics had been required to consider “the need of that child for a father”. The amendment that struck it out runs to a single line. It reads, “for ‘a father’ substitute ‘supportive parenting’”. Parliament intentionally said fathers are optional. And the one arrangement that works best to keep a father in his children's house – real marriage – was left to fend for itself.

Patrick Erlandson has built an organisation around challenging that lie. He runs Father-Con in Los Angeles, and the name is the argument. “We wanted to take on the ‘con’: The lie that fathers don’t matter. They do!” He got there sideways, through eight years working to stop the trafficking of children in Long Beach, California, and he sat down with me to explain it. Watch the first half of our conversation here.

What he found was father absence doing the damage at both ends of the same trade. He lost count, he says, of the trafficked girls who told him the same thing: “I never felt that I was worthy to be loved, because I didn’t have a dad present in my life, or he was abusive”. In the worst cases, the father was the trafficker.

Then there are the boys who grow into the buyers. Boys, he says, are “being groomed to be victimisers, as opposed to the girls that are being groomed to accept being victimised”. And the lesson a boy needs most is one that only a married father teaches at close range. “If you do not have a father who’s demonstrating a love for his wife that boys can see, well, then they’re getting their lessons from porn or from their friends”. Pornography teaches the one thing that makes a buyer. “Nothing feeds entitlement like pornography, because I have no obligation to this person that I’m watching”, he says.

Britain is not watching this from a safe distance. On 11 July, the Centre for Social Justice published From Boy to Man, the latest report in its Lost Boys series. It reported: “2.5 million children in the UK have no father figure at home, representing one in five of all dependent children.” Among those in its polling living most comfortably, the report found marriage mattered more than a degree.

The same report states what works, and the order matters. Finish school, get a full-time job, get married, then have children. Men who did it in that order were more than twice as likely to say they were living comfortably or doing alright - 69 per cent against 28 per cent. Marriage comes third on that list, and it comes before the children. It is the promise that keeps their father at the table.

We have argued this for years and been told it is nostalgia – but that doesn’t mean you can’t have it again. Marriage is open to every couple in this country today, and everything it protects comes with it. A child does not need supportive parenting in the abstract. She needs her own father, in her own house, on each ordinary day.

So please watch Patrick make the case and send it to one man (or woman!) who needs it – a son or a friend who has been told often that dads are expendable. They are not. Next Saturday, we will send you the second half, on fathers and daughters.