To think that men who evade paying for their children are a burden on society?

Op I agree based on a mini survey of one, my brother. He got multiple women pregnant, yes their responsibilities too but I imagine he was.... Well...

Then when one decided to keep the child he didn't pay or even put a single penny aside for him.
Infact moaned that one day he would want money 🙄🙄😱🤔😡😡👿 utterly feckless.

But ifnits resulted in a pregnancy neither of them has 'kept it in their pants'. So neither of them should be able to shirk their responsibility.

I'm not talking about violence, I'm talking about feckless reproduction, child neglect and abuse, fraud, etc.

Women have the final say about the conditions into which their offspring are born, if they are born at all.

@PassingStranger there's a thought often posted on here that many men are really mostly invested in keeping the woman they are sleeping with happy, so, especially if the man has a new family, he will prioritise them. Kids are seen as an extension of the woman so if he detached from her he detached from them. Certainly sounds about right for my ex anyway!

Don't know why people don't want to pay.
They would be paying if they were still together. What's changed. The child still needs to be kept.. Weird.

In the UK 85% of single parent households are headed by women. Which I think is plenty enough to justify focusing the discussion on male behaviour without us having to pretend it's an issue with both sexes.

Totally agree. No political will and no real consequences if they don't. If you dont tax your car there are penalties. The onus is on the driver to make sure they are doing what they should be doing. If there were the same penalties for men who didn't declare children to the tax man and make arrangements with their employer for a part of their wage to divert to their child's mother, I think more men would pay.

There are so many men who threaten to apply for full custody so that the woman is too scared to rock the boat by asking for a higher contribution. There are so many men who are self employed, earning loads for their business account but paying themselves a small wage so that they only have to pay a minimal fee to the resident parent. There are so many men who say "well, you'll get less if you go through CMS". There are so many men who use the payments as a way if controlling their ex "yes of course I'll pay... oh, somethings come up, you can have half now and half in 6 weeks". So many men, so many tactics, and every time it is commented on that perhaps this isn't the best way to be treating your children, it is always "not all men" or "women do that too".

Why does your utopia have anti-social behaviour, murder, rape, sexual violence and taxes?

It’s mainly men though! That’s just a fact.

Oh bugger off with such rubbish. The threat of women’s violence rarely requires the level of policing that my local football club buys in most Saturdays.

And we’ve heard (on BBCRadio 4 Today programme) that the football clubs have never paid the full cost of this. That the threat of male football violence costs us taxpayers and Council tax payers millions every Saturday.

That’s before we get to the stats on male violence, male perpetrated sexual assault and what so many PPs here know about: the deadbeat non-dads who decide they don’t have to pay for their children.

Im sick of paying for all that.

tax all men an extra 1% to cover the stupid feckless men. I’d bet that within a generation the social pressure would change men’s behaviour.

Oh have a day off with the "women do it too" crap. Its tedious.

Well said @RhaenysRocks !!

There's been a lot of comment on here about feckless people on both sexes having children without real commitment and lots of blaming women for not choosing better. These threads always go the same way, with whatabboutery abounding. The OP asked specifically about men who fail to pay which, statistically is by far, 95-99% the biggest group and not all absent fathers were random or short term relationships. Plenty of us on here were in relationships of years or decades, married, even went through IVF at the man's urging only to STILL be left a few years down the line because the reality of family life and parenting was too much of a chore. All the MRA apologies on here should be ashamed of themselves and ho and start their own thread instead of trying to undermine this discussion.

So why is the CMS not using its powers? Is it heavily infiltrated by MRAs or deadbeat dads?

@Miaowzabella there's just no political will for them to do so. They're massively understaffed.

So the priority ends up being doing the 5 cases where you can get an agreement set up or a payment made, which means the 3 really difficult cases just get shunted aside repeatedly.

There's also a constant air of not being too difficult. I got told off for being "too aggressive" by refusing a man an extension. He'd been dodging payment for four years, but he asked for another month. In my quality check I was told I was too aggressive. My manner was fine, I followed the rules and everything, but I should apparently have given the extension because he asked...

How about you go and look up that stats and come back to us on that on 🙄

That should absolutely not be allowed. Let them fund their pensions with what's left over AFTER supporting their vulnerable minor offspring.

Women perpetrate a lot of abuse and antisocial behaviour, too.

So why is the CMS not using its powers? Is it heavily infiltrated by MRAs or deadbeat dads?

Yep. Just had a mandatory reconsideration reducing my payments after ex decided to lump more into his pension whilst I had to opt out of mine as I need every penny I earn to pay for a roof over our heads. To be fair took him years to catch onto that one, dummy.

The very fact that there is even a need for CMS to pursue these men or even for child support to be a thing is a problem in itself. When separated parents co-parent their children the way they should (ie 50/50) there is no need to pay child support as both parents are providing equally for their child during the time they have them in their care. That means food, clothes, bills, childcare, all properly split.
My ex brother in law pays no child support to my sister because he cares for my nieces properly 50/50. That includes paying for any childcare that’s needed on the days he has them.
If a parent is not prepared to commit to that level of responsibility regardless of how the relationship with the other parent might work out then they shouldn’t be a parent.
But yes. Since we don’t live in ideal world, absolutely feckless fathers have a lot to answer for and should be pursued relentlessly for the money.

For what it’s worth, and I know this is a very right wing view from someone who is quite liberal in all other respects, there is absolutely zero excuse for any parent to be having children they can’t afford and yes i am referring to parents on benefits having 4, 5,6 children with no incentive to work to pay for those children. There are endless options available for contraception so there literally is no excuse AT ALL.

Some of the replies on this thread… wow!

Firstly, we do not have reproductive equality. Britain is one of the best countries in the world to be a woman in terms of legislative equality. That doesn’t translate 100% to lived reality.

Last year the CPS ran a huge survey with the public. The results are highly concerning. On average, 33% of people think it isn’t rape of a woman is pressured into sex but there is no violence. 40% think it’s ok to remove a condom without consent. A third of men felt if a woman had flirted on a date, it wouldn’t count as rape even if she did not explicitly consent. Only 42% of 18-24-year olds believed that being in a relationship did not mean consent to sex could be assumed.

Rape Crisis (using ONS data) say 1 in 4 women have experienced rape or sexual assault (compared to 1 in 18 men). Half of all rapes are carried out by a partner or ex-partner. Last year more than 1.6 million women experienced domestic abuse (ONS).

Women are more likely to acquire STIs than men during unprotected sex because of the nature of the act. Only biological women can get pregnant, with all the risks (physical and social) that brings.

Sex for men and women is NOT equal. From initial consent to the act itself, women are inherently more vulnerable.

Some of the babies born to “feckless single mothers” are the product of sexual abuse and rape. Sometimes not even recognised as such by the mother herself. Abusive men actually like getting women pregnant - not because they give a shit about the children, but because it keeps the women vulnerable. And if they can do all of that while not even having to play an active role in family life, let alone contribute financially, so much the better.

So with a this in mind, I DO blame men more than women for pregnancies those men don’t want. The data absolutely supports that they have far more influence than women over this.

As for not having children you can’t afford. Well, if the only people having children were those who could afford to raise children without any state contribution whatsoever (which includes schools and health care), the country would implode quite quickly. Even if we took out education and health care we’d still have a massive population crisis. Society needs a large section on low to middle incomes, it’s how capitalism works. Some of these children grow up to be a Dr, nurse, teacher, etc. Others will be in far less-well-paid but also necessary roles, such as cleaners, carers, hospitality workers, admin assistants, etc.

They’re more likely to be a ‘drain’ on society if they are raised in poverty with fathers who take no interest in them. It’s in everyone’s interests to stop these men procreating.

If I’d walked out on my DC as a single mother, I’d have been open to prosecution for child abandonment. Why aren’t the fathers who walk away and do just that treated the same? At least the ‘feckless’ mothers are feeding and bathing those children, putting a roof over their heads, getting them to school, etc.

In my Utopia, all children would receive a Universal Basic Income, paid for by a tax levy on parents. Eg each child receives £200 a month, and each parent owes HMRC £100 a month per child.
if they cannot (or will not) pay the debt remains and can be reclaimed with interest in future.

In my Utopia, all 18 year old boys would do some sort of civic service for a couple of years, and all of them would have to do a stint in child care and elderly care. They would also all be vasectomised with sperm frozen for when they make a deliberate decision to have a child.

And all men would pay an extra 1% income tax to cover the anti-social behaviour and damage done by men in terms of murder, rape, sexual violence and other forms of violence.

But I realise this might be too much for most to contemplate!

But if we tot up the costs we ALL pay for men’s violence and lack of paternal responsibility, I think we’d be surprised.

I get that. It's would need an absolute sea-change and that's not something that could or would happen quickly but even your ex (as an example)... if he were ostracised or thought less of by his peers, that would chip away at that giant ego of his, surely?

If it became the norm to actually pay for your children and it was seen as disgusting to hide money away from them, the landscape would change.

In the meantime, if the government stepped in to broker the payments as PP suggest, i.e. make the payments to the resident parent (usually mother) and recoup that money from the other parent (by force if needed) then that would do nicely.

For the hard-of-thinking on the thread, BOTH parents need to step up for their children. It's a rare maternal parent that fails to do this. Every day, every minute of it, everything for their child(ren).