Hundreds of thousands of men in the UK are unwittingly raising children who are not their own having been duped by unscrupulous women. We should be making more of an effort to expose 'paternal discrepancy', keeping quiet is not an option!
The man sued her for the £60,000 he had handed over in child
maintenance after they split up, but only gained a small amount of
compensation, even though the judge said he had been a victim of “clear
deceit and fraud”.
The prevalence is higher among members of lower
socioeconomic groups, young parents and first-time pregnancies. Not to
put too fine a point on it, if you’re a teenage dad from a poor
background, you might want to get a DNA test. And at the risk of scaring
any sailors out there with long-term girlfriends, the study also
stated: “Higher rates of infidelity are seen among pairs who are not
married. Furthermore, time spent apart in marriages or long term
relationships (for example, through occupational travel) is also
associated with higher levels of infidelity.”
Paternal discrepancy is often discovered by accident – such as through organ donation or medical tests for an illness which has a genetic element. Sometimes a man has tried to father a second child and infertility testing shows that he couldn’t have fathered the first.
Genetic counsellors are the professionals who advise on the results of tests for hereditary conditions, often after samples have been taken from foetuses in the womb as well as from the parents. Consequently they are often the first to know that the father isn’t the father. A study in America found that more than 95 per cent of them would not tell a man that the child wasn’t his. (Around 95 per cent of genetic counsellors are female, and you have to wonder if more men would be informed if more counsellors were male.)
And, of course, it’s not just the father who suffers - the son or daughter can fare even worse if it is suddenly discovered that his or her father is, biologically, a stranger. A few years ago a young woman named Elspeth Chapman stumbled upon her mother’s diary and discovered that she was the product of an illicit affair. “I was devastated. I couldn't believe it. My world began to fall apart after that,” she said. The resulting legal case, widely covered in the press, tore her family apart and ruined her relationship with the man who had brought her up.
Anna Middleton, a genetic counsellor working for the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, said she had only informed one man that he was not the father of his children. She had had no option because he had been tested for infertility and there was no way around informing him. “That was absolutely devastating information for him. It had to be handled incredibly sensitively,” she says.
“It’s something that is thought about very carefully. It’s a piece of information that could destroy a family and it would only be shared if there was no choice, because it was directly relevant [to the medical condition being investigated].”
Informing a couple of non-paternity can usually be
avoided by sticking very closely to the specific medical task the
counsellor has been given, she explains: “If they have come for testing
for a genetic condition, then that is what you focus on and you don’t
delve into any other interesting information that is gained from the
tests. If they want a paternity test, they can buy one from Boots.”
Many admirable men knowingly bring up other men’s children as their own without telling the child, because to do so would confuse and upset them. But for most men, the idea of doing so unwittingly wouldn’t just be a theft of the love, effort and time that they put into the relationship, but would affect them on a primal level, almost as deeply as if their own children were to be taken from them.
We get the word “cuckold” from the cuckoo which lays its eggs in another bird’s nest; and the cuckold has been an object of scorn and mockery for as long as he has been around. Yet given the apparent scale, and the devastating effect of paternity fraud, surely it’s time to see such a man not as an object of ridicule, to be sniggered at behind his back, but as the victim of a cruel deception. After all, all it takes is one phone call for any father’s world to be shattered in the same way.
Edited by WD
Source
By Gareth Rubin: It is the ultimate fraud. Across
Britain, thousands of men are raising children that they
have been tricked into believing are theirs, when they were really
fathered by another man. And now one victim of paternity fraud is
calling for it to be made a criminal offence after he spent six years
bringing up a boy he thought was his son, only to find out that his wife
had used the sperm from her ex-boyfriend at an IVF clinic.
The man sued her for the £60,000 he had handed over in child
maintenance after they split up, but only gained a small amount of
compensation, even though the judge said he had been a victim of “clear
deceit and fraud”.
It sounds like an
extreme and isolated case. But studies suggest somewhere between two
and 10 per cent of men have been fooled into raising another man’s
child.
For obvious reasons, paternity fraud – or paternal discrepancy as healthcare professionals refer to it – is hard to track. The best British review
was published in the journal Epidemial Community Health ten years ago.
Looking at all other good studies, it said the median average was a rate
of four per cent. So one father in 25 is labouring under a serious
misapprehension.
Paternity fraud is often discovered by accident – such as
through medical tests for an illness which has a genetic element
Paternal discrepancy is often discovered by accident – such as through organ donation or medical tests for an illness which has a genetic element. Sometimes a man has tried to father a second child and infertility testing shows that he couldn’t have fathered the first.
Genetic counsellors are the professionals who advise on the results of tests for hereditary conditions, often after samples have been taken from foetuses in the womb as well as from the parents. Consequently they are often the first to know that the father isn’t the father. A study in America found that more than 95 per cent of them would not tell a man that the child wasn’t his. (Around 95 per cent of genetic counsellors are female, and you have to wonder if more men would be informed if more counsellors were male.)
And, of course, it’s not just the father who suffers - the son or daughter can fare even worse if it is suddenly discovered that his or her father is, biologically, a stranger. A few years ago a young woman named Elspeth Chapman stumbled upon her mother’s diary and discovered that she was the product of an illicit affair. “I was devastated. I couldn't believe it. My world began to fall apart after that,” she said. The resulting legal case, widely covered in the press, tore her family apart and ruined her relationship with the man who had brought her up.
Anna Middleton, a genetic counsellor working for the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, said she had only informed one man that he was not the father of his children. She had had no option because he had been tested for infertility and there was no way around informing him. “That was absolutely devastating information for him. It had to be handled incredibly sensitively,” she says.
“It’s something that is thought about very carefully. It’s a piece of information that could destroy a family and it would only be shared if there was no choice, because it was directly relevant [to the medical condition being investigated].”
Many men knowingly bring up other men’s children as their own
without telling the child, because to do so would confuse and upset them
Many admirable men knowingly bring up other men’s children as their own without telling the child, because to do so would confuse and upset them. But for most men, the idea of doing so unwittingly wouldn’t just be a theft of the love, effort and time that they put into the relationship, but would affect them on a primal level, almost as deeply as if their own children were to be taken from them.
We get the word “cuckold” from the cuckoo which lays its eggs in another bird’s nest; and the cuckold has been an object of scorn and mockery for as long as he has been around. Yet given the apparent scale, and the devastating effect of paternity fraud, surely it’s time to see such a man not as an object of ridicule, to be sniggered at behind his back, but as the victim of a cruel deception. After all, all it takes is one phone call for any father’s world to be shattered in the same way.
Edited by WD
Source
No comments:
Post a Comment