While political pundits will pore over David Blunkett's recently published diaries for the inside story of New Labour, many readers will be more interested to find out what he has to say about his affair with Kimberly Quinn and very public court battle regarding contact with their child. Yet there is nothing new in Blunkett's professed desire to be a good father, and part of this "little lad's" life. His story is just one in a stream of men's accounts of their pain as fathers denied access to their children.
We live in a time of heightened public, media and political interest in the issue of the responsibilities and rights of all fathers. This interest is maintained, in part, by the high-profile stunts of an increasingly vocal and well-organised fathers' rights movement, most visibly represented in the UK by Fathers 4 Justice. Such groups suggest that laws once favouring fathers have now swung too far in the opposite direction, establishing men as the new victims. Protesters demand a redressing of the balance through reform of child support law, changes to contact rights, and a presumption that children will spend equal time at the home of each parent following separation.
Why has the fathers' rights movement gained such momentum now? One explanation that has proved attractive to some parts of the media is the idea of "backlash", most famously discussed by the US author Susan Faludi, who describes a powerful counter-assault against the achievements of feminism. As women gain more influence outside the household, she suggests, men lose their traditional role and authority both at home and in the workplace. Inevitably, men fight back and "gender wars" result.
This is one of the claims examined in a new collection of essays by leading commentators on family law and policy in five countries. It argues that the image of backlash fails to capture the complex realities of contemporary family life, which cannot be reduced to a balance sheet in which men proportionately lose what women gain in power and rights. A more accurate explanation of the current high profile of fathers' rights might rather be found in a more complex mixture of factors. Specifically, long-term upward trends in divorce rates and numbers of single parent families mean that fathers increasingly find themselves living apart from their children, and their relationships with them may thus be more fragile.
The greater fragility of the paternal bond sits uneasily with changing social expectations of men as fathers. Today, the "good father" is expected not merely to be a provider but also a hands-on, caring parent who is able to connect emotionally with his children.
The findings of therapeutic, psychological and sociological research suggest a qualitative shift in many men's emotional relationships with their children and commitments to "family life". Society is demanding that men become more involved as fathers precisely at a time when, in certain respects, it is more difficult for them to do so. The current struggles of the fathers' rights movement can be understood as part of this complex and painful renegotiation of intimate relations against a backdrop of changing lifestyles and expectations.
While the social reality is complex, the rhetoric of the fathers' rights movement has a beguiling logic and simplicity. What is needed, they suggest, is nothing more than justice for fathers. And justice requires that men and women receive equal treatment before the law. But is it really so easy? Should mothers and fathers be treated in exactly the same way? And what would this mean?
Symbolic recognition
What tends to be systematically effaced in such arguments are questions about the consequences of applying gender-neutral norms to what remain, despite all assertions to the contrary, highly gendered fields of practice. In a context where mothers continue to shoulder the bulk of day-to-day care of children before separation, does a 50/50 split of caring post-separation represent justice? And how do children fare if residence is awarded equally across two households?
It may be that the fathers' rights movement's demand for equality should not be heard primarily as a call for practical change but rather as a demand for symbolic recognition. The failure to accord fathers equal contact time with their children may cause psychological harm to men's sense of their worth as fathers, being perceived as, according to them, secondary importance to their children's mothers. Fathers' rights movement websites are full of powerful and moving accounts of fathers' pain at being allowed to see their children only at formally sanctioned, narrowly prescribed times, while mothers as resident parents retain seemingly unlimited access to them.
Even for men whose long working hours had left little time to spend with their children in the context of intact families, that a court should determine when contact should occur may understandably seem an intolerable breaking of the bond between father and child. It is no wonder, then, that family law has become a particular target for the anger and frustration of fathers' rights campaigners.
The research suggests that the fathers' rights movement has enjoyed limited direct success in achieving its aims in the UK and elsewhere. In the UK, the goal of a presumption of shared "equal parenting" on separation has been unequivocally rejected by the government of which David Blunkett was himself once part. However, while the movement's campaigns may have failed in this sense, it may have succeeded in less tangible ways - most notably in influencing the contours of popular debate.
In the Guardian, as elsewhere, concerns are now regularly expressed by politicians, academics, legal practitioners and a range of organisations about men's lack of involvement in their children's lives. That fathers deserve equality is often proclaimed with little interrogation of what this means in practice. And it seems often to be assumed that legal reform is capable of solving these problems, with no consideration of what might realistically be expected of law in this area.
It is perhaps not only the benefit of hindsight that lends such poignancy to the intervention of a rather younger David Blunkett in a parliamentary debate on assisted reproduction in the early 1990s. Arguing that reproductive technologies should not be available to single women, Blunkett claimed: "Child bearing is not a right. It is part of the unfathomable life force. That is why man and woman together must take responsibility for the wellbeing and love of the child."
What remains unstated in this seductive vision of mutuality is what happens when relationships break down, and how calls for equal rights for all parents can guide us through the messy, bitter turmoil that all too often accompanies divorce or separation. While it is right that the pain experienced by individual fathers - and, indeed, of children and mothers - should keep questions of parental rights and responsibilities high on political agendas, there are no easy answers to be found in legal reform.
· Richard Collier, professor of law at Newcastle University, and Sally Sheldon, professor of law at Kent University, have co-edited Fathers' Rights Activism and Law Reform in Comparative Perspective, published by Hart Publications, £14.95. To order a copy for £13.95 call 0870 836 0875 or go to theguardian.com/bookshop