Who Influences Family Law Reform? Discourses on Motherhood and Fatherhood in Legislative Reform Debates in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines resistance to law reform initiatives in the field of child support and child custody and access law by those who say that special rights are being given to women and that the “family” and fathers are under threat. Specifically we consider whether legislative reforms in these areas have been inappropriately influenced by feminists, as many fathers’ rights groups would argue, and we try to determine who set the agenda for the legislative changes that occurred in Canada duri8ng the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. Relying on debates in the House of Commons and parliamentary committees, our findings are that the interests of women did not receive preferential treatment. The debates on support enforcement focused more on the need to protect the state from financial responsibility for the “victims” of divorce than on the economic needs of women and children. During the 1980s especially, men’s defaults in support payments were increasingly linked to the alienation of fathers from their children. This concern about paternal alienation, combined wit the assumption that the law had gone too far in terms of favoring women over men, resulted in legislation on child custody and access that reflected a compromise which generated new difficulties for mothers in custody disputes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".