Equal Parenting Alliance News – April 2007
© 2007 The Equal Parenting Alliance Party
MEDIA
Page 2
We had the following letter published in the Guardian on the 2nd November:
By asking "does a 50/50 split of caring post-separation represent justice?", Richard Collier and Sally Sheldon demonstrate a widespread misunderstanding of family law reform (Unfamiliar territory, Society, November 1).
A call for equal treatment for parents after separation is not the same as a call for an exact 50/50 split of care. After all, few "normal" parents share care exactly 50/50, but nobody would say they should not be regarded as equal parents.
Similarly, the call for a "presumption of contact" reflects the fact that both parents are entitled to contact with their children when together - but not just after they have separated. Everyone agrees that it's best for children to maintain reasonable contact with both parents after separation, but under family law the "starting point" for contact is 100/0. We believe the "starting point" should indeed be equality, but the exact share decided in the best interests of the children involved.
Equal Parenting Alliance on politics.co.uk
We have taken out a subscription to the politics.co.uk website, which features political parties and pressure groups.
This means we become an ‘opinion former’, sharing the same status as FNF and the Labour Party.
The main advantage to this site is that it is visited by politicians, their researchers and journalists looking for easy stories. So by appearing on politics.co.uk we hope to increase our profile before these groups.
A feature of politics.co.uk that we expect to make best use of is publishing our press releases. Currently we send our press releases to the media, but basically they are ignored. Each time we send a press release to politics.co.uk it will be
featured on their front page under the “Latest Press Releases” heading. This should substantially improve our visibility.
Luckily we were able to negotiate a substantial discount on their normal fee of £185 per month, so we’ll see how it goes and review whether we are getting value for money in six months time. (Most of this subscription cost has been funded by generous donations).
It was a toss up between subscribing on this site or getting some car stickers made. We decided the web would be more effective advertising for the party at our current state of awareness.
Our site went live on December 1st 2006 and is attracting quite a few hits to our main site.
Contributions Welcome
Although this newsletter is designed principally to tell our members and supporters what we’ve been doing, we’d welcome contributions from members for publication. Although standards are very high (that’s a joke by the way!) send any contributions by email to:
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