Bridgetown.
President of the Men's Educational Support Association (MESA), Ralph Boyce says his male advocacy group is closer to making proposals that will bring balance to the way child maintenance justice is dispensed among the sexes in Barbados.
Boyce has firmly adopted the view that the high cost DNA testing as means of determining paternity should not be absorbed solely by the man .
"The administration of justice is heavily skewed against men and for that reason we will be intensifying work on the whole DNA testing and we have started to get some results already. It is wrong for a man to have to pay the full amount $1000. In Antigua the man pays 50 percent and the woman pays 50 percent, so it is unclear to me why this as not be adopted here as yet", Boyce told Trakker News.
Boyce also believes that in cases where a has been paying court maintainance for a child and later discovers he is not the child's father, the woman should be made to pay back the money to the man.
"This is something I feel strongly about, I know of cases where men have been supporting children for 18 years only to find out they were not the fathers of the children.In such cases the woman must be made to pay back every cent. Britain already has the legislation in place because it is essentially fraud", Boyce said.
The former senior civil servant said the law seems to adopt a softer apporoach to women who blatantly defy court orders, which give men access to their children.
"I have never heard of a woman being held in contempt of court for defying one of these orders.As a matter of fact, the authorities as well as the general public, adopt the view that there must be some underlying reason for a woman to withhold visitation other than pure vindictiveness", says Boyce.
