Even Bob Geldoff has lent his name to the “father’s rights” movement with a recent Channel 4 polemic.

In the middle of all this rhetoric and emotion I’ve felt that we’ve been missing hard facts so I was pleased to see that UK family-support charity Parentline Plus has released Hopes, Stress and Love – Listening to fathers based on the issues that fathers raise in calls to the charity’s help line.

They paint a picture of men who are deeply concerned about their children’s welfare, involved in their education and who care deeply about improving the family experience. This cuts across all family situations — 44% of calls in the survey were from fathers within a traditional “nuclear family”.

More disturbingly the report identifies high levels of stress and feelings of isolation in many of their male callers and a significant level of concern about conflict with partners / ex-partners and the effect of this on the children.

The authors conclude with a call to all family support services not only to recognise the essential role of fathers but also to understand that reticence to seek help is in many cases made worse by a perception held by many men that support services are biased against them.

Thought-provoking stuff.

No wonder then that after (finally) coming across “Reed’s Law”:http://www.reed.com/Papers/GFN/reedslaw.html thanks to “this”:http://smartpei.typepad.com/robert_patersons_weblog/2004/08/reeds_law_and_t.html thought-provoking article by “Robert Paterson”:http://smartpei.typepad.com/ I shortly noticed these two:

* Adina Levin in “describing”:http://alevin.com/weblog/archives/001477.html the recent “experiments”:http://alex.halavais.net/news/index.php?p=794 to test Wikipedia’s resilience spots that the real power of Wikipedia’s “defensive techniques”:http://frassle.rura.org/wikipediaShowsIts lies in the effect they have of turning the site into a warren of virtual neighborhoods
* In [bliki]Building Public Value[/bliki] the “BBC”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/ is seeking to link its strategy with the greater public good in support of the argument for Charter Renewal. A lot of the BBC document talks about the power of that unique organisation to build a sense of community amongst various parts of the British population (an example of an activity that specifically stimulates group-forming would be “iCan”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ican/). Could this strategic direction be the best example yet of a broadcast-based organisation learning to tap the power of “Reed’s Law”:http://www.reed.com/Papers/GFN/reedslaw.html ??