Chapter 10 · The Same Right to Be Heard

I am the father of a daughter. She should be allowed to be a child, shielded for as long as possible from what I know exists out there. In here, I catch glimpses of it at close quarters. People I have to share a prison complex with, pass on the way to the health unit or during outdoor exercise. Men I would never let into her life.

That is why I support #MeToo. That is why I want violence against women brought to light, oppression named, and no one allowed to hide abuse behind a respectable façade. I mean it.

I also believe we need #MenToo. Those two struggles can stand side by side. If we truly want equality, we have to be willing to examine who is harming whom, including when the woman holds the power in the situation. Including when the man is the one sitting there asking for help.

Weighing them does not help. Measuring his height. Looking at his shoulders and deciding that he cannot possibly be the victim. You do not have to raise a fist to tear someone's life apart. You can do it with a false allegation that reaches the right office. Then others can do the rest.

I hear stories about this. I experience it myself. That is why Camilla Fossum Pedersen's work on the deliberate obstruction of parent–child contact has meant something to me. What she addressed remains a living hell for fathers trying to hold on to their children. Talking about it takes nothing away from an abused woman. Surely the compassion we have fought to establish should also be capable of extending to a man.

In my book, “Fengslene vest for loven … og alle andre himmelretninger”, I describe how one restraining order became three without my having breached the first. How, for nine months, I was cut off from contact with my daughter while she was with her mother. I tried to find out what I was accused of, what her mother and the child welfare service had said. I even wanted to be able to make supervised phone calls. That possibility disappeared, too.

You, the reader, have to try to stand in that situation for a moment: There are allegations about you that can keep your child away. You cannot obtain what you need to respond. But you are still expected to respond properly, within the deadline, through the right channel. From prison. With the access you have been allotted.

Then the attention shifts. Her mother has said something. There is a witness I am not allowed to see or whose account I cannot test. The school, the child welfare service, the police and the court enter the picture, while I have to try to get someone to investigate how this began. What actually happened, before the allegation acquired a uniform and official letterhead.

I believe her mother is sabotaging our contact. But when dealing with the system, the man in prison becomes a ready-made answer to why the situation is difficult. There he is, after all. There must be something about him. How easy does that make it to look away from what her mother is doing? Where must I stand for someone to hear me without letting the prison wall answer first?

The image that comes to me is ugly. Four witches bend over a father trying to protect his child. Child welfare. Police. The correctional service. The court. Each with a telephone, the cords tangled together and leading on into the darkness, to the mother's shadow. They talk to one another. The father tries to make himself heard beneath the entire weight.

Look at who is at the bottom. How is he supposed to get up? Who examines the allegation before it gets another official stamp? Who asks what the child is losing while everyone protects their own decision?

And when men take their own lives in prison, we must dare to ask what has happened to their hope. What they tried to tell someone before they could no longer keep going. That, too, is something society must be willing to see.

Equality must mean that I, too, get to respond. That a father can be the one subjected to abuse. That violence can consist of getting others to tear a child out of his life on grounds he disputes, and then using his despair to explain why it had to happen.

The struggle for women cannot become a free pass to stop examining women's actions. The struggle against violence has to follow the act. All the way into the office. All the way down to the paper. Whoever holds the pen.