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Fathers forgotten when authorities ditch snail mail
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October 24th, 2014
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Councils will mostly only contact mothers once they start solely using e-Boks on November 1
From November 1, when the councils will be able to send mail via the digital service e-Boks instead of the postal service, a number of fathers will lose the ability to receive mail about their children, Metroxpress reports.
Most children are only linked to their mother’s CPR number, so only she will receive digital mail about the child – even in cases where parents have shared custody of the child.
Calls for change
“If the council’s psychologists, for example, summon both parents to a meeting about a child’s behavioural problems, only one parent will get the message,” Ole Hansen of the local government organisation Kommunernes Landsforening told the paper.
“I’m afraid we must have forgotten about it.”
Several fathers’ organisations are calling for fundamental changes to what they see as a system that continually favours mothers.
“The completely unreasonable gender discrimination begins in the delivery ward, where only the mother has the pregnancy linked to her CPR number,” Svend Aage Madsen from the men’s heath organisation Selskab for Mænds Sundhed, who is a research manager at Copenhagen’s Rigshospital, told Metroxpress.
“The father has no place in the official system, and that discrimination continues at the councils where they often only address the mother.”
Jesper Lohse, the head of the fathers’ group Foreningen Far, believes the discrimination extends beyond the authorities’ methods of communication.
“Female case workers often make unfair decisions in favour of mothers because they don’t understand or sympathise with fathers,” he said.
“It’s grotesque and obviously discriminatory that only mothers get mail from councils that arrange mothers’ groups and not family groups – as they do in Sweden.”
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