© Law School, University of Tasmania 2010 Loving fathers? Implications of State Intervention JANICE SIM* Abstract Children are the most vulnerable, innocent and powerless group in society. They are most at risk of harm and death in their first year of life and often are victims of and easy targets for violence whenever conjugal discord and familial stress are present. This paper examines in the context of child killing, the parallel cases of failed state intervention, in families in which the male assumed the right to authority and control, but where that position collapsed. Looking across cases where state intervention has failed, the paper argues for a theoretical conception of the state of dysfunction in the family. Situated within this context, and as the title suggests, the paper explores the invisibility of certain risks to child endangerment. In broad strokes, the paper canvasses the argument that the replacement of a dysfunctional parent with a substitute ‗parent‘ model (the State apparatus) that is equally dysfunctional can sometimes have the opposite and adverse consequence of augmenting the propensity to child endangerment. The paper also explores the corollary impact of domestic violence within the family and questions the impact of mandatory intervention as an appropriate strategy in the long term to curb the prevalence of domestic violence and improve child safety. Introduction Patriarchy is an authoritarian, classed, hierarchical social system founded on male dominance in which the keys of authority, definition and control are in male hands. In the twentieth century even after the rise of feminist consciousness, surprisingly, this system still prevails in both overt and covert form, particularly in institutions such as the family, the State and its bureaucratic institutions, law enforcement and the military. In some arenas such as the workforce, education, the arts and public life, women‘s consciousness has taken on a topical and prominent place in society. Nevertheless as Summers 1 points out, even there, patriarchy maintains * Janice Sim is a Postgraduate Fellow and doctoral candidate at the University of Sydney. This article is part of her doctrinal thesis on parents and carers who kill. The main themes of the thesis are built around child safety. She is indebted to the National Coroners Information System for their involvement in the identification and extraction of the relevant cases. 1 Summers. A, The end of equality: work, babies and women’s choices in 21 st century Australia (2003).