Bermuda’s courts need more power to force deadbeat dads to keep up with their child-support payments, it has been argued, as the plight of destitute single mothers left in debt has become more desperate.

“My son’s father owes more than $10,000 and he has yet to make one single payment, but I’m the one in court,” said a young mother-of-three, who asked not to be identified.

A $1,000 bill landed her in debt court, but the woman, who only just got part-time hotel work, could not pay.

She spoke with The Royal Gazette as part of a continuing campaign by the Coalition for the Protection of Children to highlight what the organisation calls a draconian practice: the threat of incarceration for contempt of court when orders to pay end up getting shirked.

According to women’s advocate Sheelagh Cooper, the threat inflicts undue fear and stress on people who are unfamiliar with the court system. Ms Cooper believes it should be replaced with a process focused on problem solving.

Statistics from the Department of Corrections show that actual incarceration is rare.

However, the woman responded: “We don’t know that they’re not actually going to lock us up. We just know that what the judge orders is what’s got to be done.”

Meanwhile, her former partner travels in and out of the Island freely, while the woman has been given a week to pay $300 that she does not have.

The passport of the mother’s former partner cannot be seized by the courts, but Ms Cooper maintains that Magistrates’ Court can put the non-paying father on a stop list until he makes good on his $75-a-week commitment.

“He has the best of everything — clothes, shoes, everything,” said the woman, who lives with her grandmother and shares a room with her children.

She has no reliable local address for her son’s father to give to Police, or an overseas address, while the man refuses to pay or to explain why.

Lawyer Chris Swan, who handles many debt cases, said that he had “only sympathy” for people who could not pay their bills and said judges were happy to work with debtors to find reasonable payment schemes that they could abide by.

He recalled a senior woman with a “substantial” hospital bill who ended up paying $2 a week to cover it.

“This was a woman of no means who took what she had and kept to her commitment, and took care of it,” Mr Swan said. “The moral to all of this is we are absolutely happy to work out an arrangement with anybody, and so are the courts.

“What the courts are looking for is consistency.”

The provision in the Debtors Act allowing for people to be committed for contempt of court “needs to stay”, Mr Swan maintained.

“Everyone decries it until they’re in a position of being owed a lot of money,” he said.

However, the lawyer conceded that more could be done to get men to pay their share.

“Years ago, the magistrate Tyrone Chin did something incredibly controversial, and apparently it worked,” Mr Swan said. “Delinquent fathers were hauled into court and committed, and sent to the Prison Farm. They went out during the day and worked, and their salaries went towards child support. It was one of those draconian measures, but it actually worked. I’m not sure when it faded away.”

Confronted with these familiar scenarios, Mr Swan said magistrates encouraged women to describe their circumstances — and get in contact with their former partners to work out a deal.

“Ultimately, if mothers are not willing to pursue matters, if the relationship was adversarial, it’s difficult to get them to settle on a contribution,” he said.

Short of redirecting already scant resources, such as sending out bailiffs to serve orders on deadbeat fathers, Mr Swan said he could not see what extra the system could do.

Some have suggested changing the law so that delinquent fathers cannot relicense their vehicles.

“In some circumstances, that may provide for payment, but it creates a very slippery slope for people that genuinely don’t have means,” Mr Swan said.

The Royal Gazette spoke last month with a single woman who was left with a $15,000 hospital bill after giving birth.

“It would be crossing all kinds of moral and legal boundaries, but the hospital could insist that fathers sign the admission papers and help settle payments,” Mr Swan said. “I’ve had experience with medical treatment overseas where, first thing, they want to know who’s paying; they want to have your credit card. There is a compassion element, but I could foresee a situation wherein if women are coming in pregnant and they’re not married, then it’s not too much of a stretch to get as much information as they can on the fathers.”

The latest woman who spoke with The Royal Gazette praised Mr Chin for his get-tough approach. “He was awesome,” she said. “He ordered a paternity test and said if it wasn’t done, he was going to jail. But then we got switched to a different court and the order Mr Chin put in place went out the window.

“It’s really wrong to be threatened with being locked up for not being able to pay a bill that I can’t afford. I chose to feed my children — and I have my child’s father out there who owes me all this money.”