Take a long hard look at these bullet point stats, and as you do ask yourself this: Are they all coincidences or is there a massive socio-relationship problem that MUST be addressed immediately?Children from fatherless homes in Bermuda account for:* 63 percent of youth suicides;* 70 percent of juveniles in state-operated institutions;* 71 percent of pregnant teenagers;* 71 percent of high school dropouts;* 75 percent of adolescent patients in chemical abuse centres;* 80 percent of rapists motivated with displaced anger;* 85 percent of children that exhibit behavioural disorders ;* 85 percent of youths sitting in prisons;* 90 percent of homeless and runaway children.Some of those homes are fatherless because the no-good b*****d up and left. Many are fatherless because the mothers stop fathers from having access to children a practice that defies all kinds of human rights.Life is such that some fathers are abusive and need to be kept away. But not all. The British Government recently changed laws aimed at stopping mothers from preventing fathers from spending quality time with their children.Here’s what went down in London last week:Mothers who refuse to allow fathers access to the children will have their passports confiscated. They’ll also be denied access to a driver’s licence and may even have a curfew imposed upon them.It’s Britain’s way of catching up with many other territories who believe and impose parental sharing by law.And Bermuda must legislate now to do so.Eddie Tavares is elated with the punitive measures in Britain.“Bermuda has to follow suit. I have been fighting the fight for so long now, advocating for access and change to the rules here and this British decision gives me reason to hope.”Tavares co-founded ChildWatch Bermuda and he studies the outcomes of broken homes and the impact on children. His latest worry is parental alienation, a crime in many countries, but a practice that’s allowed to go unabated here.“Nothing about this practice is healthy for the children and you can see by those statistics above just what damage this does toward children from broken homes. It has to stop. Every study about the ramifications children feel once their parents separate and divorce result in one truth — shared parenting is the only answer to help the children have some sort of normal life post separation.”There will be families where this isn’t best.I come from a broken family, and as a child I suffered terribly not having a father around. My biological father shot through when I was a baby and my mum remarried several years later. Her new husband beat us. He was a drunk and a bully and a disgraceful human. I remember one night, because the events are seared into my soul, how he came home in a paddy wagon completely wasted. My mother took him from the police who had found him face down, passed out on the footpath outside the pub near his work. She allowed him to slump on the sofa and after about 10 minutes he stirred and said something that I did not recognise.I do not know what it was that was said to this day, but it infuriated her and him. He rose, pulled the belt from his pants and started beating her with it. When she was on the ground, he wrapped it around her throat. I jumped on his back, grabbed his hair with all my might, but he flung me across the room. I stood, with tears streaming down my face and full of the reckless courage 11-year-olds possess, yelled at him, “You wait I until grow older, I will bash you.” He took his shoe off, cornered me, and beat me so badly I had to be taken to hospital.He was fatherless. His father was kept from him by his mother when she fled the marriage as a teenager. Looking back now, I can see the pain, the hurt, the harm denying children a loving family framework can do.That man was a monster but maybe what happened to him as a child was responsible. Two years after that beating, he was killed in a hit-and-run incident.As for my real father, he was a philandering mess of a human too, who refused to pay child support and fled to New Zealand when I was three months old. I have never seen him.Little wonder I have empathy towards children who are the innocent victims of parental break-ups.And I feel sorry for Eddie Tavares too. We spoke on the phone yesterday and he expressed his sincere joy that Britain had taken steps toward legally stopping this ‘abuse’ of innocent children. But there was a sadness to his voice too. His own son had not phoned him for Father’s Day.....a victim, it seems, of parental alienation.So — have you pondered enough? The sad stats at the start of this column — are they coincidence or a cry for help to the legal system to introduce shared parenting?You decide.