New Delhi: "Don't punish my child, punish me; don't drag him, drag me," a wailing India-born pharmaceutical scientist from the US pleaded as heavily armed CBI sleuths pushed his seven-year-old son inside a court room of the Supreme Court. The sleuths had tracked down the son and his mother to Chennai last week.

Dr V Ravi Chandran has been in India for the past two years, looking for his US-born son Aditya. Chandran's estranged wife Vijayshree Voora moved Aditya to India against an American family court order. The court had also allowed the child's father his joint custody.

Police statistics show that child abuse has a new face: drunken mothers. Police say they get around 400 reports of domestic violence against children each year; these days around two-thirds of the cases point to intoxicated mothers.

The recession has apparently had a lot to do with the spike in the number of inebriated women who turn abusive.

"The typical case is a single mother who has an alcohol problem and who's become exhausted by work," explains Police Sergeant Pekka Hätönen, who's in charge of the child abuse unit at the Helsinki Itäkeskus police department.

Mothers paid by the state to have babies with men they barely know. What HAVE we done to the British family?

It's the most destructive crisis of our age - a generation of violent, illiterate, lawless young men living outside civilised society.

The Mail asked a leading investigative journalist to spend nine months exploring their world.

Here, in the second part of a fascinating series, she reveals her chilling findings - and exposes how the benefit system is breeding boys condemned to a life of crime and despair because they've never known the benefit of a loving family. . .

A child custody battle naturally goes in favour of the mother. But is this always fair to the father?

Two fathers fighting for child custody rights got the thumbs up from the Supreme Court last week. On Friday, a mother had to withdraw a petition trying to thwart a father’s legal quest for more time with his daughter. The apex court had weighed in on his side, directing the divorced couple to settle it out of court.

On the same day, in another case, where a father has been estranged from his son for two years, the Supreme Court directed the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to step in. The CBI has been given six weeks to find the mother who has gone absconding with her son. The apex court felt compelled to take this step since its repeated directions to state police departments on the matter had come to naught.

Bangalore: “When I was small, I thought you were simply great. And when I grew up, I knew I was always right as a puppy!” says a dalmation looking up at its dad. This was on a card a teenager finally bought for Father’s Day. He is one of the many sons who belong to the new creed that does not say ‘I don’t need a special day to honour my dad’.

The Western trend has surely caught up with Namma Bengaluru. While sending flowers and cakes home is the trend among outstation sons and daughters, the ones at home prefer to go out for a dinner and surprise their father with gifts. Online booking centres and gift shops in the city have witnessed heightened activity the past couple of days.

“We get orders from abroad and other Indian states. Usually the price range of gifts we sell is from Rs 500 to Rs 800,” said Ravi Tiwari of Orchidsnroses. They have special Fathers’ Day kits, comprising laptops as well as gulab jamuns. Customized packages are also available.

Many Bangalore men who are separated from their wives but pine for their children are set to mark Father's Day by taking out a rally here. Kids should get the love of both parents, they stress, even as divorce cases are going up in India.

Along with others, Saturday's rally will see these men asserting their right to be in touch with their children. June 21 is Father's Day.

It is the brainchild of Children's Rights Initiative For Shared Parenting (CRISP), a city-based NGO, fighting for shared parenting rights, in association with Save the Indian Family Foundation (SIFF).

'Not every child is lucky enough to have the love and care of both father and mother, even when both the parents are alive during their growing up days. Due to a rise in divorce cases in the country, most children of separated parents are deprived of both their parents' affection,' Kumar Jahgirdar, president of CRISP, told IANS.

Your identity follows a standard format in India: son or daughter of Mr X. That is how you know one Sunita or Ram is different from another. But what if you don't want to put in your father's name or be identified solely by your family name? Should you be denied all official documents? Shouldn't your mother's name be sufficient to establish your identity?

Unfortunately, that is not the case, as illustrated by the recent case of a 19-year-old Mumbai girl, who was denied a passport because she refused to write her biological father's name on the application form. The man had not communicated with his daughter since the day she was born and the girl thought it justified to leave his name out. Read More Even though her mother raised her and the girl still lives with her, the courts have said she can be granted a passport if she lists her foster father as her father and fills in the application form accordingly.

Mothers in India clearly have a long way to go to achieve legal gender equality.

PANJIM, MAY 18: This Christmas,  10-year-old Rico will have lunch with his mother and dinner with his father. But the lunch arrangement on Christmas day will be altered every subsequent year.

On his mother’s birthday, he will be with her and on his  father’s birthday, he’ll stay with his father.

Likewise, his birthday will be celebrated alternately by the mother and the father every alternate year.

On school days he will be with his mother from Monday to Friday and be with his father every alternate weekend.

The programme for Ryan has been chalked  out  by the Bombay High Court  at Goa while settling the issue of his custody between warring parents.

Chandigarh: Child custody case pending in the subordinate courts of Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh for over six months will now be decided within three months.

Taking cognizance of long delays, the Punjab and Haryana High Court has also empowered the district judges to deal with dereliction, if any, on part of the judicial officer in doing so. The registrar (vigilance), Punjab and Haryana, have been appointed nodal officer for supervising the entire exercise.

Though the exact number of such cases is not immediately known, some of the cases have been pending for over a decade. Among the oldest is a case pending since 1998 in the guardian court in Amritsar.

A contentious access battle playing out in family court made news last week when a B.C. Supreme Court judge made the highly unusual decision of barring a mother from seeing her daughter for one year.

The ruling, which the father’s lawyer called “historic,” was made after the mother, known only as Ms. A, alleged that the father had subjected the teenager to severe emotional abuse which she said endangered the child’s safety.

Citing Ms. A’s extreme parental alienation toward the father, Justice Donna Martinson said she was satisfied that Ms. A’s allegations were unfounded and that the mother “continued to undermine the relationship between M and her father and has acted in ways that are detrimental to M’s psychological healing.”