HEART-BREAK AND DETERMINATION

THOUSANDS LOOK UP TO BOBBY SMITH, FOR HIS COURAGEOUS SPIRIT AND PERSISTENT DETERMINATION FOR CHANGE.

His followers comprise of alienated parents, fathers' rights activists and those wanting a change in the current family court law system.

Anyone passing by the 33-year-old lorry driver would think he was just another person going about his business.

Yet the press of a search button online would reveal lorry driving isn't the only job Bobby does; that protesting for an important cause outside the Prime Minister’s house, on top of famous British landmarks, and through creating his own political party has become another responsibility of his.

"Obviously some people are going to call us idiots," he says. "But other people know what we're doing and why we’re doing it."

For Bobby Smith’s life was "destroyed five years ago", and he is on a relentless mission to repair it.

The father-of-two from Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire hasn't been able to see his two daughters, who cannot be named for legal reasons, aged 11 and 8, for five years now.

"I separated with my children's mother in March 2008, I would see my children for half the week, this carried on until about 2010, where she just stopped me from seeing the children due to her making false accusations about me." said Bobby, speaking in his strong East End accent.

"The police arrested me and took no further action. I then had two years of supervised contact and saw my children once a fortnight, paying £62 each session."

The National Association of Child Contact Centres (NACCC) told Bobby that this was the longest continuous supervised contact they know of within the country's district.

He added: "Then in January 2013 the judge decided that I was in the wrong 'on the balance of probability', and asked me to do a course. I didn't do anything wrong, neither did I have the right to a fair trial in front of a jury, so I refused to do the course and he stopped me from seeing my kids, just like that"

Since then the tall, shaved head father has made seeing his children again his ultimate goal. When he failed his first appeal in April 2014, the decision was made to begin protesting for his rights.

Starting with creating his own campaign, 'Give Me Back Elmo' and joining fathers’ rights organisation, New Fathers 4 Justice, he was driven with determination to make a change in the Government’s law.

"I love my children, and obviously I'm protective of them, I feel like, as a Dad, it is my responsibility." Bobby said passionately, his voice teaming with the endeavour of a man with a past of hardship. 

“When people say they would take a bullet for their kids, they mean it. Doing protesting isn’t much you know, I just know if I do I’ve then done everything I can.

“When they come back as teenagers and they’re trying to work out what’s happened and why they didn’t see their dad, they’re gonna know they’ve always been loved. As soon as I started protesting I felt empowered.”

The alienated parent was first heavily publicised in regional newspapers for 'hijacking' a £100,000 bronze statue of the Jones family: two single mum sisters and their children in Birmingham on November 1st 2014.

"With the Birmingham statue protest I was showing it up for what it was." He said firmly. "They were putting it on a pedestal and saying how brilliant it was and I showed it up for just being completely wrong without having a dad in it.

“I thought they were normalising a fatherless family, I'm not critiquing single mums or women, but the statue doesn't say anything about fathers, and fathers are needed just as much as mothers are. Having both parents in a child's life should be default, mothers and fathers both have different qualities to give their child."

The runner-up family to the Jones family who weren't taken forward to become immortalised were a family of mixed ethnicities: a black father, a white mother and mixed race children.

"The runner-up family would have been better to represent families in Birmingham, you know. What the artist did, to try and be controversial, was made it to have a pregnant woman with no dads in there, and it is Birmingham's money, she shouldn't have experimented with."

The day the Birmingham family statue was unveiled, Bobby received the unfortunate news that he failed his final appeal at court to see his children.

Arguing his point, Bobby added: "In this country fathers don't have equal rights, mothers are seen as the better parent to keep the child. In my case, the courts did because there is no presumption of equal parenting, when there should be.

“When parents separate, married or not, unless the mother or father has convictions of violence or sexual assaults or any other serious concerns, which is a small minority, it should be 50:50 contact. Equal parenting should be the starting point, then go to court and try to change it."

Over a year later, Bobby has continued in spreading his message and pushing for equal parent rights. Creating a name for himself and gaining mass publicity worldwide.

Rich Adams, Administrator for fathers' rights campaign organisation, New Fathers 4 Justice, said: "We want nothing less than a legal presumption of equal contact for a child with their parents if they split up, and the abolition of the deeply controversial, undemocratic secret court system that still exists within the 'family' division despite forty years of inequality and protest.

“In the 21st century fathers deserve more equality after family breakdown as much as women do in the workplace but the rights of fathers to share equally in the lives of their children have been ignored by successive Governments.

“Children do much better when they have regular contact with both parents. Not seeing your children and being denied access to them is like a living bereavement."

In May 2015 Bobby took an alternative route to gaining David Cameron's attention, after camping outside of his house in June, August and December of 2014, he decided dressing up in a large, bright red, bobble-eyed costume would get the Prime Minister's attention, one way or another.

Speaking about his idea to create his own political party, Bobby said: "I spoke to David Cameron all over Christmas as well because I was outside his house for three to four days, and I knew it was a waste of time trying to speak to him anymore, because I was given the harassment order.

"I thought there’s no point in getting arrested, for speaking to him, so I thought I ought to go down a different route, and I thought I’d do it more publically and if I dress up as Elmo, it’ll get attention, and it did."

Bobby waited outside the polling station where David Cameron was placing in his vote, among 40 photographers. Dressed as the Sesame Street character, Bobby and his fellow campaigners stood sternly and refused to move with the Prime Minister only inches away from them.

"I got 37 votes. I don't even know where the votes came from." He laughed. “It doesn’t matter to me though, as long as I got my message across.”

Bobby has no limits when it comes to his protesting: risking his safety and wellbeing to raise awareness of his cause; he puts everything on the line to get closer to his goal.

One of his most poignant protests to date include scaling Buckingham Palace, with fellow protester, Martin Matthews, weeks after the Paris terror attacks.

"I know that me walking around with a banner isn't enough, so what we did was we took advantage of the high security fear and we knew that if we got onto that palace it would become major news." He said.

“Even though the news outlets report mostly on the security breach, they do mention fathers’ rights, and that’s why I had a banner what clearly said 'New Fathers 4 Justice', because it’s just about time to get the message out there, putting pressure on the government and getting public support.”

Buckingham Palace is heavily protected with electric fences; Bobby and Martin carried a ladder, walked across to the Palace and simply climbed up.

"We were quite lucky. It also highlights how they haven’t got their security very high, there’s all this talk about ISIS and they can’t even protect their own royal family. I mean we’re peaceful protesters but we could have been anyone."

The day following, Bobby and his fellow fathers' rights activist, Martin Matthews, were in held in custody for half the day for trespassing.

While Bobby and Martin were on the roof, they were talking on breakfast TV in Australia, and the day after the protest, Radio 1 presenters were debating fathers’ rights on their national radio station.

"It was definitely worthwhile doing." He said proudly. “The day after I got out of the police station after the Buckingham Palace protest, because I’ve been banned from using social media now, I picked up a few newspapers to show my kids when they’re older.”

Speaking on Bobby and Martin's courage and their daring act, Ray Barry, Chairman for Real Fathers For Justice, said: "They are two brave men who risked their lives to bring this matter to the public’s attention. Nothing else seems to work, and so it needs the courage of people like Bobby and Martin to do it. We salute them.

“The change that is needed is a simple one: a presumption in law that when a couple separate they retain equal responsibility for raising their children."

The strong minded father immerses himself into his protests non-stop; enough so, he can't carry on with a normal life, the responsibility towards his children too great.

His daily life consisting of going to work to earn money to live, and protesting.

His other protests include climbing MP Chris Grayling Ashtead home as Elmo in another rooftop protest, scaling West Minister Abbey on Father's Day and confronting Harriet Harman and the Labour Pink Bus campaign, wearing a T-shirt with "This is what a victim of feminism looks like" handwritten across it.

Pausing before sinking into a deep moment, Bobby said: "My case has been left now, it's just a waste of time now. I'm so many years along now that it’s just not worth it now.

"I just have to wait for my children to come and find me. When I last saw my eldest daughter properly she was 6, she’s now 11 and at secondary school now.

"I’m never going to get any justice in the family courts, all you do in family courts is spend money and upset yourself. You go there thinking you’re going to win, and you come out feeling like you want to die. And that’s why dads end up taking their lives or going the bottle and drinking. It’s the constant let down."

Bobby lost a friend to suicide who also campaigned to get his daughter back.

In the UK, the rate of male suicide is three times higher than that of females, with suicide being the highest cause of death among males than any other.

Ray Barry added: "When someone decides to kill themselves there are usually several factors which contribute to it: for example – if a man's wife leaves him, takes the children and won't let him see them, he may fall into depression, turn to drink, lose his job, lose his home and money in the divorce.

"He then finds that another man has replaced him as step father in his children’s lives, and that CSA are chasing him for money he hasn’t got. If he then commit suicide, it is difficult for any researcher to attribute the suicide to any one cause. Rather, it is a chain of events which leads to it, of which losing his children is one event.

"In my opinion, there is no doubt that losing one's children is one of the principal drivers of the high male suicide rate. It cannot be a coincidence that 24% of fathers in this country have no contact with their children and that ¾ of people who commit suicide are men. There must be a causal link between the two."

During the year 2013, there was a total of 6,233 suicides in the UK, 4,858 of those by males and 1,375 by females.

JK, director of Samaritans branch in Birmingham, a charity that provide a 24 hour listening service to reduce suicide, said: "I think one suicide is one too many. A stigma attached to masculinity is born out in suicide in very, very, generalised terms.

"We can kind of perceive some crisis in masculinity, if you like, where often men do feel like they bottle up feelings and or they don't necessarily feel they have people to talk to, intimately.

"Our aims are to preferably reduce suicides to zero, it's quite high initially, but we'd quite like to see suicide completely eradicated from culture, whether that happens or not, who knows. As men are three times more likely to take their own lives than women, analysis we have to date suggests that it is a particularly gendered issue.

"It’s important to us that we get our message out there as much as we can to the people that need it the most."

However, it hasn't always been let down after let down, Bobby managed to receive a message from his eldest daughter in July of this year through someone at her school.

"My daughter asked the person if they knew me and they said 'yes', and my daughter said 'tell him that we love him and that we're not allowed to contact him because we'll get into loads of trouble.’" He said with a stroke of joy in his tone.

"When I heard that, I actually did cry. Because I wasn’t expecting it until they are 16 or 17. It’s only a little thing, but it means a lot. It means that she knows what I’m doing, she knows I’m trying my hardest. I haven’t spoken to them for 2 and a half years, so the only thing that has changed her mind is the protesting."

Bobby uses such motivation as the drive behind every protest he does, saying that “all my protesting is just for them”, in hope they will see that he never gave up.

His most recent protest was a couple of days after Christmas, which included a protest camp Bobby and his fellow activists set up outside David Cameron’s house, where all parents were able to visit.

They were served with a notice and threatened with arrest if they did not leave.

Anyone who knows Bobby would know that Christmas is the hardest part of the year. He goes "into hibernation"; staying up in the early hours of Christmas to forget about the day and instead make video clip messages for his daughters in the hope they'll see them.

“I literally don't celebrate Christmas at all. I don't even acknowledge it.” He spoke in between pauses. “I protest around Christmas time, because obviously Christmas is the worst time of the year, Christmas is all about kids, especially in the run up to it, and it’s just painful. The last month is just painful.

“If you’d had that joy of having children, especially at Christmas and celebrating, for it to just then be stolen from you, it’s just heart-wrenching, you know. It’s really upsetting, so you just have to blink a lot and try not to pay attention to a lot of it.”

Last year Bobby's eldest daughter underwent counselling at her school after teachers worried about her Christmas list – consisting of wishes to see her daddy who she hadn't seen for a years.

Rich Adams added: "Christmas is a very emotional time when you aren't able to see your children or grandchildren. Many of whom will go through the formalities of buying presents for their children and grandchildren and putting them under the tree, hoping above hope that they will see them.

“Over 4 million children did not see one of their parents on Christmas day due to family breakdown."

GROWING RESPONSIBILITY:

"My kids are missing out on having me in their lives, 100%." Bobby said confidently. "We had a beautiful relationship, we really did, and I'd even play pretend make-up with them.

"Not seeing their father is affecting them now, and I know it's going to affect them into adulthood."

Bobby began protesting for his own case, at the start his aim was to get his children back. Now, after continuous publicity and recognition, his protesting has turned into something much bigger that has become a whole social issue in itself.

“Besides this, I feel like I have to protest anyway. Even if the press never reported on the protests, and no one ever said 'well done' or 'thanks', I'd still feel like I’d have to do it anyway.” He says.

“I just feel like it’s the right thing to do. Because obviously I went through the whole court procedure, so I’ve given the government a chance, and I feel like if I just leave it now, go back to my normal life and wait for my kids to come and find me when they’re adults, I’d feel guilty.”

Even when Bobby gets to see his children again, he still has plans to carry on protesting and supporting other parents out there in similar positions to him.

Elaborating on his gained responsibility, Bobby said: “People think myself and other people who protest are the solution, it gives people hope. Even when I get my kids back, I still want to carry on, because I know there’s a lot more dads out there who like I said kill themselves or become depressed, because they can’t see their children.

“But I wouldn’t have as much time as I’d be building relationships with my kids. I wouldn’t be doing direct action, obviously I’d still be supporting other dads, but I wouldn’t want to be doing anything that could get me arrested for a while.”

Bobby's ultimate goal is to get his daughters back, although the time of them being little children has passed, he lives in hope that when they become teenagers he will be able to build a relationship with them again and make up for all the time they’ve lost.

"Love for your children is unlike the love you have for a partner or your mum and dad, it’s a more intense love because they’re part of you. And if they’re taken away, you just feel completely empty."

FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT: NEWFATHERS4JUSTICE

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