Rampant misattributed paternity
There are times when fathers have trouble relating to their children. There are times too when fathers wonder if they ARE related to them!! Dr Karl has been down the lab to check if the suspicions are warranted.
The word "paternity" is fairly straight-forward. It comes from the Late Latin, "paternus", meaning "relating to a father", and it signifies "the state of being someone's father".
The subject of "paternity" grabbed the headlines in March 2005.
A man claimed that he was the son that Federal Minister Tony Abbot had put up for adoption 28 years earlier. After much to-ing and fro-ing, the Australian public was informed that the Federal Minister was not actually the biological father. Almost as a casual aside, the figure was again bandied about that, in the general population, the percentage of "fathers" who are not genetically related to their children is typically 30%. It ain't necessarily so.
In the paternity trade, the technical term used to denote fathers who are not biologically related to their children is "misattributed paternity". The percentage is around 20-30%, but only in an incredibly small subset of men (0.025% of Australian men). These men not only have strong reason to believe that they are not the biological father of their children, but also then get themselves tested by a commercial Paternity Laboratory. This figure (around 20-30%) is fairly consistent for various microscopic populations of suspicious fathers all around the world - the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, etc. These men apparently have good reason to suspect that their parentage is in doubt.
But this minuscule, highly skewed group has a very different rate of misattributed paternity from the rest of us - the other 99.975%. One way to track the percentage of misattributed paternity for the general (and trusting) population is by certain medical conditions that can be passed to the children if, and only if, both parents carry the condition. This tells us that in the general Australian population (and most of Western society), misattributed paternity is around 1-5%, and usually much closer to 1% than 5%. This backs up a 2001 Australian sex survey that looked at 10,173 adults who had been in a regular relationship for over a year. This survey found that 2.9% of women had more than one sexual partner over that year.
One expert who has researched this topic deeply is the sociologist, Professor Michael Gilding, from the Swinburne University of Technology. He chased down every single bit of public information relating to paternity fraud over the last 30 years, and wrote his paper, "Rampant Misattributed Paternity" in the journal, People and Place. He found that the sources of these 30% estimates were "based on hearsay, anecdote, or published or unevaluable findings".
So how did this figure of "30% for misattributed paternity in the general population" appear in our public consciousness?
Probably with a single throwaway line by Dr. Elliot Elias Philipp, spoken at a Ciba Foundation Symposium in 1972, on the topic "Discussion: moral, social and ethical issues". His comments were about an unidentified town in south-east England, with the "research" being done possibly in the 1950s. His exact words were "… we blood-tested some patients in a town in south-east England, and found that 30% of the husbands could not have been the fathers of their children…" That single sentence was very attractive to the media of the day, and has been regurgitated ever since. However, the statement was never backed up by written research in any peer-reviewed journal where it could be evaluated by other researchers - it was only ever a single throwaway line at a conference.
The 30% figure is a very dramatic one, and is endlessly trotted out by the media. It is also publicised by two other groups - first, support groups for the fathers who are indeed not biologically related to one or more of their children, and second, the Paternity Laboratories who charge for the tests.
The internet and the media have helped spread this myth. During the media storm around Minister Abbot's "alleged fatherhood", Professor Gilding's colleague, Lyn Turney, was interviewed in a Brisbane newspaper (Brisbane Sunday Mail, 27 March, 2005). She was quoted as claiming that the rate of misattributed paternity in the general population was 20%. But she said no such thing to the interviewing journalist. I guess that the old saying holds true for newspaper editors looking to sell papers, that "necessity is the mother of invention".
Published 02 June 2006
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