Father's House Blog

On July 11th of this year, the Sunday Times ran a headline. It read, ‘I have no dad and nobody cares about me’ – Moat’s final lament.

The Moat referred to was fugitive Raoul Moat who had evaded capture by the police for over a week in the area around the village of Rothbury in Northumberland. Moat had already killed one person and severely injured two others, including a police officer whom Moat shot twice in the face, rendering him blind for life. As the police eventually caught up with him a stand off began in which Moat lay face down near a bridge with a sawn off shot gun in his hand. His gun was aimed at himself. The police kept their distance for hours and it was during this time that Moat uttered what were his last recorded words, overheard by neighbours. ‘I have no dad and nobody cares about me’.

Not long afterwards three loud bangs were heard. Two of these were police Tasers. The other was Moat’s gun which he had discharged, fatally wounding himself. Moat was dead by the time he reached hospital.
Since those dramatic events around 1.00am on Sunday morning July 11th reactions to Moat’s death have been varied and often extreme, ranging from those like Josephine Healey - Moat’s mother - who allegedly claimed that he was better off dead, to the tens of thousands who signed up on a Facebook page in which Moat was heralded as a victim and portrayed as a folk hero.

For us at Father’s House, one of the most significant and poignant aspects of the whole Moat incident was his statement that he didn’t have a dad and no one cared about him. In this tragic and iconic remark Moat gave voice to the greatest social disease of our age – fatherlessness. Like the thousands of men in our UK prisons, Moat’s life had been marked by ‘father absence’.

In the week after Moat’s death I visited a UK prison. About twenty male prisoners were doing the last of six sessions of an excellent course run by the Sycamore Tree Trust on victim awareness and restorative justice. After the meeting ended I spoke to a number of the prisoners and asked them if they had fathers. All of them told sad stories of absent, addicted, or abusive fathers, apart from one young man who said that he had a good father but that he’d made very bad choices. However he told me that the majority of the men in the prison were fatherless and that this was an important factor in them resorting to a life of crime.

All of this, of course, does not excuse the things that individual prisoners have chosen to do, any more than it excuses what Moat did. But it does highlight the desperate situation in the UK today. Far too many children are growing up without the love of a good father. At the Father’s House Trust we all care passionately about this social problem. We feel increasingly that we have a Wilberforce-like mandate to reverse this situation and to work for the abolition of fatherlessness and the reformation of fatherhood in the UK and beyond. That may seem a big dream for such a small team but somewhere somebody has to do something to stem the dark tide of father absence in the UK. Indeed, since Moat’s statement, ‘I have no dad and no one cares about me’, a number of people have written to me quoting the Book of Esther, saying that the mission of the Father’s House is ‘for such a time as this’ (Esther 4.14). We believe that too.

Moat’s last recorded words are truly a sign of the times. But in all of this, compassion for Moat’s fatherless life must not draw us into naive and superficial responses. There is a blind dad who will now never be able to see his wife or his two children again. He won’t be able to watch his children grow up or, eventually, his grandchildren born. A fatherless man has irreparably damaged the life of a father who no doubt adores his children. That in itself is truly an alarming sign of the times.