I looked into the sexist targetting of mothers under truancy laws – here's what I uncovered

Despite the advances made towards gender equality, mothers are still too often seen as the primary caregivers, and their children’s schooling, emotional wellbeing and behaviours still largely regarded as their jurisdiction

Parents of truanting children have been pursued ever more aggressively by councils in recent years. There’s endless talk of a “government crackdown” on unauthorised absences, while parents frequently find themselves hit with fines for taking their children on term-time holidays.

Wherever you stand on the issue of a parent’s right to choose what’s best for their child, there is a gross miscarriage of justice here – the sexism that imbues our society has reached new heights, and mothers are once again held to impossibly high standards compared to their male coparents.

As The Independent revealed today, In 2013, just over 11,730 parents were prosecuted in England and Wales for failing to ensure their children’s attendance at school, according to a Freedom of Information request to the Ministry of Justice. By 2017, this had risen to 18,377. One thing, though, has remained more or less constant — from year to year, around seven in 10 of those taken to court are women.

It would be easy to dismiss this disparity simply as a reflection of household demographics. There are, after all, more single mothers than fathers. But if a child hails from a single mother-headed family it does not necessarily follow that the father is out of the picture. In most cases, fathers also have parental responsibility.

While a slightly skewed gender balance in prosecutions is to be expected, it shouldn’t be anything like the numbers we are seeing. Department for Education guidelines are clear that all natural parents, regardless of whether they are married, can be held responsible when it comes to truancy, but local authorities are free to decide who to prosecute in each case. In 2017, 73 per cent of court-issued fines – which can be up to £2,500) went to women, as did 84 per cent of community sentences. It’s clear who is paying the price.

According to Rona Epstein, researcher at Coventry University and co-author of a recent study on truancy prosecutions, mother bear the brunt of prosecutions in cases of a two-parent, heterosexual household too, but she cannot explain why this is the case.

To me, it seems clear that as a society far too quick to judge mothers. Despite the advances made towards gender equality, mothers are still too often seen as the primary caregivers, their children’s schooling, emotional wellbeing and behaviours still largely regarded as their jurisdiction. Their failings — or perceived failings — when it comes to child-rearing are judged more harshly than those of fathers.

We see this over and over again as research and reporting focuses on the impact of a mother’s actions on their children’s wellbeing, and the endless amount of pressure put on women to behave a certain way while pregnant. Choices on how to give birth, whether to breastfeed and how to sleep train are fraught with social pressures, the vast majority come down on mothers – not fathers.

The disparity does not stop with prosecutions. Inside courts, women are more likely to be found guilty than men for truancy offences – 79 per cent of women prosecuted in 2017 were convicted, compared to 70 per cent of men. The Magistrates Association has not noticed the disparity itself, and is unable to offer a definitive explanation once it’s brought to light, although they suggest it may be because anecdotally women are less likely than men to defend themselves. Though sad, it’s certainly a more palatable explanation than the alternative — that magistrates are actively discriminating against women in their application of the law.

Epstein argues that until proven otherwise, it seems the courts are holding women to an “unfair degree of responsibility on a gender bias basis”. For their part, the Ministry of Justice emphasises that magistrates act independently from them, while the Department for Education has not acknowledged the gender disparity in prosecutions.

One thing is clear: even when it comes to the law, which is supposed to be impartial, women are losing out. We collectively seem to hold women and mothers to higher standards, we imagine that they should have a greater degree of awareness about what their children get up to when they leave the house in the morning, or that their efforts to encourage reluctant children into their school uniforms should be more successful than a father’s. It naturally follows that we would assign them a greater degree of culpability when things go wrong.

But in a world already stacked against women, we need to examine these instincts and ensure we’re not acting upon them. Otherwise the law will exist to marginalise those already at a disadvantage and protect those most privileged – and that’s not a society I want to live in.