On January 12, 2011, Federal Councillor Sommaruga announced that she would postpone the ready-to-use draft law on the new regulation of joint custody for at least one year.
The discontent that has since spread among fathers needed an outlet.
With the "Send a Stone" , the umbrellaorganization for shared parenting (GeCoBi), in cooperation with other organizations, therefore showed a clear and unambiguous response on February 11th.
Schick en Stei was able to mobilize hundreds of people within a few hours; in less than a week, over 1600 people registered and together sent around 1200 stones.
This success is largely due to the media coverage and has far exceeded our expectations. We would like to sincerely thank everyone involved. We have received countless positive responses and a great deal of support, which we are very grateful for. The power of this campaign has inspired us all.
Thanks in no small part to this extraordinary force and the broad reaction of the population as well as the media, Federal Councillor Sommaruga visited us on the very first evening of the vigil in Bern.
In a lengthy discussion between the two presidents of GeCoBi and männer.ch on the one hand, and Federal Councillor Sommaruga on the other, we were able to present and explain our concerns and fears. Ms. Sommaruga listened carefully and clearly took our worries seriously.
This was expressed specifically in their binding proposal for further action.
Federal Councillor Sommaruga's proposal
: Federal Councillor Sommaruga will convene a roundtable of experts by April 2011. Representatives from fathers' and men's rights organizations, as well as representatives from women's organizations and children's rights groups, will be invited to this roundtable. The roundtable is intended to remain very small and will be tasked with taking concrete steps to clarify the proposal as quickly as possible and get it underway.
What does this mean for us?
We have, of course, analyzed this question. We have concluded that we should interpret this offer for a roundtable discussion as a genuine interest on your part in a swift and effective approach. Naturally, it remains to be seen what such a roundtable will ultimately achieve and how it will be organized. In any case, it is an opportunity to significantly influence the further legislative process, something that fathers' organizations have been demanding for many years. Our demand was for the immediate implementation of Ms. Widmer-Schlumpf's current proposal. However, we must be aware that we do not know the details of this proposal; we were essentially asking for a pig in a poke. The current proposal to participate in the further process, on the other hand, opens up far more extensive possibilities for us. Although the additional round was initially triggered by concerns from the women's side, the constellation of participants at the roundtable will ultimately give men's and fathers' organizations another opportunity to raise their concerns, perhaps even more comprehensively than in the current state of the proposal. For example, the issue of custody rights for unmarried parents may become a topic of discussion again.
What happens next?
Since our actions primarily aimed to demand that we be heard, we can declare this first goal achieved. Federal Councillor Sommaruga listened to us and assured us on live television that she understood and took our concerns seriously.
Your offer to invite us to a roundtable discussion is a respectable step towards a more equitable way of forming opinions.
The perspectives of fathers and men are no longer excluded from the political process, and that is remarkable.
Of course, we are also aware that so far we have "only" offered a dialogue. Only the composition and execution of the roundtable will reveal whether a genuine dialogue develops, or merely another chat session.
For this reason, we have decided the following for our two actions:
Vigil:
The vigil in its planned form (two people daily) ended with yesterday's handover of the stones to Ms. Sommaruga. We demanded to be heard, and we were heard. However, we want to continue to harness the enthusiasm and willingness to participate and have therefore decided to continue the vigil in a slightly modified form. Instead of standing in front of the Federal Parliament Building in pairs every day, we would like to hold a larger vigil every month on the 14th (due to the start of the campaign on February 14th). We hope that this approach will lead to a steadily growing movement that could perhaps attract large groups of people in a few months. In this sense, the participants who have registered for the vigil so far should be considered a core group that will hopefully attract more and more people. We are convinced that this will allow us to launch a sustainable campaign in the long term, one that our politicians will no longer be able to ignore.Those who have already registered for the vigil are currently being informed individually. Of course, we are also looking for additional participants for this new format of vigil. Interested parties should contact us at mahnwache@gecobi.ch
Sending Stones:
Due to the overwhelming response to this campaign, we had to adjust our plans several times. While we initially planned to package the stones individually, each with a personal letter, we realized over the weekend that this would have been the wrong approach. The stones themselves are not our message; they serve more as paperweights. The real message was and is the hundreds of letters from people addressed to Ms. Sommaruga. Fathers, mothers, children, grandparents, experts—they all sent letters: moving, encouraging, accusatory, demanding.We couldn't and didn't want these messages to disappear into a large pile of stones, so we decided to deliver these letters, bound together, directly to Ms. Sommaruga. We did this for the first time yesterday, along with five symbolic packages of stones.
Yesterday morning, the first 500 or so stones arrived at Bundesplatz. After these stones triggered the expected flurry of activity, our logistics center agreed to temporarily store the stones for the Bundeshaus (Federal Parliament Building).
We have decided to continue the campaign. The response and the desire of people to write to Ms. Sommaruga has simply overwhelmed us, and we are very grateful for it.
Out of respect for Mrs. Sommaruga's cooperation, we have decided to temporarily suspend the physical shipment of the stones.
We are currently working with the Federal Department of Justice and Police (EJPD) to find a suitable solution for the stones. Our goal from the outset was to donate the stones to a charitable project after the campaign. We are very pleased that the EJPD also wants to support this, and we are confident that together we will find a good solution.
GeCoBi sees itself as a constructive partner in building new social structures. We are pleased to be able to visibly demonstrate this soon in the form of a stone donation.