IF A MAN dressed as Spiderman is still perched up a crane at Tower Bridge this morning, motorists cursing the near-gridlock he continues to bring to much of the City may not wish to hear this. But there is a legion of other would-be superheroes out there, waiting their turn to cause disruption in the name of fathers.

David Chick, the 36-year-old from Kingston upon Thames, southwest London, who has forced the closure of the bridge to traffic as part of a protest for fathers’ rights to see their children, is just the latest footsoldier in the frontline of what has been dubbed “the new sex war”.

Chick has waved the banner of Fathers 4 Justice, a direct-action group that calls itself a civil rights organisation campaigning for the rights of children to see both their parents.

Fathers 4 Justice says Chick is a supporter rather than a member, but the group has sympathy for his plight (details of which cannot be reported for legal reasons) and believes that he highlights the growing anger of fathers who have problems gaining access to their children.

“The question is, why does a man climb 120ft up a crane in the wet and the wind and stay there for several days?” says Matt O’Connor, founder of Fathers 4 Justice. “He’s not doing it for the fun of it. He’s desperate and he’s been driven to it.”

The group says mothers who have custody of children routinely flout the contact orders issued by courts that stipulate how often and for how long fathers can see their children. They cite a statistic from the Lord Chancellor’s Department that, in 2001, of 55,030 contact orders issued, half were broken.

O’Connor says that often when a marriage breaks down and the father moves out of the house — “a silly thing to do” — contact is not a problem. But as divorce proceedings progress or the mother finds a new partner, problems begin. First the child does not appear for a visit, then it happens again, and eventually access ceases. “The mother may say that it is upsetting her or it is upsetting the children.”

If the father goes to court, O’Connor says, it can cost £15,000 in just the first few months and the process is slow, with the Children & Family Court Advisory & Support Service (Cafcass) required to make reports. All the while the father does not see his children. Fathers 4 Justice wants to see the law changed so that there is a legal presumption that both parents should have contact with their children. They also want to see a “level playing field” when contact arrangements are being drawn up, so that the process begins from a position where both parents have equal rights.

Most controversially, Fathers 4 Justice wants to see new procedural directives issued to family law judges that would see greater enforcement of contact orders. “We want to see mothers told: ‘If you break the order you will go to jail.’ The law has to have teeth,” says O’Connor. Discussions have been held with ministers at the Department for Constitutional Affairs but O’Connor says he is not optimistic that any changes will be made.

Bob Geldof, who has given his support to Fathers 4 Justice, has condemned custody rulings for being based “on the ‘sugar and spice and all things nice’ school of biological determination rather than anything more significant”. He argues that family law as it stands doesn’t work and “is rarely of benefit to the child and promotes injustice, conflict and unhappiness”.

Fathers 4 Justice has been spreading its message across the country. Most recently two fathers dressed as Batman and Robin staged a three-day rooftop protest at the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand.

After angry fathers went to the Cafcass offices and painted the doors purple, the service announced that it had “no sympathy for them. We talk successfully to other fathers’ groups, but we will not talk to Fathers 4 Justice.”

James Ferguson, head of family law at the London law firm Taylor Wessing, says it is deeply unfortunate that “some parents cannot resist fighting their battles through the medium of their children.”

He accepts that there are “clearly issues about enforcement of contact orders” but cautions that it is “difficult to legislate and be prescriptive because every case is different”.

He says the demand from Fathers 4 Justice to jail mothers who persistently break orders is extreme. “Courts have to try to be objective and do what is in the best interests of the children. It is pretty unusual that the welfare of the children dictates that the mother be put in prison.”

He suggests that a better alternative is for the courts to take custody away from mothers who persistently break contact orders and award residency to the fathers. This is already possible under the Children Act. In practice most courts maintain the status quo.

Meanwhile, O’Connor says there is much more to come. He says that in the past few weeks their membership has leapt from 3,000 to 4,000 and they are receiving “hundreds” of e-mail inquiries every day. “The recent action has been a precursor of the disruption that is to come.

“We will start closing family courts down. We have people queuing up to be arrested. We have people queueing up to go up cranes. We have people queueing up to X, Y, Z. I can think of 50 or 60 dads off the top of my head who would do the same thing.”