Ot­to Car­ring­ton

Se­nior Re­porter

ot­to.car­ring­ton@cnc3.co.tt

Pres­i­dent of the Fa­thers’ As­so­ci­a­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go (FATT), Rhon­dall Fee­les, is re­ject­ing crit­i­cisms of his or­gan­i­sa­tion’s re­cent claims on pa­ter­ni­ty fraud that were made at a press con­fer­ence on Tues­day. He is in­sist­ing that the da­ta he pre­sent­ed is cred­i­ble and ground­ed in re­al cas­es.

Fee­les was re­spond­ing to a state­ment is­sued by the Caribbean As­so­ci­a­tion for Fem­i­nist Re­search and Ac­tion (CAFRA TT), which ques­tioned the va­lid­i­ty of FATT’s fig­ures and cau­tioned against the mis­use of sta­tis­tics in the na­tion­al de­bate on pa­ter­ni­ty test­ing.

CAFRA TT had ar­gued that Fee­les’ fig­ures, which sug­gest­ed that 143 of 440 men who un­der­went DNA test­ing over a five-year pe­ri­od were not the bi­o­log­i­cal fa­thers of their chil­dren could not be gen­er­alised to the wider pop­u­la­tion. The fem­i­nist group not­ed that sim­i­lar glob­al stud­ies placed the rate of non-pa­ter­ni­ty be­tween one and four per cent, far be­low the “one in three” fig­ure cit­ed by Fee­les.

How­ev­er, Fee­les told Guardian Me­dia he saw no rea­son to re­spond fur­ther, dis­miss­ing CAFRA TT’s po­si­tion as lack­ing cred­i­bil­i­ty.

“I am not in­clined to re­spond to that be­cause that re­al­ly didn’t chal­lenge the sta­tis­tic per se,” Fee­les said. “They can’t chal­lenge the sta­tis­tic; any­body look­ing at that could see they just went on Google to try to find some type of da­ta.

“I’m not see­ing who did the re­search, what labs it was con­duct­ed in, noth­ing of that sort.

Ac­cord­ing to Fee­les, FATT’s sta­tis­tics are drawn from ac­tu­al lab­o­ra­to­ry tests con­duct­ed in Trinidad and To­ba­go, un­like the “broad on­line da­ta” CAFRA TT ref­er­enced.

“When we present our sta­tis­tics, we can pin­point our fig­ures to per­sons that were test­ed. Who are they point­ing to?” he asked.

He al­so re­ject­ed ac­cu­sa­tions of misog­y­ny lev­elled against him, say­ing he was ac­cus­tomed to such crit­i­cism from those “fear­ful of ac­count­abil­i­ty”.

“The at­tacks on me about be­ing a misog­y­nist, that’s a nor­mal thing. I’ve al­ways been iden­ti­fied with bad be­hav­iour by women that most of them are just fear­ful of be­ing held ac­count­able for,” he said.

Fee­les added that FATT’s po­si­tion aligns with re­search else­where in the re­gion, in­clud­ing a study con­duct­ed in Ja­maica, and ac­cused crit­ics of “draw­ing at straws”.

He said, “The greater per­cent­age of women are be­hind us, and we’re pre­pared to work with them.”