UK: Should we be doing more to expose paternity fraud?

Article here. Excerpt:

'It could be the ultimate fraud. Across Britain, thousands of men are likely to be raising children that they have been tricked into believing are theirs, when they were really fathered by another man. And now one victim of paternity fraud is calling for it to be made a criminal offence after he spent six years bringing up a boy he thought was his son, only to find out that his wife had used the sperm from her ex-boyfriend at an IVF clinic.

The man sued her for the £60,000 he had handed over in child maintenance after they split up, but only gained a small amount of compensation, even though the judge said he had been a victim of “clear deceit and fraud”.

It sounds like an extreme and isolated case. But studies suggest somewhere between two and 10 per cent of men have been fooled into raising another man’s child.

For obvious reasons, paternity fraud – or paternal discrepancy as healthcare professionals refer to it – is hard to track. The best British review was published in the journal Epidemial Community Health ten years ago. Looking at all other good studies, it said the median average was a rate of four per cent. So one father in 25 is labouring under a serious misapprehension.'