A married couple from Vojvodina had a family crisis. The wife, angry with the husband, pacjed her baks and their five-year-old son and left. After a month she filled for a paternity test and asked for a divorce.
The husband was shocked. Still, he didn’t want to believe that the boy whose diapers he once changed, gave baths, learned to walk and listen to his first words – was a child of another man. The doubt started eating him alive because of the “licentiousness” of his wife, about which he found out too late. His biggest fear with facing the results of the DNA test came true – the boy he raised had a different biological father.
This authentic story of the people, whose names (because of the protection of their privacy) we cannot give, ended with the man who the boy called “dad” leaving. Even though he was angry at his wife because he couldn’t forgive the biggest lie she told him for years, he thought that the boy doesn’t deserve to suffer because of it. He loved him as he was his own because he thought he he was. He wanted to keep seeing him. But his now ex-wife decided to continue her life with the man who was the biological father of her child. That excluded the possibility of the “deceived dad” to keep seeing the child.
A couple of years went by and the “dad” form our story has a girlfriend today which is supposed to give birth this year. This time he is certain that the child is his, but he still suffers because he can’t see the boy he raised as his own. Even though he secretly saw his from time to time. He didn’t approach him because he didn’t get the approval of the court to see him.
It doesn’t matter who made him, what is important is who gives him love. Serbian society usually pities the “deceived fathers”, the ones that raise the sons and daughters which don’t have their genes. Docent Goran Brajušković PhD isn’t prone to being one of those pitying the “wrong fathers”. He points out that the greatest thing is the child’s happiness, which doesn’t depend on whether the child has a biological father or not, but on how that man treats him
„The biological father is not that important. From a social aspect it is far more important that the man, who was with it, raised the child well and gave it love…In that sense, it really doesn’t matter who is the biological father”, says Brajušković, an associate of the Center for humane molecular genetics of the Biology college in Belgrade, where the DNA paternity tests are being done.
About 20 paternity tests on average are being done on monthly bases in labs in that center. Most usually the ones getting tested are fathers with older children. Brajušković says that sometimes even older people come:” Kids that are 60 come for a paternity tests with their fathers that are 80 years old. Even underage children come with their parents. There are really no rules”.
Except the Biology College, the paternity test can be done on Institutes for forensic medicine in Belgrade and Novi Sad, and a couple of private labs in Serbia. Just like the Biology College, the Institute for Forensic Medicine receives around 20 applications for paternity determination a month. Docent Oliver Stojkovic PhD, head of the DNA lab of the Institute, claims that it turns out that every third tested father is not biological.
„That doesn’t imply, of course, that every third father is not the biological father in the general population. However, some statistics were done in the world where it says that the coefficient of infidelity is 10 percent of the population of the world. That means that every tenth child in a kindergarten in Scotland, for example, has a non-biological father recorded in their registry of birth”, says Stojkovic.
The range of people coming in for testing is wide. There are women who try to prove in court that the real father of the child is; fathers who want to deny paternity in court, but also suspicious fathers who want to salve the dilemma on whether the children they are raising are theirs or not.
„We have done a couple of thousands of test till now. Every situation you saw on a Spanish soap opera already happened here. There were cases where a woman would bring first one man, and after that the second and lastly the third guy. There were also fathers that brought five children and it turned out that, for example, the third one wasn’t his” Stojkovic explains. He claims that one brought five children and found out that only the oldest one was his.
DNA analysis is completely reliable: The Institute for Forensic Medicine has been determining paternity for the last nine decades, and the technology has changed with time and wasn’t all that reliable once. The newest method, DNA analysis, is almost 100 percent certain. The only scenario where a mistake could be made is, for example, with identical twins. But such a case hasn’t yet been recorded in Serbia.
„At the beginning the expertise was based upon the old method of “does the child look like the father or not”. After that, in the 70’s, the expertise was done based on blood types. That method could only exclude the father with the incompatible blood type and was done on probability, so mistakes were made. The blood type analysis left some dilemmas. There are no such dilemmas with the DNA analysis”, Stojković explains and adds that the paternity tests based on blood type was also very expensive – around 1000 Gemran marks
He remembers a case of one man from Kraljevo, which was named the father of a child in the 70’s. Based on different evidence, including the fact that he wasn’t able to have children, he appealed the ruling of the court in Kraljevo by which he was named the child’s father. The case even made it to the Supreme Court who ruled against the “deceived father”. Ten years ago, the same man from Kraljevo did the DNA analysis, which determined that he is not the father of the child. But it was too late.
„So he now has evidence that is valid in court. But there is a thing called “ruled decision” in law. The verdict that the Supreme Court reached cannot be overruled by some extraordinary judicial medicine”, Stojkovic adds. The deceived man from Kraljevo is left only with the knowledge that he is really not the father of the child. On the other hand, his non-biological son gets, by law, his inheritance.