Kids who don't live with their dads will become drug-addicts and rapists according to this ad.

Never let facts get in the way of a bigoted scare campaign.

The Marriage Alliance are an Australian lobby group who really like marriage. They also really like fathers. They’re very, very confident that marriage equality will “reject the necessity of fathers”.

So they celebrated Father’s Day this year by releasing a video of how great fathers are, and how terrible children become if they grow up without fathers living with them.

According to Marriage Alliance’s new advertisement (which they have posted to Facebook), fatherhood is important (and not at all creepy) because a father is apparently:

Fathers are also:

But kids who don’t have a dad living at home turn out to be terrible. How terrible?

Well, unfortunately, they mostly end up in prison.

Or drug addicted:

Or they just run-away.

But the thing you’ve really got to watch out for with children who don’t have a dad living in the home, is this:

It’s pretty dramatic stuff. I mean, who knew that kids who didn’t live with their dads would grow up to be rapists?

These are some pretty shocking statistics – and some very bold claims.

So it’s worth having a look at where this data comes from.

A little digging and you find that the dad-less rapists were discussed as part of this study:

That study from 1978 indicates that people, who say that they rape because they are angry at their fathers, came from a home with an absent father – which does not at all indicate that 80% of rapists did not grow up without fathers in the home.

And how about those drug addicted kids? Well, the data about them comes from:

Rainbows for all God’s Children appears to be this esteemed research institute:

It’s possible that in researching their advertisement, the Marriage Alliance missed the research published in the Population Research and Policy Review in 2014 about the relative well-being of children raised by same-sex couples.

Which is pretty clear that kids raised by same-sex parents do just as well as kids from different-sex households – including when it comes to substance abuse, sexual activity and psychological health.

Or maybe Marriage Alliance missed the study by the Australian Institute of Family Studies from 2013, which revealed that:

Sure, it doesn’t make a great slideshow.

But I think the available and respected research on the topic can be effectively summarised as follows:

And if we need stats, these ones seem particularly apposite: