Family Law

•Court Orders in relation to child contact and access

Once a Court Order is made, that order should be upheld if breached, and sanctions should be actively used to address anyone found to be flouting order without good reason.

•Child contact; protection of children in domestic violence cases

Full risk assessment of cases reporting DV should be carried out as fast as possible but with adequate resources and full investigation into the nature, and relevance to any abuse with the matter before the court. False and malicious claims should be treated as a criminal act of perjury with effective sanctions to deter such claims. It is well recognized within the Family Courts that the majority of DV claims are unfounded, and are a product of the hostile litigation environment created in adversarial winner takes all Residence and Contact disputes.

•Child support and maintenance
Child Support should not be calculated on the number of overnights a child spends with either parent. This calculation and associated discounts acts as a disincentive for controlling Resident parents to deny the Non-Resident parent reasonable parental involvement, including overnight stays.

•Application of the Children’s Act 1989; publishing orders, appeal of orders, “leave to remove”, interviewing children.

The Family Courts need to be open to scrutiny by the public and professional peers to those who work within the system. Children and parents should be afforded anonymity by not exposing their names unless to do so would be in the public interest.

Cases of perjury and false and malicious claims of Rape, DV and abuse should expose the culprit, as they have the potential to go on and commit the same crimes in other relationship, without ever being found out.
“Leave to remove” should be only accepted in exceptional circumstances. Ideally parents would be educated in the early stages of separation of the benefits of establishing a Shared Parenting arrangement and the disadvantages of Sole residence Vs Non-Resident Parent status.

It is currently rare for a Resident Parent to be denied removal, and the NRP often fights a futile and costly battle to prevent the move. The problems typically stem form the imbalance in parental care, power and control, which is associated with the titles attracted by the legal definitions of Resident Parents and Non-Resident Parent. Removals would be a far less common occurrence or more fairly contested when both parents are Shared Resident Parents at the start.

•The allocation of Child Benefit and its impact on future entitlements

In a Shared Residence arrangement Child Benefit should be split between the parents equally. No calculation on number of nights should be included, as this would just compound the current problem created by the CSA penalty to Resident Parents who allow overnights, or reward for Non-Resident Parents granted overnights. Where there is clearly a case of imbalance parenting and duty of care, the first assessment should be to determine if hostility by a parent is preventing a more equal care arrangement or if one parent is clearly abdicating their role.

If hostility is the problem, that needs to be resolved first, to avoid rewarding an abusive controlling parent with 100% benefit entitlement. If the case involves an absent parent by choice, their irresponsibility should attract financial penalties.

Early Education and awareness services:

Gender neutral approach
I believe that the root cause of many of the problems relating to hostility and parental litigation stem from the imbalance in control and power relating to parental roles, and the effect that has on a parents ability to fulfil their duty of care.
When a family go through the trauma of parental separation they have few support services to turn too, and far too many end up seeking legal advice, and get direct to the Family Courts.
The starting advice for mothers (mainly) is to contest and gain Residence. For fathers (mainly) they get advice to apply for Contact Order. Few legal professionals go through the ins and outs of what Residence and Contact actually do to a parent natural status, and role.

The new C1A Domestic Violence forms are being used in a very gendered way as well. Leading to legal professionals to encourage of extract information form female clients, but not doing the same from male clients based on the own assumptions and preconceptions of the prevalence and nature of gendered DV. This leads to several unjust and badly argued cases, and also is the breading ground for malicious claims.
Men typically will not be asked and will also not recognise their status as a victim of Domestic Violence (typically emotional and psychological for men) at the hands of the controlling ex partner they are being forced to take to court due to withholding their joint child. This abuse goes unrecorded and worse unrecognised in most case.
A woman suffering the same abuse will be actively engaged to recognised and report the abuse within the court paperwork and process. When the statistics and count of cases involving reported DV are available, it will clearly show skewed and inaccurate results due to this unequal gendered approach.

If less fathers where told to go for contact and instead applied for Shared Residence, we would start to see the model that matches many fathers real expectations. If mothers were educated to know that fathers were no longer optional peripheral roles in the new family model, they wouldn’t contest his ongoing involvement. Add to this the incentives to win all, and to not lose, the battle ground today is fierce. We need to encapsulate early parental roles and duty educations and back those up with incentives and systems that support both parents mutual care and financial support for the their joint child.

Today’s approach is fundamentally flawed in that it clearly deals with each gender of parent differently based on old models and out