Letter sent to Harriet Harman and MP'S

I am writing to beg for your help on behalf of the many thousands of children and their mothers who are routinely being forced by the courts to continue suffering at the hands of violent absent fathers, and for whom there is currently no remedy.

As can be seen from the facts below, and as you will be able independently to confirm from government and legal sources, it is virtually impossible for abused mothers and children to obtain protection from their violent former partners in the Family Courts of England and Wales.

The Shared Parenting Information Group aims to promote the continued involvement of both parents in their children’s lives. Their website (http://www.spig.clara.net/) provides a “Good Courts Guide”. The Guide provides statistics supplied by the Lord Chancellors Department. In 1994 a mere 1 in 40 Contact Applications were refused by the County Courts in England and Wales. By 2003 this very small proportion had been reduced to about 1 in 400. Over the years 2000 to 2003 half of the courts received collectively some 52,000 Contact Applications and did not refuse a single one.

I have consulted a great many Family Law practitioners and asked if any of them has ever handled a case where a Contact Application was refused. Not one had, and a barrister stated that the chances of a mother successfully opposing a Contact Application by a violent former partner were now much less than 1 in 1000.

The confidentiality imposed by the Family Court system prevents the mothers from publicising their personal plight. However, something of the seriousness of the issue can be seen in a report prepared by Hilary Saunders for Women’s Aid that was published in 2004 and is accessible via the Women’s Aid website. The report identifies 29 cases where children were killed as a result of contact arrangements.

It is clear to me, on the basis of the cases of which I am aware, that CAFCASS and, in turn, the Family Courts are interpreting parental responsibility as being the inalienable right of any absent father to have access to his child, regardless of his behaviour and the threat he poses.

It is also clear that death threats, abduction threats, harassment and molestation of the mother, even when perpetrated by the Applicant while proceedings are ongoing, are not deemed by CAFCASS and the Family Courts to provide sufficient grounds to justify the refusal of a Contact Application. Nor is the physical and psychological harm that the mothers and children suffer as a result of Applicants’ behaviour. Furthermore, Applicants are allowed by the courts to commit perjury, submit false documents and breach court orders with impunity, and CAFCASS are being allowed to submit blatantly biased and factually incorrect reports without subsequently being required by the courts to correct them.

The Court process is a devastating experience for the mothers and their children. Mothers suffer stress-related illnesses (up to and including stroke), clinical depression and anxiety, or worse, caused by the constant threat of ultimately being compelled, on pain of imprisonment, to hand their children over to the abuser. The demands on their time created by the legal process will curtail their already limited opportunities for quality time with their child, who will suffer as a result. Many will lose their jobs as a result of illness and court related absences. If they are not poor enough to qualify for legal aid they will face unaffordable legal costs or have to go to court unrepresented.

They will have to face their abuser in court over and over again. They will have to reward him by giving evidence in court of the further psychological, physical and financial harm he is succeeding in inflicting on them and their children. The courts then reward and encourage him further by minimising or ignoring what the Applicant has been doing, medical evidence of its effects, and other evidence (such as criminal convictions, drug and alcohol abuse etc) that may be placed before them by the mother.

The children will normally have been harmed prior to the separation by the violence of their father, either directly or by witnessing or even just hearing his violence to the mother. Their memory of this and their associated fears will be reawakened by his forced reintroduction into their lives. Their sleep may be disturbed by night terrors. They will often suffer physically and psychologically as a result. Many will also worry, usually in silence, about their mothers’ distress and illness. They will often be affected by poverty caused by the CSA’s failure to obtain maintenance by the father, the mother’s loss of employment, and child care costs incurred by lone mothers. Children’s vulnerability to illness will typically increase and their social and academic development at school will often be impaired. They will find any sense of security the mother may have managed to build following the separation utterly destroyed by the mothers’ unavoidable preoccupation with protecting them from their fathers and the disappearance of fun from their home lives.

The courts are supposed to treat the best interests of the child as paramount. In fact they are almost invariably ordering contact where there is not only a total absence of evidence that contact would be in any way beneficial to the child, but also positive evidence that contact is already being, or is highly likely to be, harmful. The courts are also supposed to take account of the wishes of the child, yet they invariably order contact even when the child is vigorously opposed to it and plainly in terror of the Applicant.

I believe that, Family Court judges should be required by law to issue a No Contact Order if the Applicant:

• is found to have been habitually violent to the mother and/or the child and is shown to have caused actual physical or psychological harm to either of them OR
• fails an independent Risk Assessment by properly accredited assessors OR
• is evidently using his Contact Application maliciously to continue controlling and abusing the mother OR
• has failed, by his acts and omissions, to demonstrate that his Application is based on a genuine desire to have a positive and meaningful relationship with his child OR
• is shown to lack the basic parenting skills that would be necessary to ensure the safety and security of the child while in his custody OR
• has acted while proceedings are ongoing in a manner that has caused physical or psychological harm to the mother and/or child OR
• is proven to have committed perjury or knowingly submitted false evidence in the Family Court OR
• has wilfully breached Family Court Orders OR
• is on the sex offenders register OR
• is shown to be involved in serious crime that might place the mother, child or the Applicant himself at risk OR
• is shown to be an abuser of drugs and/or alcohol OR
• is wilfully evading his parental responsibility to contribute financially to his child’s upkeep.

I would also suggest that, where supervised contact in a Contact Centre is considered, it should not be ordered by the court if the child does not wish to have contact with its absent and violent parent. It is self-evident that there is no justification for forcing a child to have contact with a father who is so dangerous that he can only be allowed contact under supervision in a secure Contact Centre, and yet this is routinely ordered as a precursor to the inevitable ultimate outcome - unsupervised contact.

Neither CAFCASS nor judges sitting in Family Courts are in any way accountable. This situation needs to be changed immediately. Women who have suffered Domestic Violence often find it very difficult to leave their controlling and abusive partners. The need to protect their children is often the factor which gives them the courage to get away. They suffer great financial and emotional difficulties in the process. Women in this position do not lightly choose to suffer the privations that follow separation and they do not refuse contact just to spite their former violent partner. They do so for entirely honourable and compelling reasons. It is obvious from the statistics that Contact Applications are almost always pre-judged in favour of the Applicant, and that the legal process is no more than a lucrative, cruel, and I would say criminal, charade. The courts are knowingly legitimising, assisting and perpetuating Domestic Violence.

I implore you to use your proven talents and influence in the field of domestic violence to help put an early end to this disgraceful travesty of justice which is torturing and endangering so many thousands of women and their children. The mothers are simply striving, at all costs and against currently hopeless odds, to fulfil their paramount duty - to continue protecting their children and themselves from their violent former partners.

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