After two years in the making, the Channel 4 Dispatches programme about domestic abuse and the family courts was finally shown last week.  If you missed it you can find it here, but beware if you’re going through the family court in children proceedings as you may find it triggering or distressing.

Louise Tickle, journalist, has been working tirelessly for the last five years to try to get more openness and accountability into the family courts and has done a wonderful job with her interviews and presenting this programme.  But before you think about going to the press with your own story, remember that these brave mothers have put their own liberty on the line to tell their stories and could face a prison sentence for breaking the family court privacy laws.

Julia’s was one of the stories featured: she said she thought her case was ‘black and white’ given that she had discovered her ex had previously been convicted of sexually assaulting two other children, but she has been to court 37 times over 8 years.  Her ex wanted 50:50 residence, she wanted him to have only weekly supervised contact and she was accused of alienating her children from their father.

And then there was the distressing footage of four police officers forcibly dragging Jane’s children from their beds, kicking and screaming, in the middle of the night to take them to live with their father.  Unfortunately this story did rather seem to hijack the whole programme.  Forced removals like this are clearly horrendous but they don’t happen every week (there have been at least 42 over the last three years) whereas dreadful decisions are made by the family courts every day and I would have preferred the focus to be on that.  But if the sensational aspect of the programme has resulted in more people becoming aware of what’s happening in the family courts then so much the better.

Court orders are sometimes made for children to move from their mothers to live with their fathers when their mother’s allegations of domestic abuse are countered by allegations of parental alienation by the father.  But usually the removal doesn’t have to be forced and either takes place directly after school, or the mother is too fearful of not complying with the court order and sends the children off against her better judgement.  Worse still, the children often don’t see their mother again for a long time – Jane’s children didn’t see her for eight months and she was warned she’d go to jail if they kept trying to run from their dad back to her.

Edward, now 24, who tried to jump off a second floor balcony when the police arrived, was forcibly removed three times and said he was separated from his mum for 14 months, despite her going to court over 25 times.

Since the programme aired men have been protesting on social media about how one-sided the programme was, because no fathers were interviewed about parental alienation.  It is perhaps unfortunate that the subtitle for the programme was ‘Family Courts Uncovered’ as that may have given the impression that all the flaws of the family courts were to be exposed, rather than the programme dealing specifically with the issue of domestic abuse and the allegations of parental alienation that are commonly made in response to  them.

Bob Greig from Only Dads said “domestic abuse and parental alienation in the same sentence is a recent phenomenon and I don’t see why they’re coming together.  If there was domestic violence in that relationship it’s perfectly natural for the child to want to live with the non-abusive parent and that isn’t parental alienation.”

Dispatches also carried out an online questionnaire of parents and lawyers and over 2000 parents said the judge was actively hostile towards them.  Only 7% of 2,500 parents were very satisfied with the outcome of their case.  As our system is adversarial, meaning there are winners and losers, you would expect half of the people to be satisfied and the other half to be unhappy with the outcome.  And 26 of 33 young people who were the subject of proceedings when they were children said that they were unhappy with the outcome of the case. For most, this was because of coerced, court-ordered contact.

The average cost of children proceedings was found to be £13,000 although one in 20 said they’d spent over £100,000 in legal fees.

I was interested in the finding that domestic abuse was three times more likely to be found proved if the alleged perpetrator had been cross-examined.  This shows the importance of insisting on a fact finding hearing – and of not bottling out of it before or on the day!   Unfortunately however the results go on to show that in 44% of 601 cases where domestic abuse was reported to be found proved, Cafcass did not assess the children as unsafe with either parent.  Nearly 60% of 1,734 resident parents said that their children were made to have contact with their ex-partner in circumstances that they felt were unsafe.

You can read the full results of the survey here.

The people surveyed were self-selected and probably largely people unhappy with the system.  However, as Sir James Munby, former President of the Family Division, said in the programme: “Some would dismiss this as anecdotal material from a self-selecting audience. That, I’m afraid, is not good enough. If you’ve got albeit self-selected, 4000 to 5000 people then you’ve got to pay attention to it. It’s something which is deeply, deeply troubling. We’ve got to pay more attention to children.”   He said the answer to the problem is training – but the Judicial College doesn’t have the resources to train all the magistrates as well as the judges.  Compulsory training was added by the House of Lords to the new Domestic Abuse bill but the government decided it undermined judicial independence and removed it.

So what can you do if you’re in, or might find yourself in, this sort of situation?

Prevention is better than cure.  Many judges are clearly of the view that it’s more damaging for a child not to have a relationship with a parent, than it is to be abused by or frightened of that parent.  So if there’s any possibility of you being accused of alienating your child from their other parent you’ll want to be able to show that you are promoting contact and that you’re not trying to airbrush the parent from the child’s life.  You can do this by:

  • Telling Cafcass, the court etc that you want your child to have a relationship with their other parent, but you want it to be safe.  However, if your child is older and refusing to see their parent be ready to explain why.  Start with their relationship before you separated: was it good or was it almost non-existent?   Did your child experience your abuse, or were they abused themself?
  • Doing all you can to get your child to communicate with their other parent even if they’re not seeing them.  They can send birthday and fathers’ day cards.  If they’re very young you can post or email drawings they’ve done and you can send photos of your children.  Make sure you keep copies of everything you send, and the date you sent it.  Set up video calls if you possibly can – supervised by someone else if you can’t bear to do it yourself.  Ask your ex to send photos of themselves and their family and put them in an album for your child to look at as and when they may wish to.
  • Ensuring you give the other parent relevant information about your child.  They have parental responsibility and they are legally entitled to it which means the court won’t look favourably at you if you’ve not kept them informed.  You can just give the briefest of details and leave your ex to make further enquiries from the school, GP etc if they wish.  If your child needs to change school or have medical or therapeutic treatment, you have to consult your ex.  In practice that may in some cases mean no more than inform them as ‘consult’ doesn’t mean ‘agree’ – if they don’t agree they can apply to the court for a specific issue or prohibited steps order.  Be sure to keep a copy of all the information you give.

You probably won’t want to do any of this, but until all our judges and magistrates are properly trained and the courts work to protect children, it’s better to do this than have your child removed and not see you for months.

And if you do find yourself in court at risk of losing your child, with an expert in parental alienation being proposed, do all you can to oppose the application.  Check whether the expert is regulated or accredited to a professional body – Dispatches found that most of them aren’t. Torn Apart spelled out that there is no research on the long term outcomes of removing a child to live with the alienated parent in order to restore their relationship.   There are a few small scale studies from US practitioners’ own case notes but Cardiff University has said none of these would meet NICE standards.  So do challenge any study that’s quoted in your case.