Gingerbread Contact Survey…and a little philosophy

Gingerbread’s website was down today when I went to find this report, so I’m linking to the post on Divorce Survivor which attaches the report itself and summarises some of the stats (its 140+ pages long). I got distracted by something half way through reading this, but what struck me was the discrepant reporting as between [...]

Participation of Children

An interesting article by District Judge Crichton (Inner London FPC, champion of the Drug & Alcohol Court Pilot) about enhancing the participation of children in Family Proceedings. He suggests that children of an appropriate age should be routinely asked by CAFCASS about the possibility of meeting the judge and that judges should not be reluctant to [...]

Contact Inactivity?

I promised I would post when I found the elusive list of contact activity providers that the DCSF / CAFCASS have been threatening to publish since early December. And so here is the link. I want to weep. I knew there would be holes in the provision at the outset, but in my region (the [...]

New Year…New Law…Same Old Problems

So it’s back to work in 2009 and in my pigeonhole are several sorry tales of Christmas Contact Orders gone wrong. A timely reminder that a) its no good having an order if the court doesn’t produce a copy with the warning notice prior to the start of contact, because then it can’t be enforced using [...]

Children & Adoption Act – postscript

Further to my post yesterday, there is a piece in The Times today about the new provisions and John Bolch at Family Lore has posted the new court forms which are in use as of today. Resolution are quoted in the article by Frances Gibb, their full press release is here. . The quote in [...]

New Powers In Contact Cases

The remaining provisions of the Children & Adoption Act 2006  (Part I) finally come into force tomorrow (8 December 2008). They amend the Children Act 1989 to enable the court to make contact activity directions and conditions and to enforce breach of a contact order by way of and enforcement order which imposes an unpaid [...]

moving on

Just a thought about how often in intractable contact cases it is very difficult for parents to move on – not only because of the issues in the case themselves but because of the need to retain eligibility for legal aid – often a parent (typically a father) is unable to go out and look [...]

At Long Last…Contact Activity

The contact provisions of the Children and Adoption Act 2006 are finally coming into force on 28 November following a brief consultation in the summer. Draft rules have been published. See Family Law Week for links to the relevant MoJ pages. What is unclear is how this will all work in practice. There will be additional [...]

REPORT: Outcomes of applications to court for contact orders after parental separation or divorce

It has taken me some time to read this report in snatches over the last week. John Bolch has already posted about it, and The Times published an article recording just how ‘furious’ fathers rights campaigners are with it. . This report is a really interesting piece of work, although much of what it says [...]

Drug Addled

Let me juxtapose a few things: The current debate about whether to downgrade ecstasy from class A to B/C. Hotly debated on Radio 2 (?)today whilst I was on the way back from a far flung court. Recently, a CAFCASS Officer who in a case where the father’s hair strand test had come back with very [...]