On this page learn:
What is happening?
Most people assume that when a relationship breaks down, mothers keep custody of the children.
They believe that if a father is abusive, the courts protect the mother and children.
In the present day family courts in wealthy countries like the UK, USA, Candada, Austrialia, EU countries and South Africa, the opposite is happening.
Where a mother or child reports abuse, the father almost always gets custody of the child. This is particularly the case where the allegations concern child sexual abuse.
This situation can be flipped when the father is the safe, protective parent.
In cases where the relationship between the parents is not particularly hostile, the family court system exacerbates conflict. This results in years of highly stressful court cases, draining the family of its psychological, emotional and financial resources. This results in job loss, homelessness, ill health and suicidality.
Perfectly good parents are stripped of their assets fighting for the ability to see their children. The stress reaches the threshold of emotional torture, and is especially harmful for children.
In 2023, the UN Special Rapporteur submitted a report to the UN Human Rights Council about child custody cases, and in a further letter to the Hague Conference on Private International Law described what is happening in the family courts worldwide as “egregious miscarriages of justice”.
This is causing unacceptable individual harms and social costs, directly and indirectly.
Why is this happening?
There are many reasons why this happens but they can be summarised as:
Ideology
In private family law cases, since the 1980s a policy has quietly taken hold, partly as a result of no-fault divorce. There is a presumption of of shared parental care that is used as a blunt instrument. For professionals in the family law system, perhaps no-fault divorce and shared parental care mean there is no need to scrutinise individual cases for evidence of abuse.
As a result, mothers who feel unable to agreed to shared custody arrangements because they know this will undermine their children’s safety and wellbeing are victimised and accused of “alienating” the child. This often results in custody of the child being transferred to the other parent.
In public family law cases, an ideology of social engineering has seen a dramatic rise in numbers of children taken by child protection services. This is because a number of risk factors for poor life outcomes were identified in the 1990s, and analytics models used to identify children at risk. However, since these models included poverty, disability, race, joblessness, previous involvement with child protection services for adults and children, this resulted in the effective profiling and revictimisation of parents who as a result had their children taken on the “risk of future harm” rather than concrete evidence.
Money
In both private and public family law, money is a primary driver of a system that has itself started to be the primary perpetrator of child abuse.
The family law market in the UK was valued at £2 billion in 2023, while in 2024 a report forecast the Child and Youth Services global market would surge to $199.12 billion by 2028.
Unfortunately drivers like this favour protracted, contentious court proceedings over simple outcomes that prioritise child safety and welfare, and forecast intrusive social services intervention instead of families’ rights to a private and family life.
Additionally, a children’s social care market that has been largely privatised favours taking children and placing them in residential homes, foster care and adoption rather than offering families the support they need.
This is made worse by conflicts of interest throughout the system that have become completely normalised, and by Government targets that may once have sought to motivate protecting children, but now motivate children being taken from loving homes simply because their parents are poor, have disabilities, are from racial minorities or were victims of domestic abuse.
Child sexual abuse
There are several ways in which child sexual abuse features in cases where children are wrongfully taken from their mothers.
The first lies in the inability of police, social workers, judges, juries and others to reconcile horrific evidence of child sexual abuse with the often very plausible defendent standing before them. This leads to a failure to prosecute child sexual abuse. Mothers of these children then face a family court where they are treated as liars and themselves the risk to the child.
The second is evidence of paedophile rings that are embedded in public institutions themselves and are knowingly putting children into settings where they will be abused. This may be by their own parents, who may or may not make them available to third parties for abuse, or it may be through institutions where children have historically been at high risk from predators.
A third is that survivors of child sexual abuse may be deemed by profiling tools to be so “damaged” by their experience that they are judged unfit to parent their own children. Thus we see intergenerational harm occurring within families where there has been abuse and victims sought help from the authorities. They never dreamed that one day they would be revictimised by having their children for the crime that was committed against them.
Competence and background of officials
A frequent complaint of litigants in family court is discriminatory attitudes on all grounds: sexism, racism, ableism, and a shocking lack of compassion.
In the case of judges, social workers and other professionals involved in children’s cases such as guardians ad litem (Cafcass officers), expert witnesses, there are questions that must be asked about recruitment, background checks, conflicts of interest, and whether the person is personally and professionally competent to carry out the role.
For example, many judges are from a class where generations may have attended boarding school. Do they have the compassion to deal with the daily lives of ordinary mothers, fathers and children?
One would assume that all professionals working with children have completed relevant professional education and would be working to the highest professional standards, but the reality is that the family courts have created a closed system with little or no outside scrutiny.
Regulators, as in other sectors, seem to be protecting their professional bodies rather than the public.
Families have learned that the professionals working with their vulnerable children did not have basic background checks.
There is a retention and recruitment crisis for social workers, leading to barely qualified individuals working with vulnerable families. Many are employed on a freelance basis, meaning that they can easily disappear and are completely unaccountable. Some social workers are overseas citizens, and families have voiced fears that they are involved in human trafficking rings.
There is a well documented history of human trafficking rings working in public institutions. One is the Irish Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland. Another is the Romanian adoption crisis of the early 2000s, where social workers and medical staff colluded to target vulnerable mothers and illegally take their children.
Litigants have complained that judges hearing their cases were under the influence of alcohol during hearings and did not declare serious conflicts of interest.
Children are extremely vulnerable to predators. Unfortunately we have let our trust in the British justice system and public servants be abused, and this has been compounded by the lack of transparency, a lack of a functioning appeals process or effective law enforcement.
It is now within and as a result of these institutions themselves that children are being abused.
Lack of oversight
In the UK, legal aid was withdrawn for private family law cases (divorce and child custody). At the same time, the Government stopped publishing data on outcomes, perhaps fearing the impact of the cuts to legal aid.
In addition, family cases have historically been heard in private, originally intended to protect the anonymity of those involved, especially children. However, this has created an opaque system where wrongdoing may take place behind closed doors.
What can we do about it?
Our founder, Nataly Anderson, is an MBA and design researcher, with experience working on public sector transformation projects.
Today, the design of most Government services is contracted out to consultancies who do research to learn what the needs of the service users are, and design the service to meet those needs.
All important services have to assessed to make sure they meet the Government Service Standard. For example, make the service simple to use and publish performance data.
After the Ministry of Justice’s damning 2020 report, Assessing Risk of Harm to Children and Parents in Private Law Children Cases, a full scale service transformation project should have been commissioned. But instead the project was given to the Family Justice Board, which is comprised of politicians and heads of court and children’s services. Also influential in this redesign work are bodies such as the Family Justice Council, the Private Law Working Group and the Family Solutions Group. Most the members of these bodies are members of the Judiciary, practising lawyers and others who are in fact professional stakeholders in the divorce and child custody industry. In other words, they are in a conflict of interest.
Also involved are the Domestic Abuse Commissioner and the Victims Commissioner. Survivors of domestic abuse feel that the Domestic Abuse Commissioner is also overseeing a growing industry dealing with survivors of domestic abuse. This industry offers refuge spaces (essentially institutionalising working-age women), provides advocates, delivers training for judges (which has been proven not to work), delivers perpetrator programmes which seem to be counter-productive, and so on.
Predictably, all of the reforms on offer so far have been “tinkering-type reforms” which take a very long time to implement, further years to assess, and further complicate a system already hideously over-crowded with advisors from social sciences but where the law itself is notably absent. Also absent are reforms that would make public officials accountable for their actions or introduce a meaningful appeals process.
We are told that the pilots of these systems are evaluated very highly, but we are not told by whom, or what the criteria are.
In the meantime people are dying. In December 2024, Urfan Sharif and Beinash Batool were sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder and torture of Sara Sharif. She had been placed in the custody of Urfan Sharif, who had an extensive history of violence towards women and children.
Our founder Nataly Anderson is a mother who lost custody of her children following their kidnap from the UK. The family courts in Croatia not only failed to uphold the rights of Nataly and her children to be reunited, they also awarded custody to the father who kidnapped the children aged 2.5 years old, and who has dragged the whole family through an ordeal that is still ongoing since 2016.
Nataly believes that the key to solving the crisis is to take control of the design and oversight of the family justice system out of the hands of those with vested interests, and put it into the hands of families and communities.
Families are witnessing with dismay that once again, the death of a child is being used as a stick to beat already embattled families, instead of the officials responsible for an entirely preventable death accepting accountability and committing to meaningful change. In this instance, meaningful change means an adequate criminal justice response to domestic abuse, and adequate protections for adult and child victims after relationship breakdown.
We are advocating for a participatory approach to radically transforming the way we deal with child arrangements following relationship breakdown, drawing upon the needs of families themselves. This requires learning from their lived experiences, supported by advice from independent legal and other professionals.
The same applies for social care, where social services must stop being misused to destroy families and violate their human rights.
As a group, we acknowledge that the same problems we describe are also visible in relation to vulnerable adults, such as the elderly and those with disabilities. They are also occurring in the Court of Protection and in probate cases. Our focus for the time being is families, though we offer our solidarity to groups suffering similar injustices.
Back to basics
This is a complex problem that requires systems approaches to solving it, but the designs might be surprisingly simple. And they may result in enormous cost savings for families, and for the public purse.
Essentially this involves stripping out the profit incentives that are overriding the primary considerations of child safety and welfare.
It involves uncovering where policy conflicts with law, and addressing deviations from human rights.
We are asking the British Government to convene a working group of families, civil servants and professionals to create and oversee the delivery of an emergency packet of measures ti address the crisis in the family courts:
- Faulty judgments to be declared void ab initio
- Support with rescue and rehabilitation of impacted children
- Urgent agreement on compensation for human rights violations, loss and damages
- An independent commission assessing prosecution for criminal acts
- Co-production of systems redesign and resolution of legal status of children
- Establishing governance for a permanent and fully independent Civil Commission to oversee child rights
Join the Movement for Family Law Redress and Reform
You are not alone.
Families have been silenced and shamed for too long.
Join our community. Tell your story. Campaign with us for justice and redress for victims of the family court crisis.