This article was first published on the Family Court Crisis Substack on 20 July 2023.

As a founder of Family Court Crisis, I welcome the report of the UK Domestic Abuse Commissioner which highlights systemic problems in the family courts that Parliament has been aware of for decades.

However, I feel that the report does not reach far enough into the roots of the culture or the policies driving the systemic human rights violations which were also raised in the report of the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, “Custody, violence against women and violence against children”.

As parents, we are at the coalface. We feel, see and hear for ourselves what is happening in the family courts. Our perspective as parents is different to that of lawyers, judges etc. I feel that officials such as the Commissioner are one layer further removed from the problem.

As parents, we are the primary service users of the family courts, and our children are supposed to be the beneficiaries of the service. We are parents who have been fighting, often for years, to protect our children and ourselves.

We are primary stakeholders and as such need direct involvement in identifying the root of the problem, and finding a solution. Policy should be created in consultation with us, with the needs of our children front and centre. Policy should not be done to us.

This is a principle at the root of the UK Government Service Standard, which is a mandatory set of guidelines for the design of all public services, including the justice system.

At Family Court Crisis we are primarily mothers who are victims of the family courts. It is difficult for us to do anything other than speak for ourselves, but I know that the issues we highlight here also affect men, who, as the Commissioner identifies, face their own set of problems as victims of domestic abuse in family law cases. I stand in solidarity with fathers who are also in this position.

Nobody, woman or man, should face the issues I describe below, especially where they threaten the safety and welfare of children.

Judicial culture

In the UK, we have long entertained a notion that our justice system is exemplary, with a world-class reputation. Most of us, as mothers in family court, have not experienced the justice system before we were forced into this position.

We are aware that there have been cases of notorious judges whose names have entered the public consciousness as examples of how justice should NOT be done. One of those was Judge Pickles, who famously said that a victim of sexual assault was “asking for it”. I believe many of us thought those attitudes were consigned to history in our age of diversity and equality. For us, family court has been a wake-up call.

The parents we speak with have evidence of discrimination on all grounds: sex, race, nationality, language, disability, socio-economic status and sexual orientation.

Not only this, but I hear of instances where I am forced to conclude that the judge intentionally harmed the interests of a parent, regardless of the harm inflicted on their child in so doing. I hear of parents treated in such a draconian manner, so lacking in compassion, that we have the impression that the judge enjoyed victimising the parent in this manner.

The racial and sex discrimination in the courts is documented. One would have thought that in family cases at least judges would be cut from a different cloth. Not so.

Some of the parents I speak with are lawyers who have worked in other parts of the justice system. They are horrified by what goes on in family court.

The issue of culture goes much deeper than understanding domestic abuse. Lundy Bancroft, a US psychologist who worked for decades in the family justice system, described “horrible mother-blaming attitudes”. I can confirm that these same attitudes are directed at decent fathers who become entrapped in this system which has been designed to reward bad behaviour.

I believe this culture is embedded in a justice system which is created by and for a patriarchal elite. An elite which is largely educated in public schools, brought up in draughty, loveless buildings, raised in an environment of abuse. Those who prosper in this system largely fit in with this trope, even if their background is more diverse.

I hear of judges and other family law professionals fraternising openly in freemasons’ lodges, at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, holding business interests which put them in conflict of interest, failing to disclose personal relationships which make it impossible for them to be unbiased.

The corruption which we have witnessed taking hold in other areas of public life, most visibly politics, is clearly affecting the justice system. I am unsure if it has always been like this, or if it has become worse with the widespread political tolerance for playing fast and loose with the truth and the rules.

I must mention judges and magistrates working on family cases who are not specialists in family law at all, including those who are “fee-earning judges”, barristers paid by the day to hear cases. No judges are held accountable in any meaningful sense. The appeals process does not work, and judges are very rarely sanctioned for misconduct.

There is a lot more wrong with judicial culture than the report recognises.

Culture in other professions involved in the family justice system

When it comes to Cafcass officers, social workers, “expert witnesses” and lawyers, parents rarely have anything positive to say about any of the professionals they interact with in family court.

The culture is one of coercion, bullying, discrimination, tone-deaf patronising attitudes. Perjury is rife. There is almost zero integrity or adherence to professional guidelines.

Whether we are speaking about judges or other family court professionals, you cannot train people out of lack of integrity or toxic attitudes.

Policy and lobbies

The report speaks in encouraging terms about changes in the approach of Cafcass in relation to domestic abuse and “parental alienation”.

I believe that these notional “changes” are a smoke screen and that there is no real intent to change the approach to family law cases. Certainly not in the required timeframe.

Since the publication of the Harm Report, things have got worse for parents, not better.

Cafcass is a European member of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts (AFCC). The AFCC is a trade organisation which has developed a family justice business model which outsources decision-making to mental health professionals, “guardians ad litem” and other experts from the soft sciences. All of these earn a living from the family courts, and the more families are trapped in the system, the more money they bring in.

The soft sciences that inform family court are steeped in the ideologies of the fatherhood movement in the USA, funded by powerful lobbies. These theories hold that the intact family is sacrosanct, and that the primary deviant responsible for family breakdown is the mother. They consider single mothers to be the scourge of society, parasites on benefits breeding legions of hoodies.

Meanwhile, we were stay-at-home mums dedicating our whole lives to nurturing our children. We were child care experts and professionals in many walks of life. We were doing very well in our careers until the family courts tore our lives apart, leaving us jobless, penniless, homeless, with our health destroyed.

Until we take a hard look at how these US theories and business models became embedded in the UK family justice system, reform is going nowhere. Reform has been promised for decades, in the US especially, and mothers have been left destitute while the purveyors of broken promises hobnobbed with the systems that broke them.

Until we look at the lobbies and funding streams pushing hateful ideologies into public policy, we will achieve nothing.

This also applies to the domestic abuse sector, which is very often funded by the same sources funding the anti-mother movements. Mothers are increasingly reporting poor practice and conflict of interest in domestic abuse organisations which leave them with the very real sense that there is nowhere to turn.

Why the reforms proposed in the report will not work

Cafcass is not fit for purpose. Parents are universally unhappy with the way they are treated by Cafcass, and with the way their legitimate complaints are treated.

The involvement of guardians ad litem has been found to be correlated with a strong increase in the likelihood that a victim of domestic abuse will lose her child to a domestic abuser.

Children’s Services are a disaster and have no business in private family law. Social services have become an agency for social policing, implementing policies which are very close to genocide. Parents are not safe being involved with social services.

As for pathfinder courts, the view of two out of two litigants I have spoken with is that things are NOT changing for the better.

The report talks about independent domestic violence advocates (IDVAs) and independent domestic violence advocates (ISVAs) – who are powerless to influence the outcome of cases.

The family justice system is like a Heath Robinson machine, a pile-on of professionals, each of who makes a living from the system.

Guardians ad litem, social workers and expert witnesses are efflorescences of this bloated monstrosity of a system.

We need to simplify it, not further complicate it.

We don’t need any of them.

The idea of increasing legal aid to all litigants simply shifts the burden of paying for a dangerous torture chamber to the taxpayer. We know that lawyers are no longer prepared to work for the money that legal aid gives them, especially not in complex cases.

Monitoring the family justice system seems destined to dispassionately observe the further torture of families for years to come. No effective complaints procedure has been proposed for individual litigants. There is no mention of an effective accountability mechanism. It is dangerous to speak of enshrining the independence of the judiciary when we know the judiciary is anything but independent. And as long as this state of affairs is permitted to continue, people are dying. Children are being tortured, their childhoods lost and their life outcomes decimated.

The report reflects a mindset that is trapped within the notion that we need a “family court” system like we have today at all. We don’t. “Family courts” are not courts of law at all and should not be considered judicial bodies. It is misleading the public. This is the reason why the outcomes of family law cases are so often out of step with evidence, due process and the law.

Reform has to go much deeper.

Our task now is to get down to the work of discussing what a FUNDAMENTALLY reformed family justice system should look like, and until we have it, what interim measures we can take to protect adult and child victims and redress the serious miscarriages of justice.

This is what I will ask Parliament to secure.

I would be keen for other parents to share their views, because our voices matter.