Written evidence submitted by Families
Need Fathers (CAF 3)
We warmly welcome this enquiry. Of necessity
this submission is somewhat bare of detail and detailed argument
but we would welcome being giving the opportunity to provide evidence
to the committee.
INTRODUCTION: ABOUT
FAMILIES NEED
FATHERS
Families Need Fathers is poised to become—if
we are not already—the largest single membership organisation
in the family field, overtaking Gingerbread. We see ourselves
as representing the two million or so parents who live apart from
one or more of their natural children, and the needs and wishes
of by far the greater part of the 3.5 million children who live
apart from one of their parents.
The evidence is that a majority of children
who live apart from one of their parents want to see more of them,
and that a majority of such parents wish to see more of their
children.
Our central belief is that children's needs
for a meaningful relationship with a loving and loved parent do
not end when those parents no longer live together. We are an
equal responsibility and child-friendly organisation. In the contentious
and turbulent world of gender politics our views and stance are
sometimes misrepresented. There are now other organisations in
this field with whom we have some common ground. We, however,
are the respected charity, being listed in publications produced
by the Law Society and the Lord Chancellor's Department, amongst
many others.
Our first priority is to provide active support
for parents whose children risk being prevented from having adequate
time with them to form or maintain meaningful family relationships.
We also lobby in traditional ways for better recognition of the
needs of children to have both their parents involved in their
lives. We are regarded as having a worthy cause to promote, and
respected for the way in which we go about it.
However, we deplore the fact that we need to
exist at all. The rights of children to have adequate bonds with
loved and loving parents should not require a lobby to achieve
it. Our name does not imply any hostility to women or mothers.
We accept as strongly as anyone the mutual needs and rights of
children to their mothers. It is their right to a second parent
that needs development. We are concerned that child centred and
egalitarian values should be applied to family relationships as
well as to other things.
We help some 150,000 parents per year. This
is without any financial support by the state or charity funds
(with the recent exception of a Home Office Family Support grant
for one worker primarily concerned with training). This dearth
of support considerably limits the amount of social welfare work
we do and the attention we obtain for our cause, which has come
to be known as the Shared Parenting Movement.
The charity relies on volunteers doing what
they can in what time they can spare from earning a living for
their families during often unnecessarily stressful times. Our
submissions are perforce less polished and less well documented
than those of organisations with far greater resources. Excluding
the earmarked FSG, our entire annual turnover is less than the
personal salary of the Director of the National Family and Parenting
Institute. Most towns and cities with populations of more that
100,000 have women's aid projects officially funded more liberally
each year than the shared parenting movement has been in all its
history. Nonetheless we see much of what happens at the sharp
end.
The shared parenting movement is making a significant
impact on social and judicial attitudes. This country is suffering
a crisis in parenting. A whole raft of social problems are attributable
at least in part to insufficient and on occasion inadequate parenting.
It is now some time since we have heard any serious commentator
deny the desirability for children to have both parents to show
them the love and care that they need. However, this is often
bitterly contested in practice. The wish for children to see more
of the parent they see less, and of that parent to see more of
their children, is regularly frustrated. It is scandalous that
a demonstrated need for better parenting should co-exist with
the exclusion of loved and loving parents from providing it. A
whole raft of social policies is predicated on only one parent
being important. For example, with a few minor exceptions, all
the new state aid now going to support parents financially goes
to one parent, irrespective of how the care and costs are shared
between them. Another example: the national childcare strategy.
One of our central demands is that children should only go into
institutional daycare if satisfactory parental care was unavailable.
Yet the possible availibility of the other parent is systematically
ignored both in principle and practice. It is assumed that institutional
daycare is always the only alternative to care by the primary
carer.
We find our cause belittled by those who should
know better. To illustrate, here is a statement from an official
spokesman of the National Association of Probation Officers, the
trade union and professional organisation of Children and Family
Reporters:
"The question of whether the attitudes
that advantage men in most areas of life, and to which they seem
attached, may disadvantage them in questions concerning children,
does not amount to sexism in NAPO's eyes, nor it is an issue we
see a need to address."
FNF AND CAFCASS
Fathers Need Families lobbied for something
along the lines of CAFCASS long before anyone else did. The separation
of family court work from the criminal work of the Probation Service
has been a demand since our foundation, 23 years ago. It was some
twelve years ago that we suggested the merging of the FCWS, Guardians
ad Litem and sections of the OS into a new child-centred service
within the LCD. We wanted to see an effective, proactive service
that did preventative and after-care work, and which had in-house
mediation, conciliation and related services. The primary reason
for this was to achieve better outcomes for children and parents.
But there could be major financial gains to the government, for
example in reducing the costs of legal aid. Furthermore we wanted
to see practitioners moving away from reporting on parents in
adversarial proceedings towards evidence-based advocacy of the
needs of children both to the courts and to parents.
A national service would create an opportunity
to develop professional practice based on training and best practice
guidance. It would end the quite unacceptable variations in recommendations
in which "welfare of the children" is interpreted in
ways that seemed to reflect the attitudes of those in power rather
than on the basis of evidence or attention being paid to the needs
and wishes of the children.
It follows that we were delighted at the establishment
of CAFCASS, but are nonetheless disappointed and alarmed at lack
of progress towards its aspirations. We are warmly supportive
of the value stance CAFCASS has taken, especially at the very
top. Mr Hewson spoke at one of our AGMs and won warm support for
his fair and child-centred approach.
We are nevertheless very critical of the failure
of CAFCASS to deliver an improved service on the ground. There
are certainly improvements, but instead of a child-centred approach
generally being taken, the people whom we represent are becoming
more rather than less dissatisfied. The family justice system,
in which CAFCASS is one of the principal players, appears to be
falling further and further behind social change. Increasing numbers
of fathers aim to be more involved in their children's lives.
Recent studies have shown that fathers generally spend significantly
more time with their children than they did even a decade ago.
We nevertheless find that traditional parenting stereotypes, which
are quite out of kilter with the notions of equality that rightly
pervade most areas of society, are being reinforced by ill-informed
professionals in the family court system. It should immediately
be said that what is at issue is shared parenting, not a return
to patriarchy. It is direct hands-on care that is at issue and
not "stand-apart power".
PRINCIPAL AREAS
OF CONCERN
The adoption of guidelines
CAFCASS, through no fault of its own, has spent its
infancy embroiled in internal conflicts. The issue of the quality
of the service provided has not had proper attention. The concerns
of many of the practitioners have been about employment matters
and not about the outcomes for children.
Recommendations following enquiries are still,
it seems, all over the place. There are paradoxically two aspects
to this. The first is the different treatment of cases that are
similar. The second is only superficially contradictory—the
recommendation of a stereotyped regime whatever the circumstances
and wishes of the children and parents involved. This is residence
to the mother, and contact with the father every second weekend.
There appears to be no consistency, for example, on whether there
should be midweek contact. This is very important as it gives
both parents a role in the school life of children. There is no
consistency on whether "half the holidays" means half
adult workers' holidays or half the school holidays. There is
no consensus—or obvious pattern—on whether "every
second weekend" means from school on Friday to school on
Monday, or from sometime on Saturday to sometime on Sunday. The
greatest diversity seems to concern babies and toddlers, where
some CFRs consider that there is a negligible role for fathers
and others do not see why the children should not have both parents
involved. Over issues like domestic violence or other allegations
of abuse there is disorder. Some CFRs seem to take almost any
allegation as contra-indicating contact. This is by no means contradicted
by the claims of WAFE and others that, on occasion, mothers cannot
get proper attention to their concerns.
In the pilot phase of CAFCASS the broadly based
Children and Family Advisory Group agreed and prepared a paper.
It appears to have been binned. The use of these and related guidelines
is urgently needed.
Training
Some CFR's are properly equipped by training
to do their job in private law cases, (which is this charity's
primary concern.) They are in a small minority, judging by a growing
body of anecdotal evidence. At the lower end the training is utterly
unacceptable. Two personal illustrations are known to the principal
author of this note. The only guaranteed training is a social
work qualification. One of us taught the family module on a CQSW
rated as "excellent". It contained some 24 contact hours
on all family issues in total. Such issues as the needs of children
for an identity, or how to distinguish whether the expressed wishes
of the children were genuinely theirs or an artefact of the pressures
of their situation, how to assess the bonding of toddlers, or
whether contact organised this way might be better than that way,
were not remotely addressed. The same author is acquainted with
a Probation Officer who moved from the criminal to the family
side in September 2000. He asked for training but was told there
was none available until February 2001. He borrowed my copy of
"a Guide to the Children Act" to have something to do
on.
A recommendation of the CAFAG was that CAFCASS
draw up, in consultation with stakeholders, a template of what
a CFR needed to have training in and experience of. Different
stakeholders would have different things they wanted included,
but there would almost certainly have been agreement on large
areas. We would not, for example, have sought to exclude training
in domestic violence, nor, we believe, would WAFE have sought
to exclude training in Parental Alienation.
All CFRs should be run past that template, and
identified deficiencies remedied.
To the best of our belief this recommendation
was not acted on. To our certain knowledge this "stakeholder
group" was not involved.
Consultation
CAFAG recommended that there should be plenary
stakeholder meetings. Despite the wide diversity of the participants
in CAFAG—for example NCOPF and WAFE, as well as ourselves
and even ManKind—there was considerable consensus on quite
a number of things. Since then, however, CAFCASS consultation
seems to have been selective and bilateral. It is quite some time,
for example, since we have met with CAFCASS nationally although
another meeting is scheduled in a few weeks. There is some dialogue
regionally but this is somewhat patchy.
Prevention and diversion from court proceedings
Adversarial court proceedings are appallingly
harmful, especially to the prospects of parents developing co-operative
parenting afterwards. There seems to have been little development
of these services.
Aftercare
The preparations of reports are no more than
stages in the story of the children's lives from parental separation
to adulthood and beyond. The research corroborates the obvious—the
lives of the children and their parents are in constant flux.
The children grow up and their needs and wishes change. Their
parents move house and region. They start and stop work and the
organisation of their work changes. They repartner and de-repartner,
sometimes repeatedly, and so on. (The priority that some CFR's
and the courts give to the supposed needs of the misleadingly
named "reconstituted" family over the children's needs
for their true parent is based on woeful ignorance of the evidence).
The support services that children and parents receive from CAFCASS
and elsewhere during all these changes are shockingly inadequate.
Family Assistance orders may not meet all the needs, but the latest
figures for them are only a bit over 500.
The style of CFR work
The job of a GAL is to be a robust advocate
for the children in public law proceedings. There is little sign
that CFRs are adopting the same stance in private law. They still
seem to report on the parents rather than for the children.
A complete reframing of their stance is necessary and we see
only a few signs that it is occurring.
The manner reports are prepared and the way enquiries
are done
There should, in our view, be a standard structure
for a report, departed from if there was stated good reason. It
should cover such things as the training and experience of the
person or people preparing it; the way the enquiry was conducted;
reports on what the parents and children said (in appropriate
cases), the CFR's comments on these views, the parenting skills
and experience of the parents, relevant research, and recommendations
that are justified with sound argument. All parties should be
able to recognise as accurate the view attributed to them. When
the CFR reported "facts" the evidence on which these
are based should be clear. The judgements that the CFR made should
be clearly argued for on the basis of their values and the information
they had collected, but be clearly distinguished from finding
of fact. They should always be a review of the options and the
case for and against them. Relevant research should always be
cited. And so on.
We still see reports that seem to be simply
rather verbose versions of, "The CFR met to the parties and
this is what I recommend."
There should be a standard pattern for enquiries,
varied only with appropriate justification. Risk assessement should
always take place. There should always be checks with the police
and social services. Schools should always be approached if the
children were at schools. The children (when old enough) should
always be talked to unless they refused, but always away from
both their parents, or their bonding otherwise assessed. The children
should be seen in both homes unless there are good reasons why
not, and so on.
There still seems to be inconsistency in these
matters for no good reason we can see.
IN SUMMARY
The aspirations of CAFCASS are wholly commendable.
They have failed so far to deliver. Some, but only some, of these
are the inevitable results of resource constraints.
Your report should be, in our view, wholly supporting
of the aspirations of CAFCASS, warmly recommend a serious increase
to resources, but be very critical of implementation.
We would welcome being called to give written
or oral evidence.
John Baker, Chair and
Ian Smith, CAFCASS Liasion Officer
On behalf of the Trustees
March 2003
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