Appendix 5: Summary of private written evidence
Summary
We received 28 pieces of written evidence which we agreed to treat as private, either at the request of submitters or on the advice of staff. These submissions refer in detail to individual cases rather than general policy issues. Almost all focussed on adoption and family justice.
Adoption
One birth parent complained that their child had been fostered by a same sex couple, despite their request that they be placed with a heterosexual couple. One also argued that local authorities seek to have children adopted for financial gain. They said: “the current rate of fees that local authorities in my area currently get to claim for each ‘successful adoption’ they procure, is £33,871 per child!”
We also heard from adoptive parents. One told us: “We have 2 adopted children who are now aged 9 and 8. We spent three and a half years of hell trying to get them and have had 8 years of hell since.” They described having six social workers in the space of a year—an experience echoed by other contributors—and not receiving the support they needed to look after the children, who were ultimately removed from their care. They concluded: “it is an absolute nightmare, and I would advise anyone to think twice before they adopt.” Another adoptive parent highlighted a lack of support for children who have suffered sexual abuse.
Family justice
Several respondents raised the issue of the cost of contact. One mother told us:
“I was told I now had to pay for seeing my son in a contact centre. When I explained I could not afford £225 on supervised contact I was told that was because single mums on universal credit spent their benefit all in one go and didn’t know how to budget.”
Similarly, a father explained: “These sessions cost around £600-800 a time (for 3 hours of contact), when all costs are taken into account (including the centre, the supervision, my fuel and a day of lost earnings etc.)”.
Most comments related to the presumption of parental involvement and domestic abuse. A domestic abuse victim described her first experience in court:
“First, the Judge whose first entrance into our lives involved him striding into the court room, flicking back his gown, thumping down into his chair and where, red in the face, he roared at the hushed court room. He was shouting that he was in charge in this court, he made all final decisions and no one else.
I cannot begin to tell you the impact of that scene on a woman who had spent the best part of twenty years trying to avoid getting a man angry, trying to placate, trying to find the right time, the right way to broach any subject, and here I was faced with a man with ultimate control over me, shouting and looking angry.”
Other women also reported feeling humiliated or frightened by judges. One said that being a victim of domestic abuse was held against her as it was assumed it would make her less capable of parenting.
She then described meeting her Cafcass officer:
“[I saw] the only pamphlets on reception were those of ‘Fathers4Justice’ and my heart sank. On sitting down in his office the Cafcass officer informed me that he had already spoken to father, knew exactly what was going on and he also told me that he felt that he didn’t need to speak to either myself or my children, as he had got full scale of what was going on by speaking to my ex.”
The contributor added that her children had not been sufficiently consulted about having contact with their father:
“The [Cafcass] separated parenting course told us that on separation we should have involved our children, how we ought to put our children first, that we should have asked them what they wanted, where they wanted to live, who they wanted to be with. I repeatedly tried to tell the court this fact, that our children had never been asked. Their father had decided, I had unwillingly agreed and now the court was removing their choice. Despite the advice of their own programme, my children were never allowed to choose.”
She added:
“The mantra of the family court, as told to me by my judge and repeated by Cafcass, solicitors and social workers—If you can force your child to the dentist and to school, you can force them to see their father. The fact that the father child relationship is based on an emotional footing did not seem to occur to anyone.”
An independent social worker seemed to corroborate this, arguing: “The ’Voice of the Child’ is not only not heard but is often suppressed or dismissed and children have no one external to the proceedings that they can speak to.” They described what they said was a typical case, of two daughters who “have both been adamant throughout that they want to live with their mother and they continue to state this, but this is ignored or dismissed.” They recounted how one of the girls was then sexually abused by the father during contact and—despite an ongoing investigation into this—a judge then increased contact. Similarly, another contributor told us that the presumption had put an abusive father, rather than the child, at the centre of proceedings.
By contrast, a father argued:
“The family court system is slow, expensive, heavily-biased towards the resident parent (nearly always the mother), overly-complicated, heavy-handed in its bureaucratic burden, risk-averse and generally entirely ineffective at enforcing a child’s right to have a meaningful relationship with the non-resident parent (in a situation where there is a hostile resident parent).”
He added:
“I have done nothing wrong to either my wife or to my children and yet she is playing the system (egged on by well-meaning but entirely partisan female domestic abuse advisors who are encouraging her man-hating ‘victim mentality’ based upon her one-sided tendentious and intentionally misleading accounts), continually raising the right key words to trigger police, social services and domestic abuse agencies into having to take action—which then invariably leads to nothing but wastes many months getting to this point.”
One mother—a domestic abuse survivor—told us that the presumption should be repealed “so that the paramountcy of the child’s welfare is unmuddied. It will be implicit that a child’s welfare will be furthered by the involvement of their non-abusive mother or father.”
The issue of legal aid was also commonly raised. Several contributors lamented reduced access to it following the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. One told us: “the removal of legal aid meant that I have spent every penny of savings and more, to fight my ex when it ought to have been focussing on giving my son a better life.”
However, another who had received legal aid was critical of the service they received. They explained: “I was often represented by a complete stranger (freelance solicitor) who had no prior knowledge of the case. In this I would have been better off representing myself because these solicitors were useless.”