Am I being unreasonable to think there is something seriously wrong with the family court system where an ordinary family has to go to these extremes to protect their own child

[millymog11]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67425080

Its almost as if the family court system is set up first and foremost to claw money back from ordinary people who do not qualify for legal aid (i.e. 99% of people) and second priority is to dodge some kind of expensive human rights esoteric question (the rights of a father/biological parent) above all other priorities. The rights of the children come way way down the pecking order.

This parent was convicted and was in prison for peodophilia.
But the innocent parent still has to pay out of their own money to protect their child.

I honestly cannot get my head around this. I know it is not equivalent but the courts must spend enormous amounts of money (rightly but that is not the point) in banning people from driving a car due to substance abuse but the barriers to blocking a dangerous adult from having contact with their own children seem ridiculous.

@millymog11 @waitholdup https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/mums-relief-dangerous-dad-barred-28055264 looks to be the same case, but much better written article?

Paedophiles should automatically lose any right to any form of contact with children, even their own. That’s just common fucking sense. I read this article earlier totally aghast. The man wouldn’t be allowed near a school but he could still have access to his own children? Batshit.

You are not telling me that this person knew or even had an inkling that the father of their child had these proclivities before their child was conceived

Yes, blame the victims. It always helps.

had a mother who had been told casually in passing by a social worker "not to bother fighting him cause its not worth it" (I bet it happens every single day)

as a social worker I would appreciate it if you didn't make up scenarios in your head and recount them as possible things that might have happened on the basis of your own imagination. Why do you think a social worker would have said such a thing?

No, he couldn't have access to his own children. He had the right to apply to court to consider contact. That's not the same thing at all.

Blanket laws of this type are authoritarian and ALWAYS open to abuse and miscarriage of justice.

Bobtheamazinggingerdog · Today 14:01

Social workers work on an emergency basis much of the time, the do enough to avoid claims against their employers (local authority) which ultimately means "do I support this child being taken into care or not?"

They are not going to support parents in individual cases where the decisions by courts do not affect their day to day job on the front line such as questions around Article 8. That is fair enough, and its not their job to be at the cutting edge of court decisions about Human Rights of adults except where turning a blind eye to those issues means an innocent little child is forced to have contact with a convicted paedaphile.

I actually have a lot of admiration for the work social workers do but that does not mean they do not make regular thro away comments to parents (who they probably hold in contempt) because they can, it is not recorded, and they are busy deciding whether their children should actually go into care.

They don't get involved in whether it is fair or not that the child should be subjected against their will and the wishes of all of the rest of the child's family to forced contact with a parent the child is probably terrified of.

It's much more common than people think.

Abused women are threatened with reversal of residency if they don't encourage contact. Abused children are disbelieved and forced into contact as fathers' rights are paramount.

Abusive men and their flying monkeys scream parental alienation which is simply a tool used to continue their abuse. The concept was invented as a court defence for a paedophile.

It's state sanctioned child abuse tolerated by a broken system which turns a blind eye as women and children don't matter.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66531409

that does not mean they do not make regular thro away comments to parents (who they probably hold in contempt) because they can, it is not recorded, and they are busy deciding whether their children should actually go into care.

Tell me you know nothing about social workers without...etc

Because in my personal experience there are social workers who are terrible at their jobs.

And this is the same with any profession.

Yes of course there are. But the OP is merrily inventing things that she believes social workers say to parents on a regular basis with no evidence. Even a shit social worker isn't likely to tell parent not to bother applying to court or making throwaway contemptuous comments to parents on the basis that nobody is recording them 🙄🙄🙄

This is a really interesting and eye opening news article, thank you for sharing this.

That was to
Queucumber · Today 14:35

making throwaway contemptuous comments to parents on the basis that nobody is recording them

@Bobtheamazinggingerdog Unfortunately that last comment isn't true.

Some professionals are really shit. They pick on people who they think are in or are in demographics that will not challenge them and/or fight back.

I think a lot of people are missing the point here, that the father in this case did not have access to the children. The mother applied to have his parental rights removed to prevent him ever applying to have access . There is nothing to suggest he would have been granted access had he applied - indeed the same family court that agreed to remove his parental rights would have decided to grant access or not, so I think it’s fairly safe to assume he would not have been granted access.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand why she did it - I wouldn’t want the threat of even the potential of him applying hanging over me, and would want to preemptively request a decision myself as well. Fairly safe to assume is not the same as definitely safe.

But I just wanted to stress that this example is not evidence of convicted child abusers having access to their own children. He didn’t have access. And like a previous poster, I think it’s right and proper that decisions to remove parental responsibility should be taken by the courts, because blanket rules are open to abuse. How much it costs is nothing to do with the fact that you have to take it to court - that’s a separate matter controlled by rules made by the government around access to legal aid and how much lawyers charge for them to represent you.

The article shared by Queucumber is also another separate matter - of whether people accused of abuse, but not convicted of abuse, should have access to their children. And I think we’d all agree that is a thorny subject and I don’t think anyone would advocate for blanket rules saying people accused of abuse should automatically not have access, as that would be extremely open to manipulation from the very abusers themselves.

I think it’s fairly safe to assume he would not have been granted access.

<hollow laugh>

I urge you to follow Family Court Crisis on Twitter or many other larger accounts who deal with appeals for these types of cases on a day to day basis.

And I urge you to refer to the case in the BBC article we’re discussing, where the same family court decided, when asked, to remove his parental rights to prevent him being able to ask for access. Why would you think that they’d have granted access if he’d asked for it, when we already saw that they went one step further and denied him the right to ever ask for it when the mother petitioned them?

The only difference here is that the mother has petitioned the court first to ask them to stop him being able to apply for access. It’s the same court that would have decided if he’d ever brought a case to request access. As I said, I understand why she decided to ask first, but there’s no difference in process at the end of the day - the decision being made is over access to the children, and it’s the family court that’s deciding. People seem to think that she was forced to apply to court or else he’d just have had access by default. That is not the case, according to the facts in the article.

Dr Charlotte Proudman and Dr Adrienne Barnett. There’s another but I can’t quite remember now, there are plenty others raising awareness on how family court often enables further abuse/violence towards women and children.

If you want to discuss miscarriages of justices I suggest you start a different thread. Because this example in this article that we’re discussing is the opposite - the mother petitioned the court to prevent the father ever being able to ask for access, and her request was granted, because the court found it was justified. The process worked.

@ImNotAsThinkAsYouDrunkIAm

I disagree with you.

Why are you so angry? I’m perfectly entitled to post here as are you.

Not sure why you think I’m angry? Or why you think I don’t think you should
post. Just pointing out that you’re discussing a different topic to the one this thread was started about.

Huh?

This is a discussion thread. Posters will bring in new elements to the discussion.

In this case the elements posters are bringing in are that the Family Courts aren't working as they should to protect children from abusive parents.

@SpaceRaiders isn't the first poster to mention these issues in the thread.

It doesn't surprise me at all.
I was DDs father's first girlfriend, I was 13, he was 17.
When we broke up, he was 21 or so, and moved on to a 13 year old who was also an older sibling meaning he had access to younger kids (as he did in the relationship with me)
Quite quickly after a social media account appeared where this person had added all the young pretty teenagers in our little village, it turned out to be a fake account from him, it was then found out that he had crawled into bed with one of my sisters who would have been 11 or 12, and attempted to rape my other sibling, who would have been 13 or 14 at the time.
He was arrested and when his phones were checked, it was found that he had a spare phone where he was talking sexually to my siblings.

All of this information was shared in family Court. They didn't care at all.

They ordered that he should have contact and ignored that he had a fixation with young girls.