Part way through proceedings, we're at section 7 stage. I strongly suspect that cafcass are of the mind there is no safe way to progress contact to unsupervised, owing to father's domestic violence perpetrated towards me and several findings of fact that he was also abusive to our child. He's had supervised contact for over a year in a contact centre. Our judge has left it to cafcass to decipher how contact can progress. My ex is well beyond the realms of any parent craft class or domestic abuse perpetrator programme. He does not accept he perpetrated abuse and completely blames me, he's repeatedly told different professionals that I'm mentally unstable and I'm a danger to our DD.
The first thing I was asked by cafcass was if I thought contact should remain supervised.. They also asked me a number of very negative questions about him also and expressed because DD is so young that they wouldn't take her wishes and feelings into account, even if contact is appearing to go well..
My question is, can the family court even order long term supervised contact and if so, by what means as currently I'm stuck footing half the cost of the contact centre.
During the safeguarding stage, cafcass stated if interim contact was ordered and findings were made against him and he maintains his position, then there is no safe way to progress contact.
We are now in that situation.