Domestic Abuse and the Family Courts

[IDontLikeDisciples]

This is something that has really troubled me, and the amount of injustice is quite flooring.

How can it be that Social Services will step in and remove children from a womans care if she remains in an abusive relationship , yet once the relationship is over family courts refuse to accept evidence of domestic abuse as relevant and claim it did not affect the children.

As a result women ho are left mentally ill, possibly substance dependent because of the trauma they have been through can end up at worst losing custody of her children to the abuser, or at best having to allow unsupervised contact with a man who is violent, manipulative and emotionally abusive. A sad result of this is also that the man will use this as a means to prolong is hold over the woman, and in some cases has little interest in the welfare of the children.

I am interested to hear views on this. The family court system is simply not fit for purpose as it stands but I cannot see any significant change anytime soon.

Can't argue with a word you say, am in full agreement.

It's a bit like wiht the case of the woman who was jailed for being raped and then retracting the allegation - if she was in prison for falsely retracting an allegation of rape, then it follows that the man must be a rapist. But does he get prosecuted? No, he gets given custody of the children while she goes to prison.

I'm presuming the courts are using the Taliban as consultants.

The woman you are referring to was jailed for falsely retracting the allegation that she was raped. It does not follow that the original allegation was true - it remains unproven as it was not tested in court.

Clearly, she believes that she was raped, but it is not a proven fact. However, the fact that she then retracted the allegation and went on to reinstate it means that the retraction was false based on her own evidence. It requires no further corroboration - she has effectively admitted making a false statement. There are mitigating circumstances, but it doesn't change the fact that she committed a crime.

For what it's worth, I think the guy probably is a rapist and the children would be best placed with their mother. But I'm not privy to all the facts of this case and neither are others who comment on it.

OP, I agree with you. The judicial system is inherently flawed. Most patriarchies over the world regard children as the property of the father, and it's only recently in Britain that the mother has been allowed to keep them after a split "in the best interests of the children"

There is no such thing as mother's rights and no such concept has ever existed

the woman HerBeautitude is talking about was jailed because she lied when she said there had been no rape. The entire premise behind her conviction was that a rape had indeed taken place.
And said rapist is free and won't hand over the kids

I have read, and have personal experience also of many occasions where the woman is left in the same waiting room as the man at family court despite requesting otherwise. In my case my ex used this to discretely intimidate me when I was already emotionally fragile.

I agree that this policy can lead to some very odd results. To a minor extent, I was in this situation - I was told by my counsellor that she would have to report a risk to my DD if I didn't leave exH, but when I gave far more detail to CAFCASS about our situation, the CAFCASS social worker still kept pressuring me to agree to more and more unsupervised contact.

On the other hand, it hasn't worked out that badly in practice for us (so far), and I can kind of understand why the courts set a high threshold before they will stop access by a parent. When things calm down, a bad partner may prove to be an okay father. But that said, I wholeheartedly agree that courts sometimes allow access when they shouldn't, and it's hideous to have to wait until there's enough proven damage to your dcs to get contact stopped.