What Do They Have Planned for Family Court “Reform”?

What do they have planned for Family Court “reform”?

KIT KNIGHTLY

It was busy weekend for those who follow British family court law. Normally speaking I wouldn’t count myself among those people, but then social media and news headlines decided to ruin a decent Saturday by pouring a torrent of barely-disguised agenda over my head.

It all started when I saw this tweet:

…which made my brain itch.

Consider: Ten babies per day is 3650 babies per year. In the UK there are roughly 600,000 births per year, and maybe 70,000 rapes.

If these numbers are correct, then over 1 in every 200 babies born in the UK (0.6%) are the result of rape, and 1 in every 20 rapes (5%) results in a full-term pregnancy.

It just doesn’t sound right, does it? And improbable statistics are always a horseman of an agenda.

Now, digging down into how these figures came about could be a rabbit hole in and of itself, including asking questions about the apparent 400% increase in rapes in the UK between 2011 and 2021, even as most other violent crimes go down. These statistics are telling a story that likely has little bearing on reality.

But in the end, it’s largely irrelevant. Even if the data is real, there’s no doubt the coordinated agenda rollout in the last week.

This leads us to the first law change of the long weekend, as reported in the Guardian:

In a government-backed amendment to the victims and courts bill, due to come before parliament on Monday 27 October, parental responsibility will automatically be restricted where a child is born of rape. New reforms will also see parental responsibility restricted when a parent is convicted of serious sex offences against any child, not just their own. It will mean sex offenders will no longer be able to intervene in decisions about medical care, schooling and overseas travel.

That’s change one.

Change two relates to the revocation of the “presumption of parental involvement”. Before now, British family courts worked under the assumption that contact with both parent was beneficial to children, unless proven otherwise. Changes in the law will now reverse this, from the government’s statement [emphasis added]:

If parents are thought to be a threat to their child’s safety, involvement in their lives can be restricted, for example through courts ordering supervised contact, involvement limited to written communication, or by ordering that there should be no involvement at all.

Note that it’s thought to be, NOT proven to be. A very important difference.

The third change, which was apparently a total coincidence, involved the overturning of a family court verdict by throwing out the testimony of “unregulated expert” Melanie Gill.

Gill is a psychologist specialising in “parental alienation”, where one parent turns the children against the other usually through spurious stories of abusive behaviour. Gill has testified in hundreds of cases, many of which will now be thrown out, because “narcissist” is a “gendered label”:

Essentially, this creates an environment where mothers are incentivised to allege abuse and fathers can no longer respond with counter-allegations of “parental alienation” because it’s sexist.

All of this leads up to today’s session of the Parliamentary Committee to discuss “reform” of the family court. Beginning as I type this.

There is a febrile atmosphere around these issues that’s throwing up bizarre takes left and right. Suicides “linked to” abuse should be “investigated as homicides”. Pardon murderers because they were abuse victims.

I can already see, in my mind’s eye, the outraged comments. “Why is Kit going in to bat for rapists and abusers?”

To which the only answer is “I’m not.”

I’m just aware of the fluid dynamics of definitions. I know how malleable language can be, and that “domestic abuse” and “rape” are as susceptible to to strategic redefinition as “far-right”, “hate speech” and “domestic terrorism” were before.

After all, once you’ve “changed the law to protect children from abusive parents”, you can set about changing what “abusive” means.

In the end, is this all really about domestic abuse, protecting children or feminism?

No, I don’t think so. I think this is about inflating the role of the state in children’s lives, camouflaged in gender politics designed to turn mothers and fathers against each other.

I think it’s about perpetuating the war on the cohesive family unit and increasing single-parent families, in the knowledge that single parents will be more likely to rely on state assistance and less able to resist over-reaching rules and regulations.

Remember, it is already illegal to take your children out of school without permission in the UK. We also have the pending “Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill” looming on the horizon and the introduction of “breakfast clubs” making parents reliant on schools to feed their children.

It’s also very important to note that, though the press and pundits are all talking about these issues entirely in terms of fathers and domestic abuse, the actual laws being changed do not get that specific, to quote the government again…

If parents are thought to be a threat to their child’s safety, involvement in their lives can be restricted, for example through courts ordering supervised contact, involvement limited to written communication, or by ordering that there should be no involvement at all.

It doesn’t mention fathers or mothers, only parents. It doesn’t specify domestic or sexual abuse; it just says “safety”.

Can you think of any large groups of parents in recent years who, for one very specific reason, may have been “thought to be a threat to their child’s safety?”

I’ll give you a clue, it starts with an “A” and ends with “nti-vaxxers”.

Should we trust any laws that undermine the right of the parent by assuming the state has responsibility for our children?

No, I don’t think so.

---

This article (What do they have planned for Family Court “reform”?) was created and published by off Guardian and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Kit Knightly