The 10th anniversary of the murder of Claire Throssell’s two young sons, Jack and Paul, is a horrifying reminder of the catastrophic consequences that can follow when the family justice system makes mistakes. The serious case review that followed their deaths, in a house fire deliberately started by their father, concluded that the court should have considered suspending the boys’ contact with him. Ms Throssell had left the family home due to domestic violence and had warned that he had told her he could understand why men killed their children.
Case reviews are supposed to be learned from. But a decade later, there is plenty of evidence that poor decisions are still being made when domestic violence victims come before family judges. Last month a convicted rapist, Kristoffer White, was stripped of parental responsibility for his daughter – but only after the child’s mother appealed an earlier ruling that permitted unsupervised contact.
Nineteen children were killed by fathers who were allowed contact with them between 2005 and 2015, in England and Wales. Others have been harmed. A report from the Ministry of Justice in 2020 contained 72 recommendations aimed at tilting the culture of the family court away from a presumption of contact with both parents, towards a greater emphasis on safety. But these have not all been implemented, while legal aid cuts continue to have adverse effects. A domestic abuse perpetrators’ programme abolished in 2022 has yet to be replaced.
More positive recent changes include the inclusion of coercive control in 2021’s domestic abuse act. This was part of a broader shift towards a more holistic understanding of the dynamics of abusive relationships. But it is hard to tell to what extent this is reflected in the courts or the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service – which represents children’s interests in family law cases, and has also faced criticism for past failings.
Nicole Jacobs, the domestic abuse commissioner for England and Wales, is due to lead a study on the way abuse allegations are handled. In July, Sir Andrew McFarlane, the family court’s president, reported that trials in two areas of a new, child‑centred and less adversarial approach to private law disputes had been “far more successful than even its most ardent supporters would have anticipated”. Another pilot, of family court reporting by the press and legal bloggers, has been extended beyond its initial three locations.
Huge gaps in the published data remain a sticking-point. Case numbers are in the public domain. In 2022 there were 52,204 new private law cases involving children, and 16,384 public law cases where children’s services were involved. But statistics on children’s involvement in proceedings and on the orders made by judges – and how these vary over time and between regions – are lacking. So are many other details that could help inform, and improve, policy and practice in a system entrusted with difficult and highly sensitive decisions. The risks to families in which fathers are domestic abusers, or sex offenders, remain the most serious concerns.
Senior judges have indicated their support for a more open system. But a lack of resources hinders progress. The anonymisation unit that was supposed to enable more judgments to be published does not exist, due to a lack of funding. And this means that no one – not journalists, lawyers, campaigners or the public – can learn from them.
