SCOTTISH POLICE REPORT RECORD NUMBER OF MALE VICTIMS OF
DOMESTIC ABUSE
Statistics from the 8 Scottish police forces show an increase of 11.24% in the number of incidents that they recorded as domestic abuse or violence with a man as the victim in 2010-11 compared to 2009-10 (Table 1).
The increase to 9,648 is the 11th successive year the figure has risen.
The statistics published by AMIS (Abused Men in Scotland) show that over the last two reporting years, 2008-9 to 2010-11, the number of men recorded by police as victim in incidents …

Female managers in their 20s are paid more than their male counterparts.
While the researchers argue that pay differences between men and women are down to discrimination, Ruth Lea, economist for the Arbuthnot Banking Group, says it’s nothing of the sort.
“‘The fact that younger women are paid more than men is a clear sign that there is no discrimination against women,’ she said.
‘In many cases women choose children at the expense of their careers, and I am fed up with people lecturing them that they are wrong to do so.’
Read …

This the common refrain in news reports of the riots in London and other cities.
Well, why don’t the parents of these youngsters stop them going out on the streets and looting and burning shops?
25% of children have no contact with their fathers, and 70% of youth crime is carried out by this 25% of the youth population. It follows, then, that the majority of the young rioters we see on our TV screens have been raised without their fathers, and their mothers have been unable, on their own, to …

Leave to remove caselaw took an unexpected turn when judgment was handed down in the case of Re K on 7th July.
Until then, the Case of Payne v Payne had ruled the roost for 10 years, establishing the precedent that a resident parent could remove the children to live in another country if she wished. Of all the factors involved in such decisions (including the loss of relationship with the father left behind) Payne held that the most important was that the mother would be upset if she didn’t get …

The father in the Case of Re-D has written here before, concerning the injustice of removing his children from UK and, effectively, from his life. In a further publication (see the full article on this link) the father offers a considered analysis of the irrational tangle into which this area of law has plunged itself.
In the following extract, he illustrates how Lord Justice Wall raised the possibility of a legal challenge to the Payne v Payne precedent, and then inexplicably appeared to close the door again on that possibility …

When a father does not see his children the evidence suggests this is unlikely to be through choice. He is far more likely to have been driven out and excluded from raising his children, and had the minds of his children poisoned against him by a vindictive mother. Flying in the face of this evidence, David Cameron chose fathers day to caricature such dads as “runaway fathers” abandoning not only their children but the “heroic” single mothers left to raise their offspring.
Will we ever have leaders who look at …

Mavis MacLean, Senior Research Fellow from the Dept for Social Policy and Intervention at Oxford University, spoke on Woman’s hour last week, opposing Brian Binley’s private members Bill on Shared Parenting. She based her opposition to it on the experience in Australia, where Joint Parental Responsibility was introduced in 2006. This made for poorer outcomes for children, she said, and a Bill (the Family Violence Bill) is currently going through the Australian Parliament, which would amend it. Mavis MacLean’s views have been very influential in persuading the UK Family …

Claiming to be a victim of Domestic Violence is now a passport to getting Legal Aid in Family Court proceedings, and for obtaining indefinite leave to remain in UK when threatened with deportation. With such incentives to make false allegations, it can be difficult to guage the true extent of Domestic Violence. It’s worth looking again at the investigation which Tim Harford’s BBC Radio 4 “More or Less” programme carried out in 2009:
EXTRACT FROM RADIO BROADCAST
“Domestic Violence is the leading cause of mortality among women aged 15 – 44″ Where …

Health care, housing, benefits, care for bereaved dependants – these are the issues that the debate about the military covenant centres around, but what about soldiers who return home to find their wife or partner has found a new love? We can’t legislate for love, but soldiers and veterans can, and should, be protected by law from having their children removed from their lives by family courts while they are away defending their country.
The USA has enshrined this in law. The Equal Parenting Alliance calls on the UK Government to …

“it cannot be enough for a judge simply to declare that he
has considered the ‘paramount interests’ of a child. If so, a judge
would be quite at liberty to order that a child be flogged prior to
its being removed to Australia as long as he remembered to ‘tick the
box’ and declare in his judgment that he had carefully considered the
child’s ‘paramount interests’, in accordance with the Children Act.”
An open letter from the litigant-in-person father in Re D (Children)
[2010] EWCA Civ 50
In the “postscript” of Re W (Children) [2011] EWCA Civ 345, …