Bring a private prosecution for harassment.

Too often it is the innocent party in domestic disputes who ends up on the wrong side of the law.

Take this common example:

A father comes home from work to find his partner has left and has taken their children. Beside himself with anxiety, he texts her again and again, asking where his children are, are they safe, and when and how he will see them? Shortly afterwards, he is arrested and charged with harassment for sending these text messages.

Most people would think that stopping someone seeing their children is a more serious form of harassment than sending text messages asking where they are, and this view would find some support in the Protection from Harassment Act. The Act’s definition of harassment includes a course of conduct which someone carries out, without justification, knowing it will cause distress to another. As such, taking someone’s children away and denying them contact without good reason would certainly seem to be a form of harassment. However, the reality is that the Police are more inclined to see the text messaging as harassment than the denial of contact.

The father can then find himself on the back foot when he comes to apply to a Family Court for contact with his children. The harassment charge, being a form of domestic abuse, may lead to his contact with his children being limited until investigations are completed into whether contact is safe, by which time his bonds with his children may have been permanently damaged. As for the distress caused to the father, that is outside of the Family Court’s remit, whose sole concern is for the welfare of the children.

What can be done? One option is to bring a private prosecution against the mother for harassment by denial of contact. If successful, it can provide an evidential basis for asking the Family Court not to trust her with sole care of the children in future, and instead to make a shared residence order, or to order sole residence to the father.

The issue: The present law allows resident parents to emigrate, and remove a child to another country, unless there is good reason not to. The fact that this will result in the termination of the child’s bonds with the non-resident parent is not generally held to be a good reason to refuse the resident parent leave to remove the child.

All of the research evidence show this practice is contrary to the welfare of children, and yet this principle continues to be applied by courts. This principle cannot be challenged in the Supreme Court unless the Court of Appeal itself gives permission for it to go before the Supreme Court. This makes a nonsense of having a Supreme Court at all.

This link gives you the opportunity to register your support for repealing Sec 54 of the Access to Justice Act and so allowing this, and other issues, to be considered by the Supreme Court.

Mike Robinson has now come up with another coup in the form of an e-guide on shared residence.

It is an invaluable resource for anyone handling their own case through the Family Courts, or indeed for anyone who might have a solicitor, but still wants active involvement in the management of their case. It includes the court forms needed, templates for statements, relevent caselaw and academic research, and much more.

At £15 it is well worth it.

This year, 3 of our main advisers decided to set up a more organised support service to respond to the demand, and in the last 10 weeks alone we have handled over 300 enquiries.

To access this service, click on “Need help with your case?” at the top of this page.

The initial enquiry is free, after which we make a charge for further help.

Here is the full text of the section on Families and Children in the coalition’s published programme for government:

14. FAMILIES AND CHILDREN
The Government believes that strong and stable families of all kinds are the bedrock of a strong and stable society. That is why we need to make our society more family friendly, and to take action to protect children from excessive commercialisation and premature sexualisation.
• We will maintain the goal of ending child poverty in the UK by 2020.
• We will reform the administration of tax credits to reduce fraud and overpayments.
• We will bring forward plans to reduce the couple penalty in the tax credit system as we make savings from our welfare reform plans.
• We support the provision of free nursery care for pre-school children, and we want that support to be provided by a diverse range of providers, with a greater gender balance in the early years workforce.
• We will take Sure Start back to its original purpose of early intervention, increase its focus on the neediest families, and better involve organisations with a track record of supporting families. We will investigate ways of ensuring that providers are paid in part by the results they achieve.
• We will refocus funding from Sure Start peripatetic outreach services, and from the Department of Health budget, to pay for 4,200 extra Sure Start health visitors.
• We will investigate a new approach to helping families with multiple problems.
• We will publish serious case reviews, with identifying details removed.
• We will review the criminal records and vetting and barring regime and scale it back to common sense levels.
• We will crack down on irresponsible advertising and marketing, especially to children. We will also take steps to tackle the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood.
• We will encourage shared parenting from the earliest stages of pregnancy – including the promotion of a system of flexible parental leave.
• We will put funding for relationship support on a stable, long-term footing, and make sure that couples are given greater ncouragement to use existing relationship support.
• We will conduct a comprehensive review of family law in order to increase the use of mediation when couples do break up, and to look at how best to provide greater access rights to non-resident parents and grandparents.

Ray Barry tried some old-fashioned canvassing with a modern twist: spiderman driving around the Wolverhampton South West constituency delivering key messages through a megaphone. Roger Crawford did things on an altogether bigger scale, driving a double-decker bus, emblazoned with slogans, around Oxford East.

Here are Ray’s and Roger’s results:

WOLVERHAMPTON SOUTH-WEST
Paul Uppal Conservative 16,344 40.7 +2.6
Rob Marris Labour 15,653 39.0 -4.5
Robin Lawrence Liberal Democrat 6,430 16.0 +2.5
Amanda Mobberley UK Independence Party 1,487 3.7 +1.2
Raymond Barry Equal Parenting Alliance 246 0.6 +0.6
Majority 691 1.7
Turnout 40,160 67.9 +4.8

OXFORD EAST
Andrew Smith Labour 21,938 42.5 +6.5
Steve Goddard Liberal Democrat 17,357 33.6 -1.6
Edward Argar Conservative 9,727 18.8 +1.5
Sushila Dhall Green 1,238 2.4 -2.1
Julia Gasper UK Independence Party 1,202 2.3 +0.6
David O’Sullivan Socialist Equality 116 0.2 +0.2
Roger Crawford Equal Parenting Alliance 73 0.1 +0.1
Majority 4,581 8.9
Turnout 51,651 63.1 +5.6

A message from the Australian non-custodial parents party:

Hi Ray

Congratulations in Wolverhampton SW.

You made a good effort. Your percentage of the vote is in line with what we get here in Australia.

We find that people who vote for us normally would vote for our Australian Labor Party (your Labour Party but with a “u” deleted – for Australian marketing reasons). This is because our Labor voters tend to be from our lower socio-economic areas.

Therefore I would presume that you may have taken some votes away from your Labour Party, that would have otherwise gone to that party. You have made some impact. This is by making slightly easier for the Conservative candidate to win.

Regards

John

The constituency of Wolverhampton South West, made famous by Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech, became the focus of the immigration debate again today.

Equal Parenting Alliance candidate Ray Barry said immigration had become a “political football” yet closer examination showed the effects on unemployment had been misrepresented.

“So much long-term unemployment traces back to people losing touch with their children. There’s a strong correlation between it and people being alienated from their kids, which drains the heart out of them,” he said.

Link to full BBC report

“The father has no entitlements, but is usually expected to pay for everything. Even when the mother is responsible for the break-up, the father must subsidise the abduction of his children.”

JOHN WATERS

Family ‘contact centres’ will normalise the wrongdoings of a heartless, misandrist family law system

I COULDN’T help noticing the enthusiastic media welcome for the announcement by Barry Andrews, Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, of the possibility of a pilot scheme for “contact centres”. The Minister was responding to a study carried out for the Family Support Agency, calling for the establishment of 37 such centres.

It is instructive to observe the constructions favoured by those seeking to put a positive spin on a deeply ominous development. We are told that contact centres are necessitated by the increase in “non-traditional” families. We are told that they will offer a solution in contentious relationships between fathers and mothers, and where “non-resident parents” may not have adequate accommodation in which to spend time with their children.

The implication is that these circumstances are unavoidable, the inevitable outcome of marriage and relationship breakdown and disputes over children. Such formulations are disingenuous and misleading. “Non-resident parents” are almost invariably fathers. It is hardly ever the mother who must seek “contact” or whose accommodation is inadequate.

Moreover, the issue in these disputes is rarely if ever a legitimate disagreement about how the parents might organise their now separate parenting functions. The “dispute” does not occur around some median point in an axis defining the total parenting roles, with a view to establishing exactly where, now that the parents are no longer a unit, a “line of Solomon” might be drawn. The “dispute” happens at the extreme end of that notional axis, where the father’s entitlements might theoretically begin. The dispute is not about parenting; it is about fathering. There is hardly ever any question but that the mother’s total “rights” are guaranteed. The “dispute” concerns the extent of the mother’s entitlement to become a gatekeeper between “her” children and their father.

And she holds all the cards.

If we examine the question of accommodation, we find that the mother is almost always deemed to have an automatic right to whatever accommodation resources the family has been capable of mustering.

The father has no entitlements, but is usually expected to pay for everything. Even when the mother is responsible for the break-up, the father must subsidise the abduction of his children.

The quality of the father’s accommodation is not something the family courts waste any time thinking about.

Lawyers like to talk about the “intractability” of these conflicts and the difficult job they face seeking resolutions. But what really happens is that the lawyers – those on the father’s “side” as much as those representing the mother – seek to bring about a “solution” which will satisfy the courts, which generally means acquiescing in all the mother’s demands.

The mother’s lawyers explain that it “upsets” the mother to have to meet the father, and this “upsets” the children. The judge nods gravely. The solution is obvious: forbid the father from seeing his children.

This is what passes for logic and justice in family law. Because the State backs the mother in every conceivable way, many mothers are able to get away with grossly sabotaging the relationships between fathers and children. The entire purpose of family law proceedings is to force the father to accept an outcome whereby he is stripped of his most fundamental rights, robbed of his assets and income and brutalised into a mindset whereby he is willing to accept any conditions so as to hold on to his sanity.

The establishment of contact centres would be a further step towards the total criminalisation of fatherhood.

Despite recent attempts at whitewashing, family law remains a running sore on the face of Irish justice. Instead of confronting the abuses of human rights routinely perpetrated against children and fathers, the Government now proposes a measure which would brush under the rug our most glaring denial of human rights.

Contact centres would also make it easy for an ignorant, prejudiced and heartless judiciary to normalise its wrongdoing, offering misandrist judges an alternative to adhering to the requirements of the Constitution.

The moral solution to situations where the father is denied a relationship with his child by the mother is not to create containment areas for the father to be supervised while he and his child seek to retrieve some semblance of a relationship. The moral solution is to compel mothers to stop using children as weapons of blackmail and revenge, and for the State to stop supporting these abuses.

Perhaps contact centres should be called “fathering reservations”. And why not have a uniform for fathers who are forced to use them? Perhaps something with stripes or arrows, denoting the criminal status that this society has conferred on fathers through the institutionalisation of its ugliest prejudices and the normalisation of its most flagrant trampling on human rights.

Each centre, I see, will cost upwards of €120,000 a year. There is an alternative: justice. If preceded by basic human decency, it comes free.

When my wife left me 10 years ago, it was a life-changing moment for me. I have seen nothing of my eldest 2 children ever since, and now I no longer see my 3rd and youngest either, even though all 3 live less than 2 miles away with their mother and her boy-friend, and I have fought legal battles costing over £100,000 in a futile attempt to remain in touch with them, and to be a father to them.

I was born in Darlaston and went to St Chad’s grammar school in Wolverhampton. I have lived in the city most of my life, and I am a life-long Wolves supporter. I spent 30 years in the Civil Service around Birmingham and the Black Country, and I have a good understanding of the local economy. I also trained as a priest, I have a Theology degree, and I do voluntary work, taking youngsters who have disabilities or other problems to school.

I received my pensioners bus pass this year, but continue to work, as many of us do. I run a disability consultancy from home. I have an MSc qualification for it, and solicitors engage me to help their clients return to work and get their life back on track while their personal injury claims are being fought over.

I run a help-line for Real Fathers for Justice, and deal with around 30 heart-rending cries for help every week from mothers and fathers facing the prospect of losing touch with their children. I also work as a “McKenzie Friend,” a legal term for a lay adviser who helps parents at court who cannot afford a lawyer.

I have none of the encumbrances of the major parties. Rob Marris is a fine man and an excellent constituency MP, but he has been obliged to support the Labour policies which have brought misery and poverty to the country. If elected, I would have no such party whip to obey. I would be completely free to represent the interests of the good people of Wolverhampton South West, and I have many skills I can bring to bear on your behalf. My 30 years in the Civil Service have taught me how to work behind the scenes, where most of the real work is done, and I can hold my own in debate in any company and on any subject, as can be seen from these clips from BBC’s the Big Questions, and Trisha. I am well able to stand up for Wolverhampton’s interests in Parliament.

If elected, my Main Manifesto Commitments would be:
1) Family Law reform: If parents separate, children spend
equal time with each, unless they both agree otherwise.
2) A Minister for men, to ensure men and boys receive
equality in Health, Education and before the law.

And by the way, why does Wolverhampton need the £22million “world-class” bus station which the council have promised us? Wouldn’t a Wolverhampton-class bus station and a £22million council tax rebate be better?