Children and Adoption Bill [HL]

I offer my strong support in principle for the amendments that cover the risk assessment checklist. I was persuaded by what both noble Baronesses had to say in that regard. I am sure that they both know of the cases where a violent parent has been granted a contact order—where unbeknown to the court, a history of violence has been concealed. As the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, said, there are other cases where allegations are manufactured. When two parents decide that they cannot stand the sight of each other, a lot of things are said on both sides. Frequently, one parent will manufacture allegations of violence against the other. Those allegations typically buy time. Often but not always, the resident parent will accuse the non-resident parent of an act of violence. The allegation has to be taken seriously in every case, of course, and it is not unusual to find that, for the purposes of a court acting on the precautionary principle, an allegation of violence is enough to limit the amount of contact between a non-resident parent and a child to very low levels. One cannot criticise the courts for that. What is often a matter for criticism is the way in which the evidence for an allegation of violence or abuse is examined, or rather not sufficiently examined. That is why I find the amendments so appealing. There are no accepted protocols for screening out allegations that have little or no basis in fact from those that have material substance. I agree with the noble Baronesses that it should be perfectly feasible to devise protocols that sought to establish the facts in a methodical and dispassionate way. One could ask about the time and place of the incident, exactly what it comprised, who was told when it happened, whether it involved the children in any way and if so how, and so on. It would then be possible to mark on a scale of seriousness how significant or otherwise the behaviour was in relation to the child; that is also suggested in one of the amendments. All too often, such an inquiry is not undertaken, and the significance of the matters alleged can be blown out of all proportion. The other virtue of the amendments is that they would lead to clarity. Sometimes the problem in contact cases rests on vague terminology. Nowadays, ““abuse”” can consist of anything from beating a child over the head with a blunt instrument, or severe sexual molestation, to allowing a child to witness a traumatic event. Of course emotional abuse can be very real and serious, but I have been made aware of one case where the report said something along the lines of, ““The domestic violence increased over the years””. When someone bothered to examine what that referred to, it turned out that there had been a series of arguments between the parents, culminating in the father throwing a washing-up bowl out of the window. There had been no violence between the parents themselves, let alone violence towards the child, but it was on the record that there had been domestic violence. In another case, it was reported that the husband had subjected a child to emotional abuse. When that statement was looked into, its basis was found to be that the parent concerned allowed the child to hear an argument taking place in another room of the house. That was certainly undesirable, but it should not necessarily define the character of that parent as a violent or abusive person in relation to the child. Yet often that is the label attached to a parent in the report submitted to the courts. The notes to the circular issued in 2002 by then Lord Chancellor’s Department defined safety and harm in fairly generous terms, stating:"““The term ‘safe’ embraces consideration being given to the risk of harm to the child as defined by the amendment to the Children Act 1989 (via the Adoption and Children Act 2002). The amendment says that harm ‘means ill-treatment or impairment of health or development, including, for example, impairment suffered from seeing or hearing the ill-treatment of another’””." Those notes were circulated to the safety stakeholder group established by the Lord Chancellor’s Department which sat between 2002 and 2003. The remit of the group was to help to ensure that contact between children and their parents was safe. The doctrine of indirect damage to a child, originally applied by the family courts to extreme circumstances, was taken by the safety stakeholder group to embrace much lesser degrees of emotional trauma. I say to the Minister that I question that interpretation of standard case law. Nobody would argue with someone who said that a child had been emotionally abused by being allowed to witness his father stabbing his mother or repeatedly hitting her. The problem comes when ““violence”” is taken to include more indirect and less serious forms of harm, such as hearing verbal abuse between parents. I am not saying that verbal abuse is to be condoned in any way, but the key point is what is significant and proportional. In a household where the two parents are always arguing, the love and care that both parents feel for the child may not be at issue; what is often clear is that the hatred that the parents feel for each other has been allowed to overshadow the love that they feel for the child. That should not be a hanging offence, but sometimes it can be presented as such. Proportionality is a key principle of European law. I ask the Minister whether and to what extent the UK is compliant with the EU convention on contact. The last I heard of it that convention was open for signature. Its paragraph 41 covers the principle of proportionality, stating:"““The more the right of contact is to be restricted, the more serious the reasons for justifying such restrictions must be””." That is a pretty significant statement in the light of what I was saying earlier about reasonable contact. It is especially interesting to see that contact is referred to as a right. If the UK has not signed up to that, we need to hear why. The point I make very simply to the noble Baronesses is that we have to be careful not to use terms like violence and abuse too loosely, and so add to the existing problem. I fear that one of the amendments—Amendment No. 25—though perfectly well-intentioned, may do that, but in other respects I am very supportive of what the noble Baronesses have said.