My Lords, it is a pleasure to sign all the amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, in this group. I will not go through the detail of them, but I want to make a couple of comments about Jade’s law and parental alienation to set in context why all the amendments are necessary. They certainly try to remedy the poor behaviour of ex-partners especially, but not only those, who are offenders through the criminal courts system. As we have heard through the passage of the Bill, we are talking about the most manipulative and vindictive people, who will continue to do everything they can to persecute their ex-partner or, I am afraid, sometimes their current partner.
The noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, referred to the report from the Ministry of Justice’s harm panel published in 2020. It found evidence that through the family court system abusers were exercising
“continued control through repeat litigation and the threat of repeat litigation”.
Its recommendations outline comprehensive changes to the system to stop this happening using a whole series of mechanisms.
Among other things, the panel recommended that the basic design principles for private law children’s proceedings should be set out in the way it described and which I will not go into. Much more importantly, it seems to be safety focused and trauma aware. The problem with the offenders we are talking about is that those children are already traumatised.
Although the report was principally about children, it talks about parents in private law cases as well. One problem faced in family courts is the increasing number of litigants in person. It is not even a counsel representing one of the parents; it is the estranged partner, who may have a criminal record for their behaviour, cross-examining their ex and other witnesses. That is just not appropriate. I know the law has changed on that, but that is the context in which the report was written.
The Minister referred in a previous group to the importance of training, and indeed we have had amendments on that. Recommendation 11.11 by the harm panel echoed amendments that your Lordships’ House has seen in recent years, on training in the family justice system to cover a
“cultural change programme to introduce and embed reforms”.
It then goes through a whole string of items which I will not mention, but it specifically mentions the problems of parental alienation.
Prior to that report, it was very difficult to get the family courts even to accept that there was such a thing as parental alienation—the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, has nodded at me. The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 certainly made some improvements, but unfortunately the reason for these amendments is that there are too many holes in the current system that mean that victims going through private family law proceedings can be inappropriately assessed by experts, with some inappropriately concluding that victims’ allegations, including those made by children, are evidence that the victim parent is “alienating” the other.
The victim parent often cannot get the family court to consider the previous criminal behaviour of their former partner or even a caution—I suppose that technically counts as criminal. The point is that—and we have debated this a lot in your Lordships’ House—the family court rightly prides itself on being a stand-alone court system, but in this instance the behaviour that was found through the criminal system is now replicated in the family court system; it is not everywhere but it happens. Family courts need to recognise that and take it into account.
There is recognition now of what is called the “parental alienation trap” in academic research both here and in America. Basically, it means that victims are accused of alienation. Not only does that compound the trauma from the abuse but that trauma is then used as evidence that the mother or child—and it usually is a mother—is disordered and therefore an alienator. That is a trap that you cannot get out of in a court, because whatever you do is wrong.
A further problem is that some parents who are calling their former partners disordered can now get specialist advisers who believe in parental alienation. One bit of evidence from the Victims’ Commissioner for London was a quote from a victim of the family courts:
“The therapist recommended a 90 day plan for my son to spend time with his Dad with no contact with me. She wrote in her report that there was a need to ‘sever the bond between mother and child’. The ‘experts’ then had free rein granted by the judge to force me and my son through privately paid therapy every week at £150 per hour. The therapists and social worker told me if I didn’t, they wouldn’t give me my son back. They wanted to take him away at the end of 90 days and give full custody to my ex but my ex refused as he said ‘I had learnt my lesson and he had a life and didn’t want my son all the time’. I was one of the lucky ones. I had to fight this case for over 2.5 years and it cost me a total of just under £900,000”.
People who have access to resources are using their money to manipulate the family court system even more.
It is also extraordinary that it is possible for those on bail or awaiting trial for domestic or child sexual abuse offences to have unsupervised contact with their children. Amendment 111 would prevent this. For similar reasons, victims of domestic abuse need protecting from disclosure of their personal and private medical records, as we discussed in the previous group. I will not repeat the arguments, but they are as strong here, particularly where the litigant in person will see those details in all their glory.
While we welcome the Government’s amendment to Clause 16 in the Commons to take account of Jade’s law, it does not go far enough to protect children, particularly children who have been abused by a parent—unbelievably, they retain the right to parental responsibility above the safeguarding of a child. Amendments 84 to 100 on Jade’s law also cover the issue that happened with Jane Clough, who was murdered by her ex-partner. I had the privilege through the stalking law inquiry in 2011-12 to meet Jane’s parents, John and Penny Clough. Ever since their daughter’s murder, they have campaigned tirelessly for legislation to protect victims and their children from their violent and murdering partners and ex-partners.
It is really important that these lacunae in the family court system are closed. We need to make sure that children, whom the family courts stand there to protect, are the absolute priority and that every bit of evidence from the criminal court system or other systems, through repeated litigation through the family courts, is taken into account.