Child Arrangements: Presumption of Parental Involvement
Debate between Marie Tidball and Emily Darlington(1 month ago)
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Dr Tidball
I agree. As someone who has worked in criminology and criminal justice for over a decade, I think the need for us to move beyond siloed working can be no more important than it is in these sorts of cases.
Just yesterday, we learned that the man Kiena Dawes named as her killer when she committed suicide wants to launch a custody battle over their daughter, saying that
“I’m coming to get you baby girl”.
This man has been jailed for six and a half years for assault of and controlling behaviour towards Kiena. Our current law would allow this person to have unsupervised contact with their child.
Emily Darlington (Milton Keynes Central) (Lab)
I thank my hon. Friend for securing such an important debate and for making such a powerful speech. Does she agree that the visitation presumption, custody presumption and all these sorts of things that happen in family law courts are a continuing perpetration of the domestic abuse that the women and mothers were fleeing in the first place? I will keep this case anonymous, but in my constituency I was meant to meet a woman on Saturday. The handling of the handover of the children on Friday had been so abusive and painful for her that she had to cancel her appointment with me because she was in hospital with heart palpitations. Can my hon. Friend address how we can ensure in the future that the presumption in the court service takes into account that this is continuing domestic abuse for both the mother and the children?
Dr Tidball
Absolutely. I will return to this later, but the harm report makes quite clear the re-traumatisation of both children and parental victims of domestic abuse that comes with repeated attempts at contact and the presumption that is currently in place. The consequence of that is a generation of lost voices like Jack and Paul Sykes and Sara Sharif, but there is no definitive way of knowing how many parents whose partner or spouse is a known domestic abuser have been persuaded into some form of shared care because of the presumption.
The harm report, published in 2020 by the Ministry of Justice’s expert panel on harm, found that presumption of contact must be reviewed urgently, because the principle
“put a misplaced emphasis on the child’s right to a relationship with both parents…above the child’s welfare and right to be safe from abuse and its effects”.