A wealth of little family law stories in this morning’s Metro:

• ‘homebuyers returning to the market’- first time buyers apparently are out in force trying to bag a bargain, but of course a large number of them are likely to find it difficult to raise funds unless they have a hefty deposit.
• ‘police deal with 20,000 child sex crimes a year’ – reported as if allegations equal crime, apparently one in four of this large number involved children 4 and under. I wonder what proportion result in a conviction?
• ‘Deaths of 8 children ‘are a scandal” – yet another local authority, this time Birmingham, has been accused of a systematic failure identified after 8 children known to Birmingham social services died of suspected abuse or neglect.
• ‘few ‘good’ reasons to force births’ – unsurprising story about the overuse of induction on pregnant women, 28% of which were not done for a medical reason. Gosh the medical profession do know how to disempower us and make us feel incapable of doing anything by ourselves…we’ve only been doing it for thousands of years.
• Finally, ‘big rise in racial mix families’ – one in ten children in Britain lives in a racially mixed family. Almost half of black caribbean men are in a mixed-race relationship, but only eight percent of men with a pakistani background according to the EHRC – I’d be interested to read a cultural exploration of the differences in mixing as between different communities.

Well, that kept me occupied on the train into chambers…