Search Results for: talking over

Abuse of Process: Dramatic Extent of Stalking in the Family Courts

pic: sloth 33 (thanks)

pic: sloth 33 (thanks)

Last week NAPO (The Trade Union and Professional Association for Family Court & Probation Staff) and PAS (Protection Against Stalking) published a “dossier” of 33 cases that “exposes shocking use by convicted murders, rapists and stalkers of family and civil court processes to continue to cause fear and alarm to their victims.  The briefing details cases of a convicted sex offender applying to the family courts for contact with his own children who he had abused and of convicted murderers also asking for contact orders with children of the mothers they had killed“. You can read the news item on the NAPO website here (where you can also download the dossier itself), or you can read it regurgitated lock-stock in last Sunday’s Observer: “Rapists abuse courts to harass victims”.

I first picked up on this when reading the Observer last Sunday. In essence the report is flagging the problem of how the court process itself can become simply a new forum for the continuation of a pattern of harassment. And it is quite right to do so. But (you knew there would be a but, right?) But…

The dossier is a compilation of 33 of the more extreme cases (rape, sexual abuse, murder of one parent by another) in which NAPO and PAS say this issue is most starkly demonstrated. I myself recall being involved in one case where the father who had murdered the children’s mother was highly obstructive in respect of plans for the children to be adopted by the maternal family, who insisted on being produced from prison for every hearing, resulting in much hanging around and anxiety – and it really was quite difficult for many of us (on all sides) not to simply tell him to wind his neck back in.

But I digress. As I read the Observer article something made me unsettled. How instructive are those extreme cases? And what is the “evidence” for the suggestion that “men convicted of serious offences…exploit…the legal system to instil fear in their victims” on a more regular basis rather than just at the extreme end of the scale? Initially my annoyance was at the newspaper for not explaining more thoroughly what this evidence was. When I read the example quoted from the dossier which had been cherry picked by the journalist I had to check I hadn’t inadvertently picked up the Daily Mail:

“In one case a convicted sex offender who was serving a long sentence for possessing thousands of images of him abusing children, including his own, applied to have contact with his children. According to Napo, the judge allowed the application, funded by legal aid, because he was worried that the offender would take his case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg if it was rejected. Only after repeated court hearings was the case thrown out, leaving the mother of the children traumatised.”

Verily unputdownable…”Ha”! I snorted, noting the reference to “vexatious applications”, slipped in so as to infer that all such applications must be de facto vexatious. “Next they’ll be suggesting that PR should be removed on conviction”….Oh. They ARE suggesting that. Crumbs.

Continue Reading…

Talking Past One Another

Bloggers generally ask questions, invite comment, engage in discussions, listen to other viewpoints. Some journalists and newspaper websites do likewise. But not all.

There has been much written (including by myself) about the journalism of Christopher Booker (Telegraph), in the wake of judicial criticism of his writing.

I have written two posts: “Brought to Booker” and more recently “Booker Booby Prize” and “Booker v Bellamy Round 2“. Although others apparently within his orbit have commented there has been nothing from Mr Booker in my comments moderation inbox.

But now Mr Booker, in the course of an article about a mother involved with social services whose cause he has been “championing” has responded, after a fashion, to his critics. He says,

I was again attacked last week by a prominent legal blogger, for reporting on cases where the system appears to be going tragically wrong, without having sat for days in court to hear “both sides of the story”.

This barrister compared me to a sports writer who cannot be bothered to watch a football match, but relies on a version given by one player after the game. But would a journalist attend a match when he is forbidden to name the teams or any of the players, may be imprisoned for disclosing much of what happens on the pitch, and is even prohibited from giving the final score?

This I think must be a reference to Adam Wagner’s recent blog post “Must journalists attend court hearings to report accurately?” (UK Human Rights Blog – earlier post on Mr Booker here).  Continue Reading…

Walking Talking Living Doll

Health warning: Enormo-post.

Most legal eyes this week have been on the various Legal Walks taking place in London and elsewhere, to raise funds for Law Centres and Pro Bono legal advice (and in Bristol it was an Access to Justice Walk). Not satisfied with that, half of my chambers seems to have participated in the Bristol 10k run at the weekend for charidee. But this post is about a whole other kind of walk. The SLUT WALK. Some of you may have seen Paxman last week (see 27.45m on iplayer) apparently oscillating between overexcited, bewildered and just plain petrified, pinned between a pair of variously vociferous and voluptuous women arguing the pros and cons of the proposed SLUT WALK – the contrast between their visual appearance was surely no coincidence – one tight lipped, pinned back, steely and contained; the other wild haired, verbally passionate and physically demonstrative (guess which was the Tory MP). I myself found it a strange mix of amusing and excruciating – I could almost hear the boys from my school chanting “Bitch fight!”. The polarised comments on twitter during and after carried on the theme and kept me absorbed for a whole glass of chianti.

But the quaero-erotic tableau contrived by the producers of Newsnight last week is not the topic of this blog post. I do actually want to talk about the slut walks. You can read about them here, if the whole concept has passed you by. Because to me the real issues have been slightly lost in the (predictable) media hoo ha (And in the coalition style drafting “pause” before publication of this post a further broo-ha-ha on the topic of rape has arisen from Ken Clarke’s outrageous suggestion that not all rapes are of identical degrees of gravity). Continue Reading…