Tag Archives: contact

Guest Post: Social media – our master or our servant?

This is a guest post written by Sarah Phillimore (@svphillimore), a barrister at St John’s Chambers. It arises from a discussion Sarah, myself and other colleagues had last weekend about the difficulty in obtaining s26 contact orders in placement proceedings and the spate of media reports of teenagers tracked down on Facebook by their biological family, not always with a happy ending.

Social media – our master or our servant?

I dimly remember being a teenager. It was not a great time. It would have been much worse if I had been adopted and on top of my hormonal struggles to come to terms with my place in the world, I then had to cope with the sudden discovery via Facebook that numerous members of my biological family wanted to get in touch and share their perspective about why I was adopted.

Binoculars courtesy of tunnelarmr on flickr

Binoculars courtesy of tunnelarmr on flickr

 

The human part of me feels compassion for the families who have had to face this; in some cases the fall out from such sudden reintroduction to the birth family has been massive and children have decided to move out of their adopted homes. But the less compassionate, lawyer part of me says ‘good’. Because perhaps now we can kick start more debate about post adoption direct contact. We can’t have a blanket assumption that such contact is either good or bad as each case involves a multiplicity of complicated facts and a variety of different people. Direct contact involves a dynamic relationship between people that changes over time. However, if there is now a serious risk of haphazard and unstructured post adoption contact being facilitated through the medium of social networking sites, we need to decide how we deal with that situation and our decisions should be based on good evidence.

 

The last 50 years have seen enormous shifts in societal attitudes towards accepting different concepts of ‘family’. Adoption is no longer a mechanism to cover up a shameful indiscretion and to encourage adopted children to vanish without trace into their ‘new’ family. There is recognition of the likely strength of our curiosity about our origins and the pull of the blood tie.

 

According to the Adoption Information Line, 70% of children adopted are between 1 -4 years. Only a very few are under 1 or over 10. The numbers of children adopted each year have decreased significantly from about 21,000 in 1975 to 5,797 in 1995; a reflection of the increased availability of abortion and the societal shift that no longer stigmatises illegitimacy. Adopted children are very unlikely to be brand new babies, given up by desperate teenage girls, but rather older children who have already suffered or were likely to suffer significant harm from their birth parents. We are thus considering a group of children who had a less than ideal start to life, may suffer difficulties with attachment and may retain memories of the harm done to them. It is likely that these children will find it difficult to cope with sudden and unsupported reintroduction to their birth family.

 

Research suggests that ‘communicative openness’ in adoptive families – how they think and talk about adoption – is positively linked to ‘structural openness’ – contact with birth family members – but that children’s emotional and behavioural development was not related to either the type of contact they were having with their birth families or the communicative openness of their adoptive parents (see Post-Adoption contact and Openness in Adoptive Parents’ Minds: Consequences for Children’s Development Elsbeth Neil Br JSoc Work (2009) 39).

 

More research is needed; as Elsbeth Neil recognises ‘finding empirical answers to questions about outcomes of contact after adoption is frustrated by significant methodological challenges …what is meant by contact after adoption? The type, frequency, duration and management of contact all need to be considered, as does the type of birth relative involved.’ Continue Reading…

What Kind of Debate Should We Be Having About Domestic Violence?

This post is a guest blog post written by Sarah Phillimore. Sarah is a family barrister with over 15 years of experience. She tweets as @SVPhillimore and this is her first foray into blogging. This post arose from a tweet from @change4victims calling for support for an e-petition entitled “review of access laws for domestic abusers”, subsequently retweeted by @womensaid.

The petition reads:

70% of cases in the family courts cite domestic abuse as a major concern yet only 1% are refused access. a review is required. Supervised access is the minimum that must be considered when an abuser scores low to moderate on the DASSH risk assessment. Supervision must be on a 1:1 basis. No access should be given where an abuser scores high risk on the DASSH, where a MARAC hearing is held or planned, Where target hardening is carried out on a victims property or where the abused has had to move to refuge, out of their hometown away from their support network. government should consult Women’s Aid, The Police and the Domestic Abuse helpline in reviewing this. Family law must consider children’s safety and not simply chase social ideals. A happy child with a lone parent will always make a more positive impact than an unhappy child brought up with abuse. Also where drug use is cited as a problem rehabilitation must take place before access can be considered.

 It has to date achieved 35 signatures.

Over to Sarah…

What Kind of Debate Should We Be Having About Domestic Violence?

Disclaimer:
I do not believe that it is ok for people to abuse each other, with fists or with words. We all need to take responsibility for our own behaviour and not complain that we were ‘provoked’ by another person or situation into acting badly. I agree that men who expose their children or children’s mothers to violence should expect State intervention in their family life, which could mean they are prevented from having a relationship with their children as they grow.

Why do I even need to say this? Because sadly my experience of attempting to discuss violence in relationships has shown me that it is difficult to engage in useful debate. At times it seems that only one response is permitted – men are the perpetrators and women are the victims. Any deviation from that norm is met with accusations that I must be a supporter of violence against women and anything I say should be dismissed.

I have been a specialist family lawyer since 1999, acting for both mothers and fathers. Many parents who are separating make allegations about each other’s behaviour. Violence is often an issue. I do not use the term ‘domestic violence’ because that is a ludicrous term. ‘Domestic’ makes it all sound so lovely and cosy. I find the term ‘relationship violence’ more helpful as I think  the context of the relationship in which such violence occurs is relevant – to how we blame, how we punish and how we move on. Continue Reading…

Guest blog Post: Hunger 4 Justice

The post that follows is a guest blog post by Nick Langford. Nick is a regular commenter on this blog. He and I have disagreed about many things in the comments threads, but always (I think) in respectful if robust language. I am happy to extend the opportunity to Nick to write a one off post – as per usual I don’t agree with all of it. Nick has asked for a debate, and so to kick it off my comments, are at the end of the post.

Hunger 4 Justice – Nick Langford

I am extremely grateful to Lucy for allowing me to write a guest post on her blog; I hope it will provoke some interesting debate.  We need a debate.

 

On Sunday 10th July Matt O’Connor, the founder of Fathers 4 Justice, commenced a hunger strike outside the house of the Prime Minister, David Cameron.  Such an action is clearly a dramatic departure from the style of campaigning normally associated with F4J, featuring middle-aged men in lycra.  This is campaigning of a more serious, sombre character, and O’Connor’s supporters wore dark suits and black ties.

 

The action was prompted by two factors; the first was Cameron’s failure to honour the commitments made by the Conservatives prior to the Election regarding the family justice system.  The second was Cameron’s Sunday Telegraph article on Father’s Day.

 

The Conservatives’ pledges – not widely reported but presented to F4J in a meeting with Henry Bellingham, Shadow Minister for the DCA – conformed closely to what F4J had been campaigning for.  They began with moving parental disputes out of the courts and promoting early intervention and mediation through “Australian-style” family hubs, a proposal also made by Sandra Davies of Mischcon de Reya and by Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice.

 

There would be a legal presumption in favour of automatic shared parenting within a context of equal parental responsibility and a new definition of cooperative parenting to ensure parents knew clearly what was expected of them before they entered the courts, denying them the option of prolonged litigation.

 

Contact orders would be made enforceable and there would be zero-tolerance of excuses, delay and false allegations, including (controversially) the withdrawal of benefits from parents who unreasonably withheld access.

 

Above all the Conservatives committed themselves to reducing the intolerable cost to the economy caused by family breakdown and prolonged litigation at taxpayers’ expense and to ending the ruinous destruction of children’s aspirations and potential.

 

What impressed F4J was the clear grasp of the issues Bellingham demonstrated, and the work and research which had manifestly gone on behind the scenes.  He promised an urgent and thorough review of family justice with an interim report in the Autumn of 2010.  In an email to F4J on 3rd May Nick Clegg gave his backing to this review.

Continue Reading…