Monthly Archives: March 2017

EU withdrawal – children’s rights to ‘express their views’

dbfamilylaw

Children and EU Charter of Fundamental Rights: rights to be lost?

This article looks at children’s rights in legal proceedings which will go with EU withdrawal; and which can only be replaced if MPs specifically take steps to create new law. If I were an English child I would want more protection for my rights from the EU withdrawal repeal bill than is promised by English law as it now stands.

It is not always well-known that EU has its own human rights charter: Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2000/C 364/01) , much of which is modelled on the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms 1950. In certain important respects it develops the European Convention 1950, especially in the field of children’s rights (which have no direct mention in the 1950 Convention).

The Charter will go with EU withdrawal; so will the…

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Question It!

Researching Reform

Welcome to another week.

A report by Oxford University’s Rees Centre, based on several international studies looking at placement and outcomes of siblings when they are fostered highlights some serious concerns about the separation of brothers and sisters in social care.

The findings support current government policy which is that siblings should wherever possible, be placed together.

The report tells us that about 19% of children and young people entering care, assessed as needing to be placed with siblings, are placed apart from them. It also offers a call to action, urging social workers and fostering providers to focus on facilitating sibling placements.

Key recommendations include:

For Social workers –
 Involve young people more in placement decisions. Involving young people in their placement
decision leads to better outcomes and this applies equally to sibling group placements.

For Fostering providers – 
 Recruit foster carers who are able and willing to foster sibling…

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Fighting for justice

mrswrongchoice

Who can help me? Feels like no one’s there, when you have bills in the thousands because of court proceedings when all you want to do is protect your daughter 😞

So the inevitable happened, it was only a matter of time before it would of done anyway and maybe I shouldn’t even be writing about it on here. But I need to get it out, I need to scream but I can’t!

Back in July of 2016 my daughter told me her half brother from her “father” had been sexually abusing her she’s only 6 him 9 a repeated pattern of what he done to my sons when I was with his dad.

Court never listened to me wouldn’t even entertain what he did to my boys, so he was given no extra supervision when my daughter was having contact. My daughter told her “father” what had been happening…

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McFarlane For President?

What are your views? xx

Researching Reform

With the news that the current President Of the Family Division, Sir James Munby, is set to step down next year, speculation will soon mount as to who will succeed him.

Munby’s decision to retire appears to stem from deep disappointment over the lack of progress inside the Family Court during his time as President. In a recent interview, he told The Law Gazette that there was “depressingly little to show for over two years’ hard pounding”.

Enter Justice McFarlane, an appeal court judge who works on Family Law cases, and who has recently begun to produce highly political judgments and calls to action urging improvements inside the system.

His provocative speech to the Family Justice Council earlier this month, where he called on the government to rethink the country’s adoption policy, and his overtly political judgments, which he is using to highlight problems inside the Family Courts (

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Question It!

Too sad 😦 So wrong!

Researching Reform

Welcome to another week.

Social worker and Founder of the Migrants Trust, Margaret Humphreys has told the nation’s Independent Inquiry Into Child Sexual Abuse that the abuse, lies and cover ups involved in children being sent abroad to other Commonwealth countries during the 1940s-1970s, amounted to human rights violations.

The conduct by government organisations and officials which sparked this comment includes:

  • Physical and sexual abuse,
  • Conditions of slavery and terror,
  • Removal of identities, and;
  • Lies that suggested the youngsters’ parents were dead
  • Collusion and cover-up by institutions and agencies,
  • State sanctioned kidnapping of children
  • Children being knowingly placed into the hands of paedophiles

A 2015 debate in the House Of Lords in which Lord Blackheath confirms he and others were involved in several of these government initiatives, also confirms Margaret’s experience through her work helping former child migrants find their biological families.

Child Migrants.pngOur question then, is this: who should be held…

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Your Story: Adoption Certificates And Child Identity

NEW (first story) where some stories will have reporting restrictions xx

Researching Reform

Our first story in this series looks at what happens when an adoption is badly filed.

1. Could you give a brief summary of the facts of your case? 

I went through adoption proceedings for one of my children. It was not a voluntary adoption, it was forced. 

2. What went wrong in your  case? 

There were serious administrative failings in our case, including the wrong adoption year and name being written on the adoption certificate as well as queries over the authenticity of the certificate itself, which led me to wonder whether the adoption had gone through at all. I also felt as if the evidence I produced was either ignored or dismissed and all the positive reports about me as an excellent mother were never acknowledged with a view to looking at potential options for support. Instead, adoption seemed like the end goal from the beginning.

3. What happened…

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Your Story: Share Your Family Court Experience With Researching Reform

New. Great idea xx

Researching Reform

The Researching Reform blog often hosts real stories from inside the family justice system, whether they are families’ experiences or child protection professionals’, however we have started to receive an unusually high amount of requests to share stories, so we’re offering families, and anyone else who would like it, an open platform to amplify their voices.

Your Story is a series which will feature family court experiences which need to be heard, either due to alleged miscarriages of justice or a desire to alert the public and policy makers to a specific problem inside the courts.

Our first story will be published tomorrow, and is about a forced adoption gone wrong, which features some remarkable errors.

All the stories we add are fact checked by us, and will be published without names and information which could lead to identification of the parties where reporting and legal restrictions apply.

We will ask the same…

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