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Court reporters - cAFCASS - Abolishing CAFCASS
“CAFCASS does not currently
have guidelines in relation to the amount of time a child
should spend with a non-resident parent, nor does it have
detailed written-down guidance on the factors to be taken
into consideration on time-based recommendations”
- 3 April 2002, CAFCASS’s Director of Operations Lamorna
Wooderson
Did you know that New Labour
is responsible for a state-funded child-welfare agency - employing
more than twelve hundred civil servants, and costing more
than £100 million p.a. - that brings misery to tens
of thousands of British children each year?
CAFCASS (the Children and Family
Courts Advisory Service) began operations on 1 April 2001.
After three years of operation, it has yet to establish guidelines
about what it is supposed to do. Last year, the former Chairman,
Anthony Hewson CB, quit in despair.
In theory, CAFCASS was designed
to protect the rights and well-being of endangered children.
But the agency confused the
children of divorce with . . . children at risk. Most people
don’t know that untrained CAFCASS officers write some
33,000 reports each year “investigating” perfectly
normal parents who are having trouble arranging contact and
living arrangements for their children after separation. In
the course of making reports on cases in which no issues of
child endangerment have ever been raised, CAFCASS officers
routinely:
recommend unsustainably low
levels of contact between normal children and their parents
(one hour per month supervised in a contact centre, three
postcards per year, etc)
interview children as young
as 3 or 4 asking them how much time they want to spend with
their parents after separation
make no effort to facilitate
contact when one parent obstructs it
defer, extend and aggravate
disputes for months and years in order to write reports about
any domestic disagreement: bringing back those “sandy
clothes” from the beach, or who should pay for that
broken boiler at Mum’s, or using “a damp towel”
to dry children after swimming, etc.
According to CAFCASS’s
“every case is different” methodology, any level
of contact, however miserable, can be considered reasonable
- or unreasonable - and brought to a full trial. Every case
can be endlessly investigated, with no final resolution in
sight.
No “best case scenario”
has ever been designed for resolving normal cases quickly,
efficiently, and humanely for both parents and their children.
If you, or your family, are
investigated by CAFCASS, then anything you have said over
the last ten years (including anything you have been said
to have said) could be “reported” and used to
ensure that you lose all proper contact with your children.
Margaret Hodge inherits responsibility
for this disgraceful national disservice from Paul Boateng,
Jane Kennedy, Jack Straw, David Locke, Geoffrey Hoon, Keith
Vaz.
How CAFCASS Destroys Families
- full documentation available -
While “investigating”
tens of thousands of perfectly normal families each year,
untrained CAFCASS officers routinely make absurd recommendations
about contact and residence for perfectly normal children
and their parents:
a senior officer in Inner London inaccurately advised two
parents that “no court in England will order overnight
contact for a child until he is 5 ½ years old”
an officer recommended against
overnight contact for the foreseeable future on the grounds
that “he was unwilling to let the father practice his
parenting skills on the child”
an officer recommended the end
of all contact between a father and his children on the grounds
that he “offered” to buy them a camera and pass
it on to them through their mother at the next court hearing
an officer wrote an 18 page
full-scale report on the “type of ordinary, domestic
activities” a father considered appropriate for his
children
an officer accused a father
of not being “child-focussed” for taking “his
child for a ride in a furniture van”
a senior officer advised two
parents that a child should not have her own room at the father’s
but only “a cot tucked away somewhere” so she
didn’t become confused
an officer criticized a father
who had not seen his children in 15 months for being “angry,”
“retrograde” and “showing frustration,”
and recommended against re-establishing any contact until
“the father has made a commitment over a significant
period”
recommended two hours contact
per fortnight in a supervised contact centre on the grounds
that “the father might need help learning how to keep
the children’s attention”
in a case where the mother had
broken contact orders in excess of a hundred times, an officer
made almost no mention of the fact in her report other than
to state that “it is not the role of the officer to
make spot checks on contact handovers”
an officer rejected a proposal
of co-parenting on the grounds that the father was “trying
to set up an alternative home”
CAFCASS does not keep records
on itself, or what it does. The only known documentation on
CAFCASS’s bizarre and unmonitored activities is only
available from the following sources:
Maureen Freely - phone:
01225 859 860 Oliver Cyriax - phone: 020 8748 1081
Scott Bradfield - phone: 020 7388 2210 Ken Lane - phone: 07929
982 285
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