by Mary W Maxwell, LLB
In mid 2018, GumshoeNews became aware of a problem in Australia — judges were making shocking decisions in cases of child custody where there was a likelihood that one parent was a pedophile. They were blatantly catering to the pedophile and causing what Dr Russell Pridgeon has rightly called “court-ordered child sexual abuse.”
Because it seemed to me (and still seems to me) that our judges are acting criminally, I busied myself with finding ways to catch out their misconduct. It never occurred to me to think that he law could be used beneficially for the child. Crikey! How far I have fallen into pessimism.
British Family Law
But now I’ve I had a chance to read a book on “good law” by a law professor at Oxford, Jonathan Herring. I purchased it because I saw him on Youtube appearing to be a nice chap, quite young.
It’s called Law Express, Family Law (2019) and is basically a “Cliff Notes” for law students. It contains wonderful jurisprudence on children’s business, much of it from the House of Lords and much of it quite recent.
There is no hint in Herring’s book about any bad judge and not a word about sex-trafficking. Don’t worry, I realize that Professor Herring’s rosy colored glasses are distorting, and maybe I should be peeved with him. But I’m not. I am thrilled to discover how much jurisprudence there is for us to imbibe.
Let me show you how this Cliff Notes book (as in cramming for final exams in law school) is marvelous for the way it spells out how children’s law should work, and can work.
Custody Decisions
Part of the book is about ordinary divorce cases in which both parents want “residence.” That is the new word for custody of the child – “Who should get residence?” The relevant law in the UK is the Family Law Act 1996. I won’t go into collateral legislation such as the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013, or court cases where the issue is mainly the paying of child support.
The part of the law that I am so enchanted with is the guidance (from case law as well as statute) that speaks of parental responsibilities, welfare of the child, domestic violence, and of course, “care orders.”
I know you want to hear about that last one first. My recent article about Carol Woods, a social-work whistle blower, showed that it is “the local council” – in her case the Lancashire Council – that can take kids away from their parents. In the court rulings the phrase “the authorities” means the council. In South Australia it is the Department for Child Protection, in another state it is the Department of Health and Human Services, and so forth.
Care Orders
In Britain, the Children’s Act 1989 tells the aforementioned authorities when to intervene in family life. A key phrase – indeed it is Section 1(1) – says:
“Where the court determines any question with respect to – (a) the upbringing of a child, or (b) the administration of a child’s property…the child’s welfare shall be the court’s paramount consideration.”
Under Section 17 the council must provide services to children need. Under section 31(2), which is pivotal for our discussion:
“A court may only make a care order [such as guardianship] or supervision order if it is satisfied — (a) that the child concerned is suffering…significant harm [or is likely to suffer significant harm] and (be) that the harm… is attributable to the care given to the child [failing to meet] what it would be reasonable to expect a parent would give him.”
To be “significant,” the harm may consist of something that impairs health or development. It can be harm done to a child simply by her witnessing domestic violence.
Per a case called (Re B (A Child) 2013) it’s not enough that the behavior be just “human failure” or inadequacy.
In Re L (A Child) (Care: Threshold Criteria) 2007) it was shown that the law must recognize diverse standards of parenting. OK? The law of the land is not telling this mum or that mum exactly how to rise her kids.
Interestingly, Herring’s book points out that even after a court has granted an intervention order to the city council, the council is not required to act on it per Re B (Children) (2012). Please note that I have done no research to find out if councils commonly decline to act.
How To Handle Domestic Violence
I was pretty amazed to learn that if someone is bothering you, there are various things you can seek from a British court. There is both the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 and the Family Law Act 1996. In Yemshaw v London Borogh of Hounslow, 2001, the UK Supreme Court ruled that “Domestic violence’ includes physical violence, threatening or intimidating behaviour and any other form of abuse which, directly or indirectly, may give rise to the risk of harm.”
Mrs Henslaw had claimed that her husband did not hit her, but that he emotionally abused her and she was terrified of him.
People can also can file for a non-molestation order. Per section 42(5) of their Family Law Act:
“In deciding whether or not to make a non-molestation order, the court shall have regard to all the circumstances including the need to secure the health, safely and wellbeing (a) of the applicant and (b) of any relevant child…”
Brexit Not a Problem
Recently Gumshoe had an article on the case of Johansen v Norway at the European Court of Human Rights in Stradbourg. The child had been taken too swiftly. Part of the ruling there said of Mrs Johansen:
(“17) that the May 1980 decision, insofar as it deprived J of her access and parental rights was not sufficiently justified for the purposes of Art 8(2) since it did not correspond to any overriding requirement in the child’s best interests;
(18) that the national [Norwegian] authorities had, therefore, overstepped the narrower margin of appreciation and there was a violation of Art 8.”
I had though that Brexit would mean an end to the UK’s access to the Human Rights Act and its article 8 (“respect for a person’s private and family life”), but I was wrong. In 1988 the British Parliament passed a Human Rights Act incorporating the same items as the European body.
I’m guessing that the Brits did not want their citizens running off to Strasbourg.I note that their Act also tells judges to interpret domestic legislation in a way that is compatible with the European Human Rights rulings. If they fins that is impossible they are to issue a Declaration of Incompatibility!
Proportionality
The big deal about the European Human Rights Act, for our Protective parents, is that it extolled the principle of proportionality. In the UK, in Re B-S (Children) (Adoption Order: Leave to Oppose (2013), the court decided that if intrusion onto the family was necessary, the least intrusive action should be undertaken. The amount of risk for the child is the thing to measure in determining proportionality.
The human rights area also includes specific children’s rights including the right to be heard. In Mabon v Mabon and Others (2005), three brothers age 13, 15, and 17 appealed to get their rights in a custody dispute. Law Judge Thorpe emphasized the boys’ right to freedom of expression and noted the growing cultural change respecting children’s right to autonomy. Wow.
Comparison with Australia
I have entitled this article “British Law on Child Protection – A Holy Grail for Australians To Seek.” Whether or not all is kosher in England, please pretend that it is. Please pretend that the British courts really honor the laws I have mentioned. Wouldn’t it be great if we followed their lead? Wouldn’t it be nice for us to think of the law as the provider of justice in children’s matters instead of as the provider of a whack on the head?
Granted, our Family Law Act 1975 contains “guidance” about the paramountcy of the child’s best interest, but it dissolves into ambiguity.
Family Law Act sec 60CAsays
“In deciding whether to make a particular parenting order in relation to a child, a court must regard the best interests of the child as the paramount consideration.”
In 60CC it says
(1) in determining what is in the child’s best interests, the court must consider the matters set out in subsections (2) and (3).
(2) The primary considerations are:
(a) the benefit to the child of having a meaningful relationship with both of the child’s parents; and
(b) the need to protect the child from physical or psychological harm from being subjected to, or exposed to, abuse, neglect or family violence. [Emphasis added]
Note: A and B were inserted by a 2006 amendment.
As we sadly know, the judge feels he can interpret that to give top consideration to the child having a meaningful relationship with parents. Protecting the kid from harm can almost be dispensed with. In UK, by contrast, the child’s welfare is the only consideration. Efforts to give each parent a right is construed as a catering to the parent’s rights and that is secondary to the child’s welfare.
By the way it came as a surprise to me that in the UK every mother has a right to her child but a man has the right only if he was married to her or if his name is on the child’s birth certificate.
Furthermore, the Lords in Brixey v Lynas (1997) said it is common sense that very young children are better brought up by the mother. Well, blow me down!
Finally, with an eye to a particular case in Australia, I want to mention a British decision in Re H (Minors) (Sexual Abuse: Standard of Proof) 1996. It was about three sisters, age 2, 8, and 13. Their older sister claimed she had been raped by her mother’s live-in boyfriend. The court first found that mere allegation was not enough proof of the younger girls’ risk of harm, and so no care order was needed. This was overturned on appeal. Baronness Hale emphasized that the standard of proof is the balance of probabilities.
I should get a medal for restraining my anger as I read Herring’s book, thinking of how easy it could be for the Family Court and the states’ Childrens Courts to apply the principles of proportionality, and use a sensible standard of proof on cases of allegations by a child of having been raped.
Australia, of all countries, should be promulgating the likelihood of child truth, in light of the findings of the Royal Commission.
Never mind. It’s not too late. It is always permissible for Australian judges to turn over a new leaf. We don’t need new legislation—we have all of the magnificent common law, plus it is proper for an Oz judge to cite the reasoning of high courts of other nations. Especially England!
I am tired of all the nonsense about coaching, parental alienation syndrome, a pedophile dad’s rights “to have a meaningful relationship” with a kid under 18, and on and on.
If I hear one more case of a mother losing her child — LOSING HER CHILD – because her “anxiety” about the pedo in the shed amounts to “emotional abuse” of her child, I gonna scream. I gonna SCREEEEEEEAM.
Thank you, British people. Thank you Professor Herring. Thank you, Cliff Notes. Yo, Holy Grail. All good.
Mary, there’s something in The Children and Young People (Safety) Act 2017, s 57 (b) that states that the court must act according to equity, good conscience and the substantial merits of the case without regard to technicalities,
And then mentions probabilities… (58) is that a standard of proof is “on the balance of probabilities.”
which state?
Dee, this item says that in SA the supreme court is a court of both law and equity.
.
http://www.courts.sa.gov.au/OurCourts/SupremeCourt/Pages/default.aspx
Bonus judex secundem quequum et bonum judicat, et aequitatem stricto juri praefert.
Rough translation — Dear Judge, Don’t take the letter of the law too seriously. You are allowed, under Equity, to be creative. Do as your mother would have you do.
(Unless you are intergeneratioal pedo in which case, please don’t.)
That is SA
A certin editor of a certain online news has just phoned me to say there is no hope. We are doomed. So i add this item by Sir William Therry to show that things do not always stay the same. People come to their moral senses:
“To return to the topic of my first visit to Sydney [in 1829]…
Early in the morning the gates of the convict prison were thrown open and several hundred convicts were marched along in regimental style and distributed among the several public works, the chains clanking at their heels. The downcast countenances exhibited a truly painful picture.
“To this was added a scene I witnesses a day or two later.
There issued out of the prisoners’ barracks a party consisting of four men who bore on their shoulders a miserable convict writhing in an agony of pain, his voice piercing the air with terrific screams.
“I was told ‘It was only a prisoner who had been flogged and was on his way to hospital.’ It often took the sufferer a week after one of these lacerations before he was sufficiently recovered to resume his labour; and I soon learned that what I had seen at that point was an ordinary occurrence.”
Mary adds: We need your help, Peeps. Thd individual mum who is in trouble is helpless but with your moral weight added she has a chance. H E L P !
Mustn’t convey a too-rosey picture of the British situation. Here are comments from a UK website about the usual stand-over tactics.
“In December 2016, judge [edited] granted an interim care order on my children in Hull combined courts, after social worker [edited] lied under oath. My defence fell on deaf ears. Judge [edited] had already made up his mind and my kids spent 6 months in care before East Riding of Yorkshire social services were forced to withdraw applications for full care orders. [Dying to know what “forced” social services to withdraw an application of care orders.]
“My kids and myself are still being maliciously targeted to this day, I’ve just raised a major complaint to Nottinghamshire County Council social services for libel and defamation of character after they were caught passing malicious information about me to other services.”
“It isn’t just confined to parents. Other family members can be threatened with jail – and often sent to jail – for minor misdemeanours or even nothing at all when ‘not playing ball’ with Social Services and bending over backwards to appease them. It is the most corrupt system. When is it going to change, when anyone is going to do anything about it?”
“MP John Hemming seems to care. And yes, I don’t doubt that many judges are in cahoots with Social Services and other ‘professionals’ who lie on their behalf to assist them in winning care or adoption orders or are getting backhanders or similar to remove as many children as possible from loving parents.”
Somebody, please send a bouquet to MP John Hemming!
When the Family Court commenced, one of its first Darwin cases was about a dad who came home from night work unexpecedly to find his children home alone and his wife missing. It later transpired that she regularly went belly dancing in a local night spot. The horrified father wanted divorce and custody.
My job was to check the situation out.
The women’s shelter, run by lesbians (except for the social worker), arranged for the dad to visit his children there… what? I discovered that the wife had got in first (compliments of a feminist lawyer), declaring the husband violent and demanding custody.
When he arrived at the shelter, the women told him his wife was now a lessbian and his daughters were being trained to become lesbians too. He freaked out and hammered on the door, demanding access to his children. All of this was videod and duly became audo-visual evidence of his violence to present to the court..
His neighbours said he was a dedicated dad and husband and none had a good word for the wife.
Nevertheless, the Family Court awarded custody to the wife. The shelter’s social worker left that job in disrtress, but not before she provided me with the inside story.
Ergo, the Family Court was part of the Feminist agenda from the outset and it surprises me in no way that paedophiles have found the Family Court and child protection as handy draftingdevices.
The welfare department’s social workers understood the situation entirely and supported it. They told me I am not tough enough for that line of work. perhaps, but I have never met a social worker I wouldn’t chuck under a bus in a heartbeat.
Mary, you have an uphill battle before you.
“Ergo, the Family Court was part of the Feminist agenda from the outset” — it’s not like you to draw a history lesson frorm one episode, Tony. In fact your case proves, not disproves, my point. The lesbian-ness of the situation is neither here not there. Same for feminism.
The Family Court does not act reasonably. It should not hand a child over to a parent because that parent is female (or male). It should not use a video of a man in distress to say he is unfit. We should not sit back and say “Oh well, that’s how it is.” The Family Court has no business wrecking society. That is my point.
Anyway, your case seems to have nothng to do with pedophilia. I have said before that my agenda is boutique. I am ONLY chasing after the sins of the Family Court to point up who runs this nation from the top. OK, Mr Ryan, you took me on yesterday about the good unions. Take me on again. I am spoiling for a fight.
Feminism, like all liberation movements, was all good until the “strain-out-a-gnat-to-swallow-a-camel” crew got hold of it.
Which is always what happens to every such movement
REF: Mathew 23
I l o v e this woman:
Jeremiah 17 New International Version (NIV)
5 This is what the Lord says:
“Cursed is the one who trusts in man,
who draws strength from mere flesh
and whose heart turns away from the Lord.
6 That person will be like a bush in the wastelands;
they will not see prosperity when it comes.
They will dwell in the parched places of the desert,
in a salt land where no one lives…
7 “But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord,
whose confidence is in him.
8 They will be like a tree planted by the water
that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when heat comes;
its leaves are always green.
It has no worries in a year of drought
and never fails to bear fruit.”
9 The heart is deceitful above all things
and beyond cure.
Who can understand it?
Quite right: believing that human defects can be overcome via a humanly devised system is the direct route to hell.
Everyone needs to wake up to the fact that the court system does have some value but it’s not what It lays claims to.
I’m am unsure of British Family Law’s finer points(Lord Lucan came to mind as I read the last of the article).
This is not a strong area for me and I’m am unsure it has been mentioned in “dispatch’s”. My sleuthing did uncover a “ploy” that could control an outcome beyond the parents(part to force a fight, part to drive a wedge into family required by agenda ‘u know’ #doc day#.
Court appointed Lawyer/Barrister representation of the children as prescribed by section 60 or whatever.
I note the Australian councils increasingly add to their “preschools” funded by people living in a defined area by way of gun(sorry social responsibility).
We are East Enders, East Enders
It is off topic and contains a link to story that I personally rarely will look at, not because of irrelevance but because these things cloud my thoughts, if you have time and access data(like one hour, whew) , I have been gifted.
https://www.sgtreport.com/2019/06/president-trump-take-the-key-from-bill-binney-kirk-wiebe-to-end-the-coup/
you all know the base metal guys, lost like us all. But coming back to this common thing…
Thanks for humouring me Dee,
DoT CoM flags all my antibodies, but like propaganda 90%true, 97 percent here. High rate so I give the link
THIS IS AN ABSOLUTELY PERFECT 9-MINUTE EXPLANATION OF WHAT AUSSIE PARENTS ARE HIT WITH, ALBEIT THIS IS FROM CALIFORNIA.
This case has no parental dispute in it to confue the issue. it is pure judicial kidnap.
Note: RETIRED PROSECUTOR ROGER WEIDNER SAYS SUE THE BASTARDS.
.
Mary, astonishing it was in 2009. I wonder what happened.
Than means for 10 years peeps have been doing the same thing and nobody got up and stopoed it.
I think this is why some nobodies(I’m a nobody and happy with it) look to you Mary. They just want somebody to help them smash through the quagmire. They have a common conception of law and think that protections will naturally occur if the rules are followed. You and other fine law minds here, have a lot faith in the system too. I was unfairly and harshly treated by law as a young man/boy. The hypocrisy of my situation drove me away from law and “order”. Anyway the law for the most part can be avoided(keep your head down and it won’t be shot off, literally at times), by a good mind or better. Family law comes from a different direction, it can get and wants conflict. Fine minds and better get caught daily, but mostly they can quarantine the “interests of the child”. Some unsavory strong types out there can “muscle” the law because they recognise their own and know that game usually from a brutal upbringing. Others like Dear Doctor Pridgeon(spelling does not look right but you know who I mean) is another reaction to the insane outcomes mostly unreported. I can see why such a man would be caught with a lot of nobodies helping as they are naturally out of their depth. I have no knowledge but the missing boy in the superman costume strikes me as possible parental intervention, if so, fine minds or better would have planned such occurrence that has to be maintained for around a decade(same logistics as the Dear Doctor had to contend with).
The people that can are stopping it in their own backyard.
Mary I hope and choose to believe your bright lights on the target are going to help the groundswell to out this abuse of humanity, so it can be systematically dismembered leaving only the few working parts it really needs.Needs because there are some awful parents out their too.