To Contact Order or Not

sc597

I have experienced the system first hand like many fathers here. I am afraid it doesn''t make logical sense.

From experience, as the father, you can never have a "fair" outcome. The whole system is stacked against you. You cannot win. I didn''t want to win either. I just wanted roughly 50:50 shared care or even a bit less so that I can maintain a meaningful relationship with a child. When one parent wins, the child loses.

I suggest you mentally prepare for the worst case scenario and see how you will deal with it emotionally, and perhaps financially.

If you are confident enough to self-rep, that can save you a lot of legal fees.
When I self-repped, I felt I was bullied by the judge legally. I got a direct access barrister for my final hearing just to have a level playing field legally. But it still didn''t change the fact that the system is biased. Looking back, I think I might as well self-rep all the way. I was fighting a losing battle but just the barrister had to do his best in court because he got paid for it.


- Cafcass just have the party line, a child needs stability and one place only that s/he can call home. How convenient! I never see any statistical proof that those children of divorce do better in life than the ones having equal time and care from both parents.

- If you don''t agree with the mother''s arrangement (however ridiculous it is), you are branded as controlling and not have the child''s best interest in mind, you need to have your way, etc. When you try to defend yourself in court and also highlight the mother isn''t clean as a whistle, you are branded as hostile towards her.

- I am sure the majority of fathers are just normal average people trying to hold down a job and provide for the family. They just want to have a meaningful relationship with the child. Why would a mother only want to let a child to see his/her father only 4 days a month? If the mother only gets to see the child 4 days in a month, does she think it''s fair and good for the child? Can she not sacrifice to give the child the "stability" if that''s so important to the child?

- They say since there is conflict between parents, the child is best to stay with the mother and the father only allow to see the child 2 weekends a month. But the system never considers the father to be the so-called primary carer. Guess who creates the conflict?

- Ultimately, a child can adjust to any arrangement. So, the father can never hope for a balanced judgement to have a meaningful relationship with the child.

Good news friends, against all the odds, and against CAFCASS, the Judge decided that our child was better served with both parents continuing to play an active part in her life, rather than mother''s plan to move. I''ll write up my full experience later on in case it''s of help to others here. Key message - stay positive and stay child-focussed, I know it doesn''t always work out but it is possible...

Well done, sanity prevailed!

Congrats!

There is common sense! Hope you can share the details soon.

Just by way of an update in case it''s useful for others, and my apologies for the delay, we''re still warring on every front so I haven''t had a huge amount of spare time thus far.

At the final hearing, the judge was amazing - really saw through mother''s plan to relocate as being to deny me access to my child, saw all the holes in her position statement, the negativity, her possessive language in cross examination. I came away thoroughly impressed. The judge asked us to sort things out between ourselves and return to court only if necessary a month and a half later, preferably without lawyers, if there were any particular points we couldn''t agree.

For a month and a half, mother refused all efforts to meet, negotiate, to make any progress, then appointed highly aggressive city lawyers who really came after me, insisted we needed the review hearing and appointed a QC to represent her!!! I went back to the review hearing, representing myself, thinking the judge (the same one) was going to give her a right b&llocking for completely ignoring his requests. Not a bit of it. In the review hearing the same judge was a changed man, didn''t ascribe any significance to her behaviour in the interim, and went with her proposal of giving me as little time as she thought she could get away with, mainly because he said he didn''t like "equal care" as he saw my proposal. End of debate! Frankly I have barely more than if she''d relocated! I couldn''t believe it.

Anyway, came away from that hearing, and her aggressive solicitors drafted up the order making subtle changes that would further help her flout the order, defining hand-overs as being wherever mother chose to live, against what had been agreed in court which is that they happen where they happen today. This meant a lot to me as we had discussed but left out a defined radius for us to live, as I didn''t think it necessary. Again, her solicitors refused every single suggested amendment I asked for, even bloody mindedly saying no to ones that actually suited mother over me! So, I had to write back to court asking for another review hearing!

Back we went, and this time the judge seemed to lean towards me again. But again, not a mention of her behaviour in the interim. What do mothers have to do for judges to take action over their behaviour??? It''s a scandal.

Anyway, my conclusions are:

1. Keep it positive, try very hard to avoid giving the other side ammo, never send letters to your ex in the evening, leave them till the cold light of day and reread before sending - or preferably run them past a friend or family member who has been prebriefed to remove all the emotion out of letters and emails.

2. CAFCASS are a disgrace, be very careful around them. I submitted a lengthy complaint after my experience, and got a 20 page "whitewash" back - denying absolutely every possible fault, saying I should have complained to the judge if I didn''t agree with them - but of course they know that in the middle of a contact hearing you''re not going to start slagging off part of the court apparatus in front of the judge. Absolutely disgraceful.

3. It apparently doesn''t matter how you behave in between hearings as long as you don''t give the other side any ammo. So if it doesn''t suit you to meet up and try to resolve things in a businesslike way, don''t bother. It doesn''t seem to have any come back on you in court.

4. Pick your moments for paying for representation - I think you can self-represent most of the time without issue (once you''ve got over the early and very understandable nerves), but there will be some hearings where you do need a good barrister - get one, no matter the cost. It''s a much better position having the hindsight to say that you might have won without the lawyer, rather than wondering if a few more £k would have saved your relationship with your child.

5. Don''t give up... it''s absolutely exhausting, stressful, has taken years off my life I''m sure, but it''s a battle you have to fight for your child. Keep your friends close, thank them for standing by you and keeping you sane, but don''t give up.

Best of luck....

Thanks for the update. Would you care to share the actual judgement in terms of care arrangement? How often will your kid get to see you? (Somehow you get demonised when you say "How often will you get to see your kids?" in court. It''s about the kid, not you...)


MONEY!

Having gone through the system and come out at the other end, the simplest explanation to most judgements is money. The parent who has more money will lose out in terms of time spent with children after divorce, in most cases. It''s not a perfect system.

I can understand it''s daunting for mothers having to find work and support herself financially after years of being out of the job market, having children and looking after children while they are still very young. In the event of divorce, they would just try to get as much as they can to protect themselves. People would do the same in other circumstances.

I just hope that the children are not directly linked to money. If having the majority of care of children doesn''t automatically mean more money for the one parent, I am sure there is less battle between parents. (I can never see eye to eye with my ex after all those lies and false allegations I heard in court. CAFCASS and family court didn''t need everything with evidence...)

In the majority of family cases, i.e. not extreme cases like domestic violence, I feel the court system is really a side show. Solicitors and barristers make their money. It really doesn''t matter who said and did what, as long as they are not criminal offences. I think the judge has already made the decision before you go to court. The other task left for him/her to do is to write something in the court order to make it sound vaguely logically and definitely include the immortal phrase "in the best interest of the children".
Child benefits, child maintenance, etc. are all geared towards giving money to the parent with the majority of care.
The judge cannot split emotion. The judge cannot magically make the parent with less earning potential suddenly find a good paying job. Money at least can offer a bit of stability for the children, and the parent with the majority of care.

I get alternate weekends including the Friday and Monday all day, plus one midweek overnight per week. I was proposing an equal number of nights, which would have meant mother got more time anyway because of her part time work (which my proposal neatly accommodated to minimise direct handovers), but the judge said (with no prior warning that this was his belief) that "in his experience" equal care arrangements don''t work as there has to be one main home. He said this despite acknowledging our equal care thus far. I was very disappointed with the split, but ultimately preventing the relocation was the main thing as that would have been game over for me as an involved parent really, and meant I would be associated with long car journeys.

As for money, yes it definitely helps and tips the balance, and if I had limitless cash I would love to have a QC for every appearance (I''ve borrowed money from my family to fund the barristers I have used) but I feel like the family courts are a lottery in terms of the outcomes - the hearings I have gone into feeling really confident and with a watertight case have gone against me, and vice versa. I could not honestly say that on a different day the Final Hearing would not have gone against me. Scary stuff...