Interesting article from John Bolch at Marilyn Stowe, regarding the problems experienced in trying to enforce orders for child contact in the English Legal System.
Often, going to Court and getting an order allowing a parent to see their child regularly is only the start of the process, rather than the end.
At the end of the day, an order is only a piece of paper, and, if the parent with care of the child simply chooses to disregard the order and its terms, it then falls upon the shoulders of the person seeking contact to take the matter back to Court to try and get the order enforced (with all of the additional legal costs that this entails.).
As the article mentions, it is quite rare for a parent opposing contact to breach an order quite so blatantly. It is far more common in my experience for such a parent to be much more “cute”, and to try to establish supposed “good reasons” for breaching a contact order, such as an illness of the child, illness of the parent, conflicting holiday or other commitments, etc (then repeat, ad nauseum).
In those circumstances, it can be even harder to prove deliberate breach, and it will often be a case of “giving the obstructive parent enough rope to hang themselves”, before even contemplating returning a case to Court for possible enforcement action.
The article reminded me of my first day at my previous firm. At the time, “Fathers for Justice” were hitting the headlines, and not a day went by without a disgruntled father, dressed as either Batman or Spiderman, scaling the walls of some civic building or other, to try and bring some attention to their plight.
In response to this, an eminent judge had commented in the press that the Courts should “get tough” on recalcitrant mothers, that the enforcement powers were already there, and that a Judge should not fail to seek to imprison such a person, if they continually and deliberately flouted child contact orders.
One of the Family Department partners had copied the relevant press cutting to all fee earners, and, obviously doubting that the advice would be acted upon, offerred a free bottle of champagne to the first person in the firm to report that one of the parties in their caseload had, indeed, been imprisoned by a Judge for a breach of a child contact order.
Upon leaving the same firm some 11 years later, to the best of my knowledge, the bubbly still remained unclaimed…..
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