Sir Stephen Cobb wrote Practice Direction 12J in 2017. He was sworn in as President of the Family Division on 14 May 2026. PD12J reaches private children cases only. 30,000 survivors a year apply for non-molestation orders under Part IV of the Family Law Act 1996 and fall outside it. This petition asks him to extend his own rulebook.

The gap between PD12J and Part IV is concrete. Five things a survivor without shared children loses on the day they walk into court:

1.     Fact-finding is not mandatory when abuse is alleged.

2.     The pattern-of-behaviour ruling (Re H-N [2021] EWCA Civ 448)  applies only by analogy, not as a binding rule.

3.     Judges are under no duty to consider abuse at every hearing.

4.     Procedural limits on cross-undertakings are weaker.

5.     Where cross-undertakings replace orders, no finding is recorded.

There are many, many more.

The Issue
I left an emotionally and financially abusive relationship and applied for a non-molestation order.

He evaded the process server and missed the first hearing. When he eventually appeared, he filed a counter-application alleging I was the abuser. The court issued cross undertakings: mutual promises with no formal finding, no police record, no enforcement route. I left the building treated as the legal equivalent of the man I'd asked the court to restrain.

When he could no longer harass me directly, he hired two solicitors and ran a six-month campaign of intimidation by proxy. He reframed our joint car as a loan the day I left and applied for a bankruptcy notice on the house. The judge called his tactics "aggressive" and "deplorable" on the record. She could see what he was doing. I still had to cover his costs.

I'd been to the police before any of this. They told me nothing he had done was wrong in isolation. They told me, in those words, that if he had broken my arm they could do something. He hadn't broken my arm. He had spent two years making sure no single act crossed a threshold any of them could see.

He lives close to my home, and knows where I live. Our cross undertakings expire next month. What's to stop him doing this again?

There's a family-court rule for handling domestic abuse in child arrangements cases. It doesn't reach cases like mine, or the thousands of others where survivors don't share children with the person abusing them.

The Scale of the Gap
Most domestic abuse reaching the family court is post-separation. The Crime Survey for England and Wales (year ending March 2025) found 5.0% of adults experienced abuse by an ex-partner last year, against 1.7% from a current partner.

Single-parent households face the highest rate of any household type: 23.7% experienced domestic abuse last year, against 8.1% in couple-with-children households and 7.2% in households with no children.

Separated women experienced domestic abuse at 26.3% last year, against 5.1% of married or civil-partnered women. Divorced women experienced abuse at 17.1%. Separation concentrates it.

Partners or former partners killed 178 women in England and Wales in the three years to March 2024 - 72.7% of all female domestic homicide victims. The pattern of coercive control and escalation is usually visible long before the worst-case outcome.

Practice Direction 12J only applies directly to private children law cases. Standalone non-molestation proceedings under Part IV of the Family Law Act 1996 sit outside it. Survivors without shared children navigate a different and weaker process.

The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 set the statutory definition. PD12J was revised in 2017. Re H-N confirmed that courts dealing with children should look at patterns of abuse, not isolated incidents. The MoJ Harm Panel in 2020 found that family courts still struggled to identify and respond to domestic abuse effectively. None of it has closed the gap for survivors like me.

What Extending the Rule Would Do
Extending PD12J protections to Family Law Act protective injunction proceedings would mean abuse is treated as a pattern, not as a sequence of isolated events. It would require:

1. Proper fact-finding where abuse is alleged.
2. Pattern-of-behaviour analysis instead of the mutual-allegations default.
3. Safer procedures and clearer evidence requirements.
4. Tighter limits on undertakings where violence or threats are involved.

The government and the Family Division have both recognised that non-molestation practice needs improvement. Guidance is one thing. A binding procedural rule is another. Survivors without shared children need the court to apply the same safety-first framework that already exists for survivors with them.

The Ask
Sir Stephen Cobb was sworn in as President of the Family Division on 14 May 2026, succeeding Sir Andrew McFarlane. Cobb led the 2017 review that produced the current Practice Direction 12J. He has the authority to extend that protection so it reaches every domestic abuse case, not only those involving children.

This petition asks the Family Division and the Family Procedure Rules Committee to close that gap. The rule already exists. It just needs to reach the rest of us. Please sign.