Family courts are known to be producing worrying decisions affecting (and often destroying) family life, inflicting trauma which can often be life-long.

The government’s own “Harm Report” - produced by the Ministry of Justice less than a decade ago - showed shocking findings in domestic abuse cases and very poor outcomes for many adult and child victims in private law cases.  

Other research similarly found worrying trends in family court for many families affected by public law / child protection proceedings with life-changing outcomes - “Adoption and child protection trends for children aged under five in England: Increasing investigations and hidden separation of children from their parents”Andy Bilson, Elizabeth Hunter Munro -
finding - 

•”an increase of over 35% in the rate of children adopted or investigated for child protection concerns before the age of five in 2016–17 compared to 2011–12
•There was a 60% increase in rate of children subject of unfounded child protection investigation in 2016–17 compared to 2011–12
•1 in every 16 children was investigated before the age of 5 and 1 in every 38 children had an unfounded investigation
•The rate of five-year-old children separated from parents almost doubled since 2000 when the numbers in care, adoption and special guardianship are combined
•Where adoption increased the most there was a larger than average increase in involvement in child protection at all levels”.  

There needs to be urgent change to prevent unnecessary proceedings and unnecessary separations, and to improve outcomes for victims of abuse in family courts.  

We believe the key factor which could bring change would be an end to the current rules of confidentiality in family courts, as these prevent scrutiny in individual cases (and more generally) and allow very poor decisions by social workers and courts to go generally unnoticed and not commented upon by either families or media (due to the unlawfulness of them offering any criticism publicly).

This not only perpetuates the situation of these professionals being able to act with impunity / without scrutiny - often acting uncaringly and mendaciously - but the secrecy also compounds and exacerbates the suffering of the families affected, who rightly feel gagged.  

More importantly, poor decisions would undoubtedly be massively reduced if national media - such as the BBC - were able to examine cases publicly (obviously with limits in place so that no parties can be named and so that case details which could identify the parties are not disclosed). 

Secret justice is no justice at all. The appeal system is inadequate to address the problems of family court justice as it is not accessible to the majority of affected families for social, emotional and financial reasons.  (The appeal system is stacked against traumatised families - for example, offering only three weeks for families to realise that an appeal system is open to them, to get advice from others when lawyers very often discourage appeals, and to recover sufficiently from shocking court decisions before finding enough financial and emotional resources to start the complex legal process of appealing). 

As Jeremy Bentham said “Where there is no publicity there is no justice” and “Publicity is the very soul of justice. It is the keenest spur to exertion, and the surest of all guards against improbity”