Welcome to another week.
The debate over whether all family law judgments should be made publicly available has once again come under the spotlight after a report jointly written and published by the Association of Lawyers for Children and the National Youth Advocacy Service urges yet more caution in making these cases available to the public.
The report highlights concerns expressed by young people over the difficulty in hiding children’s identities in these cases, even with anonymised judgments and details the reaction of those children who took part in the initial investigation, researching the current ways in which cases could be accessed, and published. The report cites widespread shock and embarrassment by these children, who prior to taking part in the research, were not aware for example, that cases could be made readily available on public databases like BAILII.
However, the report also goes on to acknowledge the drive towards transparency inside the justice system, and as such, tries to offer suggestions as to how to best publish judgments without distressing any children involved.
Some of these ideas include:
- Producing anonymised summaries of certain parts of judgments, rather than the judgment as a whole, on sites like BAILII
- Reviewing anonymity rules and finding ways to improve them
- Examining the resources available to improve these rules
Our question this week, is just this: do you think these suggestions are good, or can you think of better ones?
For anyone who is interested, the ALC have also written a response the government’s consultation on children and vulnerable witnesses in proceedings.
Researching Reform 
Open up the courts they shout ! Let the public in……. But of course members of the public are unlikely to bother to go.That is NOT the real issue……..
No the real issue is the gagging of parents preventing them from crying to the rooftops when their children are taken identifying themselves and their kids if they wish to do so ,and also the refusal to allow friends ,grandparents and other relatives in the court if the parents wish them to be there.
Freedom of speech is a joke where family courts are concerned and so is justice that cannot be seen to be done even by children’s grandparents or the mother’s new Partner !
If we believe in free speech and open justice we should allow parents to speak freely to the public naming themselves and their children, and also allow them to invite relatives and friends into court for moral support.
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“4.2 It was agreed between the President and young people that the best people to determine the degree to which children’s privacy and safety might be compromised by judgments on Bailii, are young people themselves.” …..”It was also acknowledged that young people have internet skills few adults can match.”
In which case, why bother proceeding with the study at all? – Let’s just hand everything over to the kids and let them make the decisions!
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Reblogged this on World4Justice : NOW! Lobby Forum..
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Reblogged this on No Punishment without Crime or Bereavement without Death!.
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They cannot be opened, family life, or the worst aspects of people needs to remain private, but there is room for some reporting, to be more transparant, not lurid details, but reasoning, process, fair, parents need to be supported to retain their rights and care, but really, i am glad to see teams beginning to help younger families, i have recenly had some experience and they are really amazing in a few ways, it’s had some hiccups, because my son is almost 18, but for younger families, surrey has systems in place. Really we want children to be nurtured by their mothers’, and ethos and practice to support that, throughout. but as we are such a dysfunctional society, we have to start repairing, which i can see real signs of developing, Others can put the right legal terms, better than me, in fact we had quite a chat on Hoaxtead Research, on this very issue, because of course, last week, given the MEP’s delegation meeting, on Forced Adoption, organised by Lucy Allen MP, reporting January, given that, and the speech given, by Kellie Cottam, which i was relieved to hear, her point out, that there are some good supports in place, and i will blog more on my experience, what came out of that was a discussion, where someone helping careleavers, wrote eloquently after a rethink, and his post would be worth a read.
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and of course the childrens’, therefore the parents’ right to privacy needs maintaining, or does it, as i write that i’m thinking if we were all less judgemental, and kinder, which btw my team are, i can assure you, i’m not an easy subject….. 🙂 but what if, it didn’t matter who knew what, in fact if we helped people…… well probs too far, but then i think the system still might collapse.
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The “system” in place is one that thrives on secrecy and untruths with service users having no way to get real truth out.Friends and neighbours of course wonder what the truth really is and wonder why parents who have had their children removed and adopted are not jailed for some crime.?
When most children age out of this system they learn from the paperwork the untruths told to them by social workers, adopters etc re their parents and natural family. Then again this is nothing new as we already know this from the baby scoop eras in Australia, USA, UK and Ireland.
These baby scoop era children – now adults are worth listening to as they have have had the experience that todays adopted children are now in.
The mothers of the baby scoop era children definitely need to be listened to as they too hold another key as to the damage done to them and the entire family,
Are we not willing to learn from the past ?
Do we as a society still choose to make money from children and still use Hitler’s Best interest of the child signature to continue to destroy our entire society.?
A few examples of the experiences of adopted children- now adults that tell the reader a lot.
Clearly children in corporate parent custody do less well thatn with natural parents, so we must ask why are we using a failed system to warehouse children? Why so many disappear from the so called custody care system and little is done to investigate.?
Privacy should not trump rights of adopted, committee told
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/oireachtas/privacy-should-not-trump-rights-of-adopted-committee-told-1.2418597
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/jude-kirtondarling/adoption-without-consent_b_8488108.html
A Girl Like Her reveals the hidden history of over a million and a half women who became pregnant in the US in the 1950s and 60s when “nice girls” didn’t get pregnant. It was a time when women were routinely expelled from high schools and colleges and forced to leave jobs as teachers and nurses before their indiscretion was visible to others. They were rendered voiceless and invisible—banished to maternity homes or homes of relatives where they could give birth, surrender their babies for adoption, and start over with a clean slate. But did they?
http://www.annfessler.com/documentary-film/a-girl-like-her/
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I repeat “Open up the courts “they shout ! Let the public in……. But of course members of the public are unlikely to bother to go.That is NOT the real issue……..
No the real issue is the gagging of parents preventing them from crying to the rooftops when their children are taken identifying themselves and their kids if they wish to do so ,and also the refusal to allow friends ,grandparents and other relatives in the court if the parents wish them to be there.
Freedom of speech is a joke where family courts are concerned and so is justice that cannot be seen to be done even by children’s grandparents or the mother’s new Partner !
If we believe in free speech and open justice we should allow parents to speak freely to the public naming themselves and their children, and also allow them to invite relatives and friends into court for moral support.
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It seems rather odd that names, parent & childs, are bandied about in criminal court but in family court they are secret!
Another anomaly is your child can be taken from you in family court but you are not convicted of any crime?
It’s also weird that a parent who has been convicted and serving a prison sentence will be allowed regular contact with their children but if your child has been taken by the family courts contact with your child is practically non existent, if at all, despite the rights of the child to have contact with their family.
Mumby has spoken out about the UKs Forced Adoption, which is incompatible with other EU countries so I have to ask why hasn’t he stopped it? The UK is showing contempt and arrogance yet again to those countries. That’s quite apart from the moral wrong of Forced Adoption and it’s huge potential for trafficking children for sex, torture, labour and body parts!
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Hi Natasha
Before commenting i think it would be a good idea if people read Appendix 1 of this report. A couple of points should have been stated earlier because they would have helped to establish the degree of confidence that could be reasonably placed in the report findings. In particular the first two paragraphs are quite revealing and they state:
“A1. Eight young people (five females, two males, one ‘mtf’ transgender) aged between 17 and 25 years undertook two exercises reading, discussing, marking up and analysing a total of 21 judgments posted on Bailii.
A2. Almost all the investigators are members of the NYAS young people’s participation group, almost all have participated in previous consultations regarding media access and reporting of family proceedings; almost all have experience of care proceedings.”
These two paragraphs alone beg a few observations and question.
The sample group is hopelessly small and statistically unrepresentative. The writers have not indicated what steps they have taken to eliminate bias. In fact they demonstrate the opposite.
The sample does not include any children from the age groups that are most likely to be the subject of care proceedings. Beyond 16 years of age children are almost automatous.
We are not told how the judgments were chosen or what steps have been taken (if any) to eliminate researcher bias.
“Almost all” of the sample group are known to the researchers. “Almost all have experience of care proceedings”: Therefore, private law applications have not been proportionately included. These form the greater number of cases before the family courts.
We are given no information whatsoever about the demographics of the minuscule sample group. It is clearly not representative on gender, ethnicity, cultural or socio economic grounds. It simply cannot be.
There does seem to be a trend in the studies prepared by Ms Brophy. It does seem that they use the same group of selected participants and that they are now becoming slightly too long in the tooth to be considered as children.
Recent neuroscience research by Prof Sarah Jane Blakemore indicates that adolescents (she considers adolescence as being from about 10 – 28) can be very suggestible, eager for approval and acceptance. This makes them a very difficult age group to research reliably because they are inclined to tell researchers what the researchers would like to hear.
If this report was being considered as an academic submission it would not get many marks other than for its presentation.
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