Welcome to another week.

These are the news items that should be right on your radar:

• Published: State of the Nation’s Foster Care Impact Report
• Published: State of the Nation’s Foster Care – Full Report
• Published: Stalking analysis reveals domestic abuse link

A documentary about women in the United States having their children removed after experiencing domestic violence is being streamed online this weekend.

The film highlights gender discrimination inside the family courts in the US, which experts say mirror the UK family court system’s own biases.

The Global Health Film Festival, which runs from 1 – 6 December, is showing the short film as part of its week-long line-up of movies designed to inspire change.

Produced in 2017 and directed by Rachel Meyrick, “What Doesn’t Kill Me” follows 86-year-old Charlotta, who stayed in an abusive marriage to protect her son, and several other women who were separated from their children and coerced into silence about their ordeals.

The film also features lawyers and domestic violence experts who share intimate personal stories, facts about this phenomenon and honest discussions about the flaws in the system and how to fix them.

The page for the film on the festival’s website offers the following information:

“It wasn’t until her husband attacked her in public that 86-year-old Charlotta Harrison found the strength to leave. She is one of the lucky ones: every day, three women in the US are murdered by a male partner and 5 million children witness or are subject to domestic violence.

But for those who escape domestic violence, the story does not end. In the US, abusive fathers are seeking custody of their children in increasing numbers. And frighteningly – they are winning in the majority of cases. Rachel Meyrick’s directorial debut explores a terrifying trend occurring in courts all over America; abusers using the family court system to gain custody and continue the abuse, putting children in extreme danger and rendering their mothers helpless to protect them.

What Doesn’t Kill Me exposes a USA national travesty compared by some to the Catholic Church scandal but also mirrors what is happening in UK courts. In this explosive era of the #TimesUp and #MeToo movement, this film illustrates to perfection gender discrimination in our court systems in which children and mothers are being actively separated from their protective parent.”

The film costs £4.49 to watch, and will be streamed on Saturday 05 December 14:30 (GMT). The purchase price includes a panel discussion about the documentary.

You can register to watch the movie and pay for it here.

Many thanks to Legal Action for Women, for alerting us to this event.

The latest child welfare items that should be right on your radar:

• Court of Appeal highlights need for early legal advice where adoption placements near point of breakdown
• Children under 16 will no longer be given puberty blockers without court authorisation after Keira Bell case
• Addendum to Practice Guidance: Placements in unregistered children’s homes in England or unregistered care home services in Wales

An online event hosted by the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory will explore the organisation’s research on child contact and how phenomena such as adoption, foster care and the Covid-19 pandemic have affected children’s wellbeing.

Attendees will be able to ask three of the Observatory’s researchers about the impact of different kinds of contact arrangements on children.

The featured researchers for the event are Professor Janet Boddy, Professor of Child, Youth and Family Studies in the Centre for Innovation and Research in Childhood and Youth (CIRCY), University of Sussex;  Padmini Iyer, Senior researcher in the Children and Families Team at the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) and Professor Elsbeth Neil,Professor of Social Work and Director of Research at the University of East Anglia, and a member of the Centre for Research on Children and Families.

Many of our readers will already be aware of how these arrangements affect children and families, having had lived experience of these often deeply traumatic scenarios.

We very much hope that some of you will attend the conference to offer your input, and to review the findings to see if they are true to life.

The webinar takes place on Monday 14 December 2020, from 4pm to 5pm.

You can register to attend the meeting here.

Decisions about contact are crucially important for children and families. But what can research tell us about the implications of different contact arrangements?

Join @JanetBoddy, @padmini_iyer and @prof_beth_neil at 16:00-17:00, 14 December.

Sign up⬇️https://t.co/dfaWeRRbVd pic.twitter.com/qmG5eB9v2v

— Nuffield Family Justice Observatory (@NuffieldFJO) November 30, 2020