As the Domestic Abuse Bill is heard today in the House of Lords - it is imperative decisions are made on facts in order to protect children from harm
Janis James MBE
Chief Executive of Good Egg Safety. A non-profit Community Interest Company. Passionate about social justice and uncompromising about keeping children and their families, safe from harm. Views my own.
Today, the 5th January, during the second reading of our new Domestic Abuse Bill, Sophie Francis Cranfield from the Womens Federation England will be making representation in the House of Lords for the 'removal of presumption of contact'.
On face value, no one would disagree it is imperative to protect children from abuse. As a survivor of almost life-ending abuse, I sought supervised contact only, so understand more innately than most how imperative it is that we protect vulnerable children.
Where this proposal becomes extremely dangerous is when it is aligned with the proposition that 'abuse is gendered'. (i.e only affects women). This is NOT a proposition borne out by facts. The UK Statistics Authority has issued two warnings to that effect.
The number of male victims would fill up Wembley Stadium to full capacity nine times over. They are three times less likely to report for fear of being mocked or disbelieved. Vast swathes of scientific, peer reviewed research shows almost symmetry in intimate partner violence (IPV).
It is not, nor ever has been, a gendered crime based on 'patriarchal oppression'. The legendary Erin Pizzey who started the first refuge in 1971 tells us this. Out of the first hundred women through her doors - 62 WERE AS VIOLENT as the men they had left behind, if not more so.
If DA is made into a gendered crime, it will increase risk to children. If the presumption of contact is removed based on false allegations - of which there are many - a protective layer of love and nurture will be removed from children.
According to Serious Case Reviews (culpable child homicides) more mothers have killed their children than biological fathers. It's the same picture in other countries. Does that make mothers dangerous? Of course not. The majority of mothers as well as fathers are safe, protective parents and the best resource any child has to live their best lives.
The media narrative, however, has been primarily based around abusive fathers. Social workers and judges are being trained with this false narrative central to discourse. Falsehood has been repeated so often it is accepted as truth.
It is not.
The evidence is readily available and it is essential those in the House of Lords have undertaken due dilligence to fact check all narrative and understand the dire consequences for our future generation - our children - if they get this wrong.
Separation from parents is the biggest cause of 'Adverse Childhood Experience' - more so even than domestic abuse.
While it is critical we remove children from any proven abuse, it is equally critical we do not literally throw the baby out with the proverbial bath water.
It is essential the House of Lords recognise the behaviours of parental alienation which are, in themselves psychologically abusive and coercively controlling. Look at the picture and tell us it is not.
Parental alienation severs a strong parent-child attachment bond many children never psychologically recover from.
Evolution equips and programs children and parents to stay close. Attachment neurocircuits are hard wired into our nervous and threat responses. Pleasure neurochemicals (i.e. oxytocin and dopamine) are released within secure attachments. Toxic stress chemicals such as cortisol are released when attachments are insecure, disrupted by threat of, or actual loss via separation, or there’s otherwise too little time together to satisfy mutual needs. Separated children may experience fear and trauma from irresolvable loss, compromising their healthy brain development. Things may stay that way until their predicament is resolved by effective and lasting reunification between attachment figures. Meanwhile, higher cognitive functions are undermined in children alienated during painful separations, enabling psychological deterioration, and denying self-resolution. (source from Professor Dan Spiel 2009)
Take a close look at this quote from Dr Adrienne Barnett who now sits on the Cafcass Research Advisory Committee and see the gender bias in action. What she is referencing IS parental alienation. It is undoubtedly a 'strategy of domestic abuse' and if parental alienation fails to be included centrally within this Bill, it will have failed our children.
Children deserve full protection. If we do not protect all children, including those of male victims, or recognise the immense psychological harm caused by parental alienating behaviours, we should hang our heads in shame.
Project Developer, London at Temper Domestic Violence, Eddie Thomas Project
3 年Dr Stephen Baskerville (Professor of Government) the family court is a legal underworld, the system of…?www.newmalestudies.com “The divorce machinery and the divorce law introduced all kinds of model concepts into the legal system, which are now spreading throughout the legal system and are poisoning it. And the source ?of this poison is the divorce system. Previously in the common law it was a well-known principle that you could not be hauled into court unless you have done some legal transgression. That if you are a law-abiding citizen you had the right to sit in your own home and mind your own business. The divorce machinery, the no-fault system introduced the principle that the innocent citizen, the legally unimpeachable citizen, sitting in his own home and minding his own business can be hauled into court and can be issued with a series of directives which if he does not obey he can be jailed without trial. Now this is a complete innovation of the common law. Another innovation is that ?the outcome is already determined. It can’t be changed, someone files for divorce and the divorce is granted. Now this is not a judicial procedure this is an administrative procedure it can be done by bureaucrats. It turns the judges into bureaucrats because the not making a judgement they’re simply administering the procedure, so they are essentially?not judges any more they are effectively simply functionaries, who are pushing one piece of?paper across the table as the law says they have to do. Well this is to devalue, to debase our entire system of justice. It is to replace justice with injustice and there is no middle ground. ?You can’t replace justice with neutral administrative procedures. Once you eliminate justice from the legal system you introduce injustice. And that’s what we have: a system whether judges and lawyers are dedicated almost without any choice to enforce injustice. And in many ways the lawyers and judges are also prisoners of the system. It is very easy to blame the judges and certainly they are certainly responsible for a lot of rife machinery but in other ways the judges are also prisoners of the system and so are the lawyers because if they did otherwise than what they do they would be disbarred. Bar associations and feminist organisations would come after them and they have done that in some cases, they would remove them from the bench.”?