Family courts plan threatens children’s wellbeing

Children and young people’s concerns about the government’s proposal to allow the media to report more widely on family court proceedings are revealed in new research conducted by the University of Oxford.

The research, which was commissioned by the Children’s Commissioner for England, shows that the overwhelming view of children who took part in the study was that reporters should not be allowed into the family courts. They said that reporters should not be in hearings that address matters that are intensely private, embarrassing and humiliating.

It also reveals that if a reporter was in court to hear evidence, many children and young people would not speak freely to professionals, including doctors and social workers they came into contact with.

Dr Julia Brophy, from the Department of Social Policy and Social Work, said: ‘My research shows that children will be much less willing to speak to the professionals charged with undertaking assessments if they believe that what they say could appear in a news report. This could seriously impact on a judge’s ability to make difficult, balanced and often life-changing decisions in the child’s best interests.’

According to the study, a small number of children and young people saw some merit in improving public awareness about the work of family courts, in particular demonstrating that the children involved were not in any way to blame for the traumatic events in their lives. However, the children respondents stressed that this should not be achieved at the expense of the children and parents concerned. They also wanted parents and children to be consulted about the presence of reporters in court.

The Children’s Commissioner for England, Dr Maggie Atkinson, is now calling for an independent review of the rules on media access to hearings. In April 2009, following representations from the media and others, the government changed the rules to allow media in to family court hearings. Discussions are currently underway in parliament as part of the Children, Schools and Families Bill to allow journalists to report more widely on cases.

The Deputy Commissioner, Sue Berelowitz, said: ‘For any child or young person a family court case is an extremely unsettling time. Their parents may be going through a divorce. They may have been physically abused or neglected by a parent. Intimate details of their lives, although anonymised, could appear in the media and remain in the public domain for life. It is only right that their views are included in debates about the information that the media can make public.’

Family courts deal with a number of issues: child support; disputes between parents on where the child lives and access to children; restraining orders, or the welfare needs of children who have, or are at risk of, significant harm in their parents’ care.