On 1st May, we wrote about a report in the local Dorset press that we said inaccurately described a judgment in Bournemouth Family Court as being an order for ‘no contact’ between a child and his mother.
There have been a few developments since we sent our complaint to the press regulator, IPSO:
- IPSO have accepted that our complaint comes within their remit.
- The two editors involved have confirmed that a correction will be published, although we haven’t seen this yet.
- We received a response from Ellis Jones, solicitors, on 8th May to our email of 17th April to the solicitor who was quoted by the PR firm that sent in the story. They apologised for the delayed reply and offered to ask the PR firm to get the article removed. Clearly, they weren’t aware that it had already been removed on 22 April. We hadn’t originally identified the firm but as they are now saying their interpretation of the court judgment was justified, we think it only fair to present their side – as follows:
I note what you say in respect of the recent press coverage of [solicitor’s] case and I am sorry to hear that you still feel that this is inaccurate. You will have noted from reading the judgment that the mother was seeking a resumption of direct contact but that the Court declined to make such an order. It is therefore on this basis that [solicitor] gave her comments to the media in the context of a wider discussion about the stereotypical assumption that the Court will always favour the mother of the child.
Whilst you are correct to say that the Court did still award the mother indirect contact, [solicitor] was not purporting to give a high-level summary of the issues raised within, or the outcome of, the matter in which she was involved. Her comments were of a very general nature only, using the common parlance of ‘contact’ as meaning face to face or direct contact. After reading the article, I do not believe that any readers would feel mislead [sic] upon learning that the mother was still awarded indirect contact by way of sending letters, cards and gifts once a month. It is the fact that the Court declined to award the mother any face-to-face contact which is what makes the case noteworthy and which would have been of interest to the public.
We have considered asking our PR agency to add an asterisk or footnote to the coverage to address your concerns that readers may believe that the Court did not award the mother any indirect contact, but we have resolved to simply ask them to withdraw the coverage altogether so as to draw a line under this exchange. We have now issued these instructions to our PR agency who are passing on this request. We are advised, however, that this may take some time to process.
This is the judgment – Re J (a Child) (No. 2) (Contact Following Change of Residence) [2025] EWFC 491 (B)
As can be seen from our 1st May post, we saw evidence that some readers were indeed misled into believing a judge had completely removed all contact and effectively ended the relationship between the child and his mother. We therefore don’t agree with the solicitors’ interpretation as set out above; an accurate report would say the judge restricted contact, or refused the mother’s application for direct contact. Our formal complaint is about the press, who didn’t check the source material before publishing. IPSO don’t have a role in regulating what lawyers or PR firms send to the press, but it now appears that the inaccuracy was incorporated in the press release.
We hope the correction will be up soon and that we can tell IPSO our complaint has been resolved.
Image: Photo of Bournemouth by Christophe Finot, via Wikimedia Commons