Lucy Reed has commented on her Pink Tape recently about a case that has been widely reported, where a father sewed bugs into his daughters school clothes and was severely criticised for it. In the blog she considers the significance of that judgment and the relevance of The Transparency Project’s guidance on recording of meetings with social workers. You can read her blog post here : For the record… You can read previous posts about our recording guidance here.
This case was also commented on by John Bolch on Marilyn Stowe’s blog at
http://www.marilynstowe.co.uk/2016/05/25/the-secret-family-courts-narrative-has-a-lot-to-answer-for/
John wrote that the father [on a false premise as it turns out] ‘wanted to be able to show that his daughter was saying things to professionals that they were not reporting or acting on. In other words, the father no longer believed that the professionals were doing the job in the impartial way that they should.’ He went on to say: ‘I don’t know whether the father in this case, or his partner, had been influenced by the rantings of the secret family courts brigade.’
I was about to question the link he had made between this father’s extreme behaviour and ‘secret’ courts, when I glanced at the comments to the post. Almost universally these agreed that the father’s actions were a result of a secret court system.
Generally, both Marilyn and John present balanced accessible views of the family justice system – so it is perhaps surprising that people who read their blog still have such a skewed perspective.