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CAFCASS will dictate the meeting. They will most likely have spoken to “mother” at length first and reached a judgement based just on that. Seeing you will be to tick boxes and re-affirm their existing opinion. They will of course let you say your bit for a few minutes. Chances are you have taken a day off work and had to travel to their office for a set meeting so that is only common coutesy. They will though have a list of questions that they want to get through and anything you put to them is just a diversion from that.
I got lucky once and had a CAFCASS woman talk to me at length over the phone for 2 hours. She proposed the phone interview. She genuinely seemed to care, wanted to know the details of the violence I had been subjected to by the ex (50+ assaults in 7 years) and was up on the web as being involved in the usual social justice stuff and stated she “likes to fight injustice”. Of course she was moved on before we ever got to court and that whole two hours was lost and none of it was ever mentioned again
Just once I got lucky and found someone who seemed to have a social conscience. The rest. Drones who are all just following the documentation. Too scared to do anything which ventures away from the idea that newly divorced men are all potential wife and child killers.
The judge was right to advise you not to go after the mothers mental health. It is anything but a level playing field and rubbishing women in court apparently makes us appear to be scheming and manipulative men, hell bent on controlling their exes. As much as you want to fight false allegations I would now say that with the value of hindsight you just need to go with whatever the judge directs and spend as little time fighting the nonsense that your ex and her solicitors dream up to rubbish you in court. Rise above them.
You have no other option but to talk to them. They have all the power.
They are not so much man haters but the vast majority would probably identify as feminists. It seems to be a CAFCASS institutional bias. They only hire people of that mindset.
So by default women are victims and men are by nature violent, potential rapists and child abusers. The reality is more like both genders are equally as likely to be abusers but CAFCASS still do not see it like this.
So with your ex in a refuge and with non molestation etc they are going to approach you as if you have been found guilty.
What can you do…. Remain child focussed and tell the truth. Then they might permit you supervised contact. You will have to jump through hoops and even then the Cafcass officer will treat you with suspicion and even fabricate stories.
Meeting with Cafcass is an ordeal. My own experience is they were not prepared to listen. They only wanted to pursue my ex’s allegations against me. I got psychiatric consultants giving me the all clear but even then Cafcass who only ever met with me for 30 minutes still insisted that I must be supervised.
In short, do not ever trust them. They lie and say soothing things in person and then write damming reports. Utter scum. I would gladly see them all behind bars for crimes against children.
Follow the free advice on this forum. Submit an application to the family court.
You might not secure any “rights” or contact but you will at least show you care and if the millions of us who have lost children all did this then you can bet the government would do something to stop the drain on the public purse.
Educate yourself as to how to bring legal proceedings without solicitors and go and raise hell in the courts
Thank you for sharing. More people need to speak up against this abuse of power by the social services.
Too many children are being taken under the weakest of pretexts.
Safeguarding my arse. Too many people with an inflated idea of their own importance who cannot see that there are a whole multitude of ways to parent which are all valid.
Relocate with them!
Sorry but that realistically is the only way to stay as a father.
IF you succeeded in blocking their departure how would your ex retaliate?
Good luck
For what it is worth there is an internal complaints system within Cafcass. If you believe individuals have failed then it is sometimes worth asking for their managers contact details and raising a complaint.
Do not ever expect any public admission of incompetence but maybe, just maybe some of this gets fed back into staff appraisals. The officers who failed to show up in court with something as serious as false child rape accusations might have to explain to their manager why they made that choice.
Then again it is Cafcass. They believe all accusations made by mothers and even when confronted with expert evidence to the contrary will then fall back on the “welfare checklist”. They cannot quite quantify why but their gut feeling tells them you are a “wrong un”.
Unbelievably these people earn 30-40k along with all the benefits of a public sector job and endless time off for stress.
Rise above it. Any man who moves in with another man’s children and goes along with this “new daddy” role is an arse. Your ex is the loser here as she has a new man who is beneath contempt. I am not sure how far they would even get with this in front of a judge. The judge will question how long until this man leaves the children’s lives.
Warren Farrell makes for good reading. He moved in with a woman who had a child/children from a previous relationship. He clearly saw the boundaries and his role as a stepfather only and his obligation to facilitate contact and encourage the relationship between his step daughter and her biological father. If i was in this situation I would want to do the same. My relationship is purely with the childrens mother and I am there to do the right thing by the children which would be to push them in the direction of their real father as much as possible.
This mirrors so many men’s experiences. My ex kidanpped the children. Ripped them out of their home and the courts and police do nothing.
Then the allegations come and the attempts at non molestation orders which you need to fight off (most judges want hard evidence of danger).
I was always advised not to sling mud back in the opposite direction. The courts do not like men to go in and rubbish women and yet the reverse is pefectly acceptable.
Cafcass are slippery ……. They can call you in for a 30 minute interview after having spent a morning with your ex in the children’s new home and you can see they have already reached a judgement. You can then spend years showing that their recommendation is baseless and hollow but they invariably stick to it and refuse to back down. I had a judge reject a CAFCASS report twice before my ex’s barrister took him to task reminding him that it was unheard of for a judge to do this. The judge turned on the barrister and told him it was not his place to tell him the law but in the end he conceeded to pressure and the CAFCASS recommendation went through.
If it comes to the worst (my case I have had no contact in six years) then hold your head up high, move on and just document the efforts you made to see your kids. Show this to your friends and family and build up support networks.
In theory yes if you have parental responsibility.
In practice you have no way of enforcing this. You can spend 1000s to take your ex to court and your ex can cite arguments that you have had and the courts will then not enforce any rights under parental responsibility.
The moment you argue with a child’s mother you are automatically labelled a risk. The judiciary and Cafcass will then treat you as if you have been convicted of harassment or assault.
An easier way to get a childs address is online debt tracing searches. Costs about £40 max. If your ex is on any utility bills then she will flag up. If the online companies query your motives then just run it through a friend who is a business owner who can say your ex owes them money for work/services provided.
How to avoid 100s in legal fees and being messed around by the legal profession.
Terrible story. I only tried once to live outside of the UK long term and found much the same experience. Welfare and most jobs were almost impossible to obtain. As a young man you are expected to be in work and the state agencies still do not seem geared up to support fathers to stay in their children’s lives. They are of the impression that it is easy for us to give up on living with our children full time and that only mothers have that strong emotional bond to their children.
The reality is that if your ex wants to stop all contact she probably could with a bit of reading up and manipulation of the law.
Start being smarter. Do not put yourself in a position where rows can break out. If you keep on doing this then at some point the police will arrest you and then look to charge you (they need high prosecution stats to show they take Domestic violence/abuse seriously).
Take witnesses. Arrange neutral handover points. Avoid the mother at all costs and see if anyone else can act as a third party. With a woman like that there is no real conversation that can be had. Back away and ask people that you are both calm around to act as a third party. Courts and mediation just play into the hands of women like this. It empowers and enables them to further acts of abuse.
I had a good night. Avoided arrest but I got stopped and searched repeatedly.
Interestingly they were no longer using Section 35 orders last night to disperse a political gathering. Maybe someone has taken the MET to task over the inappropriate use of the law.
I had one constable on seeing the F4J shirt tell me I probably deserved to be separated from my kids. I told him that was worrying seeing as he did not know the details of my case. I then asked him if he jumped to similar assumptions with women who were intoxicated and wearing short skirts who report rape. All hell kicked off and the 8 officers searching me started radioing control to see if they had any legal basis to arrest me.
It was very much a good training exercise in police bullying tactics and knowing how far you can push them without leaving any grounds for arrest. They wanted me to be fearful and then were aggravated when I corrected them on procedures for stopping members of the public, stop and search and arrest.
The police pose a real risk to separated fathers. Too many of us getting assaulted, tasered and detained unlawfully.
Threatened? So no application?
I was under the impression that it was near impossible to lose PR but someone who knows the law better needs to advise you.
Threatening to take PR from you is abuse/harassment. Report it to the police and they would probably knock on the door and inform him that a complaint has been made. Really the new husband should not be communicating anything about the children with you. If he continues to behave like an arse then remind him that he has no business talking to you unless he can remain civil and polite at all times.
Good luck but you really are at the mercy of your ex. The law currently is terrible regarding moving/state sanctioned kidnap of children. It would be a brave judge to block any application by a mother to move and any such order would get overturned on appeal. I guess you really have to question her motivations for moving and the detrimental effect it would have on the children but it would not be too hard for your ex to fabricate reasons as to why the move had to happen.
This is one area of UK law that needs to change. If you have a child with someone then you should be commiting to spending the next 18 years within 100 miles of the other parent unless that parent consents for you to move. Not much to ask for.
You will just have to suck it up or move to Northern Ireland yourself if you want to continue to be a full time Dad. At least the schools over there are some of the best in the UK. Jobs market is not meant to be brilliant though.
No need to use a disclaimer. Just nothing that directly identifies you and then just denial if ever it is raised in court.
I had a judge respond to allegations that I was posting information online by saying “he was not interested in tittle tattle”.
You have 2-3 hours scheduled for a hearing. They do not want to get bogged down with the fact that your child/childrens pictures are up on the wall of shame.
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