Fury at ruling in custody battle

Story here. Excerpt:

'A MOTHER found by the Family Court to be violent, untruthful, lacking moral values and responsible for the psychological and emotional abuse of her children has been given custody of them.

The father, deemed "principled" and with "much to offer his children", has been effectively banned from seeing his daughters.

The case will spark renewed debate about family law and the issue of shared parenting.

The father, who we will name "Bill" because he cannot be identified for legal reasons, is described by a Family Court judge as no threat to his daughters, a successful parent who is "courteous" and "intelligent".

The same judge found the mother, whom we will call "Jasmine" and who abandoned her first daughter at two and spurned the child's subsequent attempts at reconciliation, had displayed "dreadful", "cruel" and "malicious" behaviour.
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Historian and Family Court critic Prof John Hirst questions the underlying principles in family law.

"The Family Court by law has to make the children's interests paramount in divorce cases. Everyone thinks this is wise and proper, but to elevate one principle above all others can produce terrible results," he said.

"To stop mothers being tempted to make accusations of sexual abuse and so keep children to themselves, the law should state that any parent making false accusations of this sort will lose the right to be chief carer of the children. If a mother has so turned the children against the father that they don't want to see him, for a time at least the children should be taken into care.

"Even on the present test of child's best interests, it is hard to see how a child will benefit from being left with such a mother. She has burdened the child with the story that her father abused her.

"Then when the child comes of age she will discover that the mother's accusations were false."'