UK: Separated mothers must not get away with 'Catherine Tate justice' and ignore dads' rights, says Appeal Court judge

Article here. Excerpt:

'Separated mothers must no longer get away with ‘Catherine Tate justice’  that prevents fathers from seeing their children, a senior judge said.

No mother should be able to ignore court orders, stop a father ever meeting his children, and then tell him ‘Am I bothered?’, Appeal Court judge Lord Justice McFarlane [link added] said.

He said that radical fathers’ groups were right to complain that men were often wrongly shut out of their children’s lives.
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The warning from Sir Andrew McFarlane, one of the country’s most experienced family judges, follows a series of reforms earlier this year designed to speed up cases which decide on how separated parents will share the care of their children.

It follows years of failure to enforce orders giving fathers contact with their children. In around 4,000 cases a year fathers go back to court repeatedly to try to get access to their children because mothers defy the courts.

Judges have rarely fined or imprisoned intransigent mothers because most believe that to punish the mother would harm the children.

At one point the last Labour government considered, and then dropped, the idea of making disobedient mothers wear electronic tags.

Sir Andrew said in a speech that he hoped the reforms introduced this spring will compel more mothers to stick to the rules.'