Centenial Celebration

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Date: March 28, 2024 Thu

Time: 1:21 pm

Results for familicide

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Author: Women's Aid

Title: Nineteen Child Homicides

Summary: This report should not need to be written, that much is disturbingly obvious. First, while it is impossible to prevent every killing of a child, when the risks are known no other consideration should be more important - yet there is evidence here that other considerations were rated more highly. Second, starkly similar findings more than 10 years ago led to the publication of guidance which, if followed, would have made these killings less likely. Yet here we are. Nothing in this report should be used to blame individual professionals for the deaths of these children. Only those who killed them deserve blame. But we have a duty to the children and their families to identify what more should have been done to protect them - particularly when guidance on how to do so has been available since 2008, following the publication of Women's Aid's previous report on child homicides and child contact arrangements, a decade ago. This report shows, that whatever the stated requirements on the family courts, there is a deeply embedded culture that pushes for contact with fathers at all costs. This is supported by the testimony to Women's Aid of mothers who have survived domestic abuse and the specialist services that support them. The knowledge that severe abuse has taken place does not stop this relentless push to maintain as close a bond between father and child as possible. A father who has abused his child(ren)'s mother is routinely seen as a "good enough" dad. The impact of abuse on the whole family, particularly persistent, coercive and controlling behaviour which continues after the relationship has officially ended, is routinely misunderstood. The evidence here is a stark reminder of the dangers of power without accountability: perpetrators of abuse who have accumulated all power over their partners' and children's lives, and courts which persist in dangerous misunderstandings and assumptions, effectively colluding in the terrorising - and in some cases serious harm - of women and children. We call on Government and the senior judiciary to ensure that no more children die as a result of a simple failure to follow the guidance that exists. We call on judges to take responsibility for their own understanding of coercive control, how it works, and how it affects both women and children. And then, finally, to act on that understanding. In another ten years, we must not yet again be repeating the same investigation, with the same findings. In fact, of course, ten years is far too long.

Details: Bristol: Women's Aid, 2016. 44p.

Source: Internet Resource: Accessed February 5, 2016 at http://www.benhoarebell.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Womens-Aid-Nineteen-Child-Homicides-Jan-2016.pdf

Year: 2016

Country: United Kingdom

URL: http://www.benhoarebell.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Womens-Aid-Nineteen-Child-Homicides-Jan-2016.pdf

Shelf Number: 137781

Keywords:
Child Abuse and Neglect
Child Homicides
Child Protection
Familicide
Family Violence
Homicides