Specialist family courts needed to deal with flow of cases — report (with case study)
Dr Carol Coulter wrote in the latest interim report that there was a “compelling case” for such courts to be put in place, as some courts were dealing with lengthy lists and some cases took days to hear, sometimes spread across a number of months.
She also said other measures were needed, such as consistent thresholds to be applied across different courts when it came to the granting of orders in relation to children, and steps to make the whole system less adversarial.
“For childcare cases alone, there is a compelling case for a specialist family court to be established as a matter of urgency,” she said. “Those embroiled in private family law proceedings are experiencing similar difficulties.”
The latest interim report involves childcare proceedings in 29 courts, presided over by 35 different judges, recording data from 486 cases, involving 864 children.
It made a number of observations, including:
nThe prevalence of parental disability (15% of cases) and substance abuse (13% involved drugs and 12% alcohol) and their likely impact on people’s ability to parent adequately;
nThe 12.6% figure for child neglect in the cases is likely to be an under-representation of the problem;
n30% of cases involved a child or children with special needs;
n77 children under one were the subject of applications, representing almost 16% of all applications;
nThe largest single category of court applications is for extensions of Interim Care Orders;
nIn more than 70% of cases, the parent was parenting alone.
Poverty was an overriding factor in many cases and there was also a disproportionately high representation of foreign nationals, including Africans, involved in the cases.
Four African children came to the courts because they had been trafficked or abandoned.
The report also found that sexual abuse was five times more likely be a cause of a care order application in married families than in families with a single parent, and sexual, physical or emotional abuse was the main reason for seeking a care order in married families.
www.childlawproject.ie
“In one case in a provincial town a judge declined to make long-term care orders for six children, and made care orders for seven months instead, saying when he came to review the matter after that time he would consider returning the three younger children to the mother, despite a lot of evidence of abuse and neglect.
“This included evidence that the younger children were strapped in their buggies for lengthy periods while their mother was very drunk. She herself spoke about a young child being sexually abused (by another person).
“An older child, who was reported to be very traumatised, had revealed serious physical abuse by his mother. The principal of the school also gave evidence of disturbed behaviour on the part of the children, and a doctor said that the three-year-old child in the family was the most bruised child she had ever seen, with bruises at his nipples, back, neck, thighs and under his eyes.
“The judge in this case said he was prepared to give the mother a chance with the three youngest children. He did not relate this decision to any discussion of the threshold required for an order or any examination of whether it had been met.”
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