The family law industry has created a system to help itself to family estates, when it was mandated to serve the best interests of the child. The best interests of children are best served by both their parents remaining in as fully functional state as is possible under what may be challenging circumstances, particularly during the course of separation or divorce.  

As with so many things in life, family law revolves around money, and this has led to financial incentives being present for one parent to control access to and care of the children, wherever the children are...the money and assets will disproportionately flow to.  Inevitably this leads to children receiving less care from one parent than they do from the other, with the parent they are not receiving care from being required to meet the costs of the parent with care and the children, plus external living costs for themselves.  In the majority of cases, the financial reality of this places trememdous strain on the parent who has been sidelined, while making for a comfortable life for the parent who has taken control of the child/ren. 

Gaining an advantageous position in family law proceedings is typically achieved through making allegations of domestic violence or abuse, other illegal activity or for one parent (sometimes both) to portray the other as dangerous to or neglectful of the children. The prevalance of claims of domestic abuse in family court proceedings has risen to a level that is more than 21 times what we see in the rest of the UK population, and accounts for 1/3rd of all domestic abuse related Police reports, stealing that valuable resource from genuine victims of crime. 

There are no consequences for false allegations made in family court, either for the parent making those claims or their legal representatives, who for all intents and purposes are unregulated (despite that being the role of the Solicitors Regulation Authority in practice they do not take action against solicitors encouraging clients to make false allegations).  The statistics below come from an infographic distributed to Peers ahead of the final House of Lords debate on the Domestic Abuse Bill 2020, a downloadable copy can be found here.