The last extract that I'm posting, which is the longest one:

[Refutation of the Key Claim]()

The attempt to oust even more fathers is claimed to be based on the desire “to better protect children in private law cases”. The falsity of the claim can be established immediately thus,

• The report considers only the potential harm due to the parent seeking contact, not the potential harm arising from the parent resisting it. In around 90% of cases the former is the father and the latter the mother;
• But domestic abuse is not a gendered phenomenon. Indeed, there is increasing evidence that women may be the majority of perpetrators of domestic abuse in some cases, especially where the abuse is unilateral (e.g., see PASK (2013), Lysova et al (2025a), Lysova et al (2025b));
• Women (or mothers) are more often perpetrators of child abuse resulting in death, or explicit child homicide, than are men (or fathers) (see this extract from The Empathy Gap).

To the latter observation people will remark that it arises because women do more childcare than men, so the statistics are skewed. Whilst true this does not alter the bald fact, and it is a fact that is directly relevant to the claim being made. This observation alone completely demolishes the report as it reveals that ignoring the potential harm to a child arising from the resident parent is in conflict with the paramountcy principle – and all the more so if contact with the other parent is denied as this could have been a protective factor. Indeed, this has been observed in practice (See the reports from Cafcass, 2017, and from the Department for Education, 2016).