I want to take a photograph of my child but I am told I cannot This is a post by Sarah Phillimore arising out of her own recent experiences. I want to focus on the single issue of when a parent can be prevented from taking a photograph of their own child, for their own […]
This is a post by Sarah Phillimore. Imagine you have landed on an alien planet. The locals speak a completely different language. Their customs and culture are completely different to anything you know. There is no one available to translate for you. No one to explain. What happens? Since starting this site in 2014 I […]
I first became aware of the case of Victoria Haigh in about 2013, when my concern about the activities of the then MP John Hemming began to mount up. In 2018 I noticed Victoria Haigh on Twitter. She was supported by a number of self styled campaigners who were linked by their shared belief that […]
I love the powerful juxtaposition of @lemnsissay and Thomas Coram here @FoundlingMuseum @TheOpenNest #mythsandmonsters #naw2017 pic.twitter.com/Sa7zjqfNIm — How To Be Adopted (@howtobeadopted) October 16, 2017 On Monday October 16th I attended the conference organised by the charity The Open Nest at the Foundling Museum in London, which had invited a group of speakers to investigate […]
This is a post by Kate Wells a retired social worker, who sets out her views about the case of W (A Child) [2015] – an extra-ordinary judgment, both in its decision to refuse to make an adoption order and return W to her father’s care and also for the language used by the Judge […]
What can I do? it will depend at what stage of the proceedings you have reached and what orders have already been made. A child can only be adopted when three orders have been made – a care order, a placement order and finally, an adoption order. Care and placement orders are usually made at the […]
This post began life as a paper delivered by Sarah Phillimore at the St John’s Chambers conference on 4th December 2014: ‘Family Justice: universal access and fair process’. It has been updated to take into account more recent case law; most particularly the case of A (A Child) [2015] and Re BR (Proof of Facts) [2015]. No […]
This is a post by Sarah Phillimore Too long didn’t read: there is a problem what I shall call the ‘DV Sector’, for want of a better title. There are a number of individual women and organisations who garner a lot of media attention, who have books and talks to promote and apparently the ear […]
This post originally appeared on The Transparency Project but objections were raised to my use of the feature image. So I repost it here. This post is to comment on the latest ramifications of the long journey of two parents who faced the same accusation in both criminal and family courts but with very […]
As a species we appear to be primed to impose a narrative on our experiences. We love stories and we need them. As Adam Gopnik commented in 2012, looking at the science behind storytelling: Gottschall’s encouraging thesis is that human beings are natural storytellers—that they can’t help telling stories, and that they turn things that […]