The Woeful State of Our Debate: the Social Work Tutor

This is a post by Sarah Phillimore The Social Work Tutor is an anonymous practising social worker who runs a very popular Facebook site. At the time of writing it has 352,016 ‘likes’.  The site purports to offer “News, comment, debate, education and humour for the worldwide Social Work community”. There is also a website which […]

The woeful state of our debate Part 8: Men vs women

This is a post by Sarah Phillimore As someone who spends a great deal of time complaining (legitimately) at the simply woeful state of our national debate about the family justice system in general and proceedings involving children in particular, I accept that it is incumbent on me to put my money where my mouth […]

The woeful state of our debate about the family courts Part VII: Barbara Hewson

This is a post by Sarah Phillimore The fact that this is number seven in a series of posts about the dangerous debasement of public discussion about the family justice system and issues of child protection, should be a clue that I think we are in a very parlous state indeed. What makes this particular […]

The woeful state of our debate Part VI: 8 questions to ask family judges.

On November 24th I attended the 9th Annual Family Justice Council debate at the Strand Palace Hotel in London. You can read more about the debate and the work of the FJC at this post on the Transparency Project. To my surprise, I found Ian Josephs himself in attendance; he took the floor to deliver […]

The woeful state of our debate Part V: Linda Arlig, Her Hammer and some Nails.

The curious ‘rhetoric case’ of Linda Arlig This is a post by Sarah Phillimore Over the past two years I have been repeatedly referred to a document authored by Linda Arlig of the Department of Social Science, the Psychology Section of the University of Orebro, Sweden.  It is called ‘The Rhetoric Case: Persecution strategies in […]

The woeful state of our debate Part IV – Cascading the judgment in Re N

This is a post by Sarah Phillimore On November 2nd, ironically as I attended a workshop on cross-border child protection issues, I received an email with the judgment in the case of Re N (Children) (Adoption: Jurisdiction) [2015] EWCA Civ 1112. This was a judgment from a hearing heard at the end of March 2015 […]

The woeful state of the debate about child protection Part III: UKIP’s contribution

The UKIP contribution to the debate. This is a post by Sarah Phillimore On Monday 26th October the Guardian published an article by Douglas Carswell the UKIP MP.  This called for the family courts to ‘open up’ in order to avoid ‘outrageous injustices’.  UKIP had previously discussed the child protection system in their manifesto, calling […]

The woeful state of our debate about child protection, Part II: Hemming and the Latvian case

John Hemmings address to the Press Conference in Riga, Latvia. On 31st August John Hemming uploaded onto YouTube a video. I mentioned this on Twitter and expressed the hope the Latvian authorities are getting information from sources other than this. John Hemming has asked me to explain why I am concerned with what he says in his […]

Censorship and the protection of commercial interests – the woeful state of our debate about protecting children.

This is a post by Sarah Phillimore On the morning of Friday August 21st I posted a comment on the Marilyn Stowe blog after the former MP John Hemming had written a guest post about adoption statistics. The biography attached to his post described him simply as a highly educated and respectable former MP and […]