This muddled writing about Child Contact Centres points to underlying
misunderstanding.

I divorced my wife. When I took this action, I did not introduce third parties between me and my children. It is most important for excluded fathers to grasp this point. The State and its lackeys- lawyers and so on - have a right to intervene in the matter of my divorcing my wife. Like marriage, divorce is a public matter in which the state has an interest, because it may result in spouse or children becoming a burden on the state.

However, intervention by the state between me and my children was another matter. When a judge suggested that I go to a "Contact Centre" and my children do the same, he was acting totally outside his proper powers, which were to do with the initial contract of marriage and the current breaching of that contract.

The state's interest in the marriage contract arises because children may result from that union, leading to parent or child becoming a burden on the state.

[It has never been alleged that the State is better at parenting than is a parent, so the State does not intervene between parent and child.]

Similarly, during divorce, the state has a right to have concern about provision for the children and for a parent of the marriage. However, putting parent and child into a special location with supervision has nothing to do with the state's interests. In no way does a parent provide for a child by confronting it under supervision.

[Confronting a child under supervision apes providing for a child in the same was as a film about the war apes the war. It is not the same thing.]

This theatrical game has been added on without any legal justification by various bureaucracies intent on exploiting the situation to make money.

Baskerville (see my website) investigates the enormous financial gain from the kind of activity which is mushrooming around divorce. It is most important that excluded fathers be not tricked into supporting such attacks on parent and child by money-hungry bureaucracies and vicious radfems.

Ivor Catt 20feb03

We find that excluded fathers get muddled over various aspects of the family courts. I have a new point to make here.

More hangs on the issue of whether a criminal offence has been committed when it comes to allegations of domestic violence than in all other cases of criminal allegations, because in these other cases, the future of children is not directly involved. It follows that it is more important, not less, for the correct verdict to be made.

The English system is based on jury trial in open court by the defendant's peers. It follows that anyone who colludes in supporting the family courts' inroads into questions of criminal domestic violence would not be able to explain why they supported the jury trial in any criminal case. They have to agree that they oppose jury trials in all cases. If, however, they are in favour of jury trials, they surely must demand that a jury be involved in open court before recourse is made to a Child Contact Centre.

Ivor Catt. 20feb03

Subject: Child Contact Centres (2)

My explanatory interview on contact centres is on the web. Although neutral in tone, it describes, also in the footnotes, how the contact centre system encourages unaccountable, arbitrary judicial control.

As the interviewee has been involved in developing contact centres since the concept was first started in the UK, in the mid-eighties, you have it from the horse's mouth in terms of the evolution of the contact centre concept.

It would be very good if those with recent experience could spell it out to us. The issue could perhaps be turned around, by asking how does the CCC NOT stigmatise the father/child relationship? I see very little evidence that ANY attention is paid to
preserving a pre-existing father-child relationship based on the assumption
that the father or any "non-resident parent" is the responsible adult. The standard approach is so far from this as to make it appear a favour if contact is "allowed" at all. Such conditions lead to possibly the worst outcome, at best a relationship with one's father based on his functional irrelevance, a fundamental disrespect evident to both father and child.

It is worth bearing in mind that the evidence appears to be that contact
centres were conceived, according to the worst possible of logic, in an attempt to give judges an opportunity to make orders for direct contact in
an institutionally supervised fashion (this supervisory role making it far more likely that mothers would meet contact orders, the thinking went), thus preventing children losing contact with their fathers (and some mothers)
altogether.

It is thus "judge-driven" - if judges, over several decades now, were not so
contemptuous of the roles of BOTH parents post-separation, misguided
philanthropists would not be placed in the position of devising institutional models to "coax" judges into providing opportunities for contact to both parents. Orders for contact at Contact Centres, like "indirect contact orders", are in reality a device designed to provide a fig leaf, to dissimulate and obscure what a court is actually doing when making such orders: eliminating one of the former parents. In practice, they probably increase the likelihood of long-term estrangement and alienation.

The motivation of those working in or committed to the present contact centre network must be highly questionable, because of the inherent contradictions in their mission. I know a man who worked in these places for a period, his description of the sadism of at least one manager beggared belief. The opportunities for abuse of power appear enormous.

Julian Fitzgerald. 20feb03
fried@aesops.force9.co.uk