Issued jointly by Disabled Mothers’ Rights Campaign, Support Not Separation and Women Against Rape, March 2024.

We are very glad that the Special Rapporteur is carrying out this consultation. We have worked for many decades with mothers fighting to keep their children (Legal Action for Women was founded in 1982). In the last 10 years a growing movement of mothers, especially single mothers, struggling to protect our children from abusive fathers has exposed a family court system which backs abusers rather than victims. Male supremacist groups of fathers who deny domestic violence have become embedded in the family court system, using allegations of “parental alienation” to continue their control over women and children. Outrageously, they have had the support of CAFCASS and the president of the family court.