He said, she said

In Family Courts across England and Wales, rape victims are being ordered to facilitate contact between their children and the very men who raped them. Despite findings* of rape, abuse, and coercive and controlling behaviour, mothers are not only being denied protection, but they are also being compelled – under legal threat – to co-parent with their abusers. And if they refuse to co-parent with their rapist, they are accused of the well-known tactic straight out of an abusive father’s playbook – ‘parental alienation’. I explore Family Court failures to protect women and children in my book, He Said She Said: Truth, Trauma, and the Struggle for Justice in Family Court.

The trauma of surviving sexual violence is compounded by a legal system that places the outdated and dangerous presumption of child contact above safety and dignity. In a recent case, I successfully represented a mother appealing a Family Court decision to grant her rapist overnight contact with their daughter. The court had already found he raped and abused this mother – including when she was just 15 and he was 24 years old when their ‘sexual relationship’ began. This is not only unlawful but likely child sexual abuse. Despite this, she is now expected to facilitate and encourage contact. Her refusal to do so is being framed by her rapist as evidence of her ‘hostility’, which the court considers a serious allegation and could amount to emotional harm caused by the mother.

Sometimes when I stand in court, I feel as though I am in a warped parallel universe. Victims are treated as abusers, and abusers are treated as victims. This is the quiet, legalised cruelty that rape survivors in the Family Court are facing every day. The system claims to act in the ‘best interests of the child’, but what interest is served by forcing children to spend time with men found to be dangerous, violent, and to have raped their own mother? Very many children are being mandated to have a relationship with fathers who raped their mothers. This is court-sanctioned abuse. When those children are older and learn the truth of what their father did to their mother, I would hazard a strong guess that they will feel deceived, angry and they might even want to harm their father, and yet the court – acting as an arm of the state – is causing children irreparable harm. No father is better than a rapist father.

In 2024, I represented Sandra, whose former partner, Kristoffer Paul Arthur White, had been convicted of raping a teenager. The Family Court later found that he had also raped Sandra – on three occasions. Yet Cafcass, the independent body that is supposed to represent the best interests of the child, recommended regular contact between White and their child. A rape survivor was expected to simply hand her young daughter over to her rapist. ‘It was earth-shattering,’ Sandra said. ‘A judge has said it happened. But it doesn’t matter that he’s a convicted rapist and he raped you – he can spend time with your child’ (p 92). When two journalists applied to name Mr White, shockingly, Cafcass supported his right to privacy over the public’s right to know that this man is a danger to women. The mother directly accused Cafcass of being an actively harmful organisation, working against the rights of children. Fortunately, the court rejected the arguments of Cafcass and ordered that Mr White could be named.

Worse still, at the heart of Family Court failures to protect rape survivors is a more insidious force: institutionalised misogyny, often hiding in plain sight – inside the language of judgments, the minimising of abuse and the disbelief of women. It is woven into the fabric of the family justice system. Again and again, survivors are not only disbelieved but discredited by judges, who apply stereotypes and outdated assumptions about how a ‘genuine’ victim would behave (for the avoidance of doubt, rape victims are not a homogenous category).

In A v B [2023] EWHC 149, the court said that a previous judge, Recorder Mark Roscoe, had made an inapt assumption that the mother’s account of rape by her husband was inherently improbable because she had submitted silently to abuse over several years (§42). This line of reasoning ignores what we know about trauma and survival responses. The court could not conceive of a rape victim choosing silence as safety – or if this is even a choice in a context of alleged coercive control? In A B & C [2022] EWHC 3089, HHJ Marc Marin did not find the mother’s rape allegations proven in part because he could not accept that an ‘intelligent’ woman like her could not remember the exact date that she was allegedly raped by her husband (§118).

These judgments reveal an alarming belief: that intelligent, educated women do not experience rape or sexual violation in marriage or partnerships. Because if they were raped, they would have behaved exactly as one judge believes a ‘genuine’ rape victim would act. Otherwise, the abuse could not have happened. Women have described feeling gaslit by their experiences in the Family Court.

And even on the rare occasion when rape is proven, many judges downplay the harm caused – failing to recognise the life-long consequences of rape.

In X (father) v Y (mother) [2025] EWFC 62, a father was found to have committed four sexually abusive acts, including rape on the mother. The mother applied for costs against the father and Recorder Laura Moys stated that his continued denial of the rapes (he instead referred to them as ‘allegations’ of ‘sexual harassment’) did not in itself constitute ‘reprehensible behaviour’ or ‘the adoption of an unreasonable stance’ (§152). Recorder Moys also refused to change the child’s surname from the rapist father’s surname to the mother’s

There appears to be a growing trend in judges refusing to use the word ‘rape’. In the recent decision of A v B [2025] EWFC 79, District Judge Richard O’Hagan stated that the word ‘rape’ should be avoided in the Family Court (§34). In another recent case, a mother complained to the JCIO about another district judge for saying the following to her in a Family Court hearing:

Judge: Well, I have read this judgment. It is not exactly rape. It was anal sex without consent.

Mother: That is rape. Non-consent is rape.

Judge: Yes, you are right. Sorry, yes, you are right.

The judge told the JCIO that apparently the initial phrase was ‘informed by an effort to apply the legal distinction between criminal and family law definitions, in accordance with Court of Appeal case law, which cautions against the use of criminal terminology in family proceedings.’ This is wrong in law and shows that the judge does not even understand basic legal principles. The Court of Appeal in Re H-N [2021] EWCA Civ 448 actually said:

‘Judges are not required to avoid using the word “rape”… to do otherwise would produce a wholly artificial approach.’ (§72)

More alarmingly, the JCIO accepted the judge’s flawed response as fact and closed the investigation.

Change is achievable. My book also covers some of the precedent-setting cases I’ve had the privilege of representing survivors in. One such case is that of Kate Kniveton (former member of Parliament). After enduring abuse at the hands of her ex-husband, who had been a member of Parliament and minister at the time, Kate faced a chilling dilemma: pursue justice or protect herself and her child from further harm. ‘Initially, the decision had been clear cut,’ I write. ‘She wished to limit Griffiths’ contact with their child, and the best chance of achieving this was to have the most serious allegations against him proven in court’ (p 83).

But even when those allegations were proven, his control did not end there. Mr Griffiths attempted to block full publication of the judgment – a tactic the court had already recognised as part of his pattern of coercive behaviour (p 84). In my book I write about how he used the child’s right to privacy ‘as a shield for himself’, a move not uncommon among men seeking to obscure their abusive histories (p 85). To make matters worse, a court order required Kate to share the cost of supervised contact with Mr Griffiths. She was, in effect, being made to pay for her rapist to spend time with their child. That ruling was eventually overturned by Mrs Justice Emma Arbuthnot, but the fact that it was made at all reveals the extent of the court’s failure to recognise the harm they can cause to victims. In the end, Kate’s child was protected as the court refused to order direct child contact between the father and child, a s 91(14) order was put in place for three years, the father’s exercise of parental responsibility was restricted, and the child’s surname was changed to include Kate’s surname.

Rose’s case offers another moment of hope. Initially, her rape allegations had been dismissed in error by Cafcass and HHJ Christopher Dodd. I represented her successfully at an appeal before Mrs Justice Sarah Morgan. At a re-trial, HHJ Clive Baker found the mother had been raped, and he went on to acknowledge what is so often denied: that ongoing contact with the mother’s rapist would constitute continued court-sanctioned abuse (§68). ‘Each school report or medical document that arrives with the father’s surname,’ the judge wrote, ‘is a reminder… not only of what has happened to her but also the truth that she must come to terms with’ (p 288). Much like Kate, Rose and her child were protected by the court as the father’s parental responsibility was terminated, the child’s surname was changed to the mother’s surname only, a s 91(14) order was enacted until the child turns 16 and the father was ordered to pay Rose £30,000 in costs.

But Rose not only won the right to protect her child – she won the right to speak, and to do so in her own words using an alias. She challenged the constraints so often placed on survivors and secured a right to share her experience without relying on journalists to quote her. I’m incredibly proud of the way she has reclaimed her voice in a system that had once wrongly dismissed her rape allegation. Her case affirmed that survivors’ voices matter for shaping wider understanding and reform. Despite this ground-breaking victory, cases like Rose’s remain the exception.

We see these patterns rooted in misogyny, legitimised by law and enacted by a Family Court system that too often values paternal contact over child safety, and neutrality over justice. We must stop pretending these outcomes are one-offs or unfortunate anomalies – rape myths are being enacted from the bench. When survivors are forced to fund their rapist’s contact with a child, or told their education and eloquence make them ‘unlikely’ victims, the court moves past failure and into harm.

So what’s next? We start with transparency. The secrecy of the Family Court must end. Survivors must be able to speak, and the public must be able to see what happens behind closed doors. What sets apart the cases above is that they were reported on by dedicated journalists and legal bloggers, and the judgments referenced were published. How many cases do we not know about, simply because they remain hidden under a veil of secrecy? How many other survivors face injustice in silence because no journalist is available to sit through their hearing?

We need mandatory, expert training for judges, ongoing education about trauma, coercive control and victim myths. It’s not enough to be legally literate; judges must also be free from biases perpetuating harm. We need legislative reform that prioritises safety over contact, that embeds a clear, enforceable presumption against contact with abusive parents, and that prevents the retraumatisation of survivors through repeated litigation. And we need to centre survivors’ voices in the media, in the courts and Parliament. We must ensure that survivors are not re-victimised by the very system meant to protect them. To accomplish that, we must listen to those who’ve lived through it. 

*Findings made in the Family Court – such as a determination that rape or domestic abuse occurred – are civil findings made on the balance of probabilities for the purpose of safeguarding and welfare determinations within family proceedings. They do not equate to a criminal conviction, which requires proof beyond reasonable doubt in a criminal court.