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28 January 2021 / Caroline Bowden
Issue: 7918 / Categories: Features , Family , Divorce
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Separating families: a call for action

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Separation matters: Caroline Bowden calls for a multi-disciplinary, government backed shift in ethos
  • Call for action: treating separating families in a different way.
  • Challenge: signposting couples to support services rather than having ‘the only game in town’ being the issuing of an application to the family court.
  • The Parenting Charter: children’s rights.

What do the President of the Family Division and The Sun’s former agony aunt Deidre Sanders have in common?

Towards the end of last year, they both focused on the needs of children who are, or who will be, damaged by family conflict. Deidre Sanders launched the #SortItOut Campaign which is supported by the (wordy) All Party Parliamentary Group for Supporting Couple Relationships and Reducing Inter-parental Conflict. Their attention is on the misery of children experiencing conflict, whether or not their parents are living together.

Call for action

The President of the Family Division used the publication of the Family Solutions Group Report (FSGR), in which I was involved, to call for action specifically to

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Three men wrongly imprisoned for a combined 77 years have been released—yet received ‘not a penny’ in compensation, exposing deep flaws in the justice system. Writing in NLJ this week, Dr Jon Robins reports on Justin Plummer, Oliver Campbell and Peter Sullivan, whose convictions collapsed amid discredited forensics, ‘oppressive’ police interviews and unreliable ‘cell confessions’
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