What the IDAS Family Court Report 2026 actually found

IDAS gathered evidence using surveys, interviews, focus groups and workshops. More than 70 survivors completed surveys and more than 30 survivors and children participated in interviews, workshops and focus groups, alongside engagement with professionals working across domestic abuse, safeguarding and family justice.

That distinction matters. This is primarily lived-experience research. It can identify patterns, recurrent experiences and possible system failure points. It cannot by itself tell us what percentage of every private law case in England and Wales is handled well or badly.

Within the IDAS sample, the figures are striking.

The report also records that 73% of respondents disagreed or strongly disagreed that professionals understood domestic abuse, 77% said the same about professional understanding of coercive control, and 76% disagreed or strongly disagreed that trauma was properly understood or considered.

Nearly half said they did not feel safe during proceedings.

These figures should not be extracted from their methodology and presented as universal Family Court statistics. But neither can the experiences behind them simply be waved away.

Particularly because they are not appearing in isolation.

Five years after the Harm Panel: why repetition matters

In 2020, the Ministry of Justice expert panel published Assessing Risk of Harm to Children and Parents in Private Law Children Cases.

The Harm Panel had received more than 1,200 submissions and identified deep-seated problems in the way allegations of domestic abuse and other serious harm were dealt with in private law children proceedings.

Among the themes were what the Panel described as a pro-contact culture, problems identifying and assessing abuse, siloed working between agencies, difficulties with evidence and fact-finding, inadequate protection for victims participating in proceedings and concern that court proceedings themselves could be used as a continuation of abuse.

Since then, significant things have happened.

We have had the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. Practice Direction 12J has developed. Cafcass practice has changed. The Family Justice Council has issued important guidance concerning children’s reluctance, resistance or refusal to spend time with a parent and allegations of alienating behaviour. Special measures have strengthened. Direct cross-examination by alleged perpetrators has been restricted in specified circumstances. Section 91(14) protections have been clarified. Pathfinder developed into the Child Focused Court model. Family Court transparency has increased.

In other words, it would be wrong to say nothing has changed.

The more troubling proposition is this:

Reform on paper is not the same thing as reform experienced by a child.

That is where the IDAS report becomes important.

The Family Court now has an implementation problem

There is an understandable tendency when something goes wrong in family justice to ask for another rule, another practice direction, another training package or another pilot.

Sometimes that is exactly what is needed.

But there comes a point when repeated reports describing similar problems force a different question:

What happens between the rule being written and the decision being made?

Practice Direction 12J already requires the court to confront domestic abuse where it is alleged, admitted or there is other reason to believe it has occurred.

It requires early identification of relevant factual and welfare issues. It requires safeguarding information. It requires the court to consider whether alleged or established domestic abuse is relevant to child arrangements. Where domestic abuse has been established, the court must consider its impact through the welfare analysis.

Critically, where contact with a parent who has perpetrated domestic abuse is contemplated, the court must consider whether the physical and emotional safety of the child and the other parent can be secured.

Those are not trivial safeguards.

The problem described by survivors is that a framework can be legally sound and still fail operationally if:

• coercive control is treated as a collection of arguments rather than a pattern;
• post-separation conduct is viewed separately from the relationship that preceded it;
• evidence is dismissed as “historic” without examining why it may remain relevant to current fear or risk;
• a child’s behaviour is interpreted before the cause of that behaviour has been properly investigated;
• professionals use labels such as “high conflict” where the dynamic may actually be asymmetric;
• safe participation measures exist but are not physically in place when the survivor arrives at court;
• each application is considered in isolation rather than as part of a pattern of repeated litigation;
• or the burden of joining the dots falls almost entirely on an overwhelmed litigant in person.

This is why implementation is not an administrative afterthought.

In safeguarding cases, implementation is part of the safeguard.

“How can a parent’s right to see a child matter more than a child’s safety?”

One of the most powerful lines in the IDAS report comes from a young person:

“How can a parent’s right to see a child matter more than a child’s safety?”

Legally, it should not.

There is an important distinction here because public discussion about family justice can become imprecise.

The Children Act 1989 does not establish an absolute parental right to direct contact, still less a right to equal time.

The child’s welfare is the court’s paramount consideration.

At the time of writing, section 1(2A) of the Children Act 1989 also contains the statutory presumption of parental involvement. But “involvement” can be direct or indirect and does not mean any particular division of the child’s time.

The legislation also contains an important safety qualification. The presumption is concerned with a parent who can be involved in the child’s life in a way that does not put the child at risk of suffering harm.

That is different from saying:

Yet survivor evidence repeatedly suggests that this is how the system can sometimes feel in practice.

That distinction between the legal rule and the operational culture surrounding the rule matters enormously.

The presumption is now due to be repealed — but it has not disappeared yet

Following a government review, repeal of the statutory presumption is now contained in the Courts and Tribunals Bill.

But as at 30 September 2026, that legislative change has not yet completed its passage through Parliament.

That means practitioners and litigants should not write as though section 1(2A) has already vanished. It has not.

Equally, nobody should treat it as overriding section 1(1), the welfare checklist or the domestic abuse safeguards in PD12J.

The deeper issue will survive repeal anyway.

Removing a statutory presumption can alter the legal starting point. It cannot, by itself, remove ingrained professional assumptions.

A culture does not disappear simply because a subsection does.

Domestic abuse is often a pattern. The evidence system still tends to like incidents.

One of the most significant parts of the IDAS report concerns evidence.

Survivors described gathering diaries, messages, police material, professional records and statements only to feel that their evidence was ignored, minimised or regarded as historic.

This goes directly to one of the hardest problems in coercive-control cases.

Courts understandably need allegations to be clear, testable and procedurally fair. A respondent must know the case they are required to answer. Evidence cannot simply be replaced by assertion.

But coercive control is not always intelligible if the court is shown only five disconnected episodes.

Its significance may lie in the relationship between them:

• monitoring;
• financial restriction;
• threats;
• humiliation;
• interference with parenting;
• isolation;
• stalking or surveillance;
• manipulation of professionals;
• repeated unwanted communication;
• or the use of children and litigation to maintain access and control after separation.

An event that happened three years ago may or may not matter to today’s welfare decision.

The fact that it is old does not answer that question.

The proper question is what, if anything, the earlier evidence tells the court about pattern, context, credibility, fear, parenting, risk and present-day welfare.

That is not an argument for lowering the standard of proof or accepting allegations uncritically.

It is an argument for analysing the right thing.

Parental alienation and alienating behaviours: labels cannot replace findings

IDAS reports that 44% of its respondents had been accused of “parental alienation”.

It is an area where careful language is essential.

The Family Justice Council’s 2024 guidance is particularly important because it rejects the idea of a diagnosable “parental alienation syndrome” while recognising that children can, in some cases, be psychologically manipulated by a parent in a way that damages their relationship with the other parent.

Those two propositions can coexist.

A child can be manipulated.

A child can also resist a parent because that child is frightened, angry, traumatised, responding to domestic abuse, reacting to poor parenting, struggling with loyalty conflict, experiencing developmental difficulties or responding to a complicated combination of factors.

That is precisely why the label should never be the analysis.

This is particularly important where an allegation of alienating behaviour appears alongside an allegation of domestic abuse.

A protective response to genuine risk should not be misclassified as psychological manipulation merely because it restricts contact.

Equally, genuine manipulation should not be ignored simply because the language around parental alienation has become controversial.

The court’s job is harder than choosing one narrative.

It must identify the facts.

Useful questions include:

• What precise behaviour is alleged?
• When did it occur?
• What reliable evidence supports it?
• What is the alleged effect on the child?
• Is there evidence of domestic abuse or other harm?
• What alternative explanations exist for the child’s behaviour?
• What has the child actually said?
• Has the child’s account remained consistent?
• Has either parent facilitated safe arrangements when it was appropriate to do so?
• Is an expert actually necessary, appropriately qualified and operating within the proper scope of expert evidence?

The IDAS report goes further and recommends prohibiting the use of what it describes as unscientific concepts such as parental alienation.

That is IDAS’s recommendation. It should not be confused with the current law.

Current Family Justice Council guidance does not simply ban consideration of psychologically manipulative behaviour. It seeks to structure the way such allegations are analysed and to keep judicial fact-finding, domestic abuse and the child’s experience at the centre of the process.

That distinction matters.

A child’s voice is not the same thing as a child’s decision — but it must be real evidence

The IDAS report contains some of its most difficult material in the accounts given by children and young people.

Participants described feeling unheard, having their words reframed or feeling that professionals had already decided what their reluctance meant.

Under the Children Act 1989, the court must consider a child’s ascertainable wishes and feelings in light of their age and understanding as part of the welfare checklist.

That does not mean the child dictates the outcome.

Nor should a child be made responsible for choosing between parents.

But there is a profound difference between saying “the child’s wishes are not determinative” and treating those wishes as though they are disposable.

The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 also recognises a child who sees, hears or experiences the effects of domestic abuse as a victim of domestic abuse in their own right, where the statutory relationship requirements are satisfied.

That should change the lens.

A child living around coercive control is not merely an observer of an adult relationship.

The child’s environment may itself be shaped by fear, unpredictability, control and the impact of one parent’s abuse upon the other parent’s ability to parent safely and freely.

Listening means investigating, not merely recording

A report that says:

“The child does not wish to see Father.”

tells the court very little by itself.

A genuinely child-focused assessment asks what sits behind that statement.

Is the child afraid? Angry? Loyal? Pressured? Traumatised? Confused? Manipulated? Protecting someone? Repeating an adult narrative? Responding to something the parent has actually done? Experiencing several of those things at once?

The child’s words are the beginning of the assessment, not the end of it.

When procedure itself becomes part of the harm

One of the clearest themes in the IDAS report is repeated litigation.

More than 40% of respondents had been involved in more than three separate sets of proceedings.

Repeated applications are not automatically abusive.

Children’s circumstances change. Orders may need enforcement, variation or discharge. New safeguarding evidence can emerge. A parent must be able to return to court where judicial intervention is genuinely necessary.

But proceedings can also be used as a method of post-separation control.

The mechanism matters:

• forcing repeated engagement;
• requiring repeated disclosure of traumatic events;
• creating financial pressure;
• generating constant deadlines and hearings;
• keeping the survivor psychologically connected to the perpetrator;
• re-litigating matters already determined;
• using correspondence as a vehicle for intimidation;
• or repeatedly testing the boundaries of an existing order.

The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 strengthened the statutory framework surrounding section 91(14) Children Act orders. Section 91A expressly recognises circumstances in which further applications could put the child or another individual at risk of harm.

This is important because litigation abuse is easily missed if every application is looked at only as a new file.

Sometimes the relevant evidence is the sequence.

That is one reason chronologies, previous orders, previous findings, application histories and concise schedules can matter so much.

Courtroom safety is not a courtesy

The IDAS report describes survivors arriving at court expecting special measures only to find screens missing, entrances not separated or practical arrangements not operating as expected.

This may sound procedural.

It is not.

A person who is frightened of the other party may not give the same quality of evidence while sitting within sight of them. A survivor who encounters the alleged perpetrator outside the hearing room may arrive before the judge already dysregulated and distressed.

Participation affects evidence.

That is why the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 and Family Procedure Rules framework concerning vulnerability and special measures matters.

It is also why litigants should raise participation requirements early rather than assuming arrangements will simply happen on the day.

Measures can include, depending on the case and available facilities:

• screens;
• remote participation;
• separate waiting arrangements;
• careful arrangements for entering and leaving court;
• limits on direct questioning;
• ground rules concerning questioning;
• and, where the statutory criteria are met, the involvement of a Qualified Legal Representative for cross-examination.

A safeguard that exists only in a rulebook is not much of a safeguard.

See also JSH Law’s practical guide: Participation Directions & Special Measures in Family Court .

A note about mediation: precision matters here too

The IDAS report records poor experiences of mediation among some survivors and describes concerns about power imbalance, manipulation and inadequate recognition of domestic abuse.

That concern deserves attention.

But the legal terminology needs care.

Mediation itself is not compulsory in private law children cases.

There is generally a requirement for a prospective applicant to attend a Mediation Information and Assessment Meeting — a MIAM — before making certain applications, but statutory and procedural exemptions exist. Domestic abuse is specifically one of the grounds on which an exemption may apply where the required evidence or circumstances are established.

The distinction is important because survivors should not come away believing that the law requires them to negotiate face-to-face with an alleged abuser before they can obtain protection from the court.

It does not.

What has actually changed since 2020?

It would be unfair — and inaccurate — to suggest that family justice has simply stood still since the Harm Panel.

There has been significant reform.

1. The Domestic Abuse Act 2021

The Act created a statutory definition of domestic abuse encompassing much more than physical violence, including controlling or coercive behaviour and economic abuse.

It also recognises qualifying children who see, hear or experience the effects of abuse as victims in their own right, strengthens special-measures protection and restricts direct cross-examination in specified circumstances.

2. Stronger recognition of repeated litigation

The Domestic Abuse Act reforms concerning section 91(14) orders expressly addressed the possibility of further proceedings themselves creating a risk of harm.

3. Cafcass practice development

Cafcass has developed domestic-abuse practice policy and guidance placing greater emphasis on coercive control, the child’s experience, future risk and a clear rationale where time with a parent is recommended despite domestic abuse concerns.

4. Family Justice Council guidance on alienating behaviours

The 2024 guidance provides a much more structured approach to children’s reluctance, resistance or refusal and allegations of psychological manipulation, while emphasising the importance of properly addressing domestic abuse.

5. Greater controls around expert evidence

From July 2026, Family Procedure Rule changes strengthened the position concerning the use of regulated experts in certain children proceedings, subject to defined exceptions.

JSH Law has examined those changes separately: Unregulated Experts in the Family Court: The New Rules in 2026 .

6. Open reporting and transparency

Family Court reporting reforms now allow accredited journalists and legal bloggers greater ability to report anonymised proceedings where the appropriate transparency framework applies.

That matters because a system that cannot be examined cannot easily learn from patterns of failure.

7. Child Focused Courts

The Pathfinder model has now become the Child Focused Court model and is being rolled out nationally across England and Wales.

Wales is particularly significant: all family courts in Wales are already operating the Child Focused Model.

Its emphasis on earlier child participation, earlier assessment of harm and risk and a more investigative approach could address several of the weaknesses repeatedly identified since 2020.

But again, the test will not be the policy document.

The test will be what happens in cases.

This is where the IDAS report should change the reform conversation

There is a danger that family justice reform becomes a sequence of announcements.

New guidance is published.

A pilot is launched.

Training is commissioned.

A practice direction is amended.

All of those things can matter.

But if five years later survivors continue reporting substantially similar failure modes, success cannot be measured simply by asking whether reform activity took place.

We need to know:

• Was domestic abuse identified earlier?
• Was coercive control understood as a pattern?
• Were children’s experiences investigated properly?
• Did unsafe interim arrangements reduce?
• Were protective orders enforced?
• Were abusive repeat applications identified?
• Did survivors participate safely and effectively?
• Did professional recommendations accurately analyse risk?
• Did court orders reduce harm rather than simply conclude proceedings?
• Were outcomes consistent across different courts and professionals?

Those are outcome questions.

Family justice needs more of them.

The uncomfortable issue of professional inconsistency

One of the most revealing features of the IDAS report is that some survivors described markedly better experiences in later proceedings.

That matters.

It means the story is not simply “the system never works”.

There are judges, magistrates, Cafcass officers, Cafcass Cymru practitioners, solicitors, barristers, social workers, IDVAs, court staff and other professionals who recognise domestic abuse well and respond effectively.

The difficulty is that safety should not depend upon finding the right individual.

If two families with materially similar safeguarding features can have radically different experiences because one professional understands coercive control and another does not, the problem is not merely professional discretion.

It is system reliability.

Consistency does not mean identical outcomes.

Family cases are fact-specific and judges must retain discretion.

It means consistency in the quality of the safeguarding process: identification, investigation, evidence, child participation, risk analysis and reasoning.

Transparency must now move from visibility to accountability

Greater Family Court transparency is a major development.

For decades, much of the public discussion about private law proceedings was necessarily based on fragments: anonymised judgments, individual testimony, campaigning, professional experience and limited datasets.

More open reporting creates an opportunity to understand what actually happens inside proceedings while still protecting children’s identities and private information.

But visibility is only stage one.

Data collection must allow the system to answer questions such as:

• How frequently is domestic abuse raised?
• How frequently is it found?
• What forms of abuse are identified?
• When is a fact-finding hearing considered necessary?
• What arrangements are ultimately ordered where abuse is established?
• How often are those cases brought back for enforcement or variation?
• How frequently are section 91(14) restrictions used?
• What happens to the children over time?

Without meaningful outcome data, reform risks becoming difficult to evaluate.

And without evaluation, the same arguments can simply repeat themselves every few years.

What this means in practice for a litigant in person

None of this makes navigating an individual case easier.

If anything, one of the lessons from the IDAS report is that a litigant in person may need to make the safeguarding analysis unusually clear.

That does not mean producing 400 pages of screenshots and hoping the judge finds the pattern.

It means organising evidence so that the court can understand the case.

Build the pattern

A chronology can be particularly important in coercive-control and post-separation-abuse cases. Record the relevant event, date, evidence, impact and why it matters to the child’s welfare or current risk.

Separate allegation from evidence

“He controlled me” is an allegation.

The court then needs the facts relied upon: what was done, when, how often, what evidence exists and what effect it had.

Connect adult abuse to the child

Do not assume the court will automatically make the connection.

Explain how the behaviour affected the child, the child’s routines, emotional wellbeing, schooling, medical care, relationship with either parent, ability to communicate safely or the protective parent’s capacity to parent.

Identify current risk

Historic evidence can provide context, but the court is making a welfare decision now.

Explain what the evidence says about present or future risk.

If “alienation” is alleged, ask for particulars

What specific behaviour is said to constitute psychological manipulation? What evidence supports it? What causal connection is alleged between that behaviour and the child’s reluctance? What other explanations have been considered?

Make the child’s experience visible

The case should not become an adult contest in which the child appears only as the subject line of the application.

Identify what is known about the child’s wishes, fears, presentation and experience, while being careful not to coach, interrogate or place responsibility for the litigation upon the child.

Ask for participation arrangements early

If special measures or other participation directions are needed, raise them before the hearing wherever possible.

Show the history of repeated litigation where it matters

If repeated applications are said to form part of post-separation abuse, the court needs the procedural history: applications, orders, findings, outcomes and what is being re-litigated.

Tell the court what you are actually asking it to do

Evidence without a clear proposed outcome makes the court’s job harder.

A position statement should normally make clear:

• the relevant issues;
• the safeguarding concern;
• the evidence relied upon;
• the effect on the child;
• the legal or procedural framework where relevant;
• and the precise directions or orders sought.

The objective is not to overwhelm the court.

It is to make the court’s job easier.

What needs to happen next?

IDAS identifies three immediate priorities:

1. specialist domestic-abuse-informed Family Court support;
2. a safety-first, child-focused approach throughout private law proceedings;
3. mandatory, role-specific domestic abuse training with appropriate oversight and evaluation.

It also identifies wider issues including legal aid, enforcement of protective orders, multi-agency learning, behaviour-change provision, better data and stronger safeguards against misuse of proceedings.

Those proposals deserve serious consideration.

But there is a wider lesson.

The next phase of family justice reform cannot be judged primarily by the number of new initiatives created.

It must be judged by whether the recurring failure points become less common.

The JSH Law view: the law cannot stop at the courtroom door

Family justice deals with extraordinarily difficult facts.

Judges frequently have to decide cases in which allegations are disputed, evidence is incomplete, both parents are distressed and every available option carries consequences for a child.

There will never be a procedural framework capable of making those decisions easy.

Nor should criticism of the system become criticism of every professional working within it. The IDAS report itself records examples of excellent practice and survivors who felt listened to and protected.

But acknowledging complexity cannot become an answer to repeated evidence of the same weaknesses.

We know considerably more about coercive control than we did twenty years ago.

We recognise children as victims of domestic abuse in their own right.

We have detailed safeguarding guidance.

We have a clearer framework around vulnerable participation.

We have new guidance for allegations of alienating behaviour.

We are developing a more investigative, child-focused private law model.

The challenge now is to make those developments dependable.

The next frontier in family justice is not simply better law. It is reliable implementation of the law we say protects children.

Because there is ultimately only one meaningful measure of safeguarding reform.

What happened to the child?

Read the IDAS Family Court Report 2026

The full report is: Family Court Domestic Abuse: A Review of Domestic Abuse & Private Law Proceedings 2025–2026, by Carmel Offord, IDAS, supported by Úna Graham.

Read the full IDAS report

Key legal and policy sources considered

• IDAS, Family Court Domestic Abuse: A Review of Domestic Abuse & Private Law Proceedings 2025–2026.
• Ministry of Justice, Assessing Risk of Harm to Children and Parents in Private Law Children Cases, 2020.
• Children Act 1989, section 1 and sections 91(14)–91A.
• Domestic Abuse Act 2021.
• Family Procedure Rules 2010 and Practice Direction 12J.
• Family Justice Council, Guidance on responding to a child’s unexplained reluctance, resistance or refusal to spend time with a parent and allegations of alienating behaviour, 2024.
• Cafcass domestic abuse policy and Child Impact Assessment Framework.
• Domestic Abuse Commissioner research on domestic abuse in private law Family Court proceedings.
• Ministry of Justice material concerning Child Focused Courts and the former Pathfinder model.
• Courts and Tribunals Bill 2026 concerning the proposed repeal of the presumption of parental involvement.

Trying to make a safeguarding case understandable to the Family Court?

When a case involves domestic abuse, coercive control, repeated proceedings, a disputed Cafcass assessment or a child whose wishes and experiences are becoming lost in the paperwork, presentation matters.

JSH Law can provide practical, evidence-led support with:

• chronologies and timelines;
• evidence organisation;
• witness statements and position statements;
• schedules of allegations and issues;
• Cafcass and section 7 report analysis;
• hearing preparation;
• appeal and application paperwork;
• safeguarding-focused document preparation;
• and practical support for litigants in person navigating private law children proceedings.

The aim is simple: organise the case, identify the evidence, keep the child visible and make it easier for the court to understand what actually matters.

Book a consultation