From 41% to 2%: What Frolo’s Early Family Court Survey Is Telling Us About Trust

Credit and source

This article responds to preliminary Family Court survey findings shared by Zoë Desmond, founder of Frolo, and by Frolo’s single-parent community.

Zoë is herself a single parent with first-hand experience of the Family Court and created Frolo to provide community and support for single parents.

Frolo is continuing to collect responses and has said that updated findings will follow.

JSH Law is not affiliated with Frolo. The analysis below is JSH Law’s own. Full credit for the survey, its design and its preliminary findings belongs to Zoë Desmond and Frolo.

The number I keep coming back to

41% → 2%

Trust in a justice system is not the same thing as satisfaction with an outcome.

People can lose a case fairly.

They can be disappointed by a decision while still believing that they were heard, the evidence was tested and the process was legitimate.

That is why a reported collapse in trust deserves attention even before we know what the final survey results will show.

Five things to understand before interpreting the survey

1. These are preliminary findings.
The survey is continuing and Frolo has said that further responses have already been received.

2. The first sample is small.
Eighty-seven responses are enough to identify questions worth investigating, but not enough to describe the experience of all Family Court users.

3. It is self-selected.
People with particularly difficult experiences may be more motivated to respond. That selection effect matters.

4. Reported experience is not the same as independently verified case findings.
If a respondent reports an inaccurate professional report or unrecognised coercive control, that is evidence of their experience and perception. The survey alone does not adjudicate the underlying dispute.

5. None of those limitations means the experiences should be ignored.
Good reform starts by listening carefully, testing what people report against other evidence, identifying recurring mechanisms and asking what needs to change.

Why does the trust figure matter so much?

Courts cannot promise everybody the result they want.

That is not their function.

In children proceedings especially, judges may have to make decisions which one parent profoundly disagrees with.

Public trust therefore cannot sensibly be measured by asking:

“Did you win?”

The more useful questions are:

• Did you understand what was happening?
• Were you able to participate effectively?
• Was relevant evidence considered?
• Were material inaccuracies capable of being corrected?
• Was domestic abuse recognised where properly established?
• Was your child’s experience genuinely considered?
• Were decisions explained?
• Did the process appear procedurally fair?
• And did you leave understanding why the court reached the conclusion it did?

A functioning justice system needs more than legal authority.

It needs legitimacy.

People are more likely to accept difficult decisions where they believe the process through which those decisions were reached was fair.

That is why the movement from 41% to 2% deserves investigation.

Not because 87 respondents can prove that the whole system has lost public confidence.

But because a justice process should want to understand why people who entered it with some trust say they emerged with almost none.

Trust is not the same as satisfaction

This distinction matters enormously.

Some parents who respond negatively to a survey will have received orders they opposed.

That inevitably affects perception.

But it would be equally simplistic to dismiss dissatisfaction on that basis.

A parent may receive the outcome they wanted and still believe the process was damaging.

A parent may lose and nevertheless believe the judge handled the evidence fairly.

The real analytical task is to separate:

Reform needs to know which problem it is dealing with.

Every respondent reported an impact on mental health

Frolo’s early findings say that every one of the first 87 respondents reported some impact on their mental health, with 63% describing that impact as severe.

Again, that does not establish a population rate.

But it should prompt a serious question:

how much harm can participation in the justice process itself cause?

Family proceedings are intrinsically stressful.

They concern children, relationships, safety and sometimes the possible loss or restriction of a parent-child relationship.

No procedural reform can make those underlying circumstances painless.

But some stressors are potentially avoidable:

• unexplained delay;
• repeated adjournments;
• poor communication;
• uncorrected factual errors;
• unclear orders;
• having to repeat traumatic accounts unnecessarily;
• unsafe waiting arrangements;
• failure to identify participation needs;
• and prolonged uncertainty about a child’s future.

Trauma-informed justice does not mean agreeing with a party.

It means designing and operating the process in a way which does not create avoidable harm while still testing evidence rigorously.

89% said they saw changes in their child

This may be the most important finding of all.

Parents in the preliminary survey were not only describing what the proceedings did to them.

Most said they observed changes in their children.

And 68% of those reporting changes said no professional acknowledged those changes.

That finding requires careful interpretation.

A parent observing a change does not establish its cause.

Children can be affected by:

• parental separation;
• domestic abuse;
• conflict;
• moves between homes;
• school disruption;
• changes to contact;
• court proceedings;
• adult anxiety;
• and many overlapping factors.

But the response should not be to dismiss parental observation.

It should be to ask:

Was the child’s presentation explored?

Was information obtained from an appropriate source?

Was the child seen or heard appropriately?

Was change over time considered?

Was there another plausible explanation?

And did the eventual welfare analysis address it?

Child-focused justice cannot simply mean mentioning the child’s welfare. It has to mean being curious about the child’s lived experience.

82% reported inaccurate information in professional reports

This is another statistic which should be treated as a question requiring investigation, not as a proved accusation against professionals generally.

Professional reports inevitably contain synthesis.

A Cafcass officer, social worker or other professional may have to:

• summarise conflicting accounts;
• select relevant history;
• distinguish what is verified from what is alleged;
• record information received from other sources;
• and offer professional analysis.

That creates opportunities for disagreement.

Not every disputed sentence is an objective error.

But where there is an objectively identifiable error — a wrong date, incorrect order, attribution to the wrong person, materially incomplete history or description contradicted by the source document — it matters.

Because reports can influence:

• case management;
• risk assessment;
• whether further evidence is sought;
• interim arrangements;
• and ultimately the court’s welfare evaluation.

A justice system should therefore be interested not merely in whether reports are produced on time, but in:

accuracy, source transparency and correction mechanisms.

A professional report should be capable of being audited

This is one of the recurring themes in JSH Law’s work.

When a professional report contains an important proposition, ask:

Where did it come from?

Was it:

• a parent’s allegation?
• a child’s reported account?
• a police record?
• a school record?
• a medical record?
• an earlier court finding?
• an admission?
• the professional’s observation?
• or the professional’s inference?

Those are different evidential categories.

A conclusion becomes much easier to evaluate when its underlying source and status remain visible.

It becomes much harder when allegation, inference and fact are compressed into a single narrative paragraph.

63% said coercive control or emotional abuse was not recognised

This finding is especially significant because the problem of recognising domestic abuse in private children proceedings is not a new allegation generated by this survey.

It has been the subject of years of formal review.

The 2020 Harm Panel identified structural problems including:

• a pro-contact culture;
• adversarialism;
• resource limitations;
• and silo working.

The Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s subsequent Everyday Business pilot, based on almost 300 case files across three court sites, nearly 100 observed hearings and interviews and focus groups, concluded that those structural barriers remained present.

Domestic abuse was raised in 87% of reviewed closed case files.

Psychological or emotional abuse was the most frequently identified type.

That does not validate every individual perception in the Frolo survey.

But it means the reported difficulty recognising coercive control sits inside a much wider evidence base which the system is already attempting to address.

Why coercive control is particularly vulnerable to being missed

Coercive control rarely presents as one spectacular incident.

It is often understood through:

• repetition;
• cumulative effect;
• restriction;
• surveillance;
• economic behaviour;
• threats;
• use of children;
• post-separation behaviour;
• and change over time.

If professionals evaluate each event as a separate disagreement, the pattern can disappear.

If an email is viewed in isolation, it may look innocuous.

If the same functional behaviour appears repeatedly across months or years, its meaning may be different.

That is why PD12J increasingly requires a holistic approach to patterns of behaviour.

And it is why evidence architecture matters.

51% said they spent more than £15,000

Family justice is also an economic process.

Legal representation is expensive.

So are repeated hearings.

So are expert reports.

So is missing work.

Travel costs money.

Childcare costs money.

Repeated document preparation costs money.

For a single-parent household, those costs may be carried on one income while the same parent is already absorbing the financial consequences of separation.

That financial pressure matters for access to justice.

It can determine:

• whether someone continues using a solicitor;
• whether counsel can be instructed;
• whether advice is obtained before a hearing;
• whether a person becomes a litigant in person;
• and whether somebody simply gives up pursuing an issue.

This is exactly why the space between full representation and no support matters.

Facing Family Court without full representation?

More than half of recent private-law disposals involved neither party having legal representation.

JSH Law provides defined-scope support to litigants in person who need help with particular parts of their case rather than full representation.

Depending on scope, that can include:

• case and evidence analysis;
• chronologies;
• evidence schedules;
• witness and position statement preparation support;
• Cafcass and Child Impact Report analysis;
• domestic-abuse and safeguarding evidence;
• appeal paperwork;
• court-bundle preparation support;
• and hearing preparation or McKenzie Friend support where appropriate.

The aim is not to generate more paperwork. It is to help identify what matters and make the evidence easier for the court to understand.

Book a consultation

41% said their proceedings lasted two years or more

Again, this is not a national estimate.

But prolonged proceedings are not a theoretical concern.

Current official data show that the open private-law caseload has been increasing.

Delay matters because childhood moves on while litigation waits.

A six-year-old becomes seven.

A twelve-year-old becomes a teenager.

Relationships change.

Interim arrangements become normalised.

Memories weaken.

Conflict can become entrenched.

And sometimes the practical status quo begins exerting pressure on the eventual decision simply because it has existed for so long.

Section 1(2) of the Children Act 1989 reflects the principle clearly:

delay in determining a question concerning a child’s upbringing is likely to prejudice the child’s welfare.

Delay is not merely administrative.

It has a human consequence.

What do the official Family Court statistics tell us?

The latest Ministry of Justice figures provide useful context.

For April to June 2026:

• 14,833 private-law Children Act cases started — 11% more than the same quarter in 2025;
• 41,637 private-law cases remained open at the end of June — 14% higher than a year earlier;
• the average time to disposal was 33 weeks;
• 48% were therefore not concluded within 26 weeks;
• 1,672 open cases had already lasted 100 weeks or more;
• and in 51% of private-law disposals neither applicant nor respondent had legal representation.

Those figures do not tell us whether parents trusted the process.

They do tell us the environment in which that trust is being tested.

Increasing case volumes.

Large numbers of unrepresented parties.

Finite professional and judicial resources.

And thousands of children living through unresolved proceedings.

The Frolo findings do not exist in isolation

This is the reason I think the preliminary survey deserves serious attention despite its limitations.

Several of its themes are already visible elsewhere.

The Harm Panel

The Ministry of Justice’s 2020 Harm Panel drew on more than 1,200 submissions and identified concerns about the handling of domestic abuse, adversarialism, pro-contact culture, resources and silo working.

The Domestic Abuse Commissioner

The Commissioner’s Everyday Business research concluded that domestic abuse was the everyday business of private children proceedings and that the structural barriers identified by the Harm Panel remained prevalent.

IDAS

A September 2026 report from IDAS brought together experiences from more than 100 survivors, children and professionals and concluded that domestic abuse was still not always consistently recognised or understood within Family Court proceedings.

Sky News

Sky’s recent investigation reported a series of highly critical survivor accounts and put systemic concerns directly to the new President of the Family Division.

None of those sources proves every claim made by every respondent to another survey.

But together they make it difficult to argue that concerns about recognition, participation, delay and trust are simply anecdotal noise.

Sir Stephen Cobb has used the word that matters: culture

In his first major media interview as President of the Family Division, Sir Stephen Cobb acknowledged that legislation by itself would not be enough.

He said change would also require a shift in culture.

I think that distinction is critical.

You can rewrite a statute.

You can amend a Practice Direction.

You can introduce a new report template.

You can redesign case management.

But culture determines how those tools are used.

Culture is visible in:

• what professionals instinctively regard as important;
• which allegations they take seriously;
• how uncertainty is recorded;
• whether parents feel able to correct errors;
• how domestic abuse is conceptualised;
• how children’s behaviour is interpreted;
• how litigants in person are treated;
• and whether speed becomes more important than understanding.

This is why reform cannot be measured only by:

fewer hearings.

shorter cases.

more reports filed on time.

Those may be useful metrics.

They are not sufficient metrics.

What should Family Court reform actually measure?

If we are serious about cultural change, I think the system needs to measure more than throughput.

A court can become faster without becoming more trusted.

It can become less adversarial without becoming more accurate.

It can produce a report earlier without producing a better report.

Reform needs outcome measures which are capable of detecting those differences.

Child Focused Courts are an opportunity — but they must be evaluated honestly

The new Child Focused Court model is designed to identify issues earlier, hear children’s voices more effectively, improve information gathering and reduce unnecessary adversarial litigation.

Those aims are important.

The judiciary has described the model as transformative.

But the Court of Appeal has already made an equally important point in Re C [2026] EWCA Civ 1216:

the new procedure does not dilute the substantive obligations relating to domestic abuse, welfare and necessary fact-finding.

That gives us the correct standard for evaluating reform.

Not:

“Is the new model different?”

But:

“Does the new model make better, safer and more reliable decisions for children?”

What this means for litigants in person

None of this changes the practical reality of being inside a case today.

If you believe important evidence is being missed, the answer is not simply to write:

“Nobody is listening.”

The court needs something it can use.

That means turning concern into evidence and an identified welfare issue.

For example:

The clearer the issue, source and consequence, the easier it becomes for the court to engage with it.

Use the JSH Law Six-Question Check

When something important appears wrong or has been overlooked, I would test it through the JSH Law Six-Question Check:

How this survey should not be used

I want to be particularly clear about this because credible criticism requires discipline.

Do not use the preliminary Frolo figures to say:

“98% of parents do not trust the Family Court.”

That is not what this survey establishes.

Do not say:

“82% of Cafcass reports are wrong.”

That is not what it establishes either.

Do not say:

“63% of domestic abuse is ignored by the courts.”

Again, the data cannot support that conclusion.

And it should certainly not be inserted into an individual court case as though it proves what happened to a particular family.

The defensible formulation is:

In an early, self-selected Frolo survey of 87 parents with Family Court experience, respondents reported very high levels of lost trust, mental-health impact, concern about professional-report accuracy, child changes, unrecognised coercive control, cost and delay. The findings require further data and should be interpreted alongside wider research.

That is still a powerful statement.

It is also an accurate one.

Listening to lived experience does not mean abandoning evidence

There is sometimes a false choice in public debate.

Either survivor and parent accounts are accepted uncritically.

Or they are dismissed as anecdotal, emotional or outcome-driven.

Neither approach is good enough.

Lived experience tells us where to look.

Research tells us how widespread something may be.

Case-file analysis tells us what the record shows.

Professional evidence provides another perspective.

Official statistics show system-level patterns.

Judgments tell us how legal principles have been applied.

Good reform uses all of them.

That is why surveys like Frolo’s matter.

Not because 87 respondents should dictate national policy.

But because their responses may identify questions that a serious justice system should want answered with better evidence.

From 41% to 2% should be a question the system wants to understand

I am grateful to Zoë Desmond and Frolo for asking these questions.

And I am interested to see the full results when the survey closes and the larger dataset is available.

The methodological caveat matters.

It should be stated every time these early figures are discussed.

But methodological caution should not become institutional deafness.

The themes emerging from these first respondents are not appearing in a vacuum.

They sit alongside:

• the Harm Panel;
• the Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s findings;
• the IDAS research;
• recent investigative journalism;
• current court-volume and delay statistics;
• and the President of the Family Division’s own acknowledgement that cultural change is required.

The question is not whether every criticism of the Family Court is correct.

Of course it is not.

The question is whether the system has mechanisms capable of distinguishing:

a disappointed litigant

from:

a recurring procedural failure.

And then learning from the second.

A justice system should not be frightened of measuring whether people trust it. It should be curious about why they do not.

Child Focused Courts, legislative reform and new procedures all matter.

But cultural change will ultimately be judged by what families experience.

Whether relevant abuse is recognised.

Whether reports are reliable.

Whether children are genuinely understood.

Whether mistakes can be corrected.

Whether proceedings take no longer than necessary.

And whether people can emerge from the process — including those who did not get the order they wanted — believing that justice was at least capable of hearing them fairly.

That is a much harder measure of reform than case-disposal statistics.

It may also be one of the most important.

Need help making your Family Court evidence easier to understand?

JSH Law provides practical, defined-scope support to litigants in person in private children proceedings in England and Wales.

Support can include:

• case analysis;
• evidence organisation;
• chronologies and evidence schedules;
• identifying factual inaccuracies and source material;
• witness and position statement preparation support;
• domestic-abuse and coercive-control evidence;
• Cafcass and Child Impact Report analysis;
• appeal paperwork;
• court-bundle preparation support;
• and hearing preparation or McKenzie Friend support where appropriate.

The aim is to move from “something is wrong” to a clear account of what the evidence shows, why it matters and what the court is being asked to do about it.

Book a consultation

Related JSH Law analysis

• “The Obligations Are Unchanged”: What Re C Really Says About Domestic Abuse in Child Focused Courts
• Seeing the Pattern: What the Major Coercive-Control Frameworks Can — and Cannot — Tell the Family Court
• From Incidents to Trajectories
• Child Impact Reports and Child Focused Courts
• The JSH Law Six-Question Check

Sources and further reading

• Zoë Desmond / Frolo — preliminary Family Court survey findings, October 2026.
• Ministry of Justice — Family Court Statistics Quarterly: April to June 2026.
• Domestic Abuse Commissioner — Everyday Business: Addressing Domestic Abuse and Continuing Harm Through a Family Court Review and Reporting Mechanism.
• Ministry of Justice — Government response to Everyday Business, June 2026.
• IDAS — Family Court Domestic Abuse: A Review of Domestic Abuse & Private Law Proceedings, 2026.
• Sky News — investigation into domestic abuse survivors’ experiences of the Family Court, September 2026.
• Re C (Child Arrangements Orders; Domestic Abuse; Child Focused Court) [2026] EWCA Civ 1216.