Separated mothers must not get away with 'Catherine Tate justice' and ignore dads' rights, says Appeal Court judge



Mothers who fail to obey rulings will be 'brought up short', judge says

Appeal Court judge Justice McFarlane says men often wrongly shut out of their children's lives

In a speech, he says separated mothers must no longer get away with 'Catherine Tate Justice'



Judge Lord Justice McFarlane, pictured, said Ms Norman should 'have her day in court'

Separated mothers must no longer get away with ‘Catherine Tate justice’ that prevents fathers from seeing their children, a senior judge said.

No mother should be able to ignore court orders, stop a father ever meeting his children, and then tell him ‘Am I bothered?’, Appeal Court judge Lord Justice McFarlane said.



He said that radical fathers’ groups were right to complain that men were often wrongly shut out of their children’s lives.



Mothers who fail to obey court rulings will in future be ‘brought up short’, the judge said.



The warning from Sir Andrew McFarlane, one of the country’s most experienced family judges, follows a series of reforms earlier this year designed to speed up cases which decide on how separated parents will share the care of their children.



It follows years of failure to enforce orders giving fathers contact with their children. In around 4,000 cases a year fathers go back to court repeatedly to try to get access to their children because mothers defy the courts.



Judges have rarely fined or imprisoned intransigent mothers because most believe that to punish the mother would harm the children.



At one point the last Labour government considered, and then dropped, the idea of making disobedient mothers wear electronic tags.

Sir Andrew said in a speech that he hoped the reforms introduced this spring will compel more mothers to stick to the rules.



‘Where, post separation, a child lives with one parent, it is hard to underestimate the expectation that the system will now place upon that parent to respect and to meet the need for the child to have a good, sound, ordinary relationship with the other parent,’ he said.

‘These changes should, and in my view must, mark the end to what I might call the Catherine Tate approach to post-separation parenting, where the parent who holds all the trump cards, because the child is currently living with them, simply shrugs her shoulders and says to the other parent, who merely wants to see his child, “Am I bothered?”’

Sir Andrew said that groups like the radical Fathers 4 Justice ¿ which organised disruptive demonstrations at landmarks and in parliament in the 2000s ¿ had a case. A campaigner is pictured dressed as Batman on a balcony at Buckingham Palace in 2004

‘The system, the law, now requires them to be bothered. They have a responsibility to be bothered and if they persist in abdicating from that responsibility they can expect all those they encounter in and around the court system to bring them up short.’



Sir Andrew said that groups like the radical Fathers 4 Justice – which organised disruptive demonstrations at landmarks and in parliament in the 2000s – had a case.



‘Whilst deprecating some of their tactics, I had, in the course of a number of meetings, sat down in calm circumstances and listened to the stories of a number of fathers who considered that they had been profoundly let down by the system.

