Every week, we receive hundreds of enquiries from desperate dads who have been cruelly separated from their children in the family courts. Some enquiries are from celebrities, many of whom are left stunned by the treatment meted out to them by judges from behind closed doors, despite spending vast sums of money on expensive legal representation. Others are from dads who simply can't get their head around the confusing complexities of divorce law.

The primary problem is that there is no presumption of shared parenting in British family law – and nowhere is it written that fathers must see their children, despite the countless studies that prove the value of a dad in a child's upbringing. Courts residing over divorce cases habitually decide that children abide with their mothers, leaving the father to feed off the scraps of frequently meagre 'contact hours'.

Even then, the man is left swimming upstream. The same courts that happily send mothers to jail for not sending their children to school are oddly resistant to the idea of prosecuting someone for not adhering to contact orders. Put simply, the custodian (normally the woman) can effectively cut her other half out completely.