Fathers are predictably furious about a Ministry of Justice report out last week assessing how courts handle contact between separated parents and their children.

The study, by the Oxford University Centre for Family Law and Policy, looked at the perception that courts are biased in favour of the residential parent (the one looking after the child) — usually the mother. It vindicated the decisions of judges, finding that in the 10 per cent of cases that reached the family courts, most men won the right to contact or achieved more than they previously had.

The figures are doubtless correct. But the conclusions conceal key failings with the present system that give credence to the pain and anger felt by parents who cannot amicably agree contact arrangements over their child or children.

First, fathers (take as shorthand for the non-residential parent) resent having to go to court in the first place to battle what they feel should be their right. Secondly, a judge may make a contact order — but contact in practice may be, in one father’s words, “derisory”. Thirdly, and above all, courts still remain effectively powerless to ensure contact orders are complied with. So the judges may grant an order but it is empty.

Calum, one father, said: “The fact that tens of thousands of fathers, every year, have to go to court just to be able to see their children is a clear indication that something is wrong. Can you imagine how degrading it is to have to seek the court’s permission to see your own child — and be interviewed by a blatantly biased social worker to obtain the privilege?”

He accepts that contact orders are granted. The level of contact is often minimal, he says. “I am not allowed to see my daughter any more than every other weekend. Is that good for her? And I am one of the lucky ones.”

The Oxford study was a detailed and thorough piece of work — and its conclusions are unlikely to chime with those who feel resentful that their contact problems remain. Yet in one respect the researchers did acknowledge that the “fathers” start from a disadvantage. Resident parents, the study said, “start off from a position of strength and it is easy for them to spin things out; some applicants give up because the process is too long and costly, both financially and emotionally”.

It further accepted that “some resident parents and children remain persistently opposed to contact” and the court’s ability to deal with this “implacable hostility” are limited.

Even if courts — and government policy — are pro contact, the study noted, and however successful fathers may be in the courts, it says that “it is clear that a substantial number of children lost contact with their non-resident parent”. A reasonable estimate of the proportion of children without contact, it says, is probably 30 per cent.

So with almost one in three children not having contact with a parent, the study is only a partial picture. Judges have been vindicated; but the system overall still operates unjustly. As one letter writer to The Times, Peter Mahaffey, puts it: “In practice judges affect powerlessness in the face of the implacable hostility of a parent determined to extract revenge for divorce by using access to the children as a weapon. Therein lies the bias that the Oxford study concluded did not exist.”

One solution, according to some fathers, is to introduce a legal presumption of 50/50 contact — that must also be “meaningful” contact.

It is a viewpoint that found some favour among judges, the researchers found, as they believed that such a presumption could have some impact on the attitude and behaviour of resident parents — in other words, it could change the culture.

Courts and lawyers may know that judges operate such a presumption; but in general parents and the public do not. “News that the law had been changed to incorporate a presumption would very rapidly become common knowledge.”

Secondly, stiffer sanctions for non-compliance. These are coming into force this autumn, but it will depend on the willingness of courts to impose them — and the ultimate sanction of prison for flouting an order is never going to be attractive where it involves removing a child’s parent.

There is a long way to go before parents have anything approaching equal rights to contact with their children. The Oxford study noted that the justice system is not (nor can it ever be) perfect: courts must act in the interests of the children — and in some cases, that will mean that the non-resident parent may lose out. But it could be far fewer than now.

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