Imagine you are a happily married man touching 50. You have a glittering career, a beautiful wife and two young children. Home is a large, stuccoed house in a fashionable part of London.

Your wife starts a new job and falls in love with a colleague. In little more than a year, your life falls apart. You are accused of domestic violence and turfed out of your home of 13 years. You were once a daily part of your children’s lives; now you see them by arrangement. Fraught court hearings leave you exhausted and penniless. You rely on the kindness of friends for a place to stay.

The whole process leaves you with a broken heart and a burning sense of injustice: the irony is that you are a judge, presiding in the family courts. Amazing as it seems, this is the predicament of one of Britain’s most prominent barristers and part-time judges.

The man cannot be named due to the strict rules of secrecy surrounding family proceedings, but he has decided to speak out because he feels so strongly about what has happened.

“I cannot believe that somebody like me is so powerless,” he says. “Here I am, a judge, a father, someone who has never lifted a finger to another human being.

“Yet my wife and her lawyer have been able to run a case against me alleging domestic violence that has led to the issuing of an injunction against me with powers of arrest. Can you imagine the humiliation? I had no idea of the unfairness of the courts until I became involved with them myself.”

Groups such as Families Need Fathers and Fathers 4 Justice — some of whose supporters brought traffic on bridges and motorways to a halt as a protest at the beginning of February — have been complaining for years that men get a raw deal in the family courts, as has, very publicly, Bob Geldof.

Accusations of domestic violence are routinely thrown into the pot to justify barring men from their homes or children. Such a claim is almost impossible to refute, however glowing one’s character references — and the judge has many, from leading legal figures and from his first wife, who says she would “vouch for him unhesitatingly”.

The government and judiciary recognise that there are problems with the running of the courts. Earlier this month Mr Justice Munby, one of the country’s most senior family judges, admitted he felt “ashamed” when faced with a man who had fought for five years, unsuccessfully, to see his seven-year-old daughter.

A green paper due out this summer is expected to outline proposals for mediation, which would try to teach divorcing couples to put aside their own anger and focus on a post-separation plan for themselves and their children.

Family cases are extremely sensitive. If our judge’s situation had been played out in his own court, he hopes he would have asked more questions, taken more time, tried to get to the heart of the matter. But he admits that though he knew of the calls for reform within the law over the past few years, he did not take them seriously enough.

“As a judge you feel that your innate sense of fairness and that of your colleagues will prevail and that for that reason, the courts must work reasonably well,” he says.

His difficulties began just over a year ago. His wife had been having an affair for some months and had decided that, after 15 years, their relationship was over. The judge claims she wanted him to move out. He refused, partly because he didn’t see why he should and partly because he still loved his wife and did the lion’s share of caring for the children.