A HIGH Court judge warned separated and divorced parents yesterday that they risked losing contact with their children if they went too far in criticising the other parent.

Mr Justice Wall took the unusual step of making public a ruling that will stop a father having direct contact with his 12-year-old son. Over six years the father, a 51-year-old computer security expert, had made more than 50 court appearances in an effort to see his child, known only as O.

O had told a social worker during the course of the court battles: “It is like a war. You know they are fighting and they are fighting over me.”

In a written ruling, the judge said the court system “tends to entrench parental attitudes rather than encouraging them to change”. But parents had to take responsibility and not “blame the system”.

The judgment follow a series of demonstrations by fathers who claim unfair treatment by family courts, including Andrew Chick, who made a lone protest at the top of a crane near Tower Bridge.

In the case made public, the father, known as Mr W, blamed the courts for failing to recognise his former wife had turned his son against him. He wrongly accused the mother of child abuse, perverting the course of justice, defamation and perjury.

Mr Justice Wall said: “The father asserts that this is a case in which the mother has deliberately alienated O from him. It is not. The principal reason that O is hostile to contact with his father is because of his father’s behaviour, and not because his mother has influenced O against his father.”

He added: “Blaming the system, as the father does in this case, is no answer.” The courts were not “anti-father and pro-mother”, the judge said.

The judge said his ruling would mean Mr W would have no face-to-face meetings with his son for the foreseeable future but would be able to write letters and send presents and cards on birthdays and at Easter and Christmas.

Contact between O and his father initially took place by agreement but rifts began when the father applied to the courts for increased contact. In a letter, the boy had written: “I just want them to be friends. I love them both.”

The judge’s ruling came after the father withdrew his application for contact in a statement titled “Enough is Enough”.

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