Domestic abuse child contact was assumed safe under English family law for over a decade. It wasn’t an accident. It was written into the law.
Leaving is supposed to be the end of it. For women who share a child with their abuser, it often isn’t. The law can require you to keep negotiating with the person you left, sometimes for years, sometimes with him seeing your child regularly, unsupervised.
What the law actually said
Since 2014, Section 1(2A) of the Children Act 1989 told family courts to presume that a child’s welfare is served by involvement from both parents, unless proven otherwise. On paper, that presumption could be displaced by evidence of harm. In practice, the government’s own review found it created what it called a “pro-contact culture.” Courts routinely ordered direct, unsupervised contact even where abuse had been alleged or proven. Supervised or no-contact orders were rare, even in cases where a parent posed a genuine risk.
A review of case files behind this reform found evidence of abuse in the overwhelming majority of them, and still, unsupervised contact kept being granted.
What changed
The campaign to change this was led by mothers who lived through the worst possible outcome of it. Claire Throssell’s sons, Jack and Paul, were killed by their father during court-ordered contact, after she had raised concerns about his behaviour. Her campaigning, alongside Women’s Aid and other survivors, is directly why this is now being reformed.
In October 2025, the government announced it would repeal the presumption. That repeal is currently moving through Parliament as part of the Courts and Tribunals Bill. It is not law yet. When it passes, courts will no longer start from an assumption that contact is beneficial, they’ll rely on the existing welfare checklist instead, assessing each case on its own facts.
That’s meaningful. It’s also not the same as saying the problem is solved. A welfare checklist still involves judicial discretion, case by case, and discretion is exactly what produced the pattern this review documented in the first place.
Where we think the law should go next
Removing a bad presumption isn’t the same as building a good system. Our view is that a finding of abuse, against the child or the mother, should trigger automatic supervised contact, not a fresh discretionary decision that history shows tends to land on unsupervised contact anyway. Not a permanent bar either, people can change, rarely, but it happens, and a system that assumes no one ever does isn’t honest.
We also think there’s a point where a child’s own view should start to matter, once they’re actually old enough to have an informed one. That’s a distinct question from Gillick competence, which has no fixed age and applies only to medical consent, not contact decisions, and we want to be precise about that distinction rather than borrow the term loosely.
We’ve set out the full reasoning behind this position, including where we think the age threshold should sit, in a separate piece, coming soon.
If you’re navigating any part of this, whether you’re facing family court, co-parenting with someone who’s hurt you, or trying to understand what protections actually exist right now, The Women’s Railroad is here. The original practical guide to equip women with the knowledge and options to navigate and leave domestic abuse.
