1.0 Introduction
1.1 Background
The Family Court deals with a large number of applications for custody under the Guardianship Act 1968, most of which are straightforward and processed without a great deal of interaction between the parties and the Family Court.
However, some are complex cases which are of long duration and involve a lot of interaction with the Family Court. These make heavy demands on judicially ordered professional services, take up court time and incur legal costs for the parties.
As well as taking up time and resources, these cases are demanding for the parties involved, and in particular for the children of parents seeking resolution of their conflicts through the Court. The Department for Courts commissioned this research to investigate whether complex Family Court custody cases can be identified early through particular characteristics or criteria.
1.2 The aim of the study
The main objective of this research was to determine characteristics or criteria that could lead to the early identification of complex Family Court custody cases.
The research sought to identify two sets of characteristics or criteria:
- characteristics that are readily available to the Court at around the time a custody application is made, and
- characteristics that may be apparent at the beginning of case, but are more likely to come to light as a case progresses.
The research focused on characteristics or criteria that the Court can be expected to have or to obtain information about.
1.3 The report
After describing the methodology of the study this report contains a brief literature review (section 3), discusses the characteristics informants associated with complex cases, and the mechanisms through which they contribute to complexity (section 4), reviews the perspectives of different groups of key informants (section 5), explores options for identifying complex cases (section 6), discusses issues relating to further quantitative investigation of characteristics (section 7) and draws conclusions (section 8)
