The 10th anniversary of the murder of Claire Throssell’s two young sons, Jack and Paul, is a horrifying reminder of the catastrophic consequences that can follow when the family justice system makes mistakes. The serious case review that followed their deaths, in a house fire deliberately started by their father, concluded that the court should have considered suspending the boys’ contact with him. Ms Throssell had left the family home due to domestic violence and had warned that he had told her he could understand why men killed their children.
Case reviews are supposed to be learned from. But a decade later, there is plenty of evidence that poor decisions are still being made when domestic violence victims come before family judges. Last month a convicted rapist, Kristoffer White, was stripped of parental responsibility for his daughter – but only after the child’s mother appealed an earlier ruling that permitted unsupervised contact.
