Cox Associates: Family Expertise
Cox Associates has considerable experience in preparing reports for the family courts. As well as maintaining our own quality controls for the content, we have worked closely with a number of judges, solicitors, witness organisations & court officers to improve the style of reports and the performance of our experts in court. Many cases in this area are complex and have multi-layered issues.
The list below gives an outline of the issues we are frequently asked to address, often several within one assessment:
- Ability to Parent — Prioritising the needs of children; "good enough" parenting;
- Assessment of Children & Families — Assessments of situation & attendant risks;
- Contact issues — Absent parent; grandparents;
- Residence — Shared care or visiting;
- Risk Assessment — On parents; violence, emotional abuse, non-accidental injury; drugs, alcohol & sexual offences;
- Ability to protect children — From other parent; unsuitable partners; grandparents;
- Placement of siblings into long-term care — Attachments to parents & sibling bonds;
- Parental Alienation Syndrome — The programming or brainwashing of a child by one parent to denigrate the other parent;
- Capacity for Change— Short, medium & long-term prognosis;
- Intellectual capacity — I.Q., learning difficulties, ability to instruct solicitor;
Case Study
Mr R was accused of acts of indecency by his nephew and niece. Accusations were made recently: the acts were said to have been committed 20 years ago, and Counsel for the defence was querying the accuracy of memory / recall of an adult for events that are alleged to have occurred when they were a small child.
Research about memory in general, its reliability, forgetting, and memory in children was presented in a report, which concluded that memories of adults and children are influenced by events intervening between the original event and the time of recall — which means that recall of detail is erroneous — but the central event can be recalled reliably. Children as young as three are capable of remembering outstanding events and traumatic events are remembered particularly vividly for many years.
What was interesting about this case was, why the nephew and niece wait until now to make such allegations? The answer, it seems, was that one of them had themselves recently become a parent!