APPLIED ANALYSIS SERIES — AAS-006
THE DIRECTIVE™ — APPLIED ANALYSIS SERIES — AAS-006
The Pro-Contact Culture Problem: Safeguarding, Assumption, and Judicial Risk
A SAFECHAIN™ Governance Analysis of Child Contact, Domestic Abuse, Risk Assessment, and Procedural Decision-Making
Reference: SAFECHAIN/AAS/2026/006
Author: Samantha Avril-Andreassen FRSA
Organisation: SAFECHAINN Ltd (Company No. 12038453)
Abstract
In June 2020, the Ministry of Justice's expert panel report Assessing Risk of Harm to Children and Parents in Private Law Children Cases identified four structural barriers to recognising and addressing domestic abuse in the family courts: a pro-contact culture, resource constraints, the adversarial process, and silo working between agencies. On 22 October 2025, the Government announced that the statutory presumption of parental involvement — section 1(2A) of the Children Act 1989 — is to be repealed, following a review which found that unsupervised, face-to-face contact remains the most likely outcome of child arrangements applications even where there are allegations or findings of domestic abuse or harm, and that the presumption was one of a number of factors contributing to the pro-contact culture the Harm Panel identified five years earlier.
This paper does not propose to resolve the policy question of how family justice should balance the benefits of parental involvement against the duty to protect — that question is, as of October 2025, the subject of an active legislative reform process. This paper's purpose is narrower: to examine, using the SAFECHAIN™ Foundational Architecture Index™, the structural conditions identified across AAS-001, AAS-002 and AAS-004 of this series — disclosure, professional recognition, participation, coordination and continuity — as they apply specifically to the moment a court must decide what contact, if any, should occur where risk is alleged but not yet determined.
Keywords: Pro-Contact Culture, Domestic Abuse, Child Arrangements, Presumption of Parental Involvement, Disclosure Integrity™, Participation Integrity™, Risk Assessment, SAFECHAIN™, The Directive™
1. Introduction: The Contact Principle and the Safeguarding Duty
The principle that children generally benefit from a continuing relationship with both parents following separation is long-standing in family law, and reflects a welfare-based judgment that has wide support. Since 2014, that principle has had a specific statutory expression: section 1(2A) of the Children Act 1989 provides that, in proceedings concerning a child's upbringing, the court is to presume, unless the contrary is shown, that involvement of a parent in a child's life will further the child's welfare.
The presumption is, on its face, rebuttable, and does not apply where there is evidence that a parent's involvement would put the child at risk of harm. The question this paper examines is not whether the presumption, as drafted, permits risk to be considered — it does — but how, in practice, a court identifies that risk in the first place, at the point a decision must be made, often on an interim basis and often where allegations are contested and not yet the subject of a fact-finding hearing.
2. Understanding the Pro-Contact Debate
The term "pro-contact culture" originates in the Ministry of Justice's 2020 Harm Panel report, which examined evidence from a public consultation and identified it as one of four structural barriers — alongside resource constraints, the adversarial process, and silo working between agencies — that operate to minimise domestic abuse within the family courts and limit the effectiveness of safeguarding measures.
AAS-001 of this series examined Everyday Business, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner's 2025 follow-up review, which found the same four barriers persisting and demonstrated, through the C1A form example, one of the specific mechanisms by which they operate. That paper's focus was on disclosure and validation rates. This paper's focus is on what happens once disclosure has occurred — validated or not — at the point a court must decide on contact.
The Government's October 2025 review of the presumption of parental involvement found that unsupervised and face-to-face contact remains the most likely outcome of child arrangements applications, including in cases involving allegations or findings of domestic abuse or harm, and concluded that the presumption — whilst described as not the main driving force — was one of a number of factors contributing to this pattern. The presumption is accordingly to be repealed as part of a wider package of family court reforms.
This is significant for the framing of this paper in two respects. First, it confirms that "pro-contact culture" is not a contested or marginal description but a finding the Government's own review has accepted and is legislating in response to. Second, it means the specific statutory provision most associated with the pro-contact debate is already being removed — which makes the structural conditions examined in Sections 3 to 7 below more, not less, important, since removing the presumption addresses one contributing factor without necessarily addressing the others the Harm Panel identified.
3. The Safeguarding Information Problem
AAS-001 demonstrated, through the C1A form, that domestic abuse allegations raised at the safeguarding stage are validated by Cafcass in only 64% of cases where they were noted — a gap that exists before any contact decision is made. Where an allegation is not validated at the safeguarding stage, it does not follow that it is untrue; it follows that the information available to the court at the point of an interim contact decision may not reflect the full picture even of what has already been disclosed.
This creates a specific difficulty for interim decision-making. Interim contact arrangements are, by their nature, often made on incomplete information, before a fact-finding hearing has taken place — and yet interim arrangements can themselves become the status quo that later decisions are reluctant to disturb. A pattern of contact established on an interim basis, before risk has been assessed, can acquire a weight in subsequent proceedings that is independent of whatever the fact-finding hearing eventually concludes.
This is a Disclosure Integrity™ question (Paper 9) in a specific and consequential form: not only whether information reaches the decision-maker, but whether the sequencing of when it reaches them — before or after an interim arrangement is set — affects the weight that information can subsequently have.
4. Participation Barriers and Risk Presentation
AAS-004 of this series examined the distinction between procedural accommodation and participation capability under FPR Part 3A, and the courts' own developing recognition, in Re M (A Child: Intermediaries) [2025] EWCA Civ 440, that a participation measure must be assessed by whether it achieves fair participation, not merely whether it was provided.
That distinction is directly relevant to how risk is presented to the court. A party alleging domestic abuse, particularly coercive control, may face exactly the participation difficulties AAS-004 examined: difficulty giving a clear chronological account under cross-examination-style questioning, difficulty engaging with a hearing in the presence of the other party, or difficulty articulating a pattern of behaviour — as opposed to discrete incidents — in the format a witness statement or oral evidence conventionally requires.
Paper 1, The Participation Gap™, and Paper 17, The Equality of Arms Paradox™, are both engaged here. If the way risk is presented to the court depends on a party's capacity to present it within the procedural forms available — and that capacity is itself affected by the abuse being alleged — then participation barriers are not separate from the safeguarding question. They are part of how safeguarding information does or does not reach the decision-maker in a form the existing process is equipped to weigh.
5. Disclosure Integrity™ and Risk Assessment
Sections 3 and 4 both point to the same underlying Disclosure Integrity™ (Paper 9) question from different directions: Section 3 concerns whether information that has been disclosed is validated and available at the point of an interim decision; Section 4 concerns whether information a party is attempting to disclose can be presented in a form the process can register as relevant to risk.
AAS-005 of this series, examining financial remedy proceedings, distinguished between a duty to disclose existing in law and a system's capacity to confirm, at the point it matters, whether that duty has been met. The same distinction applies here, in a different register: the duty of the court to consider risk under section 1(2A) of the Children Act 1989 is not in question, and is unaffected by the repeal of the presumption. What this paper examines is the system's capacity, at the point an interim decision is made, to have the information that consideration of risk requires — in validated form, and in a form a party experiencing the abuse alleged is able to present.
6. The Coordination Deficit™ in Multi-Agency Cases
The Harm Panel's four structural barriers included silo working between agencies — the same phenomenon Paper 25, The Coordination Deficit™, addresses. Information relevant to risk in a child arrangements case may exist in police records of prior call-outs, in records held by domestic abuse services, in safeguarding referrals to children's services, or in a parallel criminal investigation or proceedings — each held by a different agency, on a different system, often without a shared case reference.
Paper 26, The Continuity Deficit™, is engaged where a family proceeds through more than one stage or set of proceedings — for example, where a child arrangements case follows, precedes, or runs alongside criminal proceedings arising from the same allegations, or where a family has had prior involvement with children's services. AAS-001's C1A example showed one instance of information not surviving the move from a safeguarding referral to a court's safeguarding letter; the same structural question applies to information held by police, criminal courts, or children's services that may never reach the family court at all, or may reach it only if a party or their representative specifically requests it.
Paper 6, The Institutional Failure Taxonomy™, is relevant here as a way of categorising why coordination failures of this kind occur — whether through absence of a data-sharing mechanism, absence of a duty to share, or absence of any party to the proceedings being aware that the relevant information exists elsewhere to be requested. This paper does not attempt a full taxonomy of multi-agency coordination failures in child arrangements cases; it notes Paper 6 as the framework within which such a taxonomy could be developed, should the question above — what information exists elsewhere, and whether anyone involved in the case knows to look for it — prove as significant in this context as AAS-001 found it to be in the safeguarding letter context.
7. Judicial Risk, Uncertainty, and Decision-Making
Paper 33, The Responsibility Paradox™, is engaged at the point a court must decide on interim contact where risk is alleged but not established. The court bears responsibility for the decision; the information available to inform it may be incomplete for the reasons set out in Sections 3, 4 and 6, through no failure of the court's own. The court is, in this sense, asked to exercise judgment under a degree of structural uncertainty that is not of its own making and that the decision itself does not resolve.
This is not a criticism of judicial decision-making, and this paper does not suggest that individual decisions in individual cases are wrong. The point is structural: where the four barriers identified by the Harm Panel — pro-contact culture, resource constraints, the adversarial process, and silo working — combine with the interim-decision dynamic described in Section 3, the result is that the decision most likely to set the pattern for what follows (the interim arrangement) is also the decision most likely to be made with the least validated, least complete information. The repeal of the presumption removes one factor that the Government's own review found contributed to this dynamic. It does not, by itself, change the informational conditions under which interim decisions are made.
8. What Might Follow: Governance Approaches to Risk Visibility
The repeal of section 1(2A) is part of an active legislative process, and this paper does not propose to anticipate its content. The proposals below concern the informational conditions described in Sections 3 to 7, which would remain relevant regardless of the presumption's status, and which are offered as questions for consideration alongside the wider reform package.
• Whether, at the point an interim contact decision is made, the court's attention could be specifically directed to whether any domestic abuse allegation noted at the safeguarding stage has been validated, not validated, or not yet assessed — making the distinction visible at the point of decision, rather than only in the safeguarding letter itself
• Whether the participation questions developed in AAS-004 — understanding of proceedings, ability to engage with evidence, ability to present a case effectively — could be considered specifically in relation to how risk allegations are presented, where a party's capacity to present such allegations may itself be affected by the abuse alleged
• Whether a simple, standardised prompt — at the point of an interim decision — for the court to record what is known to be unknown (for example: "police records have not been requested," "a parallel criminal investigation is ongoing and its outcome is not yet known") could make visible, for any future hearing, what informational gaps existed at the time the interim arrangement was set
None of these proposals require legislative change, and none require the presumption of parental involvement, in whatever form it takes after reform, to be drafted in any particular way. Each addresses the informational conditions under which an interim decision is made, independently of the legal test the decision applies.
9. Conclusion: Safeguarding Must Be Measured, Not Assumed
The Government's decision to repeal the presumption of parental involvement, following its own review's findings on the pro-contact culture the Harm Panel identified in 2020, represents a significant acknowledgement that the assumptions underlying child arrangements decisions in cases involving domestic abuse require re-examination. That re-examination is, rightly, a matter for primary legislation and the wider reform package within which it sits.
What this paper has examined sits alongside that process rather than within it: the informational conditions — validated or unvalidated disclosure, participation capacity, multi-agency coordination, and the visibility of what remains unknown — under which the decisions most likely to set a lasting pattern, interim contact arrangements, are made. Whatever legal test eventually replaces section 1(2A), that test will be applied to the information the court has at the time. Safeguarding, in the sense this series has used the term throughout, is not only a question of what the law presumes. It is a question of what the court can see.
Reading This Alongside the Architecture
This paper forms part of The Directive™ Applied Analysis Series and should be read alongside:
• Paper 1 — The Participation Gap™
• Paper 6 — The Institutional Failure Taxonomy™
• Paper 9 — Disclosure Integrity™
• Paper 17 — The Equality of Arms Paradox™
• Paper 25 — The Coordination Deficit™
• Paper 26 — The Continuity Deficit™
• Paper 33 — The Responsibility Paradox™
It should also be read alongside AAS-001 (Two Reports, One Chain), AAS-002 (From Recognition to Practice), AAS-004 (Participation Integrity™ and FPR Part 3A), and AAS-005 (Financial Remedies and Disclosure Integrity™), each of which examines one of the structural conditions brought together in this paper.
SAFECHAIN™ welcomes discussion with the Ministry of Justice, the Family Procedure Rule Committee, the judiciary, Cafcass, and domestic abuse specialists on the questions raised in Section 8, in the context of the ongoing reform of the Children Act 1989.
References
Children Act 1989, s.1(2A) (presumption of parental involvement, inserted 2014; repeal announced October 2025).
Ministry of Justice (2020). Assessing Risk of Harm to Children and Parents in Private Law Children Cases: Final Report.
Ministry of Justice (2025). Review of the Presumption of Parental Involvement: Findings, and accompanying Written Ministerial Statement, 22 October 2025.
Burton, M. & Hunter, R. (2025). Everyday Business: Addressing domestic abuse and continuing harm through a family court review and reporting mechanism. Domestic Abuse Commissioner's Office.
Re M (A Child: Intermediaries) [2025] EWCA Civ 440.
© 2026 Samantha Avril-Andreassen. All rights reserved. SAFECHAINN Ltd (Company No. 12038453).
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Reference: SAFECHAIN/AAS/2026/006
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© 2026 Samantha Avril-Andreassen. All rights reserved.
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