Court enforcement of child contact orders: evidence review

3. Sources and the evidence base

3.1 There is a very limited evidence base on the enforcement of child contact orders across the UK and in international jurisdictions.^[4] Trinder and colleagues, writing in 2013, found there to be a very limited evidence base on enforcement and that despite reforms in 2006 in England and Wales, no research had been done to explore or evaluate these until their own 2013 report, used to inform this paper.^[5] There is also a lack of exploration of specific issues within enforcement. As Scottish Government research from 2007 on dealing with child contact issues found: 'Remarkably lacking in the literature surveyed are any practical measures to address the failure to meet the parental responsibility of maintaining contact by the sizeable minority of nonresidential parents who lose contact altogether, even where the child concerned positively desires contact and this would be in the child's best interests'.^[6]

3.2 This review has therefore had to rely on a small number of sources. One key source is the review mentioned above by Trinder and colleagues. This research on enforcement of contact orders in England was carried out on behalf of the Nuffield Foundation^[7] in 2013. The research was based on a sample of 215 enforcement applications made in England between November 2011 and October 2012.^[8] A further key source for understanding enforcement (also mentioned above) was Scottish Government research from 2007, examining and reviewing mechanisms to deal with child contact issues in international jurisdictions.^[9] It is worth noting at the outset that there is very little data on cases of child contact enforcement in the Scottish courts. Other evidence is based on international law and law reform reports and other academic publications.

3.3 However, there are a number of current research projects, focussing on issues surrounding family courts' response to child contact issues, which will add to the existing evidence base once completed. A key project for the Scottish context is:

Improving justice in child contact: a partnership project being conducted across five European jurisdictions (Bulgaria, Cyprus, Portugal, Romania and Scotland) between November 2018 and November 2020.^[10]

The outputs from this project should be monitored, to add to the existing evidence base.

3.4 In early 2016, policy colleagues within the Scottish Government contacted civil servants across the European Union about responses to enforcement of child contact orders in other jurisdictions. The responses, considered alongside information from the 2007 Scottish Government report,^[11] are summarised in Appendix 1.