A FATHER’S access to children is routinely curbed at the merest cough of the word ‘abuse’ – except when the father is a Pakistani immigrant with a record of abuse dating back before the victim was born.
Sara Sharif was ten years old in August 2023, when murdered by her father Urfan Sharif and stepmother Beinash Batool. They were convicted in December 2024.
Only after the convictions was the public told that Urfan Sharif had been known to authorities as an abuser before Sara was born – an abuser of an earlier partner, of Sara’s older sibling, of Sara’s mother. He abused Sara for years. A postmortem counted at least 71 historical injuries. The abuse was reported by teachers, social workers, neighbours, and the child herself. Yet a family court returned Sara to her father and stepmother.
Making the case tricky was that all three parents (father, mother, stepmother) had been accused by their children of abuse, and that parents often manipulate children into claiming abuse by the other side.
Yet Urfan Sharif and his co-ethnic second wife were treated more generously than Sara’s white, Christian mother. Suddenly, in 2019, a Surrey County social worker decided, and a judge agreed, that Mr and Mrs Sharif were not threats after all, five years after the county had recommended that Sara should be taken in foster care, and in defiance of all evidence, except the abusers’ reassurances.
The reporting so far does not explain this U-turn. I have spoken to family lawyers who cannot understand it (but wish to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation in cases they represent).
The public has grounds to question whether Urfan Sharif was privileged by race, religion, immigrant status or any other legally ‘protected’ but unequally enforced characteristic.
A pattern has been exposed in recent years. Local authorities protected Muslim abusers of white and Hindi girls, since 2008, in Rochdale and elsewhere. National government misrepresented Axel Rudakubana as a Christian choirboy of no particular ethnicity, when he knifed white and Hispanic girls in Southport in July 2024. Only after his conviction in January did we learn that what the government had designated ‘misinformation’ is correct: Rudakubana is a second-generation immigrant, with a record of violent crime, anti-white racism, Jihadism and terrorist leanings going back to childhood, for which he was never jailed.
Urfan is male, the characteristic that usually gets a family court to assume guilty until proven innocent. Yet he is also Pakistani, an immigrant, a speaker of English as a second language, and an exploiter of the hijab and home schooling to hide Sara’s injuries from the world.
Do we have two-tier justice in family courts, by race as well as gender? If so, we should be talking about two-by-two-tier justice . . . or four-tier justice, God help us.
But wait, there’s more. The judges at the family court that ruled in favour of Urfan’s custody of Sara, despite his record of abuse, were protected from exposure until the end of January this year – 17 months after her death.
Privilege by public office overlaps privilege by gender. The leading and second judge are female (Alison Raeside, Sally Williams). The third judge (Peter Nathan) was rarely involved, and retired anyway. I don’t know whether gender was a factor in their anonymity, but I know this: only the male judge cannot accuse critics of sexism.
And we still don’t know the identity of the county social worker who suddenly decided that Mr and Mrs Sharif were not threats after all. What we do know is that the social worker is female.
So that makes two-tier family justice by at least three dimensions: gender, race, and public office . . . six-tier family justice.
Britain’s family law is already sexist enough. The law specifies the child’s interest in the ‘primary carer’, who is almost always the mother, because mothers spend more time at home. Secondary carers have no rights except to information on the child’s medical treatment and schooling, which mothers and teachers routinely fail to provide, and courts routinely fail to enforce. (Of applications for enforcement orders of any type, 98.6 per cent fail. Most of the applicants are men.)
Legal disputes about parenting almost always begin with a mother blocking a father’s access. More than twice as many petitioners for shared arrangements are men. Yet female petitioners are three times likelier to be awarded primary care. Over 88 per cent of primary carers are female. Over 93 per cent of child maintenance payers are men.
By contrast, most of the authorities are women. The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is 58 per cent female, the Child Maintenance Service (CMS) 70 per cent, and the Children & Family Court Advisory & Support Service (CAFCASS) 90 per cent. CAFCASS is required to consult the child’s teachers – who are 83 per cent female.
(Public authorities do not draw attention to their gender bias. I obtained these data under the Freedom of Information Act.)
If family law authorities are overwhelmingly biased against fathers, why did they rehabilitate Urfan Sharif? The authorities are not answering this question. They don’t have to.
The law grants family courts much greater discretion than is granted to any other type of court. Hence, family courts get away with wildly different interpretations. Some courts routinely order the parties into private mediation; others routinely try to mediate directly. Some courts order fathers into gradual ‘reintroduction’ to their children over years, after just a few months without access; other courts order mothers to restore prior access.
Family court discretion is compounded by a lack of consumer choice. The parties must go to the court that has jurisdiction over the geography in which the child resides. If that court is biased, lazy, or incompetent, tough.
By the way, the child usually resides in a jurisdiction by the choice of the mother, so the local court has an implicit bias to the mother. After all, she has more influence on local politics, advocates and media.
The court’s discretion and the consumer’s lack of choice are compounded by costs. Most parties cannot afford a lawyer for the duration of a case, so the judges get to run rings around an applicant representing self. Just getting to the hearing will cost you thousands of pounds in solicitor fees. That’s before you hire a barrister to represent you in court. And you must, by law, pay for a mediator, before the court will admit an application.
The cost is not just financial, but also in time (which affects opportunity cost). Mediation typically takes months, even if the parties co-operate. Once mediation fails (a normal outcome), the petitioner waits months before a first hearing. Yes, ‘first hearing’, because nothing will be resolved in one hearing (unless the other party caves to the applicant – most unlikely). Then the applicant waits months for a second hearing, sometimes more than a year – if the court hears the applicant at all.
The prohibitive direct and opportunity costs ensure that almost no party can afford to appeal. Appeal courts like to refuse an applicant representing self, so an appeal almost always needs a lawyer – and a particularly expensive lawyer skilled in appeals.
Even if the applicant can suffer the costs of an appeal, appellate courts will usually consider only procedural irregularities (such as a failure to consult the school), not the court’s interpretation of the evidence, and not the merits of the court’s judgment.
But surely judges are supervised? They’re not. They don’t report to anyone. You can complain to the Ministry of Justice, which pays them, only to be told that MoJ respects the independence of the judiciary. They’re not elected, so you can’t vote them out.
Alison Raeside herself marvelled at the lack of supervision in a now-deleted podcast: ‘I’ve never had an appraisal. Imagine that. You don’t get any feedback. No one tells you if you are any good.’
Yet she wasn’t being honest about the feedback. In 2018, she was criticised by the High Court for unfair, unequal and irregular handling of a case. In another case, a father sent threatening messages about her denial of access to his daughters, for which he was jailed in 2019. Later in the same year, she made her fateful decision to return Sara to Urfan Sharif. Sara suffered four more years of escalating abuse before she died.
So, court discretion, lack of consumer choice, prohibitive legal costs, prohibitive time delays, unwillingness of appeals courts to intervene, no supervision . . . sounds cushy to be a family court judge, right?
You might be thinking that the applicant could at least invite public scrutiny. Nope. Journalists are not permitted. Parties are subject to criminal prosecution for discussing cases (even though CAFCASS officers and teachers are notoriously indiscreet).
Journalists, in this nominally free and liberal country of ours, had to apply (yes apply) to the High Court, to get permission (yes permission) to report on who handled the Sara Sharif case. Only national media could afford such an application. Different outlets shared the cost.
Those journalists were initially refused. Justice Williams claimed a ‘real risk’ of harm to the judges from a ‘virtual lynch mob’. He had no evidence of any lynch mob, except justified public outrage at a family court that had returned an abused child to her abusers to be murdered. Two of the judges were already retired anyway. I smell whiffs of the government’s argument for turning a blind eye to organised abuse of girls by Muslim men – lest the public blames Muslim men.
Fortunately, Williams was overturned this year, although, get this, it took an appeal to the second-most senior judge in England and Wales (Sir Geoffrey Vos). To his credit, Vos did not hold back on the lower judge. Vos said Williams got ‘carried away’, ‘undoubtedly behaved unfairly’ and made ‘inappropriate and unfair remarks’ about the press. My translation: Williams was biased against the journalists, which implies that Williams is biased towards fellow judges. I smell whiffs of the government’s argument for refusing a national inquiry into authorities that turned a blind eye to organised abuse of girls – lest the public blames the party in charge.
So here’s a short list of outstanding subjects for national inquiries:
- The official cover-up of organised abuse of girls by Muslim men;
- The official cover-up of Axel Rudakubana’s identity;
- The inconsistent justice meted out to fathers relative to mothers;
- The inconsistent justice meted out to non-Muslims compared with Muslims; and
- The protection of family courts from public scrutiny.
I know readers can add to my short list. We’re only half a year into a five-year Labour government. By its end, the list will be very long. But not as long as the list of unjust family court cases.
