On Monday 20 October, a government-backed amendment to the Victims and Courts Bill was tabled which will ensure that parents convicted of serious sexual offences against any child will automatically have their parental rights over their own children removed.
Currently, parental rights are ‘absolute’ in law and can only be managed through a court order. This means that even if a father is convicted of sexual offences against children and is imprisoned as a result, they retain parental responsibility. There is nothing to prevent him from seeking contact with his own child or having a say in the child’s life
There is also currently no automatic parental restrictions for men who are convicted and sentenced for a rape resulting in the birth of a child. Perpetrators are able to apply for parental responsibility, leaving survivors to live in fear that they may have to regularly discuss their child's health, education and upbringing with the man who raped them.
This amendment is a victory for the rights of survivors
It is alarming that, until now, child sex offenders have been able to retain parental rights over their own children despite the serious nature of their crimes, including those children who were born following a rape they perpetrated. For too long, abusive fathers have been allowed to control survivors by exerting their parental responsibility rights.
We welcome this new amendment, which at last places survivors' rights above those of their abusers by automatically restricting the parenting responsibility of those who sexually abuse children and commit rape.
We are also pleased to hear that these restrictions on parental access will take effect immediately after sentencing. This will remove the need for complex and lengthy family court processes, which can often become a means for the abuser to continue to exercise control and manipulation over the lives of victims and survivors.
We are now waiting to gain more clarity from the government around the circumstances whereby it ‘would not be in the interests of justice’ for the Crown Court to enforce the automatic restriction in such cases.
Key points about the amendments
The new changes to restrict convicted abusers of parental responsibility were tabled in Parliament on Monday 20 October, and will be added to the Victims and Courts Bill, which is currently at Committee stage in the Commons.
There are two key amendments:
- Parents convicted of serious sexual offences against any child, not just their own, will now be “automatically deprived” of their parental rights.
- A perpetrator’s parental responsibility will now be restricted in cases where they have been convicted and sentenced for a rape that resulted in the birth of a child..
A convicted sex offender would only be able to get their parental rights back if they made an application to the Family Court and could persuade the Court that it is in the child’s "best interests" that their parental rights are reinstated.
This amendment will require the Crown Court to make a prohibited steps order at the point of sentencing for rape where the court is satisfied that a child for whom the offender holds parental responsibility was conceived as a result of that rape, unless it appears to the court that it would not be in the ‘interests of justice’ to do so.
Where it has not been established in criminal proceedings that the child was conceived by rape but the offender is convicted of rape, and the Crown Court considers the child may have resulted from the assault, the case would be referred to the local authority for it to go through family court proceedings.
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