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Northern guy,
I totally understand what you mean. It's quite evident to me through my own experience of CAFCASS and also from what others have described to me that they really do not know what they are doing.
Like you say, I think it's in a large part down to perhaps not being trained adequately, and also being massively overworked, so proper due care and attention is not given to each case.
I think too, as of course having read the work of 2 officers in my case, they both reported completely differently to one another, which shows total lack of consistency between employees. Which makes CAFCASS a bit of a lottery really, as depending on what officer you get working on your case, you could get a different potentially worse experience than had another office been on it. This to me seems crazy, because when they replied to me they tried to palm it off a "professional judgment".
To me, if two people have the same information in front of them, but arrive at 2 different conclusions, then something is going wrong somewhere along the lines. But CAFCASS response is to take up in court. But I refuse to accept that as CAFCASS should be consistent across the board. Instead they do what they want, without any consistency and then palm it off onto the court and the applicant to sort out the mess. It's atrocious.
I have read a few S7's from other applicants recently, and I found they way those reports were written to be atrocious. In all of them there was a strong bias towards the mother, with CAFCASS offering a lot of "opinion" as to what the "felt" may have happened.
But in an arena when we are dealing with facts, opinion is not good enough. I think these S7'S are jazzed up to make the mother look good, because in reality the officers are inherently biased and sexist.
Slim made a good point that a lot of the cafcass officers are ex probation service employees, and of course all they saw day to day was the scum of male society. They then now in the present day assume all men are like it. It's totally wrong, but what we have to fight against and deal with. I wish there was a better and fairer system in place.
Anyway the wholes shabbang is now with my MP, just waiting to see if they are ok to sign it off and whack it over to the ombudsman.
Keep you posted!
Even the Probation Officers I work with haven't got one good word to say about them, the problem is like you said is they use all the same tactics what Probation Officers do when they interview Fathers as they do when they interview ex convicts :dry:
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