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Hi All,
Apologies if this topic is in the wrong forum but this is my first post.
Background
I was convicted of assault on my ex-partner in March this year and I am awaiting my appeal hearing in September. As a part of the conviction, I must attend a Domestic Violence Programme every week but I have yet to be allocated a start date.
Child contact was reduced in Dec'17 to supervised contact and improved to supported contact in May'18.
The next family court hearing is in mid-August and I wanted to get some advice guidance on what stance I should take or will I just be a case of the Family Court once again following CAFCASS's recommendation?
All contact reports, section 7s were extremely positive but the CAFCASS Officer cited my attendance to a DVPP as a reason for child contact to only proceed to supported contact.
I am concerned that I will have to wait until the final DRA Meeting in Dec'18 to hopefully have normal contact resume with my kids!
Any thoughts or guidance would be much appreciated.
Mr N
Hi there
Due to the conviction for assault, its highly likely that the court will go with cafcass recommendations and as they have already cited attendance at a DVPP as a reason to stay with supported contact, that may continue until you've completed the course.
The way I see it, there's nothing to stop you from asking for contact to move forward, the worse that can happen is that they say no.
Perhaps, if you get the course finished before December you could request that cafcass oversee the DVPP report and if satisfactory, that they sanction contact progression to unsupervised. If that's possible, once you get back to court in December, a final order can be drafted as you will already have some unsupervised contact under yourbelt.
All the best
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