Fighting For Your Child — Or Fighting For Yourself?

I've been reading a judgment this week. [2026] EWFC 106(B) — it's public, you can look it up at judiciary.gov.uk/judgments/. I've read it a few times now and I'm still not sure how I feel about it. So I'm going to think through it here.

By the end of the case the father looks pretty indefensible. Repeated breaches. Suspended prison sentence. Making threats in the actual courtroom. His daughter — nearly 17 — so scared of him turning up that she was picking her university based on how easy it would be for him to find her. Fourteen court cases. Four judges. Most of her childhood spent as the subject of proceedings.

But I kept going back to the beginning.

Because the same judgment also records that this father had a genuinely warm relationship with his daughter when she was little. She enjoyed her time with him. There are videos. Multiple judges said so. And some of those good times happened when he took her outside his allowed contact — which got him into serious trouble and led to tighter restrictions.

And I think — at the start — he may have had a point. I think contact may genuinely have been restricted more than it needed to be. I think he probably experienced that as a profound injustice. And I think that injustice became the lens through which he saw everything that followed. For the next fifteen years.

That's the problem with an early grievance that has some truth in it. It sticks. Every professional who disagrees with you has been got at. Every order that goes against you proves the system is biased. You never have to look inward because the outside explanation is always there.

And I'm going to say something that needs saying. A lot of fathers will recognise that feeling. The sense that the system starts from a position that you are the risk. That the default is mother as primary carer and father as visitor. That you have to prove yourself worthy of time with your own child while nobody asks the same question the other way around. That anger is real. And in a lot of cases — not all, but a lot — it's justified.

Courts are not perfectly neutral. The bias, conscious or not, toward maternal primary care is documented. Fathers who have done nothing wrong find themselves fighting for scraps of time with children they love. That is a genuine injustice and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

But.

I also know what sits on the other side of that conversation. I know what it's like to be a mother who is genuinely afraid. Who has experienced violence, or coercive control, or the particular kind of psychological warfare that leaves no bruises but hollows you out completely. Who sits in a courtroom and watches a man she knows to be dangerous perform reasonableness for a judge who has known him for forty minutes. Who is told to facilitate contact with someone she believes will use that contact to continue hurting her through her children.

That fear is also real. And in a lot of cases — not all, but a lot — it's justified.

So we have two truths sitting next to each other and the court has to somehow find a way through them. And it doesn't always get it right. In either direction.

Which brings me back to this case.

Because what I think may have happened here is that an imperfect early framework — possibly too restrictive, possibly not attuned enough to what this father and daughter actually had — met a man who responded to that injustice in the worst possible way. Not because he was a monster from the start. But because he was a person in pain who couldn't separate fighting for his daughter from fighting for himself.

And once that happens — once the grievance calcifies into the only lens you see through — everything confirms it. Every professional who disagrees has been manipulated. Every order against you proves the bias. You never have to look inward because the outside explanation is always available.

Here's what I can't get past though.

If he had just complied. With those early orders — however unfair, however painful — turned up, taken the contact he was given, sent the letters, gone back to court properly and shown he could work within a framework — this case looks completely different. Courts respond to that. Contact builds. Trust builds. He might well, by now, have had something close to what he was fighting for all along.

Instead every time he decided his judgment mattered more than the order, he handed over evidence that he couldn't be trusted with more. He made the thing he feared inevitable.

I don't think he could see that. I think he genuinely believed he was just being a good dad.

And that's the part that stays with me.

Because there's a difference between fighting for your child and fighting for what you've decided your relationship with your child has to look like. In long proceedings that line gets crossed so gradually you don't notice.

At the end of this case his daughter was still open to letters. She left him an email address through her Guardian hoping he'd write. He didn't.

The court didn't end his relationship with her. His own choices did. But I think those choices started somewhere much earlier — in the grief of a parent who felt something real was being taken from him, who responded to that grief in ways that slowly, without him ever intending it, made the thing he feared inevitable.

If you're a father in early proceedings and contact feels unfair — hear this. Compliance isn't defeat. Working within an order you think is wrong isn't admitting it's right. It's just the only path that actually leads somewhere. Every time you show you can put your child first even when it costs you, you're building the case for more.

If you're a mother who is afraid — hear this too. Your fear deserves to be taken seriously. The court should never place a child in harm's way in the name of contact. If you are not safe, your children are not safe. That is not a secondary consideration.

And if you're anywhere in the middle of a long case — on either side — ask yourself honestly: am I still fighting for my child? Or am I fighting for something else now?

Because your child knows the difference. Even if they can't say it out loud.

Read the full judgment: [2026] EWFC 106(B) — judiciary.gov.uk/judgments/

This is not legal advice.