‘It doesn’t really matter to parents that this is ‘guidance’ and not law. It is not obvious to parents that the legal exercise a judge must conduct is unchanged, and that these decisions always did and always will depend on the unique facts of the case. It is not clear to parents that Sir James’ previous guidance of 2014 has not been revoked, but instead built upon. And it’s confusing to parents that this new guidance is based on research conducted more than two years ago with small numbers of participants. I’ve read The Transparency Project blog’s explanation of the guidance in the context of the law, but many parents will be relying upon the summaries (inaccurate or otherwise) that have appeared in the mainstream press and shared on social media. It is the signal that the publication of this guidance sends into the public domain that matters, as much as its actual content. What matters is that it feels like we have gone backwards. Secrecy, unaccountability and disempowerment are creeping back in.”
On 7 December 2018, Sir Andrew McFarlane, the President of the Family Division [pic], issued some practice guidance to judges entitled Practice Guidance: anonymisation and avoidance of the identification of children and the treatment of explicit descriptions of the sexual abuse of children in judgments intended for the public arena (see January [2019] Fam Law 68).
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