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When I was 18, I changed my name. Crucially, I gave myself a new middle name — Justine. Actually, it wasn’t new at all. It was the name my birth mother gave me before I was adopted. I can still remember the horror my teenage self felt  when I saw my birth certificate and realised [...]

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On a recent weekday evening at London’s Wembley Stadium, half a dozen Muslim women, some wearing headscarves, were taking it in turns to flip over some male opponents with impressive shoulder-height kicks. These women, demonstrating Safari Kickboxing’s female-only Muay Thai Kickboxing classes, were taking part in a ground-breaking celebration of Muslim women in sport. Pioneered [...]

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A couple accused of abusing their baby after 17 fractures were discovered have welcomed a court ruling which found that the fractures were not caused by abuse but by the bone-weakening disease rickets. The case is the second in two weeks where a court has found rickets rather than abuse was the cause of fractures [...]

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A woman was jailed for one day after letting her 12-year-old son get baptized without consulting the boy’s father, her ex-husband on the decision. Stephanie and Stephen Miller’s divorce contract states that decisions, including those on religious upbringing, about their children must be made together – and the boy’s mother was dragged to court. Both [...]

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My father died recently and my brother has moved in with my mother, and has been living there for six months. He has put his own house up for sale. I live in my own house. Our parents will split everything 50/50 between my brother and me. When our mother passes away, will my brother [...]

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The two wives of a fallen soldier sat in the front row at his today funeral after it came to light following his death that he was married to both of them at the same time. But the relationship between the two women has turned ugly after the soldier’s first wife received the folded flag [...]

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After a decade in exile, I find myself making an unexpected visit to your house, returning my son to his mother after a weekend with me. I don’t make it past your hallway, where we stage a civilised conversation, that even in its awkwardness reminds me how wonderfully well we used to get on. Perhaps [...]

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As love triangles go it could not have a more A-list cast — the supermodel, the Oscar-nominated actress and the billionaire who owns Gucci. Today in a Manhattan courtroom Linda Evangelista will give evidence in what could be one of the most expensive childcare cases in US history. The model claims that French fashion tycoon [...]

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The billionaire father of Linda Evangelista’s baby wanted her to abort their son, her lawyer has claimed as the supermodel meets her former boyfriend in court over childcare support. And taking the stand, François-Henri Pinault admitted he had broken up with the supermodel after discovering she was pregnant four months into their relationship. ‘I didn’t [...]

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The heartbreaking case of Niamh Lafferty and Georgia Rowe, who died in a double suicide in 2009, was avoidable, according to an inquiry. If the care home in which the girls both lived had more staff on duty at the time they absconded perhaps someone would have noticed them leaving through the unalarmed fire exit [...]

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If there’s one thing people of all political stripes can agree on, it’s that human relationships are complicated. Often they’re downright messy. So it seems counterintuitive for a government to introduce a set of policies that are predicated upon the belief that we all fit into the mould of a traditional nuclear family – from [...]

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Expert witnesses used in court cases are risking the safety of London’s most vulnerable children and should be better regulated, a senior official said today. Andrew Christie, director of children’s services at the merged Westminster, Hammersmith & Fulham and Kensington and Chelsea councils claims there is no “quality control”. Controversial cases where expert witnesses were [...]

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A British mother is desperate to get her daughter back after she was snatched in Egypt by her father for a second time. Leila Sabra fought an eight-month battle for custody of five-year-old daughter A’ishah after she was taken in 2009. The 35-year-old, from Whitefield, Greater Manchester, moved to Cairo and was reunited with the [...]

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Britons have an addiction to divorce fuelled by a ‘Hello! magazine’ attitude to marriage, a top judge has warned. Sir Paul Coleridge said family breakdown was ‘one of the most destructive scourges of our time’. Citing growing evidence of harm to a generation of children, he said youngsters whose parents separated saw their educational achievements [...]

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Anyone who works in child protection will tell you that one of the worst aspects of the job is having to take a youngster from its mother’s arms, possibly for ever. It is heart-breaking enough, even when you are 100 per cent sure that being taken into care is the best thing for that child. [...]

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EastEnders star Jamie Foreman today promised in court to substantially increase repayments on a Child Support Agency debt of £51,000 after his BBC contract was renewed. Foreman, 53, who plays bad boy Derek Branning in the soap, was warned by magistrates he faces jail if he fails to keep up repayments of the money he [...]

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A children’s charity has called for the law on child neglect to be overhauled. Action for Children claims the current law focuses too much on prosecuting parents rather than on intervening to protect children from harm. A survey for the charity suggests many parents are unclear about their legal responsibilities to children. Children’s Minister Tim Loughton said the [...]

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Russell who died in his sleep aged 84, last November, was known for a series of provocative films such as the Oscar-winning Women In Love and The Devils. He drew up his most recent will in 2009, leaving everything he owned to his wife Elize Tribble, 58, an American-born actress who nursed him through ill [...]

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Millions have been shocked by Friday’s story of the London couple who were charged, on flawed medical evidence, with having shaken their four-month-old son to death. The charges against the parents were dropped at the Old Bailey last December, but it was only last week that they finally won his sister back from social workers [...]

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Thousands of vulnerable people facing family breakdown could end up without legal representation because of planned changes to legal aid, according to a legal group. The Family Law Bar Association says proposed changes to legal aid in England and Wales could slow and cause difficulties in divorce hearings. The government wants to cut £350m a [...]

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The woman and her partner are fighting to regain custody of the little girl after social services became suspicious that they were not her biological parents and took her away. The woman claims she was convinced she had become pregnant and gave birth to the child after seeking fertility treatment in Nigeria. She said she was drugged [...]

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A Texas mother may have taken the old adage ‘Listen to your father’ one step too far. Brian Martin alleges in a lawsuit filed this week in Houston Federal Court that his ex-wife planted a recording device on the couple’s 9-year old child in order to record his private conversations. Mr Martin wants at least [...]

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The expert who played God… and the real-life Big Brother house where he tore families apart with bizarre tasks to test if parents were fit to keep their children PUBLISHED: 23:24, 13 April 2012 | UPDATED: 03:40, 14 April 2012 Comments (29) Share Few places could have been more fitting for a memorial to one [...]

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Las Vegas, known for famous casinos and adult entertainment, is also home to more single fathers per capita than any other US city, according to census data. A 24-hour work environment with many night shifts and plenty of temptations lead to more women abusing drugs and alcohol, a high divorce rate, and more men demanding [...]

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Mother who had babies through surrogate appeals for right to maternity pay A teaching assistant whose cousin carried her twin babies has called for greater surrogacy rights after discovering that she is not entitled to maternity pay. A mother who had a baby through a surrogate has called for the right to paid maternity leave. [...]

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Jane Kassim was born without a womb and her cousin Amy Bellamy, 26, agreed to help fulfil her dream to have children of her own. Amy gave birth by Caesarean section to Isla Jane and Ivy May but Jane was stunned when she was told she wasn’t entitled to maternity leave or the statutory pay [...]

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Child benefit proposals risk ‘intrusiveness’, says Commons library Parents face “intrusive” questions from the taxman about the length and stability of their relationships under George Osborne’s planned cuts to Child Benefit, an official report states.   The House of Commons Library says couples will have to provide detailed information about their relationship to HMRC so [...]

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‘Thousands of children’ to lose legal aid in shake-up Many of the children affected will be living alone from their parents Thousands of children will lose access to legal aid under government plans to shake up the system, campaigners say. Child rights group JustRights analysed government data obtained from a series of Freedom of Information [...]

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Vincent Tabak strangled the 25-year-old at her Bristol home before dumping her body nearby where it was found on Christmas Day in 2010. The 34-year-old Dutchman is now serving a life sentence after being convicted of murder. The Legal Services Commission has already paid £6,000 towards the bill for the barrister and team of solicitors [...]

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Scotland Yard’s review of the Madeleine McCann case is expected to cost nearly £2 million in its first year. Detectives from the Metropolitan Police’s Homicide and Serious Crime Command are carrying out a re-examination of the original investigation into the girl’s disappearance in Portugal in May 2007. Since beginning work last May, the British officers [...]

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For almost five years, Kate and Gerry McCann have suffered the anguish of not knowing what happened to their daughter Madeleine. Through it all, they have also had to contend with a sustained campaign of harassment conducted by a small band of fanatics convinced they had a hand in their daughter’s disappearance. Now, one of [...]

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Council bosses have abandoned their attempts to kick the family of a convicted rioter out of their council house. Maite de la Calva was told she would be evicted from the family’s £225,000 taxpayer-subsidised home after her son Daniel was jailed for joining in a raid on an electronics store. But the action has been [...]

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Border staff turned back lone, “vulnerable” children who failed to claim asylum when they arrived at UK ports, under a secret “Gentleman’s Agreement” with France, it has emerged. England’s children’s commissioner Maggie Atkinson revealed that under the 1995 deal, lone children arriving without travel papers were deported. The UK Border Agency ended the removals last [...]

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A “gentleman’s agreement” that allowed vulnerable children who entered the UK alone to be sent back to France has been ended after investigations by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner (OCC). The Landing in Dover report found the agreement allowed unaccompanied children to be sent back to France within 24 hours if they did not [...]

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Thousands of children are being ‘needlessly dumped in prison’ because of Britain’s failing youth justice system, a think-tank has warned. The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) said courts and prisons were being used to ‘parent children’ and were expected to sweep up problem youngsters inadequately dealt with by other departments, such as social services. In [...]

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Thousands of children are being “needlessly dumped in prison” because of Britain’s failing youth justice system, a think-tank has warned. The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) said courts and prisons were being used to “parent children” and were expected to sweep up problem youngsters inadequately dealt with by other departments, such as social services. In [...]

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A teenager left brain-damaged by a hospital blunder as a newborn baby has been awarded £6.5 million damages. Ewan Waker, now 15, was diagnosed with dangerously low blood sugar levels shortly after birth. But midwives at Harold Wood Hospital in east London sent him home. His mother Cecilia today said the High Court settlement was [...]

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The Ay family, Kurdish refugees from Turkey, was detained for 13 months in 2002 as the Government attempted to return them to Germany, where they had first made a claim for asylum. Among those detained at Dungavel immigration removal centre in Scotland were four children aged between seven and 13. The case gained celebrity attention [...]

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A baby at risk of becoming the victim of an ”honour killing” because she was born as the result of her Muslim mother’s secret affair must be adopted to keep her safe, the Court of Appeal has ruled.

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A mother, Emma Shaw, died following a catalogue of blunders by workmen at her home which resulted in her being electrocuted while mopping up water.

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A mother, Emma Shaw, died following a catalogue of blunders by workmen at her home which resulted in her being electrocuted while mopping up water.

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A mother buried alive by her “bored” boyfriend told how the thought of her young son gave her the strength to dig her way out of a shallow grave.

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A grandmother fractured her thigh after slipping on a plastic icicle which should have been cleared away by Father Christmas and his elf at Selfridges’ grotto, the Appeal Court has ruled.

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Unmarried couples who live together for five years will automatically take their partner’s entire estate if they die without a will, under proposals from the Government’s law advisers.

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When you are embroiled in one of the world’s most bitter and costly divorce battles, it pays to have a particularly loyal nanny, a legal claim filed in the High Court suggests.

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A groundbreaking report reveals the truth about how our society fails its violent young.

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It is right to try to keep families together, but we must be quicker to recognise when that’s not possible

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Despite all those Tory promises, fathers and grandparents will still be denied the right to see children after a divorce

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An official review into family justice which rejects plans to give parents equal rights to share custody of their children in the event of a split is “a betrayal of children and their families”, campaigners say.

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Female members of the Royal Family are to be given equality with men in the rules of succession to the throne, meaning if the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s first child is a girl, she can become Queen even if subsequent children are sons.

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