Where a child enjoys spending time with a parent, and that parent is capable of caring for the child safely, there would ordinarily be compelling reasons for preserving contact between them in the event of a family breakdown. The case Re CX (No 2), however, shows that this is not always enough.
Here, the court ordered that a six-year-old girl should have no direct or indirect contact with her father, despite a relationship the judgment itself describes as positive. Ending contact altogether is meant to be an exceptional course, taken only where there are cogent reasons for doing so and the alternatives have been exhausted. The judgment anticipates that the position may be revisited following a lengthy period of treatment for the mother, likely to take at least three years, but the order itself was not expressed as a simple three-year suspension.
The background to the decision
CX’s parents separated in 2020. An earlier judgment had found that the mother, referred to in proceedings as AZ, had been subjected to years of extreme emotional and psychological abuse by the father, referred to as BY, including a sustained pattern of behaviour intended to increase her anxiety and undermine her sense of security. Local welfare services had at points been concerned enough to consider disclosing the abuse to the father’s employer, though they lacked the mother’s consent to do so.
The contact arrangements made in 2023 followed a staged progression. Time with the father began in a supervised setting, moved to a supported arrangement, and was then extended, unsupervised, from two hours to six hours over eight months. That structure was designed to preserve CX’s relationship with her father while managing the risks identified by the court. It proceeded on the basis that risk could be managed while contact was gradually increased.
Why the usual structure did not hold
CX’s relationship with her father was not what changed in this scenario. Rather, what had altered was the mother’s diagnosis with complex post-traumatic stress disorder, and expert evidence that continuing the existing arrangement, or any adjusted version of it, was incompatible with her recovery.
The court was not weighing contact against a deteriorating parent-child relationship. It was weighing a functioning, positive relationship against the mother’s capacity to recover from the abuse that had caused the proceedings in the first place, and by extension her capacity to continue parenting CX at all. The court was told that all the realistic intermediate options had already been tried, including supervision, strict handover arrangements and reduced frequency, and that the guardian would have identified any further option capable of preserving both outcomes if one had existed. The position had, in the judge’s words, become a binary choice.
Why no contact remains exceptional
The legal starting point had not changed simply because domestic abuse had been established. Under the Children Act 1989, the court’s paramount consideration remained CX’s welfare, and the authorities require judges to examine the available alternatives before abandoning contact altogether. In domestic abuse cases, Practice Direction 12J adds an important qualification: contact should only be ordered where the physical and emotional safety of both the child and the parent with whom the child lives can, as far as possible, be secured.
Ending contact is therefore a last resort. What makes Re CX significant is not that the court set that principle aside, but that it reached the point at which preserving contact itself had become part of the welfare problem.
The welfare calculation
In this case, the court was required to weigh two different forms of ‘harm’. Ending contact would itself cause CX emotional harm, likely to be acute in the short term and potentially chronic if she experienced the decision as rejection or later became unwilling to rebuild the relationship. Continuing contact, however, created an appreciable risk that her mother would remain unable to recover, eventually undermining her ability to provide the day-to-day care on which CX depended.
The judge resolved that tension by treating the mother’s recovery as integral to CX’s own welfare, on the basis that stopping contact was the only means of securing CX’s medium and long-term welfare, including the prospect of eventually having two healthy parents able to meet her needs. That reasoning does not treat the father’s relationship with CX as unimportant. It treats the mother’s capacity to recover as a precondition for CX’s welfare that continuing contact, on the evidence before the court, could not accommodate.
What the no-contact order actually means
The order does not assume that the father-daughter relationship has ended permanently, but neither does the judgment minimise the risk that it might. The judgment recognised that CX could experience feelings of rejection and abandonment and could ultimately become unwilling to resume the relationship. The court accepted that risk because the alternative was to preserve contact in the short term at the potential cost of the mother’s recovery, and with it, CX’s longer-term stability.
There is to be one final occasion of contact, using an agreed narrative rather than an unstructured explanation of his own. The father has prepared a photograph album for CX. The mother is required to provide quarterly updates to the father, through her solicitor, covering matters including CX’s schooling. Those arrangements show that a no-contact order of this kind does not mean the court has simply walked away from the child’s relationship with her father.
What Re CX tells us
Re CX (No 2) does not establish that a parent’s poor mental health, even where caused by domestic abuse, will ordinarily justify ending a child’s relationship with the other parent. The decision turned on unusually clear expert evidence that the mother’s complex post-traumatic stress disorder could not be effectively treated while any form of contact continued.
What the case does demonstrate is that the effect of domestic abuse on the parent providing day-to-day care forms part of the child’s welfare landscape. Contact cannot be considered in isolation from that wider picture. Where maintaining one relationship begins to threaten the stability of the care on which the child depends every day, the court may ultimately have to contemplate an outcome that would ordinarily be regarded as a last resort.
In this case, stopping contact was itself expected to harm CX. The court’s task was not to identify an outcome without harm, because none existed. It was to decide which course offered the better prospect of protecting her welfare over the remainder of her childhood.
