Children Are Not Weapons: The Control Files #01

What Is Legal and Administrative Abuse?

The Control Files is DAD’s short-form article series on the hidden forms of coercion and control that can unfold through allegations, institutions, process, and the restriction of parent-child contact. We begin with one of the least understood forms of abuse in Britain today: legal and administrative abuse.

There is a form of abuse that does not need a fist to cause harm.

It works through allegations, referrals, paperwork, delay, process, and the exploitation of institutional bias. It can strip a parent of contact with their child, drain them financially, damage their credibility, and force them to defend themselves not only in private, but before police, courts, and professionals.

That abuse has a name: legal and administrative abuse.

Legal and administrative abuse is a form of coercive and controlling behaviour in which one person uses the machinery of the state and the family justice process as a weapon against the other. Instead of direct violence, the harm is inflicted through false or distorted claims, strategic safeguarding referrals, vexatious applications, procedural pressure, and the manipulation of systems that were supposed to protect the vulnerable.

This is not a fringe idea. A Home Office-funded NatCen Social Research study on female perpetrators of intimate partner violence found that stakeholders identified legal and/or administrative abuse as a form of coercive and controlling behaviour described as more prevalent among female perpetrators than physical abuse. The same research found that male victims can be mistakenly viewed as the perpetrator, and can have negative experiences when seeking help from frontline services such as police officers, social workers, and medical professionals. Source

When children are involved, the stakes become even higher.

Legal and administrative abuse can be used to restrict contact, delay resolution, create suspicion, and slowly turn a loving parent into a supervised, limited, or entirely absent figure in their child’s life. In that sense, the abuse is not only aimed at the parent. It reaches the child too. Children are drawn into adult coercion and control and used as leverage, pressure, proof, or punishment.

That is why this campaign is called Children Are Not Weapons.

Because they are not.

They are not bargaining chips.They are not tools of revenge.They are not evidence bundles in someone else’s power struggle.

And yet official systems already recognise that this type of post-separation harm exists. Cafcass has confirmed that its training and guidance include coercive and controlling behaviour, post-separation abuse, and the misuse of court processes, even while key gender breakdowns in some areas are not recorded as structured data. Source

That lack of data matters.

The Ministry of Justice has confirmed in response to Freedom of Information requests that it does not centrally hold the gender-disaggregated child arrangements outcome data many people would reasonably expect to exist. Cafcass has also confirmed that some important gender-based breakdowns are not held in structured form.

What is not measured is easier to ignore.What is easier to ignore is easier to repeat.

And this does not sit inside a tiny corner of public life. The Office for National Statistics estimated that 3.8 million people experienced domestic abuse in the year ending March 2025, including 1.5 million men. The law also recognises children as victims of domestic abuse when they see, hear, or experience its effects.

A difficult but necessary question follows: when does institutional failure become complicity?

A judge, police force, or safeguarding body does not become complicit merely by being involved in a disputed case. But if credible warning signs of manipulation, falsehood, process abuse, contact obstruction, or coercive control are present, and those signs are still allowed to shape outcomes without proper scrutiny, neutrality begins to collapse.

When police act on stereotype instead of evidence, they risk inflicting secondary abuse through the authority of the state. When courts allow weakly tested allegations, repeated delay, or procedural imbalance to steadily erode a safe parent’s relationship with their child, the system is no longer simply witnessing harm. It risks helping to carry that harm forward.

Complicity does not always look like corruption. Often it looks like bias, disbelief, passivity, or wilful blindness.

And the effect is the same: the abuse gains force because institutions give it force.

DAD’s position is simple. If a parent is genuinely dangerous, the system must act quickly and decisively. But if a parent is safe, then allegations, bias, delay, and administrative process must never be allowed to destroy that parent’s bond with their child.

This is also why DAD is directing attention toward the Data Accountability Decree legal action framework: a public executive summary describes it as a proposed group litigation effort focused on alleged systemic failures in equality monitoring, outcome transparency, and institutional accountability across family justice and related state bodies.

If you or someone you know may have been affected by the issues raised here — legal and administrative abuse, contact restriction, secondary abuse, institutional bias, or the use of children as instruments of coercion and control — you can register interest here:https://www.sentientcompany.org/dadglo

Children are not weapons — and the law must never become one either.

If you or someone you know may have been affected by legal and administrative abuse, contact restriction, or related institutional failures, register interest in the DAD group litigation here: https://www.sentientcompany.org/dadglo