THE ABSENT PARENT CIC – FULL MISSION STATEMENT (UPDATED: LOTTIE’s Law)

OUR MISSION

1. Raise Awareness Through Publishing, Storytelling & Education

• Publish books, articles, reports and digital content exposing the impact of the silver bullet tactic in divorce and family-court proceedings.
• Share lived experience to show how this tactic works in practice, the harm it causes, and its long-term effects on children and targeted parents.
• Educate parents, professionals and the public about post-separation abuse, coercive control and parent–child contact blocking (including by proxy) through clear examples, evidence and data.

2. Expose the Harm Caused by the Silver Bullet Tactic

• Highlight how emergency tools (including non-molestation orders) can be life-saving in genuine risk cases, yet can also be misused to gain unfair legal and emotional advantage.
• Show the emotional, psychological and financial impact on children and loving parents when face-to-face relationships are interrupted for months.
• Reveal how targeted parents are often silenced, mislabelled, or dismissed when they try to raise concerns.

3. Improve Professional Understanding & Accountability

• Support CAFCASS, social workers, mediators and legal professionals in recognising patterns of post-separation abuse, coercive control and contact blocking (including by proxy).
• Advocate for consistent standards of evidence, transparency and early testing of disputed material — including safeguards for Section 7 and ICFA reports so disputed claims are tested or not relied upon.
• Encourage meaningful accountability when unsupported decisions, drift, or poor enforcement result in avoidable harm to children and parents.

4. Gather Evidence, Collect Data & Document Patterns – The “CATCHING

THE UNICORNS” Survey
Judicial Behaviour, Post-Separation Abuse & the Silver Bullet Tactic
• Conduct the CATCHING THE UNICORNS survey to gather lived experiences from parents and professionals across England and Wales.
• Collect qualitative and quantitative data on allegations, safeguarding decisions, delays, breaches, enforcement outcomes, and long-term loss of face-to-face contact.
• Publish anonymised reports to improve professional training, guidance and decision-making and to support law reform based on evidence, not anecdotes.

5. Promote Better Outcomes for Children & Families

• Demonstrate how misused safeguarding tools, tactical allegations and delay can sever healthy child–parent relationships.
• Highlight how schools, relatives and professionals can inadvertently be drawn into enabling coercive or alienating behaviours.
• Equip parents and professionals with practical knowledge to keep children emotionally safe and supported, and to protect the child’s right to a stable relationship with both parents where safe.

6. Drive Law and Policy Reform – LOTTIE’s Law (England & Wales)

When the aeroplane was invented, the optimist built the aircraft — and the pessimist built the parachute.
Our protective laws were created with the right intention: to safeguard genuine victims of harm and domestic abuse.
But the family-court system has not yet built the parachute — the safeguards needed to stop emergency processes being misused, and to prevent separation becoming the outcome through drift.
Our core legal reform mission is LOTTIE’s Law: a statutory framework that triggers urgent action when a child has had no face-to-face parent–child contact for 150 days or more, and contact is only restored through court intervention (or remains blocked pending proceedings).

LOTTIE’s Law would require:
• a defined 150-day safeguard route with urgent review, written plan and timetable;
• a duty on the court to reach a clear legal conclusion on whether restriction is child-centred, necessary/proportionate, and factually supported, including reasons, triggers, and what must happen (and by when) for face-to-face contact to resume;
• automatic restoration of the pre-block routine where safeguarding risk is not proven (with structured stepping-stones where needed);
• early post-order compliance checks so orders work in real life;
• “time taken, time back” and proportionate costs consequences where unjustified obstruction is proven;
• a privacy-protected, findings-based LOTTIE Register (Lost Our Time Together Through Invented Evidence) to record serious, proven patterns of unjustified obstruction and repeat breaches;
• safeguards so Section 7/ICFA recommendations are tested early, transparent, or struck out on disputed matters;
• safeguards so emergency non-mol applications that affect child contact are rapidly tested where disputed, preventing delay from creating momentum against contact.
LOTTIE’s Law exists to prevent HLE (Harm through Legalised Exclusion) — where a child’s relationship is eroded through process drift, untested allegations and repeat non-compliance rather than proven safeguarding need.

7. Fix Structural Roadblocks That Enable Drift

• Advocate that essential directions (including fact-finding and testing disputed evidence) must be decided by the court on welfare/justice grounds and must not depend on legal-team
“consensus”, so a litigant in person cannot be blocked from necessary case-testing by imbalance.
• Promote a clear, statutory safe harbour for anonymised speaking-out, so parents can describe systemic issues and lived experience in the public interest — without identifying a child or publishing restricted material.

8. From Story to Change – My Time as “The Absent Parent”

My own journey sits at the heart of why this CIC exists.
For 321 days, I was removed from my child’s life.
Contact was cut, blocked and delayed.
Money demands in exchange for equal shared parenting were made and dismissed by professionals.
When I refused to pay, the situation escalated.
During reconnection, manipulation and distressing conduct was carried out openly and ignored.
There were repeated breaches of the Child Arrangements Order and days with my daughter were repeatedly lost without meaningful consequence.
When I attempted to enforce the order, the system responded with a long restriction on further applications.

This experience is not unique. It is part of a wider story:
a system that records almost everything — except the harm created when drift, weak testing and weak enforcement allow the silver bullet tactic to succeed.

Through The Absent Parent CIC, the mission is clear:
• To name what is happening.
• To count what is being lost.
• To secure LOTTIE’s Law so “time taken” becomes “time given back”, and children are protected from HLE (Harm through Legalised Exclusion).
Only then will the silver bullet stop being a winning strategy and start behaving like the boomerang it truly is — returning to the sender through appropriate consequences, while restoring a child’s right to a loving relationship with both parents where safe.