Silence in Court?: Hearing Children in Residence and Contact Disputes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the extent to which children are consulted about their wishes and feelings in residence and contact disputes in three county courts in England.We found that children's preferences and feelings were included on court files in approximately one quarter of cases brought under section 8 of the Children Act 1989 applications.The reason for this low representation of children's voices appeared to relate to the age of the children involved (the younger they were the less likely they were to be consulted) and to whether parents came to an agreement before a report was ordered or before it was allowed to influence the outcome.We found that older children were more likely to influence the final outcome of a case; that children tended to be consulted in cases involving a high degree of conflict; and that children whose wishes and feelings did not coincide with the court welfare officer's conclusions often found their wishes overridden in the outcome of the case.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".