High-profile divorce cases regularly grab headlines and public attention and their circumstances (not to mention the public response to them) can reveal much about social norms and behaviours. Divorce cases can also lead directly to legislative reform, e.g. Owens v. Owens (2018) led directly to the passing of the Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act 2022, which made it possible for couples living in England and Wales to divorce without ascribing blame to either party, something unimaginable when divorce first became a concern of the state under the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857. Much contemporary family law legislation can be traced directly back to the 1857 Act, yet historic data about the lived experiences of the men, women and children who appeared before this first family court is currently unknown. Moreover, without a methodological framework to examine the poorly indexed court records (held under J 77 at The National Archives), such information is unknowable. This project will address these shortcomings using a new, multidisciplinary methodology that combined mixed-method historical approaches with feminist legal theory and digital humanities. An innovative relational database, designed by the PI, will enable the systematic examination of petitions made to the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes (CDMC) from its establishment in 1858 to 1923 (the limit of the 100-year rolling embargo). The project database consists of two smaller interlinked databases. The first uses core information about the case itself to create an Individual Case Record (ICR), and the second create Individual Person Records (IPR). IPRs can be attached to multiple ICR. The names of solicitors, barristers, clerks, judges, petitioners, respondents, and co-respondent(s), including their occupation, address, details of marriage, legal grounds of the petition, details of any children and related custody arrangements, along with the decision reached by the court, will also be recorded. There are also a small number of cases where an IPR outside of the legal professions is attached to multiple ICR. For example, Nadine Sophie Charlotte Brinkley appears as a child and later (twice) as a petitioner, offering the exciting opportunity to examine the longitudinal socio-economic effects of divorce in the 19th and 20th century. The resulting dataset will be interrogated to address 4 key research strands: a) History of divorce and domestic abuse b) Economic cost of divorce c) Child custody and mediation d) Development of the family law profession Systematically examining the J 77 files using the innovative relational database will answer direct queries about the CDMC, its officers, and the couples who appeared before it. The data will contextualise contemporary issues but, more importantly, through a collaborative workshop with policy makers and third sector groups including CAFCASS, and Women's Aid, and tailored policy reports, it will also influence new practice direction. The PI will also collaborate with project partner The National Archives, to engage with groups outside the academy, notably the family history and genealogy community and raise awareness of the rich information contained in the J 77 collection. This innovative, multidisciplinary methodology will transform not only our understanding of petitions made to the CDMC but also of 19th century society more broadly. In addition to policy and public facing outputs, the database will also form the basis of a field-defining monograph on the lived experience of divorce in 19th and early 20th century England and Wales and 2 journal articles. Crucially, the database will also act as a gateway to J 77, allowing scholars including human geographers, linguists, criminologists, psychologists, social scientists, historians, and legal scholars to create their own J77 cohorts for the first time, thus inspiring new research in multiple sectors and ensuring an afterlife for the project.

Women's involvement in the Criminal Justice System (CJS) can impact negatively on their relationships with their children. A proportion of mothers appear in both the CJS and the Family Justice System (FJS). As a result of family court proceedings, children may be placed with family members, with foster carers, or may be adopted. The disruption of mother-child relationships is associated with repeat offending and can be harmful for children. However, an absence of evidence based on large-scale quantitative datasets, means we cannot answer vital questions about the scale of this disruption and caregiver outcomes for children. Recent policy developments in England and Wales aim to preserve mother-child relationships with the aim of reducing female offending and repeat involvement in the criminal courts. However, policy makers are hampered by a lack of baseline evidence about mother-child relationships, against which they can measure progress. By focusing on female defendants in the Magistrates' and Crown Court, who also appear in the family justice system (public and private law cases), the COMFT study will link data to advance knowledge about caregiver outcomes for children, when mothers face trial. The study will be completed by a highly experienced and established team of data scientists, statisticians, and specialists in criminal and family justice. Based at Lancaster University, Swansea University and the University of Central Lancashire, the team will use the SAIL Databank at Swansea University, to safely access anonymised data and provide completely new cross-justice insights. The study titled "Child Outcomes for Mothers Facing Trial (COMFT)" has been made possible because the SAIL Databank has acquired new crime datasets produced as part of a related ADR UK study "Data First" - led by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). Family Court records are already held by the SAIL Databank. The Data First programme has unlocked valuable records which have been anonymised for research purposes. The MoJ is the project partner, and this will ensure effective sharing of expertise throughout. The Children and Family Court Advisory Service (Cafcass) and Cafcass Cymru are also essential partners. The study will last two years. Stage 1, comprises the linking of women's records across criminal and family justice, and the production of analytic tables to enable analysis of mother-child journeys and outcomes. The team will also describe (document) these data and convene workshops, to help other researchers use the SAIL Gateway for related research. Stage 2 of the study comprises two sub-studies that will capture the demographic profiles of mothers, and maternal pathways between the two sectors of justice, including repeat involvement. The sub-studies will also describe the type of family court proceedings (public and private law) in which children appear, and caregiver outcomes for children. A unique feature of this study, is that it has been designed with mothers with lived experience(s) who will form an advisory group (COMFT-Together). Mothers will help to shape the project and translate findings into policy solutions that are helpful to mothers and children. The leading national charity Birth Companions will support this group and are partnered with the team throughout. The study will provide a much clearer understanding of whether justice systems preserve or disrupt relationships between mothers and children, and help to identify opportunities for prevention. It will benefit policymakers tasked with delivering female offender policies, frontline practitioners, as well as children and families.

The study will identify outcomes for children of care proceedings by linking administrative data on children's services with data collected in a study of these proceedings. Linking research data about their court cases with administrative records about children's subsequent care can provide an account of outcomes for children, which will assist professionals working in the family justice system to make better decisions about children in these proceedings. Supplemented with information drawn from children's local authority social work files and interviews with professionals responsible for services, the study will demonstrate the power and limitations of administrative data in understanding outcomes of care proceedings. This innovative use of administrative data will be useful to academics and non academics, developing knowledge of the effects of contemporary policy and practice in child protection, and enabling a systemic and interactive approach to understanding care proceedings. The DfE and Cafcass are project partners supporting research access to the administrative datasets. In England and Wales, local authorities bring care proceedings in the family court to secure the protection of children where suitable arrangements cannot be made with parental agreement. The court's role is to make decisions and orders in the child's best interests, to secure justice for parents and children, and to hold the local authority to account. To achieve this it scrutinises the local authority's care plan and considers other proposals for the child's care from parents/ relatives and the child's representative (cafcass guardian). Decisions in these cases are necessarily based on a prognosis about the child's future care but courts obtain no information about what happens to children subsequently. This is true for most of those working in the family justice system (judges, lawyers, children's guardians, expert witnesses and social workers. Following these proceedings, local authorities have the responsibility for implementing the care plan/order by looking after children subject to care orders, finding families for those subject to adoption plans and supervising or supporting supporting those cared for in their families. Administrative records are kept on each child in the care system or supported by the local authority, and these provide accounts of social care performance by local authority and over time. This study will use these data to provide an account of the care/service histories for a sample of approximately 290 children subject to care proceedings in 2009-11, collected in an earlier ESRC study of practice in 6 local authorities. Data from these proceedings provides a rich account of children's pre-care lives and the court process through which plans were scrutinised and orders made. Linking these datasets will provide a nuanced account of the impact on children's lives of the legal and social work process that are applied to them. In 2013, a new process for care proceedings (now PLO 2014) was introduced to secure case completion in 26 weeks, approximately half the time taken previously. Court powers to order assessments were controlled, making courts more reliant on information from the local authority. The study will draw a new sample of care proceedings brought by the same 6 local authorities in 2014 to compare processes, decision-making and outcomes for children after 1 year with those in the earlier data. This will establish the extent to which shorter proceedings are resulting in more timely decisions for children, different plans and orders in proceedings, and different outcomes for children one year after the final court order. Outputs will include a report, summaries for family justice professionals, articles in academic law, social work and research methods journals, and for practitioners. There will be impacts on practice in child care and protection in the family court and local authorities.