Purpose and Structure
The question
Fathers' Inquiry asks one standing question: Are fathers and their children treated justly?
It stays a question. This is a record, not a campaign, and it is organised so that a reader who disagrees with everything in it can still check every part of it.
What this is
Fathers' Inquiry is a public record of testimony. Fathers affected by parental alienation, and by the conduct of family courts, police and child protection services, give an account of what happened to them. Each account is recorded privately, edited, and published as an individual recording alongside a full transcript.
Beside the recordings sits written analysis of the patterns they describe, built from published data. Every figure on this site carries its source, the year of the data, and a note on what the figure does not show. Where a number weakens the argument, it is published in the same place as the numbers that support it.
What this is not
This is not a court, and it is not a tribunal.
It has no power to summon anyone, no power to compel a document, and no power to put a question to anyone who has not agreed to answer it. It cannot administer an oath, and it does not claim to. It does not decide who was right. It does not award anything, order anything, or overturn anything.
Nothing published here is evidence of anything, in any proceeding, anywhere.
Nothing published here is legal advice. Fathers' Inquiry is not a law firm. It cannot tell anyone what to do about their own case, and it does not try to. Anyone considering whether to speak publicly about a matter that involves them should take advice from a lawyer in their own jurisdiction first.
4. How to Read an Account Published Here
Each recording on this site is an account given to the Inquiry. It is one person's description of his own experience, in his own words.
It has not been tested the way a court would test it. Nobody has cross-examined it. The people described in it have not answered it, and in most cases have not been told of it, because they are not identified in it and so could not be.
Fathers' Inquiry does not decide whether an account is true. That is not a finding withheld; it is not a thing this Inquiry does at all. What it does instead is narrower and is set out in full in the Rules of Procedure: it records the account, it checks what can be checked from documents, and it states plainly on each recording what it was able to check and what it was not.
So when you read an account here, read it as what it is. A man said this happened to him. Some of what he said is corroborated by documents, and the verification note on that recording says which parts. Some of it is not corroborated, and the same note says so.
5. Why the Accounts Are Anonymous
Every witness is anonymous. This is not something a witness chooses; it is how this Inquiry works, and there is no option to be named.
The people a witness describes are also de-identified – the other parent, judges, lawyers, officers, caseworkers and experts. This is done by generalising what is said rather than by removing names from it. "A court left a contact order unenforced for fourteen months" can be published. The same sentence naming the court, the judge and the county cannot.
This has a consequence, and it is a real one rather than a technicality. Fathers' Inquiry can show that a pattern exists. It cannot hold any individual to account, and it does not try to. Some accounts cannot be published at all once they are generalised this far, because what remains no longer describes anything specific. That is an expected outcome of the method, not a failure of it.
Anonymity protects two people who are not the witness: the child at the centre of the account, who cannot consent to any of this, and the other parent, who has not agreed to be described.
What anonymity does not do. It does not prevent recognition by people who already know the case. A former partner, a lawyer who worked on the file, or a caseworker who handled it may well recognise an account from its details, however carefully those details are generalised. The page How We Protect People sets out what is done and what cannot be done, and anyone thinking of testifying should read it before applying.
6. How Testimony Is Taken
The full procedure is published in the Rules of Procedure, including the question set that every witness is asked. It is published so that a reader can see exactly what was asked and in what order, rather than taking anyone's word for it.
In outline:
- Application and screening. Not everyone who applies is recorded. Screening exists mainly to establish whether speaking publicly would put the applicant, or his children, in a worse position than staying silent. Where it would, the answer is no, and that answer is not negotiable by the applicant.
- A statement of truth, signed before an independent verifier, before the interview. It is not an oath. Fathers' Inquiry cannot administer an oath and does not pretend to.
- Recording, in private, with the questions shown on screen.
- Editing and de-identification, followed by a documented review by someone who did not do the editing.
- Approval by the witness of the exact file that will be published. Nothing is published that a witness has not seen in its final form.
- A minimum of 30 days between recording and any possible release.
No recording is released on an announced date. A recording is published when every stage above is complete, and not before, whatever else is happening.
7. What Is Published About Refusals
Fathers' Inquiry will publish how many accounts it declined and, in categories, why.
This is unusual and it is deliberate. A body that publishes nothing it is given, and never says so, is selecting for the most striking material and presenting the result as representative. Publishing the refusal rate is the cheapest available check on that, and it is a check a reader can apply without trusting anyone.
8. Corrections
If something published here is wrong, it gets corrected, and the correction is visible rather than silent. The Publication & Correction Policy sets out how to raise one and what happens next.
A recording that is corrected after publication keeps its original URL, carries a note saying what changed, and the correction is applied to every copy, including any mirror on another platform.
9. Who Publishes This
Fathers' Inquiry is published by a small group of fathers, working independently. There is no company, no charity and no organisation behind it – none of those exist yet, and nothing on this site should be read as suggesting otherwise.
The people who run it are not named here, and that is deliberate. This site removes identifying detail about every witness and about everyone a witness describes. Applying a weaker standard to the people doing the removing would be inconsistent, and the reasons a witness needs protection – a live matter, children, people who would act on the information – are not unique to witnesses. Several of them apply to the people running this as much as to the people testifying.
This is not a claim that anyone here is beyond identification. It is a decision not to publish names.
What does not change: there is a contact route that a person reads, corrections are made and shown, and the whole process this site runs on is published so that it can be checked without knowing who wrote it.
It takes no money. There is no donation page, no membership, and nothing on this site asks for a payment of any kind.
10. Independence
Fathers' Inquiry is not affiliated with any political party, any campaign group, or any organisation that lobbies on family law.
It is a separate undertaking from anything else the people running it are involved in, and shares no accounts, no user records, no money and no infrastructure with any of them.