News.

In *Re C (Born August 2022)* [2026] EWFC 74 (B), decided on 7 April 2026 in the Bromley Family Court, Deputy District Judge Nahal-Macdonald conducted a fact-finding hearing into allegations of physical abuse and coercive control made by a mother against the father, in a case that had run for 57 weeks alongside live criminal proceedings.

The judgment illustrates the procedural difficulty — increasingly relevant to instructed psychologists and psychiatrists — of assessing risk and parenting capacity while a criminal matter applying a different (higher) standard of proof runs in parallel. Experts asked to report in such cases must be careful to work from the family court’s findings rather than pre-empting them, and to flag where their opinion is contingent on facts not yet determined.