Can I See My Children With A Domestic Assault Charge?
I’d like to talk to you today about a common fact situation where you’ve been charged with domestic assault on your husband or your wife for example, and you have children so there’s going to be a condition that you not attend the matrimonial home and not to communicate with your spouse and the first question you are going to ask us is “can I see my children?” Well number 1, this is going to depend a little bit on whether your terms of association, what it says. It might say nothing about this situation and in that situation it’s going to make it very difficult because you cannot communicate with your wife. She might withhold the children. What we’re going to do in that situation is we are going to speak to the Crown and see if they will allow us to bring a variation application which hopefully they consent to, to allow access to the children to be arranged by a third party that way you are not breaching the communication order. So that can obviously often be arranged. Sometimes the police are you know, wise enough to add that in the original terms of bail but we sometimes have to bring a bail variation. So we are usually able to get that done as long as the children were not part of the crime and they weren’t, for example, the people who were assaulted.In another situation where the assault was on one of your children typically the police probably are going to put a condition for sure not to see that child and perhaps all of the children. That’s going to be very difficult to change or vary. So that is the answer to that question. It’s a common question and we can often solve the issue. Sometimes we can’t if the victim is the children.
