Jargon buster
- CAFCASS: CAFCASS stands for the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service. If one of you has made an application to court because you can't agree about arrangements for your children, the court will usually ask a CAFCASS officer to help by providing mediation or writing a report for the court about your children's needs. CAFCASS officers are sometimes called Child and Family Reporters and sometimes called Court Welfare officers.
- Child maintenance: Money payable by the parent the children do not live with to the parent they do live with to help cover the children's living expenses.
- Children and Family Reporter: A CAFCASS officer.
- Civil partners: A same-sex couple who have entered into a civil partnership.
- Cohabitants: couples who have been living together who are not married or civil partners. It includes both male/female and same sex couples.
- Contact (the new word for "access"): When and where a child can see a parent they don't live with or another adult (such as a grandparent), or have contact with them in other ways, such as phone calls, letters, presents.
- Court order: An official decision by a court.
- Dissolution: How a civil partnership is ended. In nearly all respects it is the same as a divorce.
- Injunction: An order made by a court either stopping someone from doing something or requiring someone to do something. If that person breaks the injunction, they could be sent to prison.
- Legal aid: A government scheme to help people with low income and limited savings to pay for legal advice, assistance, mediation and representation.
- Memorandum of understanding/statement of outcome: A document put together by your mediator at the end of the mediation sessions, setting out your agreement in writing.
- Money on account of costs: A sum of money paid to a solicitor at the start of your case to cover part of its cost.
- Parental responsibility: All the rights and duties that go with being a parent. All married parents have parental responsibility for their children. If you are not married, only the mother has it automatically, but an unmarried father can get it in a number of different ways.
- Residence (the new word for "custody"): Who a child is to live with.
