Jargon buster
- Cafcass: Cafcass stands for the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service. If one of you makes an application to court, 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.
