Rape victim urges parliament to cut off abusive parents

The Conservative MP Kate Kniveton has called on the UK government to reverse the presumption that contact is in the best interest of a child. Kniveton’s ex-husband, the former MP and minister Andrew Griffiths, was found in a family court to have physically abused and raped her. In a landmark ruling last month, after five years of litigation, Griffiths was barred from seeing his child after Kniveton successfully argued he posed an unacceptable risk of harm. Speaking in the House of Commons for the first time about Griffiths’ abuse and her experience in the family court, Kniveton said she was “dangerously close” to being let down by the legal system. She told MPs: “It should not be the exception that only my child has protection from a man found by a court to have committed multiple accounts of rape and abuse against the mother. That should be the standard.” Kniveton won Griffiths’ Burton seat in 2019 running on a domestic abuse platform after she left him in the wake of a sexting scandal involving two of his female constituents. Justice minister Mike Freer said a review into the presumption of parental involvement would be published by “late spring or early summer”. Griffiths denies that he raped Kniveton.