F v Cumbria County Council and M (Fact-Finding No. 2).

In family fact-finding proceedings, allegations are determined on the balance of probabilities. The seriousness of an allegation or its consequences does not require evidence of special cogency or clarity. The court must assess reliability in the ordinary way and act on proved facts, not concerns or suspicions. Family and criminal proceedings apply different standards of proof and may therefore reach different conclusions. Where established findings are reopened, the court should consider the previous and further evidence together and reach its own conclusion on all relevant information. Medical evidence must be assessed both separately and in combination with the wider evidence. The court should resist tailoring individual findings to fit an attractive unifying hypothesis, while recognising that an unexplained medical cause may be a proper conclusion.

These family proceedings concerned an application by the father of Poppi Worthington and two surviving children to discharge care orders and obtain contact orders. The application sought reconsideration of findings made at an earlier fact-finding hearing in March 2014, when the court found that the father had perpetrated a penetrative anal assault on Poppi but that the medical cause of her death was unascertained. The further hearing was granted because new medical evidence was said to raise an alternative explanation for the post-mortem findings and bleeding. The central issues were whether the earlier assault finding should be reopened or changed, and whether the further medical evidence established a different conclusion.

1. Outcome. The applications were dismissed. The court maintained its previous finding that the father had perpetrated a penetrative anal assault on Poppi, using his penis or another unidentified object. The conclusion that the cause of death was unascertained was also maintained.
2. Fact-finding in family proceedings is governed by the balance of probabilities. Serious allegations do not require evidence possessing a special quality of cogency or clarity. The court must make an ordinary assessment of reliability. It must act on proved facts, not concerns or suspicions.
3. The absence of criminal proceedings did not relieve the Family Court of its duty to assess the evidence independently. Criminal and family proceedings may reach different outcomes because they apply different standards of proof and may admit different evidence.
4. On the rehearing, the court considered the earlier and further evidence together. The medical evidence was assessed both individually and in combination with the non-medical evidence. The court rejected the invitation to tailor individual medical findings to fit a unifying hypothesis.
5. The further evidence did not establish a plausible alternative explanation for the significant bleeding observed shortly after Poppi’s collapse. The court found that the anal dilatation, flame haemorrhages, anal tears and bruising to the external anal sphincter, taken together, pointed to penetrative trauma. The parametrium finding was probably traumatic, but its precise cause could not be determined. Faeculent material and glandular epithelial cells in the pelvic cavity were treated as post-mortem contamination.
6. The court concluded that the evidence as a whole continued to establish penetrative anal trauma and that the father was the only person who could realistically have caused it. It declined to determine the medical mechanism of death, as the competing explanations remained unproved.

This was a further first-instance fact-finding hearing in the Family Division. The judgment records that there had been no appeal from the March 2014 findings. The father’s applications for reconsideration of those findings and consequential relief were dismissed.