Deka Briefing: Abuse

Deka Chambers is a pre-eminent common law Set. We have leading practitioners in civil, family and criminal law. We consider this diversity a real strength in the service we are able to offer our clients.  Legal problems often straddle more than one field of law. In helping clients resolve them, we are able to offer and draw upon the expertise of our members across our different practice areas. There are many areas where we have complementary expertise: for example the related work of our police, crime and inquests and inquiries teams; the union of our cross border and clinical negligence teams in overseas surgery cases; and the benefit our professional negligence team enjoys from having in house commercial, criminal, family, property and personal injury practitioners.

This Briefing demonstrates this cross-jurisdictional expertise in cases involving allegations of abuse. It is an area where in the last 12 months members of chambers have advised and represented clients in precedent setting cases in the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal, as well as at first instance in the family, criminal, civil courts and inquests and inquiries. Here, our contributors cover a range of topics, including the law governing the removal of children from their families,  crime, developments in clinical settings following the Lucy Letby case, limitation and contribution proceedings in civil claims,  package holiday claims, and the threshold for a claim under the Human Rights Act 1998.

In this briefing you will find articles on:

• Limitation in Abuse Cases
• Abuse in the Clinical Context: Lessons from Letby
• Woodcock v Chief Constable of Northamptonshire [2023] EWHC 1062 (KB) – A Common Law Duty of Care to Warn?
• Recovering Losses from Abusers: Claims under the Civil Liability (Contribution) Act 1978
• Claims Arising out of Assaults in a Package Holiday Context
• The Removal of Children from the Care of their Parents in the Family Court: Relevant Statutory Provisions and Case Law
• Tolerating Diverse Parenting: The Threshold for Article 3 in Family Cases
• Staying Criminal Proceedings for Abuse of Process: A Brief Digest

Read the Briefing in full.