INTRODUCTION

Children's participation is now widely accepted as an important aspect of contemporary family law decision-making processes. Research findings emphasising children's desire for opportunities to be heard in legal proceedings affecting them, with appropriate weight to be attached to their views, coupled with children's Article 12 rights in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) 1989, have prompted many jurisdictions to enact, or strengthen, statutory provisions and to implement mechanisms to enable children to express their views in the family justice system. These laws and mechanisms vary significantly across the world and so this International Handbook aims to bring together the diverse range of approaches and practices in the field to identify their similarities and differences. The Handbook also highlights current trends and will help to point the way forward globally.

The idea for such a Handbook grew out of a collaboration between the four co-editors when we met in London in March 2017, and then in Leiden in October 2017, and agreed to develop an international project based on our shared research interest in child participation in family law contexts. Two of us are based in common law jurisdictions (New Zealand, England and Wales), while the other two are from a civil law jurisdiction (The Netherlands). We recognised the exciting opportunity offered by combining our common law and civil law expertise, and by inviting contributions from leading child and family law researchers in our respective networks, to produce a book that would provide a state-of-the-art update on child participation internationally. This seemed especially important given that so many jurisdictions, having embraced child participation, currently grapple with how best to implement this within their dispute resolution processes. The Handbook enables the modes of child participation in these national contexts to be considered within the growing body of research on children's right to be heard in family law proceedings from legal and social science perspectives and from theoretical and international perspectives.

Child and family law proceedings span both private law and public law issues. This International Handbook focuses on private law disputes when separated parents are seeking to resolve their children's future care arrangements (variously called residence, custody, contact, access, etc.).