IMPLACABLE HOSTILITY- an irony.
When I was at the Bar, I represented a father in a private law residence dispute which lasted for six years.
When I first got the case, the children were aged 4 and 2. The parents were in the process of separating, and the father had left the family home and taken the children with him to his relatives, not a mile from the house.
A first hearing in the local County Court won him interim residence of both girls on the basis that A (aged 4) was ‘terrified’ of his mother and needed to stay with his father pending a psychiatric assessment into his attachment to his mother and the cause of his anxieties. The court was understandably cautious, not wanting to put the girls with an unsuitable parent. Naturally, B being her younger sibling needed to go with her. The case was transferred to the High Court. Over the years a plethora of reports was commissioned. As each new professional became involved, time passed, until the girls had remained with their father, for six months and then a year and so on. At first A and B had contact with their mother, the court being determined that they should have an ‘equal’ relationship with their mother. Contact was always difficult and A ceased to see her at all after about 18 months. Predictably, B followed two years later. At each court appearance, the mother, a highly educated respectable pillar of the community became more and more desperate.
The father stated he had no part to play in the girls hostility to their mother and would pay lip service to facilitating contact whenever the girls were ready. Of course they never were ready. All the girls needed to say was that they did not want to go to contact and he would say fine. Unlike school refusal, or reticence about the dentist, when he would insist and play a parental role, he felt unable to encourage them to see their mother. ‘It is up to them’ he would say, allowing his 6 and 4 year old to not see her for months at a time. Their image of her was allowed to grow unfettered. Their hostility to her condoned by his silence.
Over the years, two child and adolescent Psychiatrists interviewed the children as did two Cafcass officers, two family therapists, a child psychologist and finally a Guardian appointed through NYAS. All stated that they felt the situation was highly unusual and their primary suspicion was that the father was over involved with the children who were colluding with his belief that the mother was not a suitable parent for them. There was never any corroborative evidence of the father’s diary entries that the girls reported being smacked by their mother. Strangely, despite his ‘concerns’ about her treatment of them, he had never alerted social services nor taken them to his GP. For such a protective parent, it was a strange anomaly that he allowed some contact to take place even though he stated that they returned with bruises. None of the professionals ever saw any evidence of anything wrong with the children.
The children were from the age of 4 unwavering in their hostility to their mother, although observations of them together in the early days, before they stopped seeing her altogether, showed a loving close bond.When in a final desperate bid for contact, the President of the Family Division ordered 2 periods of supervised contact, one of the children had a tape recorder sown into her trouser pocket by her father, which perhaps unsurprisingly recorded her sobbing and saying she was terrified of her mother and shouting that she would not let her into the contact room. The father sat in a car down the road listening to what was going on in the contact centre. Did the children know their father was listening to their ‘protestations?’ He said not.
NYAS sought a Care Order saying that the children would be better off removed from the father so that they could feel free to have a relationship with their mother. The Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist stated that the balance was in favour of care as the girls adult relationships would be severely impaired by their alienation from their mother which had been borne out of a collusion with their father’s paranoia. The Guardian agreed.
The case ended rather abruptly, on one winter’s evening at 6.30pm on a Friday night. In a Judgement the High Court Judge found that the court process that the boys had been exposed to effectively for the majority of their childhoods was abusive in itself and that to remove them from their home where apart from the proceedings, they were happy and settled and doing well educationally was so far removed from their interests that the proceedings needed to finish. In short, although of course he had not ruled out contact for the mother, the effect was that these girls would now continue to be brought up with their father with no prospect of any relationship with their mother and all that would mean for them and their future.
I represented the father and I won the case, but the result did not sit well with me, as after 6 years of private litigation, I am not convinced that justice was either done, or seen to be done. I think often of that mother who has been deprived of her children and of her children who have been deprived of her and I wonder how it happened. Perhaps a more robust approach from the courts early on in the proceedings would have prevented the inevitable decline towards total alienation.
