https://researchingreform.net/2023/06/16/domestic-violence-survivor-is-told-her-abuse-is-irrelevant-in-family-court-case/#respondDomestic violence survivor is told her abuse is irrelevant in family court case
16 Friday Jun 2023
Posted by Natasha in Researching Reform
A victim of domestic abuse was routinely told by judges, social workers and lawyers that the violence she endured from her former partner was not relevant in child protection proceedings involving their son. Files and evidence from the court bundle, which this site has seen, show repeated bullying and ill-treatment of the mother by professionals in the case, systematic failures to follow procedures and policy created to protect victims of intimate partner violence, and a lack of understanding about how domestic abuse affects children. “They don’t see us as people. They don’t see us as mothers. They look at a victim who’s in control of her emotions, that’s used against them. You get an emotional victim and they say, she’s emotionally unregulated, and they use your mental health against you,” the mother told Researching Reform.
The mother repeatedly asked the social workers and judges in her case to address her concerns about the domestic violence she had suffered, and which her son had witnessed on several occasions. She was told that the abuse was “historic” and that it was not relevant to her son’s contact hearings. The most serious incidents of domestic abuse stopped once the father acquired full time care of their son. A submission prepared for the mother by her barristers said, “M notes, and respectfully invites the Court to do the same, the nature of F’s admissions. These include his own violent outbursts, financial abuse and the inability to regulate his emotions in response to being turned down for sex, despite the obvious physical discomfort of M due to ill health at the time.”
“This is combined with F’s persistent cannabis misuse and his equally persistent efforts to lie about it to SS and the Court. His most recent admission regarding cannabis use came when he was referred to SS about the suspected smell of cannabis in his car. He denied smoking in the car, but admitted use in the recent past. In oral evidence he said he would return to using it in the future. He indicated a willingness to conceal such use from his mother,” the submission said.
The submission also raised serious concerns about allegations made against the mother and the drastic reduction in child contact. It warned of the consequences for her son if significant contact was not awarded to each parent, and the impact on their son of minimal contact with his mother. “What is proposed to the Court is significantly curtailing [edited]’s relationship with his mother. This will clearly be damaging to him. He will have a different experience of mothering to his peers and half sibling,” the submission said.
“It is law that a child witnessing domestic abuse is themselves a victim. So I can’t understand why all these people are ignoring the law. Perpetrators change their victims, not their behaviours,” the mother said.
When hearings for the case began, a judge denied the mother’s request to provide protective measures for domestic abuse victims while in court. The measures are outlined in a provision known as Practice Direction 12J. The guidance allows victims to give evidence behind screens so they cannot see their alleged abuser, or to pre-record their evidence, as well as prevent cross-examination in court by their alleged abuser. When the mother tried to appeal the contact order in the High Court, the judgment said, “Domestic abuse is always serious, but the welfare of [her son] did not depend on the domestic abuse suffered by the parents. The allegations being made were not relevant to where [their son] was going to live or how much contact he was going to have with his mother.”
The mother was told by professionals that the father was also a victim of domestic abuse, because she had physically defended herself from a sexual assault, which the court accepted had taken place, and had used bad language after she had been verbally assaulted by the father. She lost her request to appeal, partly due to a concession she had made during the proceedings: she had agreed, under pressure, not to revisit the allegations of domestic abuse in future hearings. The mother, who had been the primary carer for the toddler until legal proceedings began, and has since continued to look after her step-children, was told by the family court that she would now only be allowed six hours of contact a week because of what social workers said were significant mental health concerns. The toddler, who has a serious medical condition and special educational needs, was sent to live with his father and his paternal grandparents in the same house. The father, a cannabis user for more than two decades, consistently tested positive for medium and high levels of cannabis during the proceedings. The mother and the father were together for 11 years, and have one son together. Following what the mother alleges was ongoing domestic abuse, she separated from the father. The mother had previously been on medication for mild anxiety she had suffered throughout her life, and had reached out to a number of domestic abuse organisations for help and support. The recorded incidents of domestic abuse lodged with specialist support services prior to the family court hearings resulted in the father having supervised contact with their son, which moved to unsupervised contact within months. The father was not tested for cannabis during this period. It is not clear why contact was increased from the files Researching Reform has seen, or on what grounds the local authority felt increased contact was appropriate. The mother, believing that the father had turned a corner with his behaviour, asked him to look after their son while she was in hospital receiving treatment for an existing health condition. She then asked the father to return their son to her care when she left the hospital, but the father refused. The refusal was coupled with another incidence of domestic abuse, and coincided with the mother telling the father she had entered into a new relationship with her current partner. The disagreement about contact arrangements involving an episode of domestic abuse led to their son being placed on the Child Protection Register. The mother then initiated family court proceedings to try to reinstate her contact. An incident of domestic abuse involving the mother and the father at a hospital while their son was undergoing surgery, resulted in the mother saying she could no longer continue with things as they were. The event was shared with social services, who interpreted the incident as a suicide attempt, rather than suicidal ideation without an intent to die by suicide. The mother was given supervised contact, which included supervised handovers. Despite subsequent court-ordered reports by psychiatrists confirming the mother showed no risk of suicide, had responded very well to therapy and was functioning normally, she was never offered more than 6 hours of contact with her son. The mother had not had any suicidal ideations before the child protection proceedings began. In an email sent to the mother’s legal team, one of the psychiatrists asked to evaluate the mother said, “[The mother] has earned my respect, and I think she can rightly feel pleased with how she has stepped up and taken responsibility for putting important things right in her life.”
“What [the mother] has achieved in this course of therapy in which the majority was delivered by a psychiatrist-in-training working under close clinical supervision is remarkable. She accepted this team approach. She was utterly reliable a positive, adaptive feature of her [edited] result. She recognised and took full responsibility for her tendency to be temperamentally irritable. She has curbed impetuous, inappropriate emotionally intense outbursts. At the same time [mother] has measurably and significantly improved her wellbeing. These are not trivial. They took effort and commitment,” the psychiatrist said.
Referring to concerns about the domestic violence the mother experienced and the need to consider the abuse in the case, the psychiatrist added: “Has the impact of domestic abuse [edited] been given equal weight to the matter of [the mother’s] psychological profile, which seems to highlight her personality traits/ character flaws as if they were inherent, permanent failings?”
Despite expert evidence confirming the mother’s stability and self awareness, and the tangible progress she had made, which was produced before the end of the proceedings, the professionals in the case never attempted to review the plan in place for her son, or consider an increase in contact. The files in the case contain a multitude of examples which denigrate the mother, treat her as a “lost cause,” and diminish her evidence. A key judgment in the case contained several biased remarks towards the mother, including unsubstantiated comments made by the judge. On one occasion the judge called the mother’s application for increased contact “not sensible,” because she was “heavily pregnant” with her second child, whom she had conceived with her new partner. The mother was looking after her step-children at the time, and, she said, was more than able to look after her son as well. The judge went on to accuse the mother of being underhand after she explained that the person supervising her contact was unable to take more time off work during a specified period. “M, it seems to me, attempted to, in effect, blackmail the court into allowing her to have unsupervised contact,” the judge said.
In another portion of the judgment, the judge criticised the mother’s ability to give testimony in court, and said she was “unable, at times, to answer a simple question with a straight answer, so that her evidence took a significant time to complete.” The mother is currently undergoing tests for suspected autism. n an extraordinary series of paragraphs, the judge made comments about a telephone recording between the mother and another individual, which the judge had not listened to. “[Edited] was unable to speak during the conversation because M continued to rant and eventually [edited] told M she was putting the phone down, because the conversation was going round in circles, and hung up,” the judge said.
“What is also concerning is that, despite knowing the recording was being made, M, as I find, was unable to control her emotions and speak calmly to [edited],” the judge went on. “It seems to me that this is an example of M’s inability to control her emotions in situations where she feels under stress or has a grievance, real or imagined.”
Upon listening to the recording, this site found no evidence that the conversation was “an example of M’s inability to control her emotions in situations where she feels under stress or has a grievance, real or imagined.”
The individual speaking to the mother remained polite throughout, and while the mother was clearly concerned about lies being relayed to third parties about her, the level of anxiety present in her voice was clearly within normal limits. In another paragraph of the judgment, the mother’s research about her son’s needs was belittled, with the judge claiming, “[Father] takes the view that the school are the experts and are best placed to advise him about what is best for [his son]. M has said she has done online research, but she is not an expert and this court does not recognise “Dr Google “ as an expert either.”
The judge concluded that a child arrangements order, which sets out how much time a child has with each parent, was impossible due to disagreements about contact between the parents. “This behaviour by both of these parents shows an inability to work together in the way that a shared residence order for [their son] would, it seems to me, require.”
However, the judge acknowledged later on in the judgment that, “though M is rightly critical of F for his use of cannabis, she does not seek to argue that [their son] should live with her and only have contact with F.”
By contrast, the father in the case, who has repeatedly refused a balanced contact arrangement, is painted in a more favourable light. Although the judge acknowledged that the father had been critical of the mother, had routinely breached contact arrangements in the past, had committed acts of domestic violence, and continued to engage in the use of illegal substances, she reserved her strongest criticisms for the mother. “M’s attitude to F, that he is not a competent parent, when all the evidence is to the contrary, would, it seems to me, mean that M would not work in a constructive way with F.”
The severity of cannabis use in this case is consistently underplayed by professionals, with the judge noting that while the father’s use of the substance is illegal, it is not an issue because, in the judge’s view, the substance misuse is not interfering with the father’s care of his son. It is not clear how the judge came to this conclusion without routine testing for the substance, which stopped early on in the life of the case, and detailed evidence of the toddler’s day-to-care. The judge urged the father to stop using the drug, and set the issue aside saying, “it is time that F grew up and behaved in a more responsible and adult way.”
The wording of the contact order means that the mother must now ask permission from the father to increase contact. She has asked for more contact several times since the proceedings came to an end. The father has refused every request. When the mother reached out to lawyers to see if she was able to launch another appeal, she was told that the case contained too many errors and was too complex to process on legal aid, having spanned more than three years. Other legal experts advised the mother that she did not have a case at all. Describing the impact the case has had on her, she said, “I would say it’s soul destroying, and, deeply derogatory. It’s absolute humiliation. The order itself is insanity. I get to do more with my stepchildren than I get to do with my son. And that kills me every day.”
