A mother has been in touch with us for advice over the last year; following separation, the father was given a residence order for their daughter, and this mother has since encountered great difficulty in seeing her daughter. She has no drink or drug problem, or criminal behaviour which might justify keeping the child away from her; she is a professional woman and an active and committed Christian.

2 days a go she informed us that the court has made its final order, which restricts her contact with her daughter to 2 hours under supervision at a contact centre, 4 times a year for the next 2 years. Yes, she will see her 10-year-old daughter for just 16 hours over the next 2 years. An independent psychologist had reported that this child needed far more contact with her mother, and the child herself has begun voting with her feet by running away from her father’s home, in the face of which, this order is baffling.

No normal person would think this could possibly be in the best interests of a child: driving a wedge between mother and daughter in this way, permanently destroying the bonds between them, and let’s face it, that is where this particular court order is leading. This kind of thing has been happening to fathers for the last 25 years +, but we increasingly hear of it happening to mothers now, so just what is happening in our Family Courts? One theory is that a kind of mindlessness has grown up; rules and practices have developed, each of which came about because someone thought it would be good for children, but when applied as a whole, they deliver outcomes which have appalling long term consequences for children.

Or perhaps such practices have come about because it is convenient to state institutions that there should be one parent rather than two. No matter how hard one tries to implement equal parenting, schools continue to communicate predominantly with one parent only, GP’s and hospitals do the same, child support laws do not even recognise equal parenting as a concept, insisting that there be one parent with care to whom the other parent must pay maintenance, and anyone who has tried to have Child Allowances divided between parents will know how hopeless a task that is. In the same way Family courts will, when parents become too troublesome, simply award children wholesale to one parent and eliminate the other, as a means of bringing the litigation to an end.

2 days a go, a courtroom-full of experts met in secret: barristers, solicitors, a children’s guardian and a judge, and they arrived at the conclusion that it was best for this child that her relationship with her mother should be terminated, leaving both mother and daughter with a life sentence from which they will never recover. Both will be traumatised for the rest of their days by this decision, and this child will now be at increased risk of criminal behaviour, depression, suicide, ill health, and low achievement in life, all because of this decision. No-one in that court-room could really have thought that what they were doing was in this child’s best interests, but they did it all the same. Only they can really know why.