Mummy's Still Here

by Jeanne D'Olivier

  I argued against Christopher's view that we take this stance but he was adamant that it was my only hope of playing any role in my son's life in the foreseeable future. Had I stood my ground, would the outcome have been different? I will never know - but the Judge and other parties neither accepted my changed position, nor believed it - just as I had feared.

  The Final Welfare Hearing was due to take place in the Summer of 2012. R and Giles, who had now been promoted to being M's Guardian Ad Litem, were putting strong pressure on M to say he did not want to see me. How did I know this? Because I was the only one not to have shifted my position in saying that we shared a close loving relationship and always had. Furthermore my position came directly from me, and M's own letters, cards and earlier contact reports by independent witnesses, whereas M's alleged desire to have no further contact, came from Giles and R, both who had firmly stated they saw no role for me in M's future.

  M had never told me or anyone close to me that he did not want to see me and the long history of raising him as a single parent for seven and a half years of his life, produced a mountain of evidence that we shared a wonderful bond. More than seventy people had written in our support, to Social Services at the time they had planned to remove M from my care. The only time he was alleged not to want to see me, was since living with R and I protested that whilst Giles was affirming this in Court, he had himself witnessed a very positive contact between us. He could not deny this surely?

  The Judge had asked for further contact using a third party and I proposed a number of possible people to supervise - or a Contact Centre - knowing this was the only way of getting an independent unbiased view.

  The Judge refused all my suggestions which Giles alleged M had turned down flat. The only mouthpiece for M now was Giles who was parroting his father's wishes rather than M's. Even if, worst case scenario, M was stating that he wished to cut ties with me, which I could not in my heart believe, he would only be questioned by Giles who was opposed to contact and with his father present. How could one be sure what his true feelings were under those conditions?

  The Judge finally agreed to a "friend" and former colleague of Giles supervising. R and I were to share the cost of this and whilst any friend of Giles would seriously be suspect in my book, I had no choice but to agree. I could only hope that she would have the integrity that Giles lacked.

  Jill arranged to come and see me at my home. I could tell from the start that she was not really committed to making this happen and during the meeting she also kept telling me that M was now adamant he did not want contact. I wondered why she had bothered to come at all. I asked her if she had seen him alone and she said that he had wanted his father present. To date no-one had seen M without R in the room and no-one had seen me alone with M either since the UK proceedings began. Whilst formerly all contacts, even supervised by the most hostile of former Social Workers - had been reported as positive between us, we were now in very different and unchartered territory - swimming against a sea of people who openly had R's interests at heart, rather than M's and with no-one having witnessed myself and M alone together.

  On Christopher's advice I did not mention the sexual abuse or the fact that I felt M was now being coached by his father. I talked only of my love for M and my strong desire to see him. I showed Jill photographs of us together, statements and contact reports that described our relationship in glowing terms. My heart sank as I noted her apathy as she glanced at them with no real interest. She had already made up her mind and it was no surprise that she backed Giles's view that the contact would not take place.

  It was five months now since I had seen M. We had never been apart for more than a couple of days in the past and that was only when he saw R or stayed a couple of nights with his granddad. I thought back to how difficult it had been when I was jailed for abduction and I had had to wait two weeks before I saw M. Back then it had seemed like an eternity and the cruellest of separations but that was far cry from where we were now. Who would have thought that seeing him even in the oppressive conditions of jail, would seem preferable to the chasm we faced now?

  I could not have imagined how hard my life would become. The endless nights of sleeplessness and grief, the constant ache in the pit of my stomach as I feared for M's safety - his phone calls begging me to take him home filled my head and my heart with despair.

  I was sinking badly but the one thing that kept me going was my love for my son and I knew that I had to keep strong for his sake. I focused all of my energy on fighting the case and worked relentlessly through the sleepless nights, searching for evidence, precedents, learning and studying the law, the Children's Act - anything and everything that might make a difference.

  I had been given the thankless task by the Judge of co-ordinating bundles for myself, R and the Giles. It was a huge, painstaking and time-consuming task. I had no former experience of preparing a Court bundle and had far less resources than R, who having a business, had administration staff, a photocopier and all the other things needed to do this easily. I had only my laptop and my little home printer and was not driving, so even buying stationary or posting the bundles meant cycling with their heavy weight on my back.

  I was already exhausted, getting ill frequently from the stress, but I ploughed on, determined to meet every challenge and do it to the best of my ability. In between this, I taught my few adult clients, walked the dog and tried to keep my sanity intact.

  I finished the bundles in record time, fully indexed and paginated and hopefully containing the most relevant and poignant of evidence.

  With Jill failing to do her job and supervise contact, the Judge then appointed yet another Psychologist to the case. Once again this was Giles's choice of expert and I protested that this man had worked with him on three other cases and had never gone against Giles's view in the past.

  Given that Giles was supporting "no contact" between M and I, I could not believe that anyone selected by him would not support this view. It was baseless and cruel in the extreme but the Judge accepted his recommendation, refused my objection and allowed another person to be joined to the ever-growing chain of those supporting R.

  Christopher tried to encourage me to stay hopeful. He believed that even if this man was biased, that if I stayed calm and positive, I could persuade him that what he was being led to believe, may not be the true story.

  Whether I believed this man would go against the party line or not, I did, as I always did and approached the meeting with Dr T, with an open mind.

  The man who arrived to interview me a few weeks later was small, stout and had the appearance of Ronnie Corbett. He was initially cordial and I made him a cup of tea and invited him to sit at my dining table where I had laid out everything I could find that might give him a true picture of what our life had been before this happened.

  Whilst I had been cautioned by Christopher not to mention the Sexual Abuse concern, he himself raised it. He encouraged me to talk about my fears and told me that he had read the former Fact Find Judgment and seen the evidence of the last psychologist on the case, who had stated in Court that M had not withdrawn his allegations in her mind and would not be safe with his father.

  My heart leapt when he told me that he had the utmost respect for the former psychologist who was very highly thought of in the field and that if she felt that there was cause for concern about M's safety, then he would be obliged to recommend a viewing of the ABE by someone with the relevant experience in Sexual Abuse cases. He even told me of a case that he had been involved with in Jersey, where the Judge had found for no abuse, but after meeting the child, he had been convinced that she was an abuse victim and had been prepared to go against the Judge's finding.

  Could we at last have found someone who believed us? I was joyful at the thought that this man appeared to be listening at last. Against the background of what he had shared with me and his open statement that he saw me as an intelligent reasonable and clearly devoted mother. I carefully exp
lained the long history to our case and decided that I had nothing to lose by trusting him. As an additional insurance policy I asked to record the meeting on my phone. He raised no objection and thus armed, I opened up fully and spent what I felt were the most positive two hours I had ever had with a Court Expert to date.

  I was ecstatic when Dr T eventually left, reassuring me that he would be supervising a contact between M and I , without his father or Giles and that he would take into account the fact that M hadn't seen me for months and had had only R's influence in that time. Dr T was quite prepared to accept the fact that M may very well be parroting his father's wishes and not his own and that he would be able to identify this, should it be the case.

  The prospect of seeing my son again after so many months apart was the best tonic anyone could have given me and renewed my enthusiasm and determination to see this through to its conclusion. I worked even harder on my preparation of evidence for the hearing, feeling that there was now some hope of a positive outcome.

  I eagerly counted the days until I would see M and was happy to agree to Dr T meeting with myself and my father, who had come over for the Final Hearing to support me and give evidence.

  I would see M the following Saturday morning for an hour with Dr T supervising and M would also have some time with his beloved Granddad. After this we would meet with Dr T to discuss the contact and the way forward.

  I could barely wait for the day to come. I cleaned the house from top to bottom. Dad told me to slow down. "He's not coming to assess your house." He laughed but I wanted everything to be perfect. I bought a couple of small gifts for M, a new football and some art materials and stocked the cupboard with his favourite healthy treats and some not so healthy sweets to take home.

  I wanted to give something personal to M and he had always loved my paintings, so I spent several hours painting a picture from a photo I had of holiday we had spent in Rhodes together with my mum. I framed it and planned to give it to Dr T to take back to him.

  I did not sleep at all the night before the impending contact - counting the hours until I would be able to hug my beloved M again. I watched the clock, stared at the TV, my now constant nightly companion and waited for ten O'clock the next day to arrive.

  The phone call came at 9.45 am from Dr T - M was not coming.

  Chapter 9

  Final Non-hearing

  To say I was shattered at the news that my son would not be coming to see me after all, would be a massive understatement. I could barely breathe when I heard. My emotions ran from devastation to fury.

  I could not understand how a man of Dr T's experience could not persuade a now 10 year old child, to visit his mother for an hour with him by his side. It made no sense at all. M had never shown any fear of me. He had always engaged with me, even when R was present - albeit sometimes with an initial nervousness now that was clearly cultivated by his father and whatever poison he was drip-feeding him - but even during the most difficult of our contacts, M had always relaxed after a very short time and seemed to forget whatever the instructions were that he was being given at home.

  Dr T told me that he would email me with a full report of why the contact was not going to take place and once I had gained sufficient equilibrium to take anything in, I switched on my laptop and quickly read his lengthy explanation of why he had made this appalling decision.

  I rang Christopher for advice and read him the email - the gist of which was that M had refused to come and was adamant that he did not want to see me. I would later learn that whilst he had been ready to leave, he had suddenly changed his mind - in the presence of his father. How could Dr T not see that R was the deciding factor?

  I thought back to 2007 when the case had begun and how I had been forced to bring M on penalty of jail, regardless of any objection and when he was only five years old, to see his father in the most dire of situations. M would be sobbing and trembling and would cling to me. All of which was blamed then on me. I was accused of making him fear his father - but even when they had tried to force contact at his school or with someone other than me bringing him - he had never once engaged with R.

  It had taken six months of brainwashing to persuade M to even take a call from his father - even in foster care where he had no unsupervised contact with me and he only agreed then to thank his father for an expensive gift of a Playstation that Social Services had suggested he buy him. Carrots and sticks were the tools of choice to manipulate a small child - whereas a background of my love and care clearly meant nothing now.

  Christopher advised I ring Dr T and suggest that I go to M and see him at R's house. He felt that this could not be refused - even if I risked the possibility that under those conditions, M may well not engage with me. I would have done anything to see him. I did as Christopher suggested and tried to reason with Dr T who had, after all, been instructed by the Court to get an unbiased view of contact without R and his wife in the background. Whilst that ship had clearly sailed, it was imperative that Dr T see me with M. How could he possibly write a balanced report without doing so?

  Dr T refused my request and every other suggestion I could think of. I asked if my father could see M but that was declined also. I sat at the dining table with the activities I had prepared for M spread out before me and staring at the painting I had done of the two of us that I had spent hours perfecting and had planned to give him at the contact.

  Both Dad and I were outraged and Christopher had nothing else to offer other than to say that this was a travesty. I had to concede defeat and face the bitter disappointment of not seeing M - the consequences of which, I knew could be very dire indeed.

  Dad and I were due to meet with Dr T two days before the final Welfare Hearing that would decide my son's future and whether I would play any part in it. Once again I set to work preparing question after question for the doctor who by his actions, seemed to have swung from being someone who had initially seemed sympathetic to me, to being a fully subscribed member of R's support group.

  I was confused, mystified, bewildered and angry. I was to be given no opportunity to show Dr T the close loving relationship that M and I had once shared and which I believed would have quickly become visible, had even one Court Expert seen me with my son without R present.

  When we met with Dr T a few days later, I could not fail to express my anger. I stayed controlled but I am human and I felt a huge sense of betrayal which coupled with my grief and desperation, made me come across much more aggressively this time. That may not have been the ideal, but I was hurting beyond anything that I could articulate. I wanted to understand what had led to the sea-change in Dr T. This was the same man who had even conceded that M may well have been sexually abused by his father, who had told me that there was no evidence that anything I had done should prevent me from seeing my son and purported to seeing some form of shared care arrangement as the ideal. In fact he had firmly advocated that this would be the best possible outcome for M. Now it seemed I could end up with nothing at all.

  I challenged Dr T hard with my questions and the more I did so, the more he shrunk and became defensive. He was not the same man I had sat drinking tea with only a week ago. He was a coward, a weak man who had clearly been encouraged by the Guardian, Giles, to support his view. After all it was Cafcass who were funding the expert. Had I not seen this all before, I would have been shocked but he was not the first expert to have done a complete volte face - there had been many others who had seemed empathetic at the outset and then done a pendulum swing in their views.

  I was reminded of the psychologist that Social Services had brought over to the Island from Germany - all on the tax payer's dollar, I might add. He had told me that no-one could swing him and had supported M staying with me and not being forced to see R until he was ready and then switched his opinion entirely. He had given evidence against me, suggesting I was responsible for M's reluctance to see his father and then fled back to Germany as soon as the case was over. Philip, our forme
r QC had come across him at a later hearing in the UK where he had been completely discredited by the Judge.

  At this time there was a great deal in the news about Family Court Experts due to a report by Professor Jane Ireland who has raised concerns that many had made life-changing decisions about children without seeing the child or even the parent on occasion. Some were practising under false names and a great number had been exposed as not even possessing the qualifications they purported to hold. I did not know enough about Dr T to know what his background truly was, but he had let slip that he himself was divorced and saw very little of his own children. Giles too was a divorced father who had little contact with his kids. I wondered how much of their opinion could really be objective in dealing with mothers when they came from this background.

  Surely Experts are impartial, regardless of their views? If only this were true. We are all human and we are all affected by our own life-circumstances, but in these cases, any personal feelings must surely be put aside and as people with so much influence in moulding a child's future and either making or breaking families, one would have expected much more impartiality.

  Giles had met with Terry as one of the people I had put forward as a potential supervisor for contact and whilst he had been congenial to Terry and told him that he saw no reason why he was not a suitable candidate, he had turned him down flat. He had let slip at the meeting that he was sympathetic to Fathers for Justice to which Terry himself belonged. He had passed the information to R who had found references and photographs on the internet to Terry's activities and this was used as a reason to turn to him down - and worse still not before R had shown the pictures to M to make him nervous of a man whom he had happily played cricket with in the hallway of my house.