I was completely disadvantaged by being in prison at this critical time when, had I not, I would have been working day and night with the legal team, with the aid of my computer and papers. The Final Hearing would be the most important to date because it would decide M’s fate and who he lived with for the rest of his childhood. I needed my resources to properly prepare, but I was stuck without anything other than the gripping fear in the pit of my stomach that I was about to lose my beloved child forever.
Sometimes, I feared I may go crazy from not seeing M and the total injustice of what had happened to us. My frustration and powerlessness burned like a fire within me, extinguished only by tears of despair. Each day the fire burned a little less and I feared that the anger that had kept me strong, fuelled by nearly four years of litigation was dwindling, turning to embers and the ashes of our life becoming dust.
I was imperative to keep the anger alive knowing it was preferable to the despair and hopelessness I felt, but it was harder each day. Even a caged animal, first thrashing against its captivity will eventually lie down in its cage, defeated by its captors. Each time I felt my legs give way, I willed myself upright and let love raise me – the deep, enduring love I had for M. I knew he needed me to keep fighting and always would. I could never give up on him, and that meant I mustn't give up on myself.
My second weekend inside was now approaching. I found this the hardest time of all. Lock-down began at 5.15pm and didn’t end until 8.30 a.m. in the morning. I dreaded the long hours of solitude behind the cell door, locked in the confined space, oppressive and panic-inducing.
Each weekend, as lock-down got nearer, I would feel myself breaking into a cold sweat of anxiety. Writing was the only thing that helped me feel less alone, documenting my thoughts on paper, expressing the things that I could not say out loud; Trying to have a voice, where I had none.
Sometimes I wrote furiously, the words gushing forth, spilling my frustration and anguish on each page – other times the words wouldn't come at all. I was now sending the pages out every few days to my lawyers, as I feared otherwise that the staff would read them during their daily inspections. I knew my legal team would at least keep them safe for me until I got out - a testament for M, should he ever get to read them.
At first I'd had to exist without many basic items. I'd filled out a canteen order as soon as I had come in and so at the beginning of the second week, I did, at last have soap, toothpaste, toothbrush and a comb, as well as a newspaper which I devoured hungrily each day. I saved the Times crossword and Seduko puzzles until the night time lock up,to give me something to focus on. They weren’t much of a distraction but they were better than nothing. I had a picture in my mind of the many times I had watched M and my father pondering over the Seduko in the Telegraph together, his little brain trying to understand how it worked as his Grandad patiently showed him how the numbers added up. He loved being near to his grandfather and would take an interest in anything he liked to do, holding him on a pedestal of love.
It was Grandad who taught M to play golf and bought him his first set of clubs at the age of just three. It was Grandad who bought a Kayak so they could go out together, bobbing over the waves, and it was Grandad who gave him his wings to try new things, whilst I tried to offer secure roots. These memories would flash in my mind each night - bringing both comfort and a sense of yearning.
I watched Sky news endlessly through the night and never slept without the television switched on for company, so I was probably the best informed I'd ever been on current affairs. Not that that was of any real use to me in this non-world where things happening on the outside seemed just as unreal as this other world I'd entered.
Ten days after I was jailed, an article appeared in the Times which covered our case and talked about the problems of Judges accepting the word of experts in family cases without testing the evidence. This was a subject that would hit the press very hard a year later, but at the time it was still only really in the domain of people like Cavendish and Booker who have been pioneers in exposing the wrongs of the Family Court system in the UK and in pushing for less secrecy.
The Times article raised the problems of the new and intangible term that had been coined by experts of “emotional abuse.” It was a wide and highly exploited label that was being thrown around by so called “experts” everywhere and had emanated from the views of an American psychiatrist called Richard Gardner, whose theories, now completely discredited had disseminated throughout the world to English speaking countries.
Gardner had alleged that women who reported sexual abuse, used this as a weapon to deny contact and alienate the father. He had even made the preposterous claim that incest was a natural stage of childhood and had been responsible for the now widely used term of Parental Alienation Syndrome.
In most of the cases I'd heard about, this label seemed mostly to be attributed to women. Caring, good mothers, found themselves deemed to have emotionally harmed their children on the most spurious of reasons, such as failing to discipline enough or handing out too much pocket money, but in those cases where the father was involved, the common accusation was coaching and emotional abuse.
In our case from the first suggestion of coaching, by the Educational Psychologist to every Court appointed “expert” since, the baton of “emotional harm” had been passed on – the accusation that I'd influenced my son to fabricate things against his father.
I was powerless against it. I knew that it was a lie and that until my son disclosed, I had fully supported contact between M and R, but I couldn't prove the intangible label, they'd given me, any more than they could. There was no evidence either way, but it didn’t seem to matter as far as the Court was concerned.
As Cavendish rightly pointed out, until they abandoned, what was still a relatively new term of “emotional abuse,” more and more mothers would be forced to flee with their children as their only hope of keeping them.
Camilla flagged up hard the problem for mothers who are accused of coaching when their children make allegations of sexual abuse and tried to expose the deep flaws in a theory- that despite being fully discredited, was still being widely relied upon, especially in cases such as ours, where no forensic examination of the child had taken place.
Physical abuse is easier to identify because there are outwards marks to show for it, but often parents are wrongly accused of this form of abuse too. The child may have grazed or bruised himself in the playground and the parents could suddenly find themselves caught up in the nightmare of Social Services intervention due to an over- zealous teacher or other supposed well-meaning person over-reacting to something innocuous. Despite claims otherwise, young children are rarely believed or seen as credible witnesses. It didn't matter how much my son protested that I was a good and caring mummy who'd never coached him and never harmed him, no one listened. They refused to believe the truth of a child, when in fact, children find it almost impossible to lie and are easy to read, especially when they are very young.
The first Educational Psychologist had frightened M by telling him he had his father’s blood in him and as such, had to love him. It had seemed such a strange thing to say to a child of then only six. The Guardian had told M that he saw nothing wrong with his father telling him frightening stories about sharks gobbling him up and bogey men coming to throw him in the sea – he said he told them to his own children. When M had tried to open up to each of these people, they had shut him down and refused to listen.
The quality of people that were enlisted to supposedly help and assess, I would not have entrusted with the care of my dog, let alone my child. The Guardian didn't even know what a public school was. This was a man who had supposedly worked with children for years. It made one suspicious of their authenticity and throughout the was extreme reluctance to provide any form of CV or proof of qualifications.
Parents were supposed to hand children over to the authorities without fighting back at all and to accept whatever criticisms were
thrown at them, no matter how wrong or how ludicrous these were. This was as unrealistic, as it was unreasonable and would be hard to explain to anyone other than those who have suffered the same fate. All most people see is that you have lost your child and they find it incomprehensible that this may have happened unjustly because we are all raised to believe that they systems set up to protect the vulnerable members of society work for their benefit and in their best interests. It is an isolating experience that turns families and friends against innocent parents who have done nothing to deserve this, isolating them and damaging potential support systems when they are needed most.
M was now looking squarely at a future of being forced to live with a man who had scared him so much that he had wet himself in his presence every time he was forced to see him. This same man would have carte blanche to repeat his actions for the rest of M’s childhood and there was nowhere to turn to prevent this. M himself had chosen to block out these memories, or so it seemed on the surface. In reality I doubt he'd forgotten anything or ever would. He'd been forced to shut away those things that he couldn't deal with. I, in turn, couldn't put out of my mind, what he'd said, whimsically to the only properly qualified expert, “I hope Daddy doesn’t do it again, but the social worker says he won’t, so it must be true;” placing his trust in those adults now in control, finding his own way to survive his fear and pain.
What has been reported increasingly since this time, was how much money Social Workers get paid for taking a child into care. They have targets to reach for both adoption and fostering and there is big business in agencies that place children for either. Experts are paid phenomenal sums of money to damn the parent that they are trying to remove the child from. Fees of sometimes as much as thirty thousand pounds were often commanded for preparing half a dozen reports supporting the view of the Social Workers or Guardian.
The expert knows they won’t get paid unless they find what the Local Authority want them to find, so they would often embellish or twist the facts. If the report did not reach the threshold of what was needed to remove the child, then they would fabricate things until it did. All the time the parent is powerless against the hearsay third party evidence of these “experts” – some who have never even met them. In our case the psychologist supporting the father had repeatedly refused to meet and talk to me, a common occurrence. Silencing the person being targeted was a useful weapon and ignoring them, the norm.
I had contacted this woman numerous times by telephone, begging her to let me come and talk to her and explain what had happened and how, but she refused point blank and then described me as someone who was aggressive and challenging because I dared to ask for something that should have been a basic right.
No –one knew better than M and I, what it was like to be out in the cold. Of the professionals involved in our case, no one knew our relationship better than our GP, but she too met with brick walls, her evidence at the Fact Finding dismissed as worthless by the Judge. Instead, she was accused of bias simply because M and I were her patients and M’s father had tried to get her struck off - albeit unsuccessfully.
It now seemed that M had been lulled into a false sense of security. Not only through the endless brainwashing by the various experts, but by the fact that his father had clearly not attempted anything whilst he was under the spotlight of the Court. I feared, however, once that spotlight was off him, I feared that he might reoffend, with nothing stop him, were he to be awarded residency and placed in total control. Despite everything, I pushed the thought out of my mind and tried to believe that by some miracle the Judge would have an epiphany and still let M come home to me..
The Officers and Local Authority, all supporting the perpetrator of the crime, would all, without exception just over a year later be discredited - the entire social work team involved in our case, no longer in their positions. One would be suspended on a bullying charge, another moved sideways out of child care and into adult care and the Senior Social Worker, put on suspension due to misconduct concerning another case. Miss Whiplash who had done the most damage to us, had failed to report or act on abuse of another child whose parents were now in jail. At least in that case the abuse had finally been recognised, but in our case, her incompetence and failure to act on what M had told her, had led to this tragic result.
It remained that there had to be a key as to why this had happened to us and I prayed that Brian and Phillip would find one. Off the record they believed that a Paedophile ring lay at the heart of this, but without firm evidence, there was no hope of exposure. We'd even hired Private Investigators a couple of times, but they never managed to turn up anything really significant. They'd filmed some of our contacts showing M's distress at seeing his father. They'd even managed to capture the psychologist bringing R to and from the airport and then going into his home, but as far as the Judge was concerned these things were irrelevant. Whilst they were submitted in evidence, the Judge either hadn't watched them or chose to ignore the blatant bias of the woman who led all those who came after her into disbelieving us and supporting M's father.
The best you could say was that this was an error of judgment of his part, albeit an horrific one. That, in itself was bad enough, but we suspected in ran deeper than that. It was well known that mistakes were never admitted. Clearly when they had initially re-established contact between M and his father, they had had some doubts about R's behaviour as they were still insisting that his wife be present if M stayed the night with him. I learned this from one of the Social Worker’s reports and my lawyers had questioned why they insisted upon this safety net, if they were so sure that M was not at risk. As usual, they didn't reply. They completely ignored any questions they didn’t like. It made no difference whether I wrote to the Department or the lawyer’s wrote to their lawyer – the result was the same – a stone wall of silence.
We'd even gone to the lengths of employing the same Investigator who'd been involved in the Madelaine McCann case, but what he turned up was of precious little help. To date, Madelaine has not been found and the key to this case would probably never be found either.
One reporter had written:- “Things are desperate when ordinary people choose to leave everything behind and risk jail rather than trust the State.” Whilst I have been much criticised for doing what I did in fleeing, I would urge those people who judged me, to honestly say that they wouldn’t have run, if the option was handing their child over to someone who the child alleged had abused them.
I don’t think anyone realises how hard it is to flee. It isn't something one does lightly but sadly we would have been safe had we done it sooner, we would not have been in breach of the orders that were made through the case and as such, could have left without any fear or consequence.
Parents mostly don't take this action until all other routes have been tried. To decide to take a child from all that is familiar and abandon your home, family and friends, to go on the run, your back has to be so firmly against the wall, that there's no other option left.
Would I have run again in hindsight? Yes, probably, because the same set of factors would have existed and if there was any chance of saving M, I had to try. This doesn't mean that I felt no regret for what had happened to M as a result of us being found. I would have given my right arm to spare him one moment of the pain of that brutal day when he was forced screaming from my body or of his subsequent suffering in foster care, but at the time we ran we were not thinking of failing or consequences, just our need to reach safety.
For a short while at least M had lived the bliss of being free from the pain, strife and fear that had become his daily existence. They had been heady days – but as quickly as Paradise had been found, it had been lost again. The pain of that moment will never leave me and I have relived M’s suffering in my heart more times than I can count.
Britain at this time was more and more beginning to resemble George Orwell’s 1984. Our supposedly civilised country, was becoming a police state akin to China
with its communist regime. Whilst I was raise true-blue conservative with the benefit of private schools and colleges, and the daughter of a successful businessman, it had shocked me to hear on the news that Cameron was now intending to introduce the bill that would allow all individual's communication to be scrutinised by the government – this to include, one’s emails, Skype and social networking activity, as well as phone calls from landline and mobiles.
It was a truly horrific state of affairs and completely against the Human Rights Act which advocated an individual’s right to a private and family life. What had happened to our world and our country that this was even being discussed? Only twenty years ago, Britain had been a wonderful place to live in most respects, synonymous with freedom from fear, but now we seemed to be under State control more and more.
One woman I knew of, fled Britain when they threatened to take her child on the grounds that she herself, had been subjected to physical violence by the father. The mother was blamed for allowing herself to be abused and forced to run. She was found the first time, but ran a second time – this time heavily pregnant with a second child. Mothers all over the country were running from Britain, fleeing to Europe and Southern Ireland in the main, but not even safe in those places. Local Authorities would go to any lengths to capture the children and return them. Vast amounts of money were spent in locating and extraditing parents and children who took the law into their own hands.
It had the strange and deeply disturbing feel of Jews fleeing the Nazis. I'd faced my own “Sophie’s Choice” when going on the run with M – knowing the risk I was taking. I had no knowledge then of the others who'd taken this route. I'd picked a country whose laws were akin to Britain and that was a mistake. Had we gone to certain parts of Europe – such as Northern Cyprus or Barbados which was outside the Hague, we'd have had a better chance of safety. Now here I was paying the high price of my actions - the highest price of all - my son’s suffering. What they did to me, an adult, paled into insignificance by comparison.
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