Mothers protecting their children should not have to defy the courts
Great article in yesterday’s Guardian from Sandra Horley of Refuge:
In an ideal world, children would be able to have contact with both parents. But this is not an ideal world, and in many cases domestic violence is behind the denial of contact. At Refuge, we see many victims of such violence; and an automatic presumption that it is in “the best interests of the child” to have contact with both parents, ignores the courts’ responsibility to protect that child.
The women I speak to are not bitter exes vengefully preventing separated fathers from seeing their children. In fact, less than 1% of fathers’ contact applications are denied, in spite of the fact that domestic violence has occurred in over a third of cases. [...]
It is a sad reality that many women face a stark choice: expose their children to danger or defy court orders. So if “a mother adamantly refuses to let the child have anything to do with the father”, instead of removing and possibly placing a child in danger, judges should be taking a closer look and asking why.
mmmm, read this and the article that it was responding to. The original article spoke about cases where mothers had, over extremely long periods of time denied their children access to their fathers. The judgements were indeed tough and custody was passed to the fathers, where it was shown that the father would allow the children reasonable access to their mothers.
These judgements have nothing to do with domestic violence, however, the response from Refuge was to ’smear’ the previous article with domestic violence statistics, I can only think to blur the issues of the original article.
Undeniably, there are real and present problems with domestic violence and these need to be taken seriously, tackled vigerously and the perpetrators punished.
However, to try and use domestic violence as a broad brush reason to deny children their dads is extremely devious.
Domestic violence is clearly wrong, however mums stopping your children from seeing their fathers for no good reason, over protracted periods of time, is also wrong. I’m pleased the courts are waking up to it.
Sandra Horley pushes her usual “because some men beat their wives and children the law should regard all men as wife beaters and child abusers” mantra.
Typical!