Family courts will imprison your parents, for protecting you or simply for getting old.

When you become a parent, a lifelong protective bond is formed.

Your child will always be your child, no matter how old he or she is.

There is nothing more unbearable than seeing your child suffer.

For families impacted by the “family courts”, the suffering of grandparents is threefold:

• They suffer the torment they are enduring themselves: the grief of separation and stress experienced with the whole family;
• They suffer watching their own child torn to pieces emotionally, psychologically, financially and sometimes physically;
• They suffer for their innocent grandchildren, who instead of enjoying a carefree, happy childhood have their days blighted by uncertainty, tension, endless appointments with officials and doctors instead of development and play; disruption to their routines, separation from their loved ones, forced to live split between two homes against their will. When they complain of stress, instead of solving the problem the “authorities” push them into low quality “therapy”. For a price.

Many, many of these cases involve abuse. Abuse, usually of the mother, but it can be of the father. Abuse of the child through the abuse of their parent. And abuse of the child.

Unfortunately, it is documented in the small amount of research that we have so far, because the UK Government stopped collecting data on family court outcomes in 2012, that the worse the abuse, the more likely it is that the child will end up in the care of the abuser.

This is especially true in cases of child sexual abuse.

Hopeless cases

Lawyers know that when their clients raise abuse in child custody cases, the chance that they will lose custody of their child increases sharply. For this reason, many lawyers advise their clients not to raise abuse. My first three lawyers did exactly this.

But it doesn’t make sense. If you are trying to protect your child, you must raise your concerns which are relevant to their safety and welfare in court proceedings relating to child custody and contact.

Lawyers also know that when their clients raise child sexual abuse, their client is almost certain to lose their child.

Why is this?

A very experienced senior lawyer told me: it’s a mixture of ideology, money, and unsettling facts about child sexual abuse.

One of these unsettling facts is people’s inability to reconcile evidence with the respectable-looking person standing in front of them.

A more troubling fact is the significant number of cases where judges show complete disregard for compelling evidence, ruling in the exact opposite way than that required to protect the child from the most horrific abuse.

Psychiatrist Dr Bandy X Lee in the United States reports 100 % of the child sexual abuse and exploitation cases she sees in the “family courts” resulting in the child being sent to live with their abuser. Existing research from the USA shows somewhat lower rates on average, over multiple jurisictions and years. Nevertheless, the rates at which mothers who raise concerns about abuse lose custody of their child are nevertheless shocking.

Taking flight

So what is the result?

According to the limited amount of data published by the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH) on the number of cases reported under the Hague Convention on International Parental Child Abduction, there has been a sharp rise in mothers being accused of “child abduction” in recent years. More than 70% of these are primary caregiver mothers returning home. This coincides with the rapid increase globally in the use of false accusations of “parental alienation” to cover up allegations of abuse in child custody cases.

Being accused of “parental alienation” as a legal strategy to suppress allegations of abuse puts mothers in a position of total legal entrapment. If they do not alert officials to the risk to their children, the abuse will continue. If they do alert them, they are at serious risk of losing access to their children completely and having no ability to monitor or protect them.

So do they watch their child be destroyed before their very eyes, or do they run?

Often, they run. They run, because they do not have any option.

Then, the long arm of the pro-paedophile “family courts” reaches for them.

I describe these “courts” as pro-paedophile because, as I have stated, and this is supported by the testimony of lawyers, of the parents I am in touch with, and by the available data, they routinely award custody to paedophiles or individuals who make their children available to others to sexually abuse and exploit them. Thus, there is no other way to describe these institutions. I put the word “courts” in inverted commas because our expectation is that courts make an unbiased ruling based on the evidence and the law, but this is not happening. So, are these even courts?

The authorities come after parents who flee to protect their children from abuse using the Hague Convention on International Parental Child Abduction where both the originating country and the receiving country is a signatory to the Convention. The Hague Convention is an international agreement which is supposed to protect children from kidnap, but in practice it is facilitating the entrapment and trafficking of mothers and children.

Lobbies

These practices of the “family courts” have spread throughout the western world through well-funded lobbies which enforce the rights of violent and incestuous fathers over the human right to life and freedom from torture of children.

It is difficult for me to write from the perspective of fathers because I am a mother and tend to hear from other mothers, but it is striking that fathers are deeply unhappy about the “family courts” as well. More significantly, so are the children who are unfortunate enough to have found themselves trapped in the “family courts”.

Who is benefiting? Well, perhaps the people who make a great deal of money from these protracted court cases. The divorce and child custody industry is estimated to be worth anything between 12 and 60 bn dollars per year in the USA alone.

The same lobbies that represent the interests of the “family court” practitioners are pushing the same unlawful policies, which violate international and domestic law, on countries in Asia and Africa. And they will probably succeed, as there are so many money-making opportunities for the professionals involved, as well as access to vulnerable women and children. And of course, it’s delicious for controlling, abusive men – and for women who like to keep other women in their place, as many of the women who thrive in this sector evidently do.

Safe havens

There are a few countries in Europe which do not do this to women and children. One is Russia, which for years has refused to return women and children under the Hague Convention and has banned the practice of inter country adoption, as both are forms of human trafficking and are neither lawful nor moral. Another is the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). As TRNC is not an internationally recognised State, it cannot be a signatory to the Hague Convention. Thankfully, its authorities currently do not feel compelled to pander to the demands of western States to hand over mothers and children to be abused.

However, TRNC is coming under political attack. Fathers’ rights groups in the UK are incensed at the lack of interest of the authorities in Northern Cyprus in upholding foreign court orders. The question is, how justified or lawful those court orders are. Pressure is being put on Parliament to compel the Foreign Office to do something about TRNC. But does Parliament or the Foreign Office understand what is actually at issue here? They should do because the issue of the “family courts” has been raised in Parliament enough times. But the question is, who pays attention to these debates? There still seems to be a culture of disbelief at how awful the “family court” judges really are.

And as I told my MP, Mr Jonathan Lord, this week, this is a case of mothers and children being sacrificed to diplomatic and trade interests. One person who knows very well how this happened is European Commission child protection official turned whistleblower Roelie Post, who details immoral lobbying in favour of profit over child welfare in her book “Romania: For Export Only”.

Biased coverage

In a case reported on the UK’s Channel 4 news programme on 22 February 2024, a mother had fled with her child to TNRC four years previously following six years of torment in the UK “family courts”, and was accompanied during her journey by her father.

He did what any father would and should do: protect his daughter and her child.

The mother had made allegations of abuse against the father, and like so many others, was unable to secure protection from the police or the courts.

Her daughter was distressed at court ordered time spent with her father. Initially there had been a shared custody arrangement, but the mother reported her daughter’s distress at these arrangements. The daughter made disclosures of abuse, and there were medical concerns including anxiety. The mother had eventually lost custody of her child and was afraid for her safety and welfare. Therefore, they left the country.

The Channel 4 news report covered the criminal trial against the father. This 75 year old man has spent four years on bail and been dragged through the UK courts for protecting his daughter and granddaughter.

He was forced to plead guilty, sentenced to 18 months in prison and banned from contacting his granddaughter for five years. He had already been unable to see her for four years due to being on bail.

He did not kidnap his grandaughter. He accompanied her and her mother on their journey.

The case brings to mind the European arrest warrant out for Miroslav Veršegi, a Serbian grandfather whose took his granddaughter to Serbia from the Croatian children’s home she had been placed in and returned her to the care of her mother. The child had cried and begged not to be returned to the home: this is in the city of Osijek which is notorious for unchecked criminal activity relating to child trafficking and prostitution in the children’s social care system. Veršegi had heard rumours that his granddaughter was to be sent to Belgium into foster care. Given the high level of concern around institutional child trafficking in Croatia and the EU, this is not far-fetched.

I am fairly sure that neither of these grandfathers regret what they did. I know that many decent people consider them heroes and would do the same.

There have been cases where grandfathers have committed murder to release their daughters from the oppressive decisions of the “family courts” which subjugate their lives and freedoms to the will of their former partners.

The journalist, Simon Israel, reports faithfully the Stafford judge’s remarks: that the grandfather’s actions were “cruel, callous, and very damaging”.

What the journalist does not mention is that the “family courts” routinely pervert the course of justice, ignoring evidence, admitting perjury, manipulating processes and endangering children. Serious concerns around family court judgments leading mothers to take flight to TRNC were reported by the BBC in September 2023.

The journalist does not mention the reports of abuse made by the daughter, which I am told he had access to. He does not talk about the medical records of the daughter, her distress at being dragged through more than six years of “family court”, or the fact that she is thriving with her mother in Northern Cyprus.

He does not mention that the courts in Northern Cyprus have granted the mother a protection order against the father.

Perhaps more mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, friends and neighbours need to stand up to defend children against what my friend so delightfully described as the “pocket Hitlers” interfering in the private lives of families, and say: “Over my dead body”.

Handcuffed and starved

I have not met this mother and daughter but I have met a mother and daughter very much like them, in another part of the world. That daughter showed me a photo of the marks left by handcuffs put on her when she tried to see her siblings after they were separated by UK social services, because they had fled to be with their mum.

She told me that she reported that she and her siblings were left hungry in their foster care placement, and that there was a video camera in the shower. The Cafcass officer was not interested.

That girl is enjoying a sort of freedom in exile now, but still living in fear of the “authorities”. Her siblings are still trapped with their father who terrified them with firearms. But she would not go back at any cost. She plans to study law and sue the British Government.

Another mother who is trapped in the Far East, where she won her child abduction case but is still legally pursued by her child’s father, tells me “The courts must realise that when they order a change of residency, we run”.

Absolutely we run, when these court orders are unlawful and dangerous to our children.

Isolated

The mother in Asia is trapped, unable to set foot outside the country in case an Interpol red notice has been put on her by the UK even though she has won her Hague child abduction case. But she is seeing her daughter thrive, happy and carefree as a child should be, instead of haunted by the approaching time she would have to spend with her father. She no longer has nightmares about him.

She doesn’t want to be in Asia. She wants to be free and for her daughter to live a good life. She wants them to be able to spend time with family and friends, and is concerned they may not see her family again.

Make no mistake, mothers do not up sticks and leave their homes, their jobs, their family and friends and everything familiar on a whim. They do it because they have no choice, pushed to extreme measures by a court system that refuses to fulfil a very simple task: protect children.

The “family courts” are making fugitives and exiles of women and children who are more likely to find peace and freedom in Russia and the Far East than in Oxford or Bristol.

When mothers make the choice to flee, they do so knowing the dangers for a lone woman and child crossing borders in unfamiliar countries. They become vulnerable to many things. But they are weighing up the risks and taking the decisions they know are best for their children.

The “family courts” must stop putting children at risk.

They must stop destroying the lives of children and families for profit.

They did a better job of sorting out child custody matters decades ago, before anyone knew what domestic abuse was. It used to be very simple. The presumption that the mother had custody of the child had its roots in the simple fact that (still today), mothers carry the burden of child care in the vast majority of cases. Women are overwhelmingly the victims of male violence. By protecting the mother, you protect the child, and that’s how child custody decisions were made, before Fatherhood ideology and the profit-making “family court” model embedded itself in policy.

These matters really are not complicated. They are simple common sense. As English politician Jess Phillips said, “My milkman is a lovely fella who has six kids, and I would trust him more”1 than “family court” “professionals”.

Elder abuse

Apart from the decade of torment that has torn all sides of this family apart, reports of procedural irregularities in the criminal case against this grandfather are troubling. The criminal case was heard in Stafford. Staffordshire has a history of covering up child abuse. It is difficult not to wonder if the old problem never went away.

The frequency and seriousness of the reports of abuse of process and power in the “family courts” and surrounding systems are eroding any sense of trust in the justice system as a whole. This is a perilous state of affairs.

The mother reports failings by barristers, the grandfather being let down, misled and denied the right to a fair trial. This is why he pleaded guilty to abduction. The case warrants investigation by an experienced journalist. It is possible that the imprisonment of this 75 year old man, who his daughter fears may die in prison, is a grave miscarriage of justice.

This is not the only scenario where family members are victimised by “family court” judges for trying to help their loved ones.

Children are not the only family members at the sharp end of judicial indiscretions.

These court battles are not battles over welfare concerns. The “family courts” are an extortion racket where families are bled dry financially and local authority lawyers, social services departments and private care companies are stuffing their pockets.

The courts and social services are also targeting elderly family members, taking them into care against their will and the wishes of their loved ones, and taking control of their assets. Same racket, different target group.

So if you are thinking that none of this could happen to you, you might want to think again.

A judiciary that is out of control and an effectively unregulated legal profession leave us with bleak prospects for our future rights and freedoms, unless we get a grip very soon.