Part Four: West London Case

By Lara Feigel

Lara Feigel is the author of four highly acclaimed works of cultural history and a novel. Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at King’s College London and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she reviews regularly for theGuardianand contributes to a range of BBC radio programmes. Most recently, Feigel appeared as a lead contributor in the landmark BBC 1 cultural history of the interwar years, Art that Made Us, and she wrote and presented a programme about Doris Lessing for the Radio 4 prestigious Archive Hourslot.

PART FOUR

‘the relationship with her mother that she deserves’

Contact

Three months later, we are back in court. I’ve come in person this time. I want to see for myself these parents whose voices have become so familiar; parents I’ve pictured in cars and bedrooms, imagining the scenes in his version and then in hers and back again; hands on collarbones, backs against walls, and in the midst of this a baby and then a toddler and then a little girl, continuing to trust that the world she’s been born into is a safe one.

The West London courthouse is in an ugly square building, surrounded by carparks, close to the motorway. There is no attempt here to soften the grimness; no café, no children’s art lining the walls. Perhaps it’s at least more honest to leave visitors in no doubt that it’s an unhappy place to need to come to.  

I meet the father and his solicitor on my way in. They’re there to witness the humiliating spectacle of the bag check – an extreme procedure in all courts but an especially drawn-out one in this court, where I’m required not only to sip my drinks but to open all cosmetics and rub them onto my skin, while the queue waits behind me. After he’s gone through security too, I ask if he’d be prepared to speak at some stage; I’m told by his solicitor that he’s not. 

The mother does want to talk to me; she’s waiting in an interview room with her new partner. Her barrister, Jeremy Frost, is away so she’s representing herself in person today, bringing her partner in as a MacKenzie friend, and she’s apprehensive; this is a judge who has already made it clear that he’s sceptical of much of what she says. 

Layla is especially distressed because a few days earlier the news came in that the High Court has rejected Frost’s request to appeal. The Honourable Mr Justice Hayden didn’t even give her a chance to come to court to argue her case. Instead, the appeal is ‘refused as being totally without merit’. Although Chloe has as yet shown no signs of rejecting her father, Hayden finds that ‘the evidence establishing the Mother’s resolve to undermine M’s relationship with her Father is compelling and recognised by the three separate judges’. Although the father has been found to have hit the mother, the judge finds that HHJ O’Donovan ‘took great care’ in recalibrating the evaluation of the risk that each parent posed. 

Hayden’s brief, cursory judgment makes painful reading. It seems revealing that Hayden finds that, ‘for the avoidance of doubt’, the non-molestation order is to remain in place, when in fact O’Donovan has ruled that it shouldn’t, casting some doubt on how carefully Hayden has read through the proceedings. I am surprised that Hayden doesn’t make more of the father having been found to have hit the mother twice – and both times in front of the child. Instead the blame is placed once more on the mother. And the three judges are seen as aligned – when in fact O’Donovan’s judgment on physical abuse has contradicted the previous judge’s findings, and has been the result of a successful appeal.

We’re back in court today because contact hasn’t been easy to arrange, as contact in these circumstances often isn’t. After that day in July, when Chloe was moved with no warning, she didn’t see her mother – or even talk to her – for a whole month. Halfway through that time, the mother applied for an enforcement order.

In the brief directions hearing before this, the judge expressed surprise and disappointment that there hadn’t been more contact. But it’s not surprising that contact has been difficult to arrange, after a case this acrimonious. It’s so risky to order a transfer of residence and then leave it up to the parents to arrange contact between themselves, at just the point when the court process has created a punitive winner and a traumatised loser and left them incapable of collaborating.

For two weeks after the hearing, the parents were arguing over the final wording of the judge’s order, and the father didn’t want to begin making arrangements with the contact centres until he had the final order to send them. In the meantime he proposed Layla’s contact should be supervised by an independent social worker, who would charge around £500 for each session, and claimed that the Guardian had suggested this, ‘due to concerns about the mother’s lack of willingness to prepare the child’ for the transition. Once the order did come in, Sebastian took ten days to discover that there were no spaces available at local contact centres, though Layla had previously discovered this and let him know about it. In the meantime, she filed her enforcement application – precipitously, in Sebastian’s view. And then, between them, they arranged contact that has continued on a weekly basis since then. It’s been going well, though Chloe tends to cry at the end of visits, asking when she’ll see Layla again. During their time together, they chat and play and eat the snacks that Layla has brought from home. She’s given Chloe fluffy toys that she’s carried for weeks first, so that they smell of her perfume, though she tells me that Chloe reported the first one was swiftly lost. And she’s cut her daughter’s nails, as she says that during the first contact she found that Chloe’s toenails had overgrown and her foot was bleeding. 

Entering the courtroom, the judge immediately makes clear the stakes. The burden of proof here is criminal, unlike in usual family proceedings. Layla has to prove that the father contravened the order ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, and that there were no reasonable grounds for doing so. He’s only able to date the order to the sealed version, issued two weeks after the judgment, rather than to the draft circulated the day after the judgment. Which means that there are only technically the three days between the sealed order being issued and Layla making her application when the order can be seen as breached. 

Layla is given the chance to speak first, giving her account of why it took so long for her to see her daughter, making the case that Sebastian was finding ways to delay it, and that the London contact centre they’d used previously had slots all along, but was waiting for authorisation from him. She’s especially distressed because the judge suggested in his judgment that contact should progress to becoming unsupervised ‘after the dust has settled’, and the Guardian suggested that this should happen after about six sessions, but Sebastian has issued a schedule of supervised contact right up to Christmas. And, having offered her twice weekly video contact, Sebastian has now withdrawn the offer, claiming that Chloe doesn’t want to talk to her mother. 

The judge reminds her that the video contact he proposed in his order wasn’t legally enforceable – it was more of a ‘recital’ than an order, he says. And he says that he’s made no order about when contact should become unsupervised. He wants the parties to move towards a more cooperative stance and to make these decisions themselves. There’s a debate about whether the contact centre ‘released the slots’ as soon as Sebastian eventually authorised it, as the mother claims.

‘‘I’m not going to be misled or influenced by you using terminology which is clearly contrary to the evidence,’ the judge reprimands her. ‘You’re not helping yourself by doing that. This isn’t a conspiracy.’

Sebastian has said that he couldn’t pass on some of the videos she sent Chloe because she was praying in them in Arabic, and he doesn’t speak the language. Layla explains that she was in church, praying; what possible malevolent secret message could she have included in her prayers?

‘I have made a finding that you might undermine her relationship with him,’ the judge says.  She hasn’t been found to tell the truth. ‘The fact that you were saying it in a church makes no difference.’

‘I have told the truth, as God is my witness,’ Layla responds.

It’s time for the father’s barrister, Ms Strachan, to take over. The judge’s questions for her are specific. Where did the insistence on the independent social worker come from? 

Sebastian wasn’t insisting on the ISW, Ms Strachan says. A contact centre was going to be difficult until the order was sealed, so he was offering it as a ‘stopgap solution’.

But Strachan’s suggested wording for the order suggested contact should be supported ongoingly by an ISW, the judge says.

Strachan pauses to discuss this with Sebastian.

‘The difficulty was the contribution from NYAS,’ she says. ‘They were suggesting that there should be an ISW involved.’

HHJ O’Donovan doesn’t let this rest. In all the reports and submissions and correspondence he’s had with the Guardian, before and after the judgment, there’s been no mention of an ISW. So what evidence does Strachan have for this?

Ms Strachan responds that the Guardian had simply said that an ISW might be a solution while they waited for a contact centre. Questioned again, she repeats herself. ‘The suggestion of an ISW was simply to try to get some contact underway while this order was being settled’.

The judge looks at her astonished.

‘Can I say what you tell me is flatly contradicted by your submission on the order.’ He reads out the email she sent him saying that the Guardian had asked for an ISW to supervise the contact because the mother had failed to prepare the child for the transition.

We are all sitting up now, alert. There’s a direct contradiction here and the judge has made it clear that he needs an answer. On which occasion was she lying? Or, he asks, had she misunderstood her client’s instruction?

They circle back and forth and she fails to answer. Meanwhile the mother cries quietly in the row in front of me. She’s glad the judge is being so stringent, but she has no confidence that any of this spectacle is going to help her daughter.

The judge sends Ms Strachan out for ten minutes to concoct a better answer with her client, and the rest of us await the results. On her return, Ms Strachan suggests that as this is such a confusing situation, it might be best to call her client to give evidence. The judge says that he can’t do this; he can’t ask the mother to cross-question a man who’s been found to hit her, and he doesn’t want to spend too long on all this anyway. He just wants an answer.

‘The father was guided by the NYAS caseworker,’ she says.

So she’s sticking by her written submission? 

‘The ISW first arose as a means to get some contact underway. It was the father trying to be helpful.’

She’s contradicted herself again. The judge seems astonished that this is the best she can do. Does she need to take further instructions? No. 

‘I’m going to have to proceed on the basis that I do not have an explanation,’ the judge says. He moves on to talk about issues of contact centre availability and video contact. Can he expect the father to help Chloe prepare for video contact with Layla in the near future? Is there a timeline on this?

‘At the moment he doesn’t know when she’s going to be ready,’ Ms Strachan says.

HHJ O’Donovan is ready to make his judgment. The terms of breaching an order are, he reminds us, very narrow. Given that the mother’s application only gave the father three days in which to breach the order, he doesn’t find that it was breached. It was reasonable that, having been given a sealed order on a Friday, there was no contact in the weekend that followed. He finds the introduction of the ISW suggestion baffling. ‘I have not had a satisfactory explanation.’ But, given that this preceded his issuing the sealed order, it’s not strictly relevant to what followed. 

Even if he doesn’t find that the order has been breached, the judge has the power to vary it, making it clearer when contact should progress to being unsupervised and overnight. The mother is hoping, most of all, that he will do this, and that she’ll have Chloe overnight in time for the Christmas holiday. This is surely in the best interests of a girl painfully missing her mother and asking for more time with her. But he now says that he won’t. The order already provides for the parties ‘between themselves’ agreeing a variation. He hopes that they will do this. He hopes that ‘as the teething problems start subsiding’ and as Chloe becomes more used to her new life, they will begin to cooperate better and Chloe will have ‘the relationship with her mother that she deserves’.

The mother has also put in a request to change Chloe’s school, because the school the father has chosen for her failed its Ofsted inspections, before being rebranded as an Academy a few years ago. The judge refuses this on the grounds that she had the chance to query this when the order was made. 

Outside the courtroom, the mother cries.

‘My poor baby,’ she says. She talks desperately about the half term when she won’t see her daughter, the Christmas holiday when she’ll only have two hour slots in contact centres, the ongoing months of aridity when she’ll have no answer to give Chloe, when she asks when she can come home.

I have nothing to say in response. Whether Chloe can spend time again in the flat that for so long has been her main home is dependent on Layla and Sebastian cooperating. ‘After the dust has settled’ is a phrase that, as this hearing has shown, has no legal weight whatsoever. So Layla is required to placate a man who has been found to have hit her at least twice in front of her daughter, who took pride in reading out to her the dictionary definition of the word ‘cunt’ so that she could better understand her own inadequacy, and who sees ‘disobedient’ women as in need of ‘correction’. If she fails to do this, he can withhold access to a small girl who cries at the end of every contact session to see her mother for longer, desperate for the familiar world she took for granted for years: for evening cuddles with her mother, for friends she had no chance to say goodbye to, for toys left behind casually that warm July morning.

Published: 9 March 2026