By Lara Feigel
I am in East London at another Directions Hearing. I’ve stuck with HHJ Purkiss, and she grants me another Transparency Order, which is again unopposed. This is a more complex case. Both parents are present, though the mother’s interpreter isn’t, so she struggles to understand some of what is said. She does have a barrister though, unlike the father, who is the applicant here, asking to vary a Child Arrangements Order made several years ago.
These parents are not native to the UK. When they moved here in their late twenties, they left behind three small children, leaving them to be brought up by their grandmother. On arriving, they had three sons, all now under the age of fifteen.
They have been separated for almost a decade. The father was issued with a non-molestation order several years ago and then took the mother to court for a Child Arrangements Order. They were given a shared care order, with the boys spending long weekends with their father. These arrangements were in place until early this year, when the father refused to return the children after their Christmas visit, saying that he wanted to change the boys’ school. The mother called the police, who returned the boys to their mother. And the father issued an application to the court, alleging that the children were in danger of harm as a result of the mother’s failure to prioritise their welfare and her learning difficulties (she is illiterate). He said that they were carelessly dressed and their hygiene was compromised, and that she was too busy looking after the new baby she’d had with her current partner to look after them properly. They were also at risk of harm from the gangs operating in the area where the mother lived: one son had been attacked at school; another had been getting numerous detentions (many for missed homework deadlines) and had recently hit another student – his father was worried about retaliation and thought he was the person to help his son control his anger.
The father proposed a drastic change in his application. He wanted her now only to have her sons for three hours in the evening during one day of alternate weekends and for three days in each school holiday. The mother responded that everything was working well as it was, that the father was entitled to help them with their homework or take them to additional doctor and dentist appointments on the days they were in her care, and that he was only making the application because he would be entitled to Universal Credit if he had full-time custody of his sons. ‘I love my children dearly and I will always be taking good care of them,’ she wrote in her position statement, ‘I cannot see what my life would mean without them.’ ‘May every wool covering the eyes of the Courts from darkness be removed by the blood of Jesus Christ,’ the father wrote in his, ‘so shall it be.’
HHJ Purkiss doesn’t have to make sense of all this today. Her task is to schedule a final hearing. Nonetheless, a debate ensues about the missed January handover. Was or was not one son too pained by a sports injury to travel to his mother? Had they merely been too hungry to be returned? Out of such ambiguous domestic details, narratives have to be forged in the courtroom to accord with evidentiary standards and the love of clarity that the judicial gaze thrives on.
Right now, the father then reveals, he’s meant to have the children for half term, but the eldest child has gone back to his mother after a ‘little misunderstanding’ with his brother. ‘He acted with his feet,’ HHJ Purkiss says. The father looks over at his former wife, shaking his fists as she talks, while she slowly shakes her head. I get the impression that these are familiar gestures; the long-standing dynamics of a complex marriage are suddenly alive in the starkly distinctive setting of the courtroom.
HHJ Purkiss schedules a three-day hearing at the end of the summer– not too long a wait. She allows the parents all the evidence they want: there will be reports requested from both the boys’ schools, with the teachers summoned to attend. There’s no time for Cafcass to be involved; no chance to question these teenage boys about their wishes and feelings. We can only hope that these boys end up having more of a say in the next years of their lives.
Blog post published 12th November 2024
This is part one of a four-part series. For the other posts visit our main family court blog page
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