by Lara Feigel
Autumn sets in, and I attend remotely a case in Bromley involving an abusive mother. This is a mother who’s been found guilty in a criminal court of sending anonymous voicemails and letters to the father, claiming that his girlfriend was unfaithful to him and threatening both him and their son. She’s hired a private detective to stalk the father, and she’s sent messages racially harassing his new girlfriend. Since that conviction four years ago, she’s only had supervised contact with her son, a boy I’ll call Mark, who is coming towards the end of his time at primary school. Now, she’s applying for her contact to be made more frequent and no longer to be supervised. The father has applied for a non-molestation order and is asking for contact to be reduced rather than increased; he wants supervised contact only twice a year. He’s supported in this by the boy’s guardian, the social worker appointed by Cafcass to represent his interests.
It’s a sad case. These are parents who split up before their son was born but maintained what the mother saw as an ambiguous relationship; they continued to go on holidays with their son, where the mother claims that they still shared a hotel room on the father’s suggestion. The mother wanted more from the father, and if more wasn’t on offer, she wanted to take her son home to the country she was from and to live close to her own family. When she went to court for permission to move back home, the father offered that if she dropped the case, he’d provide maintenance money for her and accompany her on trips back to Columbia. But then a new girlfriend of the father’s was introduced to Mark for the first time, just as the mother’s own mother died at home—all her family structures were crumbling at once. And so she began to send the messages: recordings of TV shows or songs about being a fool and a cuckold; messages from a man claiming to also have had sex with the father’s girlfriend; threats to Mark. She sent the messages even when they were spending Christmas together, and she went so far as to go to the police, claiming that it was her receiving hostile messages and that his girlfriend was responsible. The reports of this behaviour from the criminal court make uncomfortable reading. The judge there was clear in indicting her as a mother: ‘You are a mother who was prepared to make up threats, not only to yourself but to your child, in order to get what you wanted. And that is a deeply disturbing view of any mother in any circumstances.’ The mother claims that her behaviour had no effect on her son, but of course it affected him by unsettling and upsetting his father, creating an atmosphere of unease and distress during a so-called family Christmas. Hessel Willemsen has been involved in this case too and found that the ‘tragedy’ for Mark was that his mother was loving and felt ‘deeply’ for her son but was also hostile towards the father, which could cause Mark in time to identify with her negative image of the father and reject him. He worried that she relied on her son to fulfil her own emotional needs ‘at the cost of his individuality.’ Nonetheless, when he filed his report three years ago, he recommended that they should aim to progress to unsupervised contact, though he has since modified his view.
The father is questioned first by his own barrister and by the legal representative appointed by the court to ask questions on behalf of the mother, as she’s representing herself in court, and abusive parents don’t cross-question each other directly. The father presents himself as desperate—unable to endure this woman’s presence in his life any longer, however indirectly.
‘It’s in plain sight,’ he says, but ‘no one does anything about it. You’re all sitting there not doing anything about it. What does she need to do? Does she need to beat me up? Is that what this case is lacking?’
But a lot has been done; this mother only sees her son intermittently, paying hundreds of pounds for a supervisor to come to her flat each time that he does. Anything more that can be done will erode his son’s relationship with his mother even further.
The Cafcass guardian, interviewed, insists that twice-annual contact is the most the father can cope with. If he can cope with twice a year, then why not six times? the judge asks her.
‘The father is saying “This is what I can give, this is what I am able to provide,”’ the guardian explains. ‘You can see the presentation today in the witness box. It’s absolutely essential that these arrangements are future proof.’
The mother cross-questions the guardian directly. She’s dropped her application for unsupervised weekly contact, but she asks why the supervised contact can’t be monthly—at a pre-arranged time that doesn’t involve her having any contact with the father. The guardian says that the more contact there is, the more potential there is for communication to break down. The mother asks for medical evidence of the father’s issues; what can she do at this point for him to feel less traumatised? It seems there is nothing she can do; the guardian agrees with the father that he needs time to heal and that this necessitates keeping the mother away from her son. The mother asks why the guardian isn’t more concerned about the effects of not seeing his mother on Mark. The guardian says that although the contact they have involves ‘really positive, heartwarming interactions,’ their relationship has been artificial for the last five years, so it’s not as though he’s losing a parent. She also worries that Mark would become confused, moving frequently between these two parents and their very different ‘accounts of reality.’
‘I don’t think this child can exist in both of your worlds right now.’
The mother is almost crying now, though she’s been trying to hold back and ask her questions practically, as a lawyer would. She asks what it will take for this current arrangement to change. They’re asking for her not to be able to go to court for three years. What is meant to happen at that point? He’ll be going through adolescence then, the guardian says; his wishes will be heard if he wants to see her. And perhaps she will be more aligned with the facts found by the court.
‘In three years, he’s not going to be interested,’ the mother says. They will have only seen each other six times between now and then. ‘What’s the point for Mark to see me at all?’
‘The reality is that you and Mark have not shared a proper relationship,’ the guardian insists. ‘It’s so artificial. There’s always someone looking over your shoulder. It’s not a particularly natural environment. I don’t think you’ve been his parent for quite a long time.’
The mother is crying now. How can she respond to this? By this logic, once contact has been made supervised, it can be taken away altogether without harming the child because the parent is no longer a parent. There was a period a couple of years ago when Mark didn’t see his mother at all for almost a year, after the mother had a disagreement with the contact supervisor and the court process to decide on how to facilitate further contact played out slowly, as court processes often do. The guardian goes on to say that because Mark tolerated this time when they didn’t see each other, it can’t have been a ‘full and nurturing and deep relationship’ in the first place.
Sitting watching these court proceedings, I feel sorry for both these parents, but most of all for their son, who almost everyone involved in this case agrees misses his mother. ‘I find it really sad,’ the guardian acknowledged on the witness stand, when asked if she’s considered the impact of the new arrangements on Mark. For the first year of supervised contact, Mark asked to be with her overnight, missing his life in one of his two homes. Since then, he’s been told that his mother bullied his father and that the police were involved, so he’s stopped asking to live with her. But still, he asks for contact to be more frequent. This is a boy who used to change into his pyjamas during the supervised contact he had at her flat so that he could feel as though he was staying the night. ‘With the frequency that I see my mum, I would like to have an extra day,’ he’s written recently in anxiously neat handwriting when asked what he’d like to see happen, though he’s also told the guardian that he’s happy for the judge to decide what happens next,’as long as she knows what I think’, and will leave it to the adults to arrange his life on his behalf.
The problem is not just the original abuse. Since then, the mother has done things that render her untrustworthy. She’s tampered with a phone bill to try to support a lie she told, saying that when she turned up at Mark’s school once, she thought she was meeting the contact supervisor there and tried to call him to ask him where he was. She’s initiated court proceedings with a frequency that could itself be perceived as abusive, though she must deeply regret initiating this particular set of proceedings, which have allowed the father to get to the point of being backed up by CAFCASS in wanting to limit her from her son’s life almost entirely. And so the judgment, when it comes, is not surprising: twice a year contact is ordered, and the non-molestation order granted; the mother is barred from going back to court for three years unless she can show major evidence of change—ideally a report from Hessel Willemsen, indicating changed levels of insight. The mother is criticised for continuing to maintain that the impact of her behaviour on Mark has been minimal. The judge agrees with the guardian that the mother is unable to meet Mark’s emotional needs. ‘She is consumed by what she sees as her inalienable rights as Mark’s mother to the exclusion of considering his welfare… She has ended up with severe restrictions on her involvement with her son, but has only herself to blame.’
This is such a difficult case to navigate. Even the judge at the criminal court, though convinced the mother was ‘wicked’ and ‘evil,’ didn’t want her locked up away from him. Indeed, that was the reason given for not sending her to prison: ‘I have got to think about your son even if you have not’. Courts don’t usually suspend contact, even with abusive parents, unless the child doesn’t want it or is in danger of suffering from ongoing abuse. Indeed, there are rapists awarded more frequent contact than this. Here, unlike in the Brighton case, Mark does want contact, and it’s been going well for Mark, although the father has found the frequent altercations over dates and times a massive strain. It’s agreed that Mark won’t be harmed by the loss of contact because the contact has been artificial for five years. But why doesn’t the child have the chance to decide if this is a parental relationship or not? The notes from the contact sessions a few years ago that I’ve read show a son happily drawing alongside his mother, and talking to her about what he’s doing and about what he might like to do when he gets older. The guardian said on the witness stand that the contact supervisor has recently reported ‘lovely, nice, warm, lovely interactions’. Who’s to say if this is a ‘nurturing and deep’ relationship? Mark himself does seem to see it as one. This is a child, unlike Sarah and Emily in Brighton, who is anxiously compliant. He doesn’t want to ask too much and seems afraid of imposing his wants on the world. And so he tells the social worker that he’s happy to leave it to the judge to decide what is best. But it may well not have occurred to him that the judge can order as little contact as she does.
Blog post published 26th February 2025; Updated 18 August 2025 following a request from one of the parties’ legal representation.
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