by Lara Feigel
The next day I go to East London. The courtrooms and corridors may be windowless here, but at least they are well-disposed towards journalists. I’m in the courtroom of Circuit Judge Her Honour Judge Reardon, who’s the transparency lead for the court. The process today is exemplary. Judge Reardon instructs her clerk to introduce me to all the parties before the case begins so that I can tell them why I’m there. Both the parents have lawyers, and this time it’s the father’s lawyer who asks for me to be excluded and asks, if I do have to be there, for me not to be able to report on the delicate background of the case. It turns out that the mother was a sex worker, and the father was originally her client before they began a relationship. The judge overrides the objections, and the hearing begins.
This is the father’s application. The mother is hostile towards him, he says; she acts unilaterally, and their fifty-fifty arrangement isn’t working. He wants to have his daughter most of the time and to have full decision-making power. The so-called expert is on his side: a parenting coach/therapist who’s attempted to improve the family dynamics while monitoring their interactions. In the court process, surveillance and nurturing are often meant to be miraculously embodied in the same person.
From the start, I find the imbalance of power in the courtroom painful. This father is a highly paid European businessman who is at ease with the workings of the state. The mother was an immigrant sex worker who got together with him—her client—long enough to produce a daughter and a lot of confused resentment on both sides. He took sex toys in a suitcase on business trips while she was left alone with the baby. They split up, and since then, she’s been bemused as to why she’s required to keep handing over her small daughter to a man she seems not to want to go to.
He’s white, she’s Black. He’s mellifluously represented by his barrister, a large, smiley woman who puts everyone at ease except the mother, whom she calmly eviscerates. He’s also paying, indirectly, for the mother’s much cheaper lawyer: a barrister who doesn’t specialise in family law and who has to have things explained to her by the father’s lawyer when she gets confused. At one point, she thinks that the social worker has described the father’s proposal as ‘not reasonable’ when, in fact, it’s the mother’s suggestions that have been described in this way, and this presents the other side with an open goal.
This little girl—let’s call her Lana—has been the subject of court proceedings for most of her life. Already, the father has won a case for fifty-fifty custody; he’s won costs, though the mother’s only income is the maintenance money he pays her; he’s won a change of nursery school. As the day unfolds, it’s easy to see why.
The father, giving evidence, is eloquent about his love for Lana and his concern for her well-being. He demonstrates his capacity for self-reflection, describing himself imagining the questions Lana might ask him later about why he took her away from her mother. He plays games with the mother’s barrister. ‘Do you want to do the answer as well as the question?’ He gets away with accusing the mother of ‘alienation’ frequently, though ‘parental alienation’ is becoming a gradually discredited term, and his barrister takes care not to use the term herself.
The mother, giving hers, is extravagantly evasive. She claims not to remember the year she moved house or the year she was in prison, a decade ago, for passport fraud. Asked if there’s anything good about this man, she can think of nothing. She can’t comment on the good times he has with Lana because she isn’t there. She can’t even reassure the court that she’ll support the arrangements if the father wins.
‘I don’t know. How can I answer that? I will be heartbroken.’
She’s made mistakes, and they all come out. In the last hearing, she produced photographs of him having sex to show his disregard for his own physical safety and exposed his cross-dressing. At one point, she alleged that he had a sexual interest in children, which meant he had a period of supervised contact. The previous judge found all this ‘an exercise in humiliation on her part’—evidence of her agenda to ‘severely limit the father’s role’ in their daughter’s life. She’s enrolled her in a nursery without his consent or without even including him as an emergency contact. She’s changed GPs without consulting the father and then unilaterally gone along with the GP’s suggestion that they should refer Lana for an autism assessment because of her delayed speech. For months, she’s been filming Lana screaming during the handovers to her father, though the parenting coach asked her to stop doing this. The parenting coach suggests there’s cruelty in this: a loving mother would comfort her child rather than callously stepping back and filming her crying.
Yet does this mean the mother is lying when she says, in despair, that she did try to prepare Lana for the handovers, only for her to scream as she left the house and pee on the way to the nursery? The coach and the father claim that Lana only cries because she hasn’t been properly prepared—hasn’t been shown that her mother is happy for her to go. But surely it’s possible that the mother did her best: she tells the court that she sent Lana with her favourite book and toy, wanting her to be at home with him. Surely this girl can be happy with her father but still find the prospect of leaving her mother unbearable. This may not be the mother’s fault.
The father himself half acknowledges it. ‘I don’t dispute that Lana has a strong emotional bond with her mother,’ he says. ‘I don’t dispute that Lana likes to be with her mother.’ But he criticises her for sending the book and toy. Why aren’t his books and toys good enough? ‘I have a library at home with about fifty books.’ This is ‘a complete undermining of my parenting.’
The mother’s mistakes seem to me the mistakes a parent makes who is ill at ease in the system and community she’s found herself in. She may have gone along with the GP’s autism suggestion because she didn’t think there was any parental choice involved. The first nursery she enrolled Lana in was on the ground floor of her apartment block; it was a merely good enough nursery, but it was embedded in her community, and Lana could toddle downstairs for her education. She should have consulted the father, but she didn’t, and because of that, he was able to change her nursery to one nearer to him, an ‘outstanding’ nursery where the children learn foreign languages and computing. Now Lana has to take the train across East London, squashed in with city workers. The mother is criticised for not attending the nursery events: a Mother’s Day stay and play, a ‘graduation.’ Asked why in court, she gives vague excuses, saying she was ill or busy. But, as a former sex worker, she may not feel at home with the city worker parents, and she may have been worried that the father would attend. Shouldn’t we accept that she feels intimidated by this man she remains financially dependent on—a man she alleges saw strangulation as part of good sex? Yet somehow, there’s no place in court to acknowledge these imbalances. Indeed, the mother’s suggestion that she’d been controlled by her husband was dismissed by a previous judge on the grounds that sexually ‘she was, in fact, the dominatrix.’ Findings from previous judgments are not open to challenge.
A couple of days later, the judgment comes. The father, the judge says, has been ‘very much focused’ on his daughter and displayed ‘no underlying resentment of the mother,’ while the mother’s evidence gave ‘little reason for optimism.’ The videos she filmed of Lana’s distress at the handovers are evidence of ‘serious harm’ which will be ‘ongoing’ in the mother’s home, where Lana is exposed to her mother’s ‘negative beliefs about her father.’ In the witness box, the mother displayed a ‘lack of warmth’ when talking about her daughter. And so the father gets everything he asks for. Lana will now see her mother for only four nights a fortnight, even during the school holidays. The mother’s parental responsibility has been restricted and she is barred from taking Lana out of the country to see her relatives.
The mother’s crime has been to hate the father for the end of the marriage. Even now, she can’t forgive his affair and can’t forgive his control over the lives he funded and continues to fund—though the maintenance payments will now reduce. But isn’t hatred a common feature of divorce? And isn’t the legal system designed to stoke it? The court fears that Lana will be corrupted, polluted by the hatred flowing through her mother’s home. She’ll be in danger of harm that will seep in if she’s there any longer than three nights at a time.
This is the new orthodoxy: to be a good parent, you must have no hatred. This mother has lost custody because she couldn’t or wouldn’t say that she valued her daughter’s love for her father—say that it was equal to hers. It may well be that this painful failure to see what’s required by the system does indeed make her ill-fitted to help her daughter navigate a world that will be full of systems like this one. But to say that she lacks warmth as well? Wasn’t it warmth that she showed in court, in the fierceness of her possessiveness? If only there was some way to decide Lana’s future that didn’t end with this painful sense of a winner and a loser.
Blog post published 12th February 2025
This is part two of a four-part series. For the other posts visit our main family court blog page
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