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 the Guardian and 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 Two
‘I hope I see you in Tescos, not in my courtroom.’
Most of the hearings here only last an hour, so the court day feels long. I have time to go to a hearing with Simmonds before lunch. This family have been back in court repeatedly since they separated three years ago. Simmonds tells me that they’ve found that, since they became a Pathfinder court, the returning cases have been reduced from 15% to 1%, but there will always be cases where contact breaks down one way or another.
This case involves two older primary age children – let’s call them Olivia and Jude. The initial separation was acrimonious; the mother alleges that the father abused her physically, sexually and financially – with these sexual and financial abuse allegations found by a judge at a previous fact finding hearing. The father was removed from the family home by the police with force. Since then, the father applied for contact and was given alternate weekends – initially with an overnight stay stipulated, though a judge then changed it to two consecutive days with no overnight. Olivia hasn’t seen him since the spring, when she came home with a bruise. Although Olivia attributed this injury to falling on a toy box, the mother took her to the GP and claims that she was advised to stop contact. For her part, the mother reports that Olivia had been increasingly unwilling to go to him, developing stomach aches as the visits loomed. Jude also hasn’t seen his father since June. Apparently he didn’t want to go without his sister. The mother has made it hard for the children to be seen by social workers, withdrawing consent for social worker visits at the last minute.
When the social workers did see the children at school, Olivia said that she wanted contact with her father, though it was going to be difficult after the long gap. The mother reported that Olivia had come home saying that she didn’t in fact want to see him, and that she hadn’t understood the questions at the time. ‘Since coming home, she has been terrified, confused, agitated, distressed, anxious, withdrawn, refusing to go to school, not eating and has said clearly that she does not want to see her father.’ Jude also said that he wanted to see his father, though he particularly wanted his sister to come too and not to go on his own again.
The mother has said that Olivia is frightened of her father’s anger, and unable to ask for food or drink while with him. She says that Jude is struggling with his moods and emotional regulation and she finds it difficult to persuade him to attend school, which he’s often late for. The school hasn’t reported any emotional difficulties. The mother has claimed that the GP diagnosed Jude as suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, relating this to his time with his father, but has provided no evidence of this. The social worker who conducted the child impact report finds that the mother’s evidence that Jude is both ‘joyful, empathetic, humour, and thriving when engaging in structured activities’ and displays ‘significant emotional instability’ is inconsistent. They therefore suggest that the mother’s interpretation of Jude’s needs may be ‘influenced by her own experiences or perceptions’. I find this emphasis on inconsistency surprising: surely it’s common to have children that thrive in certain environments, but have emotional difficulties in others.
The father has raised concerns about the mother as well. He says that Jude often arrives with him dishevelled, with unwashed hair and clothes, body odour and dirty fingernails, and complains that he eats too much tinned food at his mother’s house. He claims that the children’s access to sporting activities has ceased since he left home, though in fact Jude still plays for the local football team. And he says that the mother undermines his time with his children by going to the same attractions just before he does, and by getting a dog to compete with his dogs. He thinks the mother hindered his ability to bond with Olivia by breastfeeding her until she was three and a half, and is raising concern about parental alienation now.
The warning signs for a change of residence are here. ‘There is concern that Ms X’s narrative may be influenced by her own emotional experiences’; ‘it is possible that Jude is being drawn into adult narratives’; ‘there are concerns Ms X may be using Jude to meet her own emotional needs or to reinforce her position within the conflict’. If Jude is indeed displaying the trauma responses that the mother alleges, the social worker thinks this could have been mitigated if she’d got on better with the father and followed the directions of the court much earlier, smoothing out the children’s contact with him. The social worker offers four options: to continue as they are, attempting to make the current order work; to raise the stakes on the current order, putting in penalties to enforce it; to cut off contact with the father, in the interests of removing the stress of continued conflict; to move the children to their father, which could prevent the ‘chronic emotional harm’ they are currently suffering, but would need careful managing, and may be excessive given that ‘both have spoken with warmth about their mum and there have been no wider worries expressed about her care for them’. She states that her view is that the children should resume contact with their father while remaining in the mother’s care, with the LA supporting contact until it becomes overnight at four weeks.
Simmonds has already gone against some of the social worker’s recommendations over the past year, and made it clear that he doesn’t want to expose this mother to further trauma from her ex-husband. When he took over the case he changed contact from entire weekends to stretches of time on the Saturday and Sunday without an overnight stay.
He has an hour to attempt to sort out this tricky situation, and he arrives in court determined to make clear how high the stakes are. Entering, he sums up the dilemma: both children are saying they want to see their father, and they obviously need to see the social workers appointed by the court; but they have a loving and settled relationship with the mother who is stopping this contact from happening.
‘It’s important that Mum hears this from me. If we get to a stage where the court is saying the emotional harm from Mum is so high, then we go down a nuclear option.’ At the same time, he tells her that he remains committed to the view that there should be no overnight contact, and that the mother must never be expected to encounter the father face to face.
He offers the three solutions that have been put forward by the social worker. Either they take option 1 and sort it out today, coming up with a compromise that allows the children to live with their mother and see their father. Or they will find themselves at a full contested trial, with evidence. And if they do so, a compromise won’t be on the table any more. They will be looking at option 2 or 3 – a change of residence to the father, or a removal of the father altogether.
‘I will be honest with you both. I don’t think options 2 and 3 are in the best interests of your children. Option 1 is.’
The mother’s barrister reports that from discussions outside the courtroom, they’ve agreed that option 1 is workable for both parents. They are going to try out the father having alternate weekends (without overnights) as soon as they can. The mother is worried that the ‘supported contact’ planned with a social worker present for the next four weekends is going to disrupt their weekend clubs, but the judge makes it clear that the weekend clubs are not the priority at this point.
‘When I read the report, it’s a real worry. These children have got the weight of your disagreement on your shoulders.’
The mother is crying now. Simmonds continues with his speech, doing all he can to make this hearing a turning point.
‘We need the children to be able to say to Mum, “we’ve had a lovely time with Dad”, and to say to Dad, “life with Mum is great”.’
He says that if contact doesn’t happen, he will bring them back into court within twenty-four hours.
Asked what he wants, the father says that part of him wants to go to trial and try asking for a change of residence. But Simmonds has told him that to do so wouldn’t be in the best interests of the children, so it’s difficult for him to ask for this. ‘I also fully agree with putting the children first,’ the father says, accepting the compromise. Effectively, the power to protect the children from more court proceedings lies with a man who has been found to be sexually and financially abusive.
Simmonds applauds this decision. A change of residence gives you a 50:50 chance of success, he says. Half have brilliant outcomes, the other half are disastrous; children can’t settle, and end up going back to the other parent. He says that two children came to see him a couple of days ago to complain about the move to their father he’d forced them into.
‘They told me using the f word what I’d done to their life. I’d ruined it. You’ve got to make it work.’
And this is what they are sent out to do, backed by the support of the local authority and the court. The father it seems has been warned not to apply for residency, the mother warned she will have to agree to contact with a man found to have been abusive to her. For the next four weeks, Simmonds says, his door is open. They can come back at any point, even though they’re getting a final order.
‘I do mean what I say to you. I think you’re good parents. Let’s hope this is the last time. I hope I see you in Tescos, not in my courtroom.’
I have lunch in Simmonds’ office: he’s bought me a cheese sandwich from the court cafeteria, which I eat while envying his bean and spinach filled salad from home – his health regime doesn’t cease while he’s in court. Afterwards we eat KitKats and extremely messy oranges – he has napkins and plates for these purposes – and I tell him that spending all this time in court mas made me develop a secret longing to be a judge; I’m itching to have the chance to rule on some of the cases where I’ve disagreed with the judges. Do, he says, it’s never too late; and he may be right – perhaps, indeed, there are decades awaiting me on the Magistrates’ bench.
We talk about changes of residence, and I say how many I’ve seen. In another court, I can see how quickly Simmonds’ court case before lunch could have turned into a change of residence. The father had professionals on his side, despite being the one found to be abusive in previous hearings: the mother was at risk because of withdrawing the children both from him and from the social workers, and because of her unspecified fears. As always, the mother’s feelings about the father had become the focus of the social worker’s criticism, and so often this can lead to nuclear solutions that don’t seem to benefit the children. I’m finding it a relief, here, to feel how far we are from such a solution. It felt in the hearing that Simmonds saw that it was the adversarial system itself that’s the problem, and he tackled it head on, advising them against allowing the case to become more adversarial while not denying that a full contested trial remains the ultimate solution, if no compromise can be reached.
Simmonds says now that he can’t remember the last time he moved a child. If the children have been with a parent for a long time, he’d rather do a holistic assessment and avoid the potential disaster of an abrupt move. He is still affected by the scene he mentioned in court, when two teenagers came to tell him how badly he’d ruined their lives. He doesn’t want to be responsible for ruining more lives than he can help.
He tells me that they have a policy here of including a photograph of each child in the bundle for the final hearing. At the beginning of the hearing they spend five minutes talking about the photograph: the place it was taken; what the parents remember about that moment. It’s only then that they talk about the contested issues. It’s a small, symbolic change but I can see the difference it can make in a courtroom to talk collectively about the children, before the warfare begins.
By the time that I leave the court, and make it finally to the blustery seaside, I feel relieved at what I’ve witnessed. It remains to be seen whether the Pathfinder courts can work everywhere, as the government rolls them out more widely. They can only work when they can clear the backlog first – and in some courts the backlogs run to thousands of cases. But it does seem that here the calls of the Harm Report have been heard, and that children have the chance to have their wishes and feelings acted on before the court process has whipped their parents to the point of a hostility likely to culminate in a decision that leaves one parent high on power and the other traumatised by what’s gone on in court. As I climb onto the cliffs and look out at the stormy sea, I think that, for once, I’ve left a court hopeful that the children I’ve been hearing about all day are in safe hands.
Published 5 May 2026.