By Lara Feigel
It’s the final day of my week in court, and I’m back in East London; back with Judge Coupland in his windowless courtroom. This is a Final Hearing, to determine the arrangements for a boy of primary school age – let’s call him Joe. It’s a case that’s been dragging on for two years, delayed by the father’s chaotic refusal to engage with the court process and by backlogs in the court system.
When I speak to the mother’s barrister before the hearing, she isn’t expecting the father to turn up. They’ve had no word from him; he hasn’t filed a position statement or indicated his intention to come. But he’s here now, and they sit across from each other, the two parents, both informally dressed, with the mother’s shiny trousers and elaborate make up denoting the effort she has made for this in a very different register from the suits of the judge and barrister.
These parents separated shortly after Joe was born. At first, the baby stayed with his father once a fortnight and spent time with him on a weekly basis, but the father disappeared for weeks at a time, and it was difficult to create a routine. The father used hard drugs and was convicted of violent crimes. When Joe was younger, the father became angry and attacked the mother’s car while Joe was inside it. The mother made the court application two months later, and the case has wound on since then; Joe hasn’t seen his father for two years.
They agreed early last year that Joe was to live with his mother. A final hearing was scheduled late last year but was adjourned, due to ‘judicial unavailability’ (the court had failed to assign a judge). At that point, there was an eight month wait for a new hearing date. For those eight months, the father has been entirely out of touch.
This hearing will consider what kind of contact Joe is to have with his father. The mother would like him to have supervised weekly contact, but the Cafcass officer assigned to the case wants indirect contact only, because he doesn’t think that supervised contact is sustainable and doesn’t think there’s any sign that unsupervised contact will be possible in the near future. He suggests that the father sends monthly gifts, cards and letters, and perhaps some prerecorded videos of him chatting to his son.
Today, the father is open in his distress and confusion. ‘I want him to be happy,’ he says – but what does this wanting amount to? He hasn’t submitted to the court-appointed hair tests, because he’s been drinking and using cannabis. He’d been off drugs and alcohol for four months before the cancelled hearing, he says; he was ready then to do all he could to step up again as a father. But the hearing was cancelled, and he started drinking again. And now he’s not sure why he has to give up alcohol altogether; plenty of parents drink – indeed, the mother herself drinks – can’t alcohol be a part of parenting?
With weary patience, the judge looks at the father as he tells him what to do; it’s clear that the father has heard all this before. He needs to go to an accredited domestic abuse perpetrators’ course; he needs to submit to a hair strand test after six months of being clean. He needs to write letters to his son every month, as requested. ‘Part of it is consistency,’ he says; Joe needs to expect the letters and to get them on time.
‘Why letters?’ the father asks, and I’m impressed by both the judge’s and the father’s ability to have this informal conversation in the courtroom, these two very different characters with their different viewpoints. The boy is six, the father says – he can’t read – and how does he know the mother will even give them to him, or help him read them? But the boy is indeed six, he can, in fact, read; the two years since the father last saw the son are evident. The father now has a child with his new girlfriend and wants the children to interact. Couldn’t they set up facetimes for them? But those will be possible in the future. First, the father must write the letters that don’t come naturally to him, in the hope that this will lead to the kind of contact that does.
The power here is with the mother, but it’s power she doesn’t want. This is a woman who has sat in a car with her young son while the father, who was meant to protect them both assaulted the car around them. She’s protected now by the court, but she would like her son to have a father; she would rather the courts allow him supervised contact. The problem, as ever, is one of resources. If supervised contact wasn’t rationed, perhaps this boy could see his father ongoingly. If administrative support wasn’t rationed, the last hearing wouldn’t have been cancelled, and perhaps this father could have passed a hair test, and could by now have been ready to prove his commitment to change. Meanwhile, they are sent back into their separate lives; in this world of rationing and disempowerment, the son seems destined to remain fatherless and the father to remain defeated by his own weaknesses.