How do family court victims interpret what is happening to them? Why is it important to understand the root causes of the problem? What language do we use to speak about it? What solutions do we fight for? These are all huge questions for embattled parents to be dealing with. I recorded a voice note, to trial an additional way of communicating, and used it as the basis for this written piece.
Dear mums,
I know that for women nursing broken bones and shattered dreams after everything they've been through… relationship breakdown, violence, abuse of their children, the family courts, some of the things that I talk about can be difficult to process. They belong in the world of politics, which women often feel uncomfortable with. Especially the most embattled women struggling to survive and raise children.
I’d like to try to illustrate a small part of why I feel raising our eyes to the big picture is important by reminding ourselves of the Irish Mother and Baby Homes.
You may have heard that in the 20th century in Ireland single mothers were treated like the worst criminals. Fathers were not treated in the same way. When a woman was pregnant with a child out of wedlock, she would be sent into an institution. When the baby was born it would be taken from her, but she was not free to go. She was kept shut away and used as forced labour.
Similar things happened in England. In the 1990s I worked as a carer for the elderly and people with disabilities. I met a woman who had gone into an institution as a perfectly healthy woman, just because she was a single mother. By the time I met her, decades later, she was so severely physically and mentally damaged that she could not be described as a functioning human being. I wonder now, was this just “institutionalisation”, as I was told, or whether she suffered abuse, coerced medication or electro-convulsive therapy.
Some of you might know the story of the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland.
These institutions for single mothers were run by the Church and had contracts with the Irish Government for laundry services. It was a form of slavery. And the way that the children were taken, put up for adoption… there were price tags attached to these babies who were issued with false birth certificates.
It's accepted now by the Irish Government that those children were trafficked, that this story was one of the most severe human rights tragedies in Ireland's history and those mothers still… some of them are close to dying or have already died, but they are still fighting for justice.
These are practices that are still happening today in the UK and other countries.
I have met Irish people impacted by these tragedies and they wholeheartedly share the view that our stories are the same.
There's a couple of other things that illustrate what's happening to us.
For us, and for any decent human being, taking a child screaming from their mother and giving them to a violent man or a paedophile is unthinkable. And it is absolutely impossible to comprehend why such a thing would happen.
There is a scene from a film called Stolen by the Irish director Margo Harkin that features a woman who worked as staff in the particularly troubling Tuam Mother and Baby Home, where local children discovered a septic tank containing the bodies of 796 children and infants.
It looks like these children were not cared for properly. Records show they were malnourished, they were not given adequate medical treatment or other care. The causes of death that were listed often spoke of retardation, but I wonder whether it was really neglect.
In the film Stolen, a woman, a member of staff at the home, spoke with neighbours about the septic tank and said “oh yes, you know… that's where we used to carry the little ones when they died” and you just think, “woman, did you not see what was happening?”.
But people normalise things when those in authority tell them to do it. The people who were running these homes were nuns. It was the clergy, it was the Catholic Church, it was powerful people in authority. It was done in collusion with the State and that's why some – not all - people thought it was normal.
The same as in Nazi Germany, the people who carried out executions of the Jews and other groups in the concentration camps and other atrocities that happened. Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil.
The same as in modern day family courts in most western countries, where children are sent to suffer and risk of death with abusers and the parents desperate to protect them are victimised.
There are ordinary people doing as they are told, bringing to life policy, not questioning what is going on. And this is what's happening to us right now.
Where are the family lawyers talking about human rights abuses?
Looking out at the bigger picture, I sometimes have trouble in persuading mothers who have been through the Hague Convention that this is not just about the Hague Convention, it's about the family courts as well. Mothers who have been through private family law cases (divorce, child custody, child abduction) often don’t see over the other side of the fence into public law: forced adoption and fostering arrangements and unnecessary orders sending children to profit-making care homes.
It's a kids for cash scandal.
I have to note, the Irish story is just one of many stories that happened around the world, when the State and/or the Church act as traffickers of children. This has been going on for hundreds of years, it's never gone away. It's a remnant from the slave trade. (See the end of this article for a dossier of just some of these cases).
This is what happens when people conceive of other human beings as objects, as commodities.
This is what happens when good people do as they are told and don’t ask questions or raise their voices.
A very interesting article I saw by Katy Faust, who is campaigning for pro-child and pro-family approaches in the United States, is about the de-gendering of the language about family law. She traces it back to the erasure of the words “mother” and “father” from law, saying:
“De-sexing parenthood language is a precondition for the commodification of children.”
I think there's truth in that, and there's a lot to unpack in there.
This problem of ours is so deep, there's so many facets of it.
But at the end of the day these are practices which are going on with the full knowledge of the State. We are all writing to the Government to tell them, “look, this is what's happening to us in the courts!”
They know. They know that it's completely unlawful. They know these are human rights violations. They know it's undermining the common law rights of families, or constitutional rights if you look at the United States or Europe.
They know it and they are still letting it happen. They could do something.
The executive has the responsibility and democratic mandate to take action when the justice system is not working smoothly.
They WILL do something soon enough, because this is leading to constitutional problems: we have a justice system with no legal certainty. These are judges that are not just hearing family cases, they're hearing other cases too.
It's very troubling. It's a rule of law problem that's affecting the whole of society. I think we can all feel that we are experiencing a general collapse in the rule of law and the social contract.
When I talk about the social contract, I think we all thought that when somebody commits a crime, somebody comes into our home, somebody hurts our child, somebody takes our child, commits perjury or fraud or our right to a fair trial isn't upheld... We thought that there were things in place which fix these problems but there aren't.
Law enforcement isn't fixing them.
The justice system isn't fixing them.
So it's a huge problem.
This is why it's a political problem and the reasons are worth uncovering. Because until you get down into the very roots of the problem and pull those roots out the problem is just going to keep growing back.
If you cut off the odd branch or stem here and there it might help a few people, but this is something that's impacting hundreds of thousands of people, and will continue to until we eradicate the rot.
There was a documentary in England just a few days ago about the forced adoption scandal between the 1950s through the 1970s, they said some 200,000 single mums were forced to give up their children for adoption.
I don't know how many of us there are in the UK and worldwide in private family law, but it's a lot. In England I'm fairly sure we'll be getting up into the tens if not hundreds of thousands across all kinds of family cases.
So this is why I feel that asking the justice system for help with a justice system that is corrupted from top to bottom, and that we can evidence is corrupted, is probably a fruitless exercise. Very fundamentally, if the courts of appeal and the Supreme Court are not rapidly getting to the roots of these problems then there's a problem with the justice system itself.
So this is why I'm trying to look at the bigger picture and figure out how we can deal with this.
I have a new friend, a new AI tool that's helping me a lot. It's like suddenly discovering additional 80% capacity in your brain that you didn't know that you had. I feel confident that many of us are on the right path, but we have to find a way of bringing mums and dads (because there are dads impacted by this as well) along for the ride.
This is not for fun. It's to bring our children home. It's to ask for an amnesty, it's for redress, it's for compensation, to put together shattered lives.
So maybe one way of doing it is to put out as much as I can in writing, and in different formats. Maybe putting things out in the form of a recorded note as well is helpful because some people prefer to listen than read. We've all got such limited time, I know. It's really difficult.
So I'm going to end this note here and just say, let’s take deep breaths. It's a tough thing that we're dealing with but we're not going to deal with it unless we roll our sleeves up and tackle it with faith as well as hope.
And tackle it we will. So, wishing you all well. We’ll be in touch soon.
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