Mummy Where Are You? (Revised Edition, new) (35 page)

              Many of the girls took to their beds straight after collecting their morning “meds,” staying in their cells all day - never taking exercise or going to classes and watching television or listening to CDs endlessly.

              Now I'd given up going to classes, I ensured I always got up for breakfast, showered or bathed afterwards, kept a book on the go, scrutinised the files, making notes into the early hours and did a few hours of writing daily.  I  took the tedious walks around the exercise yard, no matter how cold and was sometimes, the only one who went out.

              I was completely disadvantaged by being in prison at this critical time when, had I not, I would have been working day and night with the legal team, with the aid of my computer and papers.  The Final Hearing would be the most important to date because it would decide M’s fate and who he lived with for the rest of his childhood.  I needed my resources to properly prepare, but I was stuck without anything other than the gripping fear in the pit of my stomach that I was about to lose my beloved child forever.

              Sometimes, I feared I may go crazy from not seeing M and the total injustice of what had happened to us.  My frustration and powerlessness burned like a fire within me, extinguished only by tears of despair.  Each day the fire burned a little less and I feared that the anger that had kept me strong, fuelled by nearly four years of litigation was dwindling, turning to embers and the ashes of our life becoming dust. 

              I was imperative to keep the anger alive knowing it was preferable to the despair and hopelessness I felt, but it was harder each day.  Even a caged animal, first thrashing against its captivity will eventually lie down in its cage, defeated by its captors.  Each time I felt my legs give way, I willed myself upright and let love raise me – the deep, enduring love I had for M.  I knew he needed me to keep fighting and always would.  I could never give up on him, and that meant I mustn't give up on myself.

              My second weekend inside was now approaching. I found this the hardest time of all.  Lock-down began at 5.15pm and didn’t end until 8.30 a.m. in the morning.  I dreaded the long hours of solitude behind the cell door, locked in the confined space, oppressive and panic-inducing. 

              Each weekend, as lock-down got nearer, I would feel myself breaking into a cold sweat of anxiety.  Writing was the only thing that helped me feel less alone, documenting my thoughts on paper, expressing the things that I could not say out loud; Trying to have a voice, where I had none.

              Sometimes I wrote furiously, the words gushing forth, spilling my frustration and anguish on each page – other times the words wouldn't come at all.  I was now sending the pages out every few days to my lawyers, as I feared otherwise that the staff would read them during  their daily inspections.  I knew my legal team would at least keep them safe for me until I got out - a testament for M, should he ever get to read them. 

              At first I'd had to exist without many basic items. I'd filled out a canteen order as soon as I had come in and so at the beginning of the second week, I did, at last have soap, toothpaste, toothbrush and a comb, as well as a newspaper which I devoured hungrily each day.  I saved the
Times
crossword and
Seduko
puzzles until the night time lock up,to give me something to focus on.  They weren’t much of a distraction but they were better than nothing.  I had a picture in my mind of the many times I had watched M and my father pondering over the Seduko in the
Telegraph
together, his little brain trying to understand how it worked as his Grandad patiently showed him how the numbers added up.  He loved being near to his grandfather and would take an interest in anything he liked to do, holding him on a pedestal of love. 

              It was Grandad who taught M to play golf and bought him his first set of clubs at the age of just three.  It was Grandad who bought a Kayak so they could go out together, bobbing over the waves, and it was Grandad who gave him his wings to try new things, whilst I tried to offer secure roots.  These memories would flash in my mind each night - bringing both comfort and a sense of yearning.

              I watched
Sky
news endlessly through the night and never slept without the television switched on for company, so I was probably the best informed I'd ever been on current affairs.  Not that that was of any real use to me in this non-world where things happening on the outside seemed just as unreal as this other world I'd entered.

              Ten days after I was jailed, an article appeared in the
Times
which covered our case and talked about the problems of Judges accepting the word of experts in family cases without testing the evidence.  This was a subject that would hit the press very hard a year later, but at the time it was still only really in the domain of people like
Cavendish
and
Booker
who have been pioneers in exposing the wrongs of the Family Court system in the UK and in pushing for less secrecy. 

              The
Times
article raised the problems of the new and intangible term that had been coined by experts  of “emotional abuse.” It was a wide and highly exploited label that was being thrown around by so called “experts” everywhere and had emanated from the views of an American psychiatrist called Richard Gardner, whose theories, now completely discredited had disseminated throughout the world to English speaking countries. 

              Gardner had alleged that women who reported sexual abuse, used this as a weapon to deny contact and alienate the father.  He had even made the preposterous claim that incest was a natural stage of childhood and had been responsible for the now widely used term of Parental Alienation Syndrome.

              In most of the cases I'd heard about, this label seemed mostly to be attributed to women.  Caring, good mothers, found themselves deemed to have emotionally harmed their children on the most spurious of reasons, such as failing to discipline enough or handing out too much pocket money, but in those cases where the father was involved, the common accusation was coaching and emotional abuse. 

              In our case from the first suggestion of coaching, by the Educational Psychologist to every Court appointed “expert” since, the baton of “emotional harm” had been passed on – the accusation that I'd influenced my son to fabricate things against his father. 

              I was powerless against it.  I knew that it was a lie and that until my son disclosed, I had fully supported contact between M and R, but I couldn't prove the intangible label, they'd given me, any more than they could. There was no evidence either way, but it didn’t seem to matter as far as the Court was concerned. 

              As
Cavendish
rightly pointed out, until they abandoned, what was still a relatively new term of “emotional abuse,” more and more mothers would be forced to flee with their children as their only hope of keeping them.

              Camilla flagged up hard the problem for mothers who are accused of coaching when their children make allegations of sexual abuse and tried to expose the deep flaws in a theory- that despite being fully discredited, was still being widely relied upon, especially in cases such as ours, where no forensic examination of the child had taken place.

              Physical abuse is easier to identify because there are outwards marks to show for it, but often parents are wrongly accused of this form of abuse too.  The child may have grazed or bruised himself in the playground and the parents could suddenly find themselves caught up in the nightmare of Social Services intervention due to an over- zealous teacher or other supposed well-meaning person over-reacting to something  innocuous.  Despite claims otherwise, young children are rarely believed or seen as credible witnesses.  It didn't matter how much my son protested that I was a good and caring mummy who'd never coached him and never harmed him, no one listened.  They refused to believe the truth of a child, when in fact, children find it almost impossible to lie and are easy to read, especially when they are very young. 

              The first Educational Psychologist had frightened M by telling him he had his father’s blood in him and as such,  had to love him.  It had seemed such a strange thing to say to a child of then only six.  The Guardian had told M that he saw nothing wrong with his father telling him frightening stories about sharks gobbling him up and bogey men coming to throw him in the sea – he said he told them to his own children.  When M had tried to open up to each of these people, they had shut him down and refused to listen. 

              The quality of people that were enlisted to supposedly help and assess, I would not have entrusted with the care of my dog, let alone my child.  The Guardian didn't even know what a public school was.  This was a man who had supposedly worked with children for years.  It made one suspicious of their authenticity and throughout the was extreme reluctance to provide any form of CV or proof of qualifications.

              Parents were supposed to hand children over to the authorities without fighting back at all and to accept whatever criticisms were thrown at them, no matter how wrong or how ludicrous these were.  This was as unrealistic, as it was unreasonable and would be hard to explain to anyone other than those who have suffered the same fate.  All most people see is that you have lost your child and they find it incomprehensible that this may have happened unjustly because we are all raised to believe that they systems set up to protect the vulnerable members of society work for their benefit and in their best interests.  It is an isolating experience that turns families and friends against innocent parents who have done nothing to deserve this, isolating them and damaging potential support systems when they are needed most. 

              M was now looking squarely at a future of being forced to live with a man who had scared him so much that he had wet himself in his presence every time he was forced to see him.  This same man would have carte blanche to repeat his actions for the rest of M’s childhood and there was nowhere to turn to prevent this.  M himself had chosen to block out these memories, or so it seemed on the surface.  In reality I doubt he'd forgotten anything or ever would.  He'd been forced to shut away those things that he couldn't deal with. I, in turn, couldn't put out of my mind, what he'd said, whimsically to the only properly qualified expert, “I hope Daddy doesn’t do it again, but the social worker says he won’t, so it must be true;” placing his trust in those adults now in control, finding his own way to survive his fear and pain.

              What has been reported increasingly since this time, was how much money Social Workers get paid for taking a child into care.  They have targets to reach for both adoption and fostering and there is big business in agencies that place children for either.  Experts are paid phenomenal sums of money to damn the parent that they are trying to remove the child from.  Fees of sometimes as much as thirty thousand pounds  were often commanded for preparing half a dozen reports supporting the view of the Social Workers or Guardian.

              The expert knows they won’t get paid unless they find what the Local Authority want them to find, so they would often embellish or twist the facts.  If the report did not reach the threshold of what was needed to remove the child, then they would fabricate things until it did.  All the time the parent is powerless against the hearsay third party evidence of these “experts” – some who have never even met them.  In our case the psychologist supporting the father had repeatedly refused to meet and talk to me, a common occurrence.  Silencing the person being targeted was a useful weapon and ignoring them, the norm. 

              I had contacted this woman numerous times by telephone, begging her to let me come and talk to her and explain what had happened and how, but she refused point blank and then described me as someone who was aggressive and challenging because I dared to ask for something that should have been a basic right.

              No –one knew better than M and I, what it was like to be out in the cold.  Of the professionals involved in our case, no one knew our relationship better than our GP, but she too met with brick walls, her evidence at the Fact Finding dismissed as worthless by the Judge.  Instead, she was accused of bias simply because M and I were her patients and M’s father had tried to get her struck off - albeit unsuccessfully. 

              It now seemed that M had been lulled into a false sense of security.  Not only through the endless brainwashing by the various experts, but by the fact that his father had clearly not attempted anything whilst he was under the spotlight of the Court.  I feared, however, once that spotlight was off him, I feared that he might reoffend, with nothing stop him, were he to be awarded residency and placed in total control.  Despite everything, I pushed the thought out of my mind and tried to believe that by some miracle the Judge would have an epiphany and still let M come home to me.. 

              The Officers and Local Authority, all supporting the perpetrator of the crime, would all, without exception just over a year later be discredited - the entire social work team involved in our case, no longer in their positions.  One would be suspended on a bullying charge, another moved sideways out of child care and into adult care and the Senior Social Worker, put on suspension due to misconduct concerning another case. Miss Whiplash who had done the most damage to us, had failed to report or act on abuse of another child whose parents were now in jail.  At least in that case the abuse had finally been recognised, but in our case, her incompetence and failure to act on what M had told her, had led to this tragic result.