Mummy Where Are You? (Revised Edition, new) (39 page)

              Segregated, vilified, humiliated and destroyed – for what? I was just a concerned mother, but I felt like a Jew who is punished for nothing more than being Jewish. 

              M would always know that Mummy loved him whatever happened now.  He surely could not block out the seven and a half years we had shared. believed our bond was much too strong ever to be destroyed.  Those years of raising him single-handedly had to carry him through whatever the future may hold.  But as each long day passed, I found it harder to see anything other than the inevitable conclusion to which we were careering ever faster - a galloping horse, out of control, that could not be halted.

              Charlene often sat outside my door speaking loudly about me in derogatory terms and hoping to upset me as much as possible.  It seemed now, I  couldn’t escape her, anywhere.

              Even going to the gym didn’t lift me as it had in the past.  It was just more mindless activity that allowed me to think too much.

              During one call, my father told me that he had heard from the Property Manager in Florida who had found a tenant for the house that should have been our home.  He expected me to see this as good news and it should have been, but I saw it as the dissipation of our dream - M’s and mine. The house represented the last time M and I had been together, safe and happy. Dad, unlike me, was thinking from a practical position- understandable given the money he had been poured into the case so far.  I could only think about the loss of M and how close we had come to freedom from the cruelty.

              Dad had always been a pragmatist and in this situation he needed to be, but it reawakened feelings of his betrayal in giving us up and M being torn from my arms in such a brutal and barbaric fashion.  I hated to think of the impact on M that would have in later years.  I have never seen anything so horrific in my life and yet it was an occurrence that now seemed to be happening daily in Britain – our so-called civilised land. Dad saw the leasing of the house as one less problem, I saw it as taking away any hope of ever going back. 

              I felt a pang of what was probably irrational anger as he burst the fantasy of ever going back, no matter how unlikely that now seemed.  I returned to my cell, where alone I shed a few silent tears as I saw us slip further and further away from freedom and closer to my worst nightmare of losing M forever.

              The Social Worker who had given the order for M to be taken in Florida had even been commended for her actions.  In one report that I had read she was said to have done sterling work in helping to locate us and persuade the American authorities to remove M - allegedly telling them I was a dangerous mentally unstable woman who may harm my son.  As I read the malicious words, I had felt a sense of horror that someone could fabricate such a lie, having never seen me with my son and only meeting me once at my home and yet, she had been able to convince someone many miles away to act upon her lies, without even checking the facts.  One phone call being all it took to end our life.

              It had also come to light in an email that I had since seen from the American Social Services notes, that she had persuaded the social worker not to carry out a "safe and well check, in case M was found to be safe and well – which naturally he was.  It was only after they took him that his life turned upside down and he was neither safe nor well.

              The
Times
had published another article which I read with interest.  Our case was again referred to as an example of the way that mothers were now being treated in Britain.  There were various responses to this in letter form, in the main supportive of my actions in fleeing - but one person, a Professor had latched on to one of the reporter's comments in a very negative way.  The journalist had used the words, “even if the father is innocent....,” which in our view clearly was not the case, and was a line taken completely out of context to the article as a whole.  This man had responded to these words in isolation and said the abuse had been discredited and painted a very damning picture of who I was.  This was not even a factual comment.  The abuse was simply not proven to the Judge's satisfaction, nor could it have been for the yardstick was whether M had been anally penetrated and without the necessary physical examination which I had tried so many times to insist upon, but which they had refused to carry out, there was no way that there could have been hard proof of what had happened.

              Again I felt a surge of anger that some stranger somewhere with no real knowledge of who we were, could sit in judgment without me being able to respond, but the old adage is true, “if you live by the press, you may also die by them.”  I hadn’t lived by the press at all, but most criminal cases of any significance find their way into the papers and there is little one can do to prevent it.  If you know that you are going to be written about, it is very tempting to at least be interviewed so that you can  try to give people a balanced perspective. There is never a guarantee that your words will be represented accurately and at the time that I had been interviewed by the
Times
, the journalist seemed to be sympathetic and my legal team had felt I should put my view forward.  I am not sure now whether that was good advice or bad, it was simply a case of trying to have a voice for the truth.

              It seems to be a flaw in the system in general that what is in fact a criminal allegation was tried in the arena of  Family Court, where sexual abuse was tried on the "balance of probabilities," rather than the higher but fairer standard of "burden of proof."  As a result the decision boils down to one thing - the attitudes and opinions of the Judge - one person, instead of a jury.

              In our case no expert had even viewed M’s evidence at the time and the Judge had relied only on what he believed to be true.  This seemed entirely wrong as he was not qualified to judge this, his background being contract law.  I am not sure that this would have happened if we had still been living in the UK as they have a much larger stable of Judges to draw upon.  The main point was that we had never found his handling of the case to be satisfactory and we had never accepted his Judgment.  This didn’t help us now, but his finding of “No Abuse” based only on whether there was physical proof of anal penetration, when there could be none without examination, was highly unsafe in our opinion - a view that was shared by many experienced barristers and experts who have viewed my son's evidence since.  All four of our former barristers and a clinical psychologist with thirty years experience of sexual abuse cases, were convinced that my son's evidence unequivocal and that there was no doubt the abuse had taken place.

              The educational psychologist, whilst not having testified at the Fact Finding Hearing, had played a hugely influential part in leading the Judge   Dr C had declared her conflict in seeing R before the case began, and we were certain that in the UK, her appointment as independent, would never have never been allowed.  The domino effect that this created, the baton and assumption of coaching that was then passed on to each expert that followed, began an impenetrable chain reaction, against which we had been powerless.

              This woman who had even gone to R's home to meet with him,  had taken every word M's father said at face value, whilst refusing me any audience at all, despite my constant pleas to meet her.  She had blatantly refused, took a position and then reinforced it over and over in each of her reports, leading the Court down a spiralling path that gained in momentum at phenomenal pace.  From then on we were in a runaway car with no breaks heading for a cliff. 

              From the very first Social Worker to whom I had turned on the advice of my GP purely to seek guidance and help when M first made his disclosures, there had been an assumption, based on no evidence whatsoever that I was a vindictive woman trying to exclude R from M’s life, all down to the influence of this expert, if one could even call her that.  In reality an Educational Psychologist was no more to assess sexual abuse, than a man on the street, but in fact she had never tried to assess anything.  She had come onto the case with a pre-conceived idea borne out of what R had told her and everything had flowed from that. 

              I had become even more concerned about the lack of impartiality of the Court, when I learned from an old boyfriend who had gone to the same school as our Judge that he openly socialised with a father who was involved in another custody dispute.  Surely this was stretching over-step the mark, and at the very least it raised the question of the idea that this particular Judge favoured men.  He had tried, in that case, to separate mother and child because the child had made allegations of physical abuse against the father, but in that case the mother had managed to flee to the UK before orders were made and the child had disclosed at school which had meant that for them, at least, the outcome had been largely a happy one. 

              It made me wonder if I should have taken M to England, rather than go so far away, but having heard some very sad stories of injustice in the English Courts since, there was no guarantee that things would have gone any better if we had done.  R’s father was much more determined to seek vengeance than the father in the other case had been, but in that case too - whilst there was hard physical evidence, the same Judge had accused the mother of coaching  the child into saying it was caused by his father.  It seemed no coincidence that many of the same Court officials that had been involved in our case, had also been involved.  I had read the Judgment  some time before and it was little more than a carbon copy of our case with the initials changed.  The mother was described in similar terms to myself and the father exonerated from all wrongdoing.  The same psychologist had also played an integral part. 

              One could say that in a small community, it was difficult to find experts due to lack of resources, but this was neither a convincing excuse, nor fact.  The Department had been quite prepared to bring someone in from Europe at the taxpayer's expense to help to strengthen their position for taking M from me and no expense had been spared in returning M from Florida. 

              We could only now hope that the one truly independent expert that we had brought in - a properly qualified Clinical Child Psychologist from Scotland would lean more in our favour than previous experts had done.  We had no way of knowing what she would give in evidence, but she at least seemed fair and she hadn’t shown a particular bias towards either parent in her report.  She had even reported some of the negative things said about me by the school, in regards to M's clothes not being ironed when I broke my wrist and the fact I had not attended Parent's Evenings, of which there were only two and I had missed one due to having a meeting with counsel.  Her criticisms, despite being taken out of context, were merely reports of statements made by those determined to damn me.   One had to take the rough with the smooth and whilst I had been outraged at the time to read that M had no self-care skills, when they took him into foster care, I knew that a report that leaned totally in my favour had more chance of being rejected than one that was impartial. 

              M had been raised with as much encouragement to be independent as was safe for him, but he was, at that time he was taken, only seven years old.  He was perfectly capable of dressing, bathing himself, and doing his teeth, but he had declined in foster care from doing those things.  I had put this down to the grief of being suddenly torn from me and put with strangers.  He had clearly suffered some depression, which was understandable and they failed to take this into account or acknowledge how any child might be if put through such trauma.  They also failed to acknowledge that he had not come straight from me, but from foster care in Florida where he had been living in a house where I believe they were good people, but from how unkempt he had often appeared at contact, had much lower standards than we had always had.

              You only have to look at the animal kingdom to see the effect trauma has on any living being.  If a domestic animal is living in an unloving environment, it often ceases to self-groom.  Children torn from loving homes respond like any human being by losing their confidence and any reasonable person could not expect the trauma of such an event not to impact on the child in some very dramatic ways.  M had both attempted to run away in a foreign country and then become repressed and withdrawn when he realised the hopelessness of his position.  It was hard enough for me as an adult to take any interest in normal functionality, how could they expect a child of seven to simply go on as normal in an alien world when he was now in his third foster family in less than year?

              When I fractured my right wrist, I had ensured M was always in clean clothes, but with no one to help me I had not been able to iron..  He had possibly appeared slightly crumpled, but half the mothers in the school didn’t bother to iron under normal conditions.  Put under the microscope of Social Services who were scratching around trying to find fault, it had been another nail in my coffin that was magnified out of all proportion and without making any allowance for the difficulty my injury presented. 

              It seemed ludicrous that a teacher at the school who barely knew me, should make such a judgment call.  Did the person who so quickly made this comment even consider the pain she had caused M?  Or how this would impact on us and our lives?  Perhaps if she had had children herself, she might have felt some compassion, but all she clearly saw was a way of scoring brownie points with the school’s hierarchy who were supporting the fee payer – M’s father.