Invisible Parent

Anonymous Anonymous

Description

What happens when the very same system designed to protect children fails? That's exactly what is happening right now in the UK family courts in cases of Parental Alienation, a form of post-divorce abuse. Cafcass define Parental Alienation as 'when a child's resistance or hostility towards one parent is not justified and is the result of psychological manipulation by the other parent'; yet experts, therapists and social workers are not trained to assess or deal with cases involving Parental Alienation. I spent years making my case to judges, experts and lawyers, all of whom failed to agree on what was actually happening between my ex-wife, my kids and myself. At the time it seemed like I was constantly trying to prove a negative, to find a new direction to reach my kids, and while all were promising, all ended in expensive dead ends as my ex-wife pursued her agenda. If I had to sum up the experience of trying to prove Parental Alienation in the courts, I would describe it as being trapped in the backseat of a car while it crashes in slow motion. The system is not fit for purpose. The family courts are slow and busy, burdened by the backlog of cases. Once you do get a hearing, they are often set months away and even then, traditional safeguarding assessments fail to detect Parental Alienation. The longer the child is away from a parent, the harder it is to stop the alienation, and the longer the issue remains unaddressed, the risk of the children suffering mental health and behavioural problems increases. Alienated parents also often display signs of post-traumatic stress: paranoia, anxiety and in some cases are suicidal. It is my hope that this book will not only draw attention to the potential injustice in cases of Parental Alienation and the need for meaningful reform to prevent further irreparable damage, but that it will help a parent going through a family separation spot signs before it's too late.

Sujets

• Droit et juridique

Informations

• Publié par: Distributed by eBookpartnership
• Date de parution: 14 février 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781839523991
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published 2022
Copyright © The Invisible Parent 2022
The right of The Invisible Parent to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the copyright holder.
While the contents and events of this book are based on real events, the characters and their lives have been fictionalised to preserve anonymity. Any descriptive resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
The author is not a lawyer. The information provided herein is simply a personal account of the author’s own experiences from their perspective, and does not, and is not intended to constitute legal advice. All opinions are the author’s own. The author makes no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy, applicability, fitness or completeness of the contents of this book.
This book is not a substitute for legal advice from a licensed professional solicitor in your jurisdiction, or for reading any original statute. This book should not be treated as an exhaustive treatment of the subject. No liability is assumed for losses or damages due to the information provided.
Published under licence by Brown Dog Books, 10b Greenway Farm, Bath Rd, Wick, nr. Bath BS30 5RL
ISBN printed book: 978-1-83952-398-4
ISBN e-book: 978-1-83952-399-1
Cover design by Kevin Rylands
Internal design by Andrew Easton
Printed and bound in the UK
This book is printed on FSC certified paper

Foreword
By Andrew Keith Walker
Writing The Invisible Parent was supposed to be a typical ghostwriting project. I never expected to put my name on it. That became necessary as the project progressed and we realised there was a need to anonymise the author. Similarly, I never expected to write a foreword for it. Again, it is simply necessary to add credibility to chapters that follow. Typically, a ghostwriter puts the words of the named author down on the page in a form that reads well. The ghostwriter is invisible and uses their writing skills to turn conversations, interviews and the author’s notes into a readable, coherent narrative. This project however, took a different turn.
That turn was the decision to make the author anonymous in order to protect the identities of the people in this book. Anonymity for the author means he can speak freely and openly about the events in his life regarding the deeply painful experience of Parental Alienation. It also means he can quote verbatim from documents that are normally prevented from publication by law, in this case, the many court reports and assessments in the author’s private hearings in the Family Court. The decision to make the author anonymous protects his privacy and that of his children, which feels wholly appropriate given the pain and trauma they have already experienced as a result of Parental Alienation.
I approached this book as a research project in the following way – I interviewed the author many times over a three month period, sometimes daily. I also interviewed friends and former employees who witnessed the events in the book. The mandate for this book was to be evidence-based and to take a documentary approach to the issues – in terms of events, statements and so on - everything written here is supported by some kind of documentary evidence or correspondence. For each point the author makes, my job was to find at least one – and usually more than one – other source corroborating the claim from the mountain of court papers and testimony. This means the narrative couldn’t become a half-remembered slew of anecdotes and accusations, it is a documentary account of the issues we cover in the book.
All the events and exchanges between individuals in this book come from real text messages, emails, legal letters and court reports. Email threads, screen grabs of text messages, WhatsApp messages, hard copies of letters, court reports, correspondence between lawyers, police statements and witness affidavits have formed the basis of this book – over 100 documents in total, produced over three years of court action – plus around 12 hours of recorded interviews and conversations with people who were there at the time.
The end result you will read from here onward, is a thematic analysis of the events of the author’s life, with a particular regard to the period of his Family Court applications to re-establish contact with his children, during which the author experienced alienation from his children and fought to re-establish contact through the Family Court. The sheer complexity of the case made it hard to tell the story in a chronology, so we opted to explore the author’s relationships with his ex-wife, his children and his fiancée, the court, the school and Cafcass in a series of essays. We also decided to unpick the many failings of the Family Court and propose reforms and improvements that would address the issue of Parental Alienation in a preventative, practical manner.
I can confirm that this book is factual with the exception of necessary changes to maintain anonymity for the author and his children. We considered this anonymisation in great detail to ensure we did not substantively alter the facts of the case or the events discussed, but we have made appropriate and significant changes to make it impossible to identify any of the people involved.
Ultimately, the book you are about to read could be the story of any one of thousands of UK parents claiming to be alienated by their ex-partner, regardless of gender or income bracket. Perhaps the most poignant aspect of this story is the fact most alienated parents will recognise themselves and their own experiences on the following pages. In that respect, the Invisible Parent isn’t just about one person, it is also about the devastating impact of Parental Alienation on the lived experience of thousands of estranged parents and children in the UK.
Andrew Keith Walker, 26 October 2020
Contents
Chapter 1: The Invisible Parent
Chapter 2: The mechanics of Alienation
Chapter 3: There is no smoking gun
Chapter 4: What did he do to make his kids hate him?
Chapter 5: The Family Court is a slow motion car crash
Chapter 6: Schools – the missing link in preventing Alienation
Chapter 7: The unintended consequences of trying to start over
Chapter 8: My ex-wife
Chapter 9: The Cafcass problem
Chapter 10: Creating a real solution to Parental Alienation
Chapter 11: My kids and their story
A letter to my children
Chapter 1:
The Invisible Parent
Before I begin telling my story, let me share this extract from a court-ordered assessment from my case by an expert on parent-child relationship breakdowns, a highly qualified psychiatrist and well-known expert witness in my Family Court case and countless others like it.
‘The mother is somewhat passive, and the children absolutely do not believe that she really wants them to see their father.’
It sums up the impossible bind an alienated parent is caught in. My ex-wife cut me off from my kids, and influenced them to hate me. I hadn’t been abusive. Never been violent. I wasn’t a criminal or an addict. I was a successful businessman, we had a beautiful home, and they had the best schools, holidays and every opportunity that someone in my privileged position could give them. My ex-wife, who received millions in our divorce and lived a very privileged life herself, hated me. And then, suddenly, so did my kids. Just like that, they were gone.
The expert court reporter I quoted above suggested family therapy, to bring us back together. This was aligned with the UK family law statute that mandates the Family Court to ensure children of divorce or separation maintain a relationship with both parents – because it’s considered to be in the child’s best interests. My kids proved that to be true. Their welfare suffered as a result of our estrangement. They were depressed and anxious after years of non-contact with me. The court expert recommended the following approach:
‘The focus of the work should be to assist the children with their current level of despair, to help them think about their family issues in a more rounded way, and, with the strong and frank assistance of their mother, to question some key aspects of the narrative. For example, how is it that they blame father for …?’ [The expert then lists events that occurred without my knowledge or involvement, which my children nevertheless blamed me for in their assessments with him.]
Again, there it is. How was it, they blamed me for a list of things that happened after they cut me off, and I knew nothing about until I discovered them for myself? I hadn’t seen my children for over two years when that was written. The court appointed an expert who interviewed my children. They told him their mother doesn’t want them to have a relationship with me. They told him I was to blame for things I knew nothing about. That is the basis of Parental Alienation. I was to blame. I wasn’t someone to have a relationship with. And the source of those opinions – some might call it brainwashing – was my ex-wife.
At the time this report was presented to the court, I had spent years alleging my ex-wife was alienating me from my kids. It wasn’t the first report presented to the Family Court that stated my ex-wife was influencing my kids to cut me off. It was another report, from another expert, appointed by another judge in another Family Court session, that supported my claim that my ex-wife was the cause of problems between me and my kids. And it made no difference whatsoever. One day, aged 11, my kids decided they never wanted to see me again. They had rooms at my house. They stayed with me mid-week and weekends.