‘My abusive ex convinced the courts to give him custody of our daughter’

Briony and her 12-year-old son live just a minute’s walk away from the park. They can see it from their kitchen window. 

However, the 40-year-old, who is speaking under a pseudonym, struggles to see it as a safe space for them to play after her ex – her son’s father – appeared there out of the blue one day. 

‘I was talking to one of the other parents when he turned up and all hell broke loose. He demanded to know who I was talking to and what I was saying to him,’ Briony, who is being supported by Refuge, tells Metro from her home. 

‘He then threatened to kill us, to bury me and my family, and threatened to throw acid in my face’. 

This is a man who has been battling Briony for access to their son for seven years. As many survivors have experienced, her abusive ex has attempted to control and manipulate her through the family courts. 

Since the end of their relationship in 2017, Briony’s former partner has lodged more than a dozen applications, requiring an endless stream of hearings.

It’s why the mum-of-two calls the family courts ‘an abuser’s playground’. 

Charlotte Proudman, an award-winning family law barrister, tells Metro that ‘many survivors think that once they’ve escaped an abusive relationship or left, then that’s the end’.

‘But when they arrive at the courtroom door, this is often just the start of another abusive relationship with their perpetrator,’ she explains.

In Briony’s case, she spent countless hours fighting her ex in court, including on her son’s birthday last year, which she couldn’t celebrate because her statement was due in. 

Even when her second child was in hospital, her ex doubled down.  

‘My baby son was in intensive care halfway up the country and even on that day when he was fighting for his life, hooked up to all sorts of machines, I still wasn’t allowed to be pardoned from the court hearing – I had to do it in the bereavement room in the neonatal intensive care unit.

‘It was just awful.’

Briony’s former partner is very charming and charismatic, which allowed him to present an entirely different character to the courts and various agencies.

‘He was trying to make out that he was the victim of years of abuse and had to save our son,’ she remembers. 

In actual fact, Briony and her son had been subject to a campaign of coercive control that saw him monitor their every move. 

This extended to where they could go, how long for, and who they could see. 

‘He didn’t even live with us, but he had such a control; he would turn up any time unannounced to check on us; to make sure we were following his rules,’ Briony recalls.

‘You couldn’t just go to the park and talk to any other parents, you just weren’t allowed to talk to anyone – males in particular.’ 

Thankfully, she was able to prove five allegations of domestic abuse at a fact-finding hearing, which saw him facing a temporary ban on making more applications.

However, Briony adds, the judge told her the ruling might have gone a very different way if she hadn’t been able to provide evidence because of the strength of her ex’s case.  

‘My ex absolutely loved it because he could do whatever he wanted in there. It was an exercise in humiliating and degrading me’ 

The mum isn’t the only one to complain that professionals – including the judges overseeing their cases – still do not properly grasp that proceedings can be weaponised as a form of post-separation abuse.

Domestic abuse and coercive control expert Dr Emma Katz tells Metro ‘the overwhelming objective’ for judges in family court is to keep children in contact with both parents regardless.

This is something that abusive ex-partners know and attempt to use to their advantage, she adds. 

‘It largely doesn’t matter what they’ve done,’ Dr Katz explains. ‘It’s very difficult for them to have done something that is seen by the court as severe enough to override the wish to have the child in contact with them.’ 

Brothers Jack, 12, and Paul, nine, were killed by their abusive father in 2014 after contact was awarded to him – despite Paul and their mother Claire separately explaining to services what he had subjected them to, with Claire even warning that her ex was capable of killing their sons.  

One of the main challenges victim-survivors face is that family courts fear ‘parental alienation’, explains Dr Katz. 

This is where one parent might be alleged to have repeatedly said or done something to negatively impact the child’s relationship with the other parent. 

A Channel 4 Dispatches survey of 4,000 court users found that the charge of ‘parental alienation’ was more likely to be levelled at parents who had cited domestic abuse. 

‘As soon as perpetrators say these words, the court’s focus shifts from domestic abuse and seeing the woman as a victim-survivor to questioning whether the mother is actually doing something really wrong here.’ 

She explains that the emphasis is then put on the woman to prove she is not an alienator. 

The government’s Harm Report from 2019, assessing how the family courts respond to claims of domestic abuse and other risks to children and parents, detailed how ‘perpetrators were sometimes allowed to raise counter allegations of parental alienation and that these were taken seriously, even when there was little or no supporting evidence’.

Lisa* is one mother who has been through this. She has not seen her 18-year-old daughter for six years after being ‘forced into’ the family courts by her former partner, who ‘removed all contact’ after accusing her of being abusive while poisoning their child against her.

At what point do you die through that constant abuse?

She describes sitting in court listening to her abuser ‘making statement after statement that was both defamatory or just a downright lie’ after being told her allegations against him were too historic to consider.

Lisa says she has been made the subject of barring orders, been ordered to pay costs and even had a non-molestation order granted against her for trying to get the court to consider expert safeguarding reports.

‘At one point, the judge was saying “you need to get a psychiatric report to prove that you are not what your ex is saying”,’ Lisa recalls. ‘My ex absolutely loved it because he could do whatever he wanted in there. It was an exercise in humiliating and degrading me.’ 

She tells Metro the ordeal has destroyed her finances, as well as her physical and mental health, to the extent that she has been given support for suicidal thoughts.

‘My health is failing, my finances are failing. And I see that my daughter is not only also being abused but she’s also being taught to be malevolent towards me,’ she says.

‘None of the services are bothered by mothers being denied contact, only fathers.’

Lisa has repeatedly reached out through letters – on Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, birthdays, and at Christmas – but never hears anything back.

‘I end up sitting there thinking it’s a bit like someone saying, “well, we’ll just let him keep strangling you, and so far you haven’t died so it doesn’t meet our threshold”. At what point do you die through that constant abuse?’

In her book, He Said, She Said: Truth, Trauma and the Struggle for Justice in Family Court,  Dr Proudman calls the notion of ‘parental alienation’ a ‘pseudoscience’ that men use ‘to flip a family court dispute on its head’.

She says that when it comes to fathers demanding contact, the courts seem to take the view that it is better for a child to have a highly abusive and dangerous parent than go without one.

One of Dr Proudman’s current clients is a woman whose daughter was allowed to stay overnight with her father, despite him having sexually, violently and coercively abused the mother.

She recently won an appeal at the High Court against the previous judge’s decision regarding overnight contact – however her ordeal is not over.

‘She is now being accused by the father of not enthusiastically supporting the relationship between the rapist father and her child,’ Dr Proudman says.

The fear now is that if the mother is found to be acting hostile towards the father, that he could get more contact or even full custody. 

‘In what world would a rape victim be pleasant, kind and enthusiastic and support her abuser to her child? I feel like I’m living in a parallel universe.’

They have no choice but to send children off to these contact visits and see them often come back dishevelled, devastated, crying, furious

Penelope* is another mother whose abusive ex was given access to her daughter with lasting consequences. 

‘My life’s been damaged and my son’s life’s being damaged from an emotional perspective,’ Penelope says.

Penelope, who is also supported by Refuge, explains that when her 5-year-old does go to stay with his dad, he has been ignored, left alone and picked on by others in the house.

The boy is now in therapy because of the anxiety in the lead-up to and immediately after contact visits.

‘They say a child needs to see both parents in order to grow up as a well-rounded individual – what about when this happens? Courts are just not interested – I think they actively choose to turn a blind eye.

‘What I find is that they seem to bend over backwards for the male. Yet every time I say it’s domestic abuse, it’s met with silence.’

Penelope’s ex has taken her to court four times for a final hearing and withdrew a six-figure sum to bankroll his pursuit of her. 

‘As a domestic abuse victim, I don’t want to negotiate with him, but I do so to keep it out of court.

‘But he forces a final hearing every single time because he is never penalised by the court for wasting its time, which ultimately has a detrimental impact on my child.’

As Dr Katz explains, for abusers who have lost control of their victims, ‘the children are really the big card they have left to play’. 

‘Victim-survivors are trapped, sending their children off to perpetrators, who are then using that time to continue the abuse – or even escalate what they are doing.’ 

‘They have no choice but to send children off to these contact visits and see them often come back dishevelled, devastated, crying, furious – and there’s very little they can do about it.’

*Names have been changed