A monstrous regimen

Thursday, 1st May 2008

Not before time, a family judge has fired a broadside at the way in which the English family courts enable decent fathers to be persecuted by vengeful estranged mothers. The Times reports that Lord Justice Ward gave vent to his feelings after telling a father that there was nothing he could do to help him to re-establish contact with his teenage daughter who had been turned against him by her ‘vicious’ mother.

The ‘drip, drip, drip of venom’ poured into the daughter’s ears by the mother included accusations of sexual abuse against the innocent father after the couple divorced, the judge said. The former wife’s tactics were so successful that the daughter wrote to her father when she was 9 saying that she wished he was dead… Lord Justice Ward told the father that the case was bordering on scandalous but the court was compelled to act solely in the best interests of the child. The girl would be too distressed if she was forced to spend time with her father after her mother’s ‘corrupting’ campaign, he said.

‘The father complains bitterly, passionately and with every justification that the law is sterile, impotent and utterly useless — we have to acknowledge there is a degree of force in what he says,’ the judge told the Court of Appeal Civil Division. ‘But the question is what can this court do? The answer is nothing. This is a truly distressing case. It may not be untypical of many, but in some ways it borders on the scandalous. It certainly is tragic.’

As I wrote back in 1999 in my book The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male (published by the Social Market Foundation) such abuses (surely the human equivalent to the female mantis eating her mate as in the picture above) most certainly are not atypical of the family courts. But no-one listened then —and with politicians of all parties still either signed up to or cowed by gender politics, they are unlikely to listen now.