Mummy's Still Here

by Jeanne D'Olivier

  We left the Court radiantly happy knowing we would now go before a tribunal of Judges in the Appeal Court. My fast diminishing candle of hope was alive with a tiny flame once more and I could have hugged this Judge for giving me a reason to breathe again.

  Christopher had brought two friends along for the hearing. He seemed to know a lot of people through his years as a successful businessman running a language school in France. The couple who joined us for lunch afterwards were a retired Teacher and his wife and for the first time, I also met Christopher's own wife - who was much younger than he and had been a former student at his school. She was stunning, blonde, svelte and her looks belied her sixty odd years.

  We were a jubilant group as we headed to an Italian restaurant talking non-stop about the hearing and with Christopher basking in the glory of having supported me. For once he praised my efforts and told me I had done a superb job and that I was a model example for any other parent who was to self-litigate her case. There was much to celebrate and we did. We downed a few bottles of good wine and devoured delicious pasta dishes and richly sauced Chicken. I ate with real gusto, knowing that at last I had a real chance of over-turning the horrific Judgment and seeing my precious son again. I could not wait to tell my father and rang him from my mobile. He too was overjoyed.

  I headed back to St Pancras in a cab with Christopher's friends who were heading back to Brighton and were embarrassingly singing my praises on a stunning job, all the way to the station. I, breathed easily for the first time and wondered how with such an easy and short hearing and a less than twenty minute speech, I had succeeded in turning our lives around. But I cared not. I had won an Appeal and there was everything to hope for and fight for. I had a reason to live again and I sent silent grateful prayers to the God I thought had abandoned me, all the way back home on the train.

  Little did we know that day that we were labouring under a misapprehension in believing in our success. I was shocked to the core when having celebrated our first small victory in years, we discovered only a short time later that the tribunal hearing was to be only another Permission Hearing. What was more the Judge had ordered that the Guardian and R were to submit their own Skeleton Arguments. Despite the optimism of Christopher and my eleven very strong grounds of appeal, I fell from a very great height and now felt an ever stronger, growing sense of uneasiness.

  I knew it was not usual for the other parties in the case to be ordered to attend and the suspicion I was fast trying to suppress in my mind, was that the reason for this was so that the barrister representing the Guardian, who was the only person with formal legal counsel, could quash my case. I voiced this fear to Christopher, who thought I was wrong, but nonetheless, either way, believed my grounds were so water-tight that I could not fail to secure either a Rehearing or a Full Appeal at the next salute.

  Christopher was so confident, he decided not to come to the hearing. This was as much due to practical difficulties as he had a pre-booked a well deserved family holiday the day after and couldn’t risk missing his flight should he get stranded in the UK. He stayed closely in touch throughout and I myself, naively thought I was so well prepared and had worked so hard, that I had to at least have a chance of winning this time. I tried to ignore the nagging memory of Ron's ominous words which would whisper in my ear through the long nights before we would go back to Court and the ever mounting suspicion that the Guardian's Counsel had been brought in to completely undermine my case. I knew full well that Judge's never make any dreadful decision alone, but always rely on others to do this for them and despite the Judge's praise of my performance in Court that day, I could not escape my fear that what had seemed to be at last a break in the relentless wall of injustice that had gone before, was no more than a momentary reprieve and flutter of calm before the tempest that would inevitably follow - the darkness after the dawn.

  If there were any prizes to be awarded for time, endurance, stamina and determination, then that would have won me the day. I left no stone unturned, supported all my points, wrote and rewrote my address to the Court and became as familiar with legal precedents as a professional barrister. For once, I felt that I could do no more. I perfected my work right until the night before the hearing which was not set down until February of the following year - a full eight months now would have passed since I had lost in the Family Court and I had not seen M now for over a year by now. I was left to wait with nothing to quench my interminable thirst of yearning for even a moment with my son. I lived only six miles from where he now resided with R and only two from his new school, but there might as well have been continents between us. Yet he lived in me and in my heart as if he had never left my side and at night I would hug one of his small stuffed animals close to me in one hand, smelling what was left of his fading childish fragrance, drawing him near me, as my little dog Coco slept on the pillow next to me, quietly willing me to join in him slumber.

  Chapter 17

  Judgment Day

  Christmas came again at the end – another year. My father travelled over from the Island to stay with me and the friends I had made in Ischia invited us to spend New Year with them.

  My sister would still not speak to me and refused to answer my emails begging her to reconcile. This placed unbearable pressure on all of us. Dad felt duty bound to spend some time with her and my brother was included in an invitation to meet for lunch in London - naturally I was not welcome. This added to my sense of isolation but for Dad's sake, I had to accept it. I could not place further stress on him by insisting he did not go. He was caught between us and it was terrible for him but the solution was not in my hands. I had made a desperate attempt to bring peace by sending a gift to her, but it had been returned express delivery without even being opened.

  The ripples of injustice spread far and wide in cases like ours. People lose friends, family members, careers and in many cases, the will to live. Some succumb to prescription drugs and alcohol to relieve their pain and to attempt to enter oblivion. I did neither. I was determined to give them no reason to say I was unfit in any way. Would it have been easier to take Prozac and hide under the duvet? I somehow doubt it. There is no pill that will take away the pain of losing a child and I channelled my frustration, grief and anger into putting as much effort into the case as possible.

  Right up until Christmas Eve, I was still working day and night to prepare for the second Permission Hearing. In the intervals between my endless hours spent hunched in agony on the computer, my back almost breaking with exhaustion and my sciatica now a daily and constant nagging companion, I taught my few students. I often wondered how I managed to teach anybody anything but having had my career as an English and Drama Secondary School Teacher so cruelly destroyed, I had set myself up to teach English to foreign students from home. The work was not as rewarding or demanding, but this was probably for the best, for at times I found it difficult to find any thoughts in my weary mind with which to teach them anything at all and the fact that I knew my material, often repetitive and sometimes a little unchallenging, was the only reason I could manage to do it. It made little difference to my income which was still, in the main, provided by my long-suffering and uncomplaining father, but I had some sense of purpose other than the case and it was good for me to occasionally be forced to focus on something that neither related to the Court or touched my desolation.

  The Judge had asked me get a copy of the Court Transcripts from the Final Hearing and make reference to the things that supported our Case. A five day hearing results in an enormous amount of paper. Every word that had been spoken, by everybody involved had to be scrutinized and each quote that served our Appeal points had to be highlighted and explained as to its relevance. It was a task of massive proportions, even for a well-trained lawyer with the assistance of Legal Executives and Junior Counsel to aid them, it would have taken weeks. For a Litigant in Person, such as myself, it was probably the hardest and most draining task I had ever faced in my life. I could not have
managed it all had I not formerly done two English degrees. The approach to preparing a case is not dissimilar to writing a thesis and this had to come close to or even go beyond the work needed for a doctorate in terms of effort.

  Each reference and quote had to be identified and typed out separately, citing not only the quote itself, its relevance and how it substantiated our case, but also any precedents that supported us - all this had to be cross-referenced.

  Having at last finished the humungous task, I realised that when I came to print it out, the indexed references from the hard copy, had fallen on different pages to the version that had been emailed to me by the transcribers - which I had used to highlight and track on my computer. This meant I had to go through the whole process a second time to ensure that everything was consistent. I was already on my knees with exhaustion and alongside this I was preparing to re-take my driving test.

  This terrible frame up by the Island's police on the trumped up Failure to Provide charge made my life even more difficult because any task that I had to do for the Court by way of filing papers would usually involve fairly decent cycle rides, getting supplies and going backwards and forwards to the Post Office often with heavy bundles on my ever-breaking back

  I had now been two years without my license and was still paying the three thousand pound fine imposed on me in monthly instalments. In addition to this, R had now filed an application for Child Support and I had legal papers to prepare for that too. It was nothing compared to the work I was doing for the Appeal, but proving I was broke took precious time away from the more important issues and dealing with the CSA administration is a task not for the faint hearted. They are notoriously the worst organized agency in Britain.

  As I cycled my way relentlessly between post offices and stationery stores, my back aching from the long hours on my computer, I cursed the Island's Police for lying under oath and not leaving me at least with the means to get about easily.

  It seemed that I was persecuted from all sides for daring to report what my son had told me on a fateful night in 2007. The night that had changed our lives forever.

  What was a mother to do when her son disclosed sexual abuse to her? We are encouraged in all directions to report it to Social Services. What were my choices when he developed Proteus Mirabilis, a rare infection known to be an indicator of sexual abuse? I had had no choice but to seek the advice and medical care of our GP and she in turn, had had no choice but to report her opinion, as her duty, to the relevant authority. But how he could we know what would follow back then and realistically what kind of parent would it have made me, had I not sought immediate medical care for my son's infections and kept him close to the doctor and paediatrician who were treating him?

  Perhaps she would have made the connection between my son's illnesses sooner, had I told our GP that he was seeing his father but there simply had been no reason to do so. We had no experience of sexual abuse, and whilst I knew R to be a bully in regard to his treatment of me, I had nothing on which to base any suspicion that he might be harming M in this way.

  No woman wants to believe that the father of her child is a paedophile and at the time I had not known that urine infections and the subsequent bowel problems that ensued could be linked to such a heinous crime. M had been too little to articulate what must have been happening at each visit for a period of two years but when he reached five he found the courage and the words to tell me. From that moment our life as we knew it was over.

  None of this made any sense. That I should lose all contact and R gain sole custody three years later, was something I could not have believed when I had innocently walked into Social Services at their invitation, to elicit their help and advice. How had this led to me being considered the bad parent? I ran these facts over and over again in my mind. Longing to turn back the clocks and take a different course of action.

  Had I known then, what I know today, I would have scooped M up in my arms the minute he told me and run away as far and as fast as possible. Had I known he would be disbelieved despite every piece of propaganda the government and news spout daily on these matters - back then - I would have seen the establishment as something to be feared and the last place to seek help. But like so many of your now reading our story, you will disbelieve that these things can possibly happen, maybe brand me as crazy or deluded, as some have, and for every person who reads this and feels compassion, there will be many who will say this simply isn't true. To those naysayers, I ask only one thing, that if you cannot find it in your heart to feel for my plight as a mother, that you at least feel empathy for M, for in damning me, you are discrediting his truth and his story. The story he has never altered to this day - the one he repeated at five years old to an army of adults he had begged to make it stop.

  Again to those who find our story incredible, I say you haven't the benefit of seeing our medical evidence or M's own words to the police - which could not fail to stir emotions in even the hardest of hearts - the film that is locked away in a safe in a Court on a Scottish Island, of a little boy nervously twisting and turning mummy's mobile phone in his hands - shivering and red-faced with the shame of what had been done to him, as he opened his heart to a complete stranger, a police officer who he believed would save him and implored her to end his suffering.

  There had never been a medical examination of M - despite my constant requests that they carry this out and they had waited nearly a year before interviewing him. I had not known the day or time that the police would come to take him for interview as they deliberately kept me in the dark so that I could not be accused of doing the very thing, I was then accused of by a Social Worker who did not know us, - coaching him.

  It is now 8 years later from the day when M reached out for help. An increasing number of women are fleeing from Britain daily, from domestic violence and sexual abuse of themselves and their children. Women who see no other way out of for themselves or their innocent children. I urge anyone reading this, to do anything and everything you can to make this situation end right now, for M and for every other child out there who has been brave enough to ask "please make it stop".

  How can this be happening and I not know? I hear those in doubt respond. For the very reason that you did not know about M and I. For every mother in this position is placed on a gagging order to prevent her going public with her case. The Press face law suits if they dare to name those involved, so public awareness is kept to the very few journalists who are brave enough to speak out regardless - Booker at the Telegraph being one of the few who writes weekly of these cases - but he can only do so in vague and anonymous terms and he cannot go against the Judgements that are made.

  In other words if the Court finds for "no abuse," even if the mother is able to prove with evidence that the finding was wrong, as in our case, he cannot say so.

  At the time I was preparing for my Appeal Hearing, a new President of the Family Court was appointed. Lord Justice Munby now advocates the lifting of injunctions on all cases where families believe they have been wronged in order to give them a voice and to bring about natural justice. He believes in the freedom of the press to report on family cases but until Parliament gets behind him and the existing Children's Act of 1989 is changed, his recommendations, whilst admirable, carry no weight for the mantra of "best interests of the child" and "discretion of the Judge" will always be used to prevent any problematic case being discussed in the social domain in any real way.

  Mothers seek desperate remedy, ignoring injunctions out of grief, anger and determination to get a voice for themselves and their children by going public on social media pages such as Facebook and Twitter, only to be threatened with further injunctions, Contempt of Court and in many cases put in jail for doing so. Nothing can change until the MPs realise the flaws within a system that bases its findings on "the balance of probabilities," rather than the burden of proof. So long as "experts" can give evidence that is opinion only based and not founded on sound hard indisputable fact,
then Munby's recommendations have no weight at all.

  We all need to get behind this for the sake of our children and urge MP's to carry this into Parliament. Let the Family Court system operate in the same way as the Criminal Courts - on the burden of proof - try cases of abuse in the criminal arena where they should be tried, by experts with real knowledge of Sexual Abuse - not Social Workers and Police Officers, many of whom are not properly trained and none of whom have the expertise necessary to judge this, yet routinely and cruelly decide the fate of children on a daily basis.

  Due to his appointment, I was able to allude to Munby in my application for Permission to Appeal, but unfortunately as he was only recently made President of the Family Court, there were few Judgements he had made on what were considered radical but necessary changes on which we could rely for precedents.

  At last the Appeal and transcript references were perfected as far as was humanly possible. My father had come over to be with me at Christmas and took my copy to be photocopied for the other parties and we managed to file everything with the Court on the same day that we set off for to spend New Year in Stratford at the invitation of the lovely friends I had made on holiday.

  Dad urged me to put all thoughts of the Court case out of my mind for the next couple of days. We had booked to stay in a country inn close to where the New Year Party was being held. It was a treat to get away from the house and the temptation to go back over evidence. Everything was now filed with the Appeal Court and whilst technically I still had time to add more to the already heaving bundles that had gone to the Court, I dared not look any further. If we overwhelmed the court, the Judges would simply not read it, Peter had warned, so I was glad to be away from any further opportunity to add something.