Issues with how EXDP treats our shared children caused our relationship to breakdown as I didn’t want our children growing up thinking that how that are treated by their father is acceptable. The final trigger was when he hurt our youngest child causing swelling and bruising that lasted over a week.
social services investigated at the time. I opened up about historic incidents and provided evidence (photos of previous marks left on children and door bell footage). However my main concern is the emotional abuse (mocking, shaming the children). Plus other concerns re financial abuse and sexual abuse (exposing the children to inappropriate language, grabbing/molesting me infront of the children, pressing to have sex when the children are sleeping in the same room)
Nothing has been done as social services consider the children to be “not at risk of immediate significant harm”
EXDP is allowed unsupervised contact with the children. He’s told social services that the marks he’s left on the children were necessary to stop them hurting each other (not true) and that I would have allowed them to hurt each other. He’s said that my reaction to his parenting (sticking up for the children when he’s bullying them) is alienating him as a parent. Social services seem to believe him rather than me.
where do I go from here? I understand that there are children in much much worse circumstances, limited resources, etc. but surely we should have better standards for parenting than to allow “low level abuse, not ideal parenting, not what we would recommend” (social services words).