Hello,
First of all, apologies, this may be long.
I have two children age 5 and 2. I was in a very abusive relationship with their father for 4 years, there was a lot of domestic violence involved. Social services involvement, numerous police calls. He has a major cocaine addiction and was always in trouble with drug dealers and kept going off on drug binges. The relationship finally ended in January 2018, the children would stay at his mothers home with him almost every weekend - sometimes he would make excuses as to why he couldn't have them. For example he briefly got a girlfriend who was at university and said he couldn't come back for the weekend to have the children as the trains weren't running due to a minor amount of snow. I looked at the train websites and the trains were running but he was adamant they wasn't. There had been no social services involvement since 2016 but at the beginning of the year I received a phone call from a social worker to inform me that there had been a drunken, domestic incident between him and his girlfriend at her university. She later got in contact with me and told me a whole bunch of stuff about how he had hit her head off her wardrobe, threatened her room mates, threatened to go to her work and tell them she's on drugs, destroyed one of her outfits so she couldn't go on a night out, she also informed me that the trains never did stop running and he just didn't want to go back home to have his children. The social worker said he was okay to continue having the children but needed to make me aware about it. Then a few weeks later, I received a call from a police officer asking me to collect the children from his mums property as he had had an argument with his mum and he called the police on her because she supposedly assaulted him. The social worker then became in contact again because apparently the police reported concerns that the property was filthy and unfit for children to be in, and that one of my children was also playing in a dogs cage when they arrived. She came out to my home to see me, advised that they were not to stay at his mothers property again and that if he wanted to see the children that I was to meet up with him at a public place like McDonald's for instance. She had no concerns with myself or my parenting/home and closed the case but advised that if I was to allow the children to stay at his mothers I would be held responsible. Given the circumstances, many chances he has had and just because he is quite evidently incapable of being a responsible parent I decided to stop contact completely. My children haven't seen him for nearly 10 months now. He was given £16,500 in compensation and hasn't used any of it to try and better himself (rehab for his cocaine addiction) or to get a solicitor and take me to court. He has never paid maintenance for them, I contacted the child maintenance service who found he's on state benefits and ordered him to pay £7 a week. I received one payment and since have been sent letters from CMS to say they haven't managed to get the payment from him. When he did get in contact, I advised that he is to find out how to go about seeing the children in a contact centre and he refused I've not heard anything since. Recently though my 5 year old has been coming out with information on things she has seen, a main one being - my mum (her nan) was taking her medication and my daughter said "did you know you can take medicine up your nose", my mum asked her what on earth she was talking about and she said "my daddy does it, I saw him putting medicine up his nose with a straw". She told my mum that her daddy had told her it was medicine when she asked. Due to all these factors and given the circumstances I no longer want my children to ever see their vile father again. I was wondering if there was a way I could go about having his parental responsibility removed?
Thank you