Lately, I’ve been feeling incredibly frustrated with the way my case was handled by the Family Court. I trust my solicitor, don’t get me wrong but yet there are elements that still don’t seem right…
To give some background, my ex is a serial domestic abuser, there are currently 8 charges on his record including one count to me when he assaulted me whilst our 10 month old daughter was on my knee.
My ex was insisting on unsupervised contact but after finding out the true extent of his history and knowing he has alcohol problems, I insisted on taking it to court, hoping that if a third party was to restrict his contact, that my ex might see the seriousness of what he has done… It didn’t. In Oct 2019, he was granted supervised contact only, given 3 hours every other Sunday.
Since contact has been granted, there were many instances where he would work instead of seeing his daughter, claimed I was trying to alienate our daughter from him, faced numourous abusive messages, blackmail and a veiled death threat.
As it stands, my ex currently lives abroad as apparently the UK Government had failed him (because of only being granted supervised contact & then a second charge of drink driving) so he felt the only way he could live a happy life was to live abroad.
Since moving in Dec 2020, there’s only been one video call and one payment of maintenance.
After reading the Practice Direction 12J Family Procedure Rules 2010 which relates to Family Court and Domestic, that states that a court should look at whether the parent is wanting contact for genuine reasons… Bear in mind that my ex had done very little in terms of caring for your daughter when he had the opportunity and also the assault on me stemmed from an argument as I believed that if he was to take time off work, he should be looking after our daughter and he thought he should just be able to go out on his bike. To me this went towards showing he wasn’t wanting contact for genuine reasons.
The Practice Direction also states that a court should take into account whether contact is safe for both the child and the victim of abuse. I informed the CAFCASS officer that we’d already had abusive messages off him and yet despite all this contact was granted, albeit limited contact.
Since contact was granted, me and my family have suffered at the hands of my abusive ex and yet Family Court doesn’t seem to want to end this. I spoke to my solicitor on a number of occasions about my exes behaviour and there doesn’t seem to be anything that can stop this.
I never thought it be turn out to be so unfair.