Hi,
I didn’t know where to post this. Really I want legal advice re breaking court orders and social services advice surrounding procedures.
I am in the family courts awaiting fact finding for domestic abuse, physical abuse of me (and the children) and daughter sexual abuse allegations due to youngest child’s many disclosures of sexual abuse by her father which were prompted initially by her having an extremely sore vagina. Social services are as they put it ‘unwilling to label Exhb as a peodophile’ and seem to require youngest child to repeat disclosures recorded by teachers (and me) for them to be ‘substantiated’. Police investigated but couldn’t do an ABE because she wouldn’t speak to them. I with held contact but SS wrote a report full of inaccuracies stating that unsupervised contact was safe so Judge ordered supervised with an ISW sundays for 4 weeks following into unsupervised. Since then the children have made allegations of physical harm in front of ISW who recorded this, nothing came of it, contact apparently still safe as this was historic.
Exhb is having unsupervised contact on a sunday 10am - 6.15pm during which time he is alone with them in his house. The children have told me that on several occaisions youngest has fallen asleep in his bed during contact. Last week during a drawing and talking therapy session with a teacher she drew a picture of a bed with her and daddy in it (she pointed it out) and said ‘daddy touched me on the foo-foo’ (which we know is her name for vagina). School alerted social services who went into the school and attempted to make her say it again (they didn’t use the drawing as a talking point as I had suggested). As she did not say anything directly to them they are reluctant to intervene again and the job falls to me to go against the order and safe-guard. She had previously told my sister that daddy hurt her on the vagina with his ‘willy-gilly, leggy-leg, knee knee’ and preciously stated to me in a video recorded disclosure that daddy’s ’killing part’ (later determined as willy through pointing) ‘knifed her in the leg’ (which she demonstrated using a sawing motion of her hand) and stated that she touched her fathers willy. All of this evidence was made available to every single person in the system and contact has still been ordered.
After this last disclosure I have asked via my solicitor to ask Exhb if a member of his family can supervise the contact so I don’t have to break the orders while we wait the fact finding. Suprise suprise he will not agree. I have had enough of nobody being prepared to safe guard my children, I cannot understand why a child drawing a bed with her and daddy in it and stating to a teacher that ‘daddy touched me on the foo-foo’ does not raise extreme safe-guarding concerns given her previous history of disclosure??
My solicitor is advising me to keep quiet, not break the court order obey the rules, be meak and mild and send my children like lambs to the slaughter because she is terrified of me being charged for contempt of court. I need someone in my corner, SS won’t do it they tell me to use PR to withold contact ergo I have to break an order a Judge happily made for unsupervised contact with this man.
Has the world gone mad?? I feel like I am being gaslit by the system? Am I breaking the court order if I state I will not hand children over for contact without a member of his family there? Contact is still happening?
Any advice welcome I am so despondent and so broken trying to keep my children safe.