Custody of child with abusive husband question

[peppa49]

hi
I was wondering if anyone had any previous experience of what the courts will allow with regards to custody with a verbally and abusive parent?

I have a two year old who lives with me but sees his dad twice per week. we are about to decide on what the provisional access options are and in hindsight I think two days was far too generous on my part.

Does anyone have any suggestions of what they've been through already and what the courts allowed?

thanks

x

Is he abusive to your ds? Frankly, ime courts pay relatively little attention to abuse to you. If your ex is managing in a semi-okay way with your ds, the contact will continue and might be increased (every second weekend and an overnight on the alternate week is a fairly common arrangement).

at the moment he is seeing him twice per week - and yes he has been aggressive towards my ds and he's also addicted to sex.

The addicted to sex thing would be irrelevant in a court unless it directly affected your child.
You would also have to prove emotional abuse - and be aware that your ex could make unfounded counter allegations against you.
Courts view contact purely from the eyes of a child and what is in their "best interests" - which is basically working towards an unsupervised contact arrangement.
My ex was violent, emotionally abusive, diagnosed with a personality disorder and narcissistic traits - and had a conviction for looking at indecent images of children ! However, he built up (over a 4 year period in court) to unsupervised contact every other weekend and a day in the week. My children hated seeing him and eventually the contact was challenged by them at court and their dad decided he didn't want to see them anymore. So we are now non contact but not because a court originally decided it !

Bloody hell, jaykay, I can't believe he was allowed unsupervised contact under those circumstances! That's insane.

peppa, the judge in my case told us neither of us was as bad as the abusive parents he sees in proceedings to take children into care. So the bar is set very low. Without knowing a lot of detail about your particular case, I wouldn't hold out much hope of being able to reduce contact from its current levels.

bibliomania - yes it is insane - but not uncommon. Our case stretched over 4 years (21 hearings in total) and I was warned at the start that contact would build up to supervised...then from there, unsupervised "as supervised can't be funded forever"). The oddest thing was that most contact centres wouldn't facilitate level 2 contact due to the risk my ex posed...so we had to travel miles for this. My children also were given (court ordered) safety lessons and informed of their dad's crimes so that they could keep themselves safe from him during unsupervised contact !
I do think that if we lived with him then Social Services would have taken the children away...but because he didn't live with us and wanted contact it became a whole different story and common sense seemed to fly out of the window !

You could either informally agree one day during the week, couple of hours, and then every second weekend for s bit longer, or refuse and let the courts decid...exactly the same thing.

Do you have a good solicitor? Do you have evidence of abusive behaviour towards either yourself, your DS or others? If the two days per week access has been going on for some time you will have a lot of difficulty arguing that it should be less if you do not have direct evidence of risk. Doesn't stop you proposing it, of course. Does he enjoy the access or see it as a chore?

He enjoys it and takes lots if photos and videos to prove it too!

Are the visits overnight or during the day?