Has anyone been to court about a contact order for ex?

[QueenB]

My husband has just issued me with a court date and a mediation meeting to arrnage more regular contact with our DD. He has seen her every Saturday since he left to be with his new love interest, and DD was 6 months. She is now 13 months and I think he wants to come to the house and put her to bed in the week. This is just totally a no-go area for me. He's been mentally abusive and physically overpowering and it's taken me 8 months to get myself back together again. Does anyone know what my rights are and what I should do? I'm worried that I am going to be bullied into doing soemthing I don't want to do. Do I have to agree to a court order?

QueenB - you need a solicitor but in the end no one can come into your house without your say so especially if he has been abusive to you.

Why can't she spend the night with him? I am a big believer in encouraging a father who want to be in the life of their child. Tweenie, I know that this is a sore subject for you (and with every right), but QueenB didn't actually say he was physically abusive, just mentally abusive. This may make him a rotten husband, but it doesn' necessarily make him a bad father, and he IS the father of her daughter.

I don't believe that any court would make an order which would mean you had to let someone who had been abusive to you (in any way) into your home. Mediation is a just to see if there is any way you can come to an agreement over contact before involving the courts. If you come to an agreement, then that agreement can be "rubber stamped" by the court giving it binding effect.

What makes you think he wants to come and put her to bed in your home? Would you be agreeable to her going to him overnight at the weekend? Has he broached the subject before or was the court date the first you knew about his desire for more contact?

I have to disagree SA - (seem to be doing that a lot at the moment!) A man who is a rotten husband is a rotten father. He's teaching his children to have rotten relationships. A good father teaches his children to have good relationships. And a man who is mentally abusive shouldn't be in charge of a vulnerable child who can be mentally abused. Fathers should be involved in their children?s lives, but not if that would hurt the child. And I think mental abuse should be taken as seriously as physical abuse, particularly where children are concerned ? their whole personalities, attitudes and future relationships will be affected by how adults treat them, and if they treat them abusively, mentally or physically, they are not going to grow up happy people.

Getting back to your specific issue, Queen B, you don?t have to let anyone into your house who you don?t want to, unless they have a police warrant! Bear that in mind at the mediation meeting, and actually tell the mediators that you are afraid of being bullied into agreeing to something you aren?t happy with ? that way, they?ll hopefully be more careful about trying to ensure that you are happy with any agreement you come to.

I would definitely consult a solicitor. You need to put together a statement where you talk about your ex's mental and physical abuse as the court will take this into consideration if an order is issued. I can't see a court forcing you to admit him to your house.

And don't forget that you don't have to go into mediation if you don't want to. You simply say, no thankyou if you don't want to use their service.

SA I never said physically abusive (but QueenB said physically overpowering - so I think somewhere there has been some kind of pushing etc.) but to me it is all in the same - a show of lack of respect against another human being and not a good example for a child and if you care about that child you should not make its life awful by hurting the other parent.

X2b was physically and mentally abusive to me but at no point have I said that I don't want him to have contact with DD so I really don't know where you got that from??

I agree that yes if he is a capable parent he should be able to see DD but FFS QueenB has everyright in this world to feel safe and secure and not under threat from this tosser in her own home!!

And if DD has not had that much contact with X2b who is to say that she would feel comforatble with that arrangement - a strange bloke in her house and her mother on tenterhooks??

I would go for a contact centre QueenB.

Good Luck.

Sorry Tweenie, I didn't mean to suggest that you were doing something wrong. I think that considering what a b*d your ex is, you are truly a great mother (and strong person) for putting your dd first and not preventing contact. I do not think that she should feel obliged in any way to let him into her home even if he wasn't abusive. I think it's odd that with a child old enough to not physically need her mother continually (ie bfing for sole source of nutrition) shouldn't be able to go to her father's house to spend the night. If QueenB is afraid for the safety of her dd then it is completely understandable, but in that case she shouldn't have him in her home under any circumstances. If she is not afraid for her dd's safety then I think, regardless of how angry she is with him, that she should let him have his daughter.
And sorry to disagree with you some more MeanBean, but if he is that rotten a person, why on earth did QueenB choose to make him her partner AND have a child with him?
I am passionate about this as over the last 5 years I have watched dh's ex systematically destroy his relationship with his children and destroy the children in the process. She has done this out of spite, jealousy and sheer nastiness. Dh was probably not the best person when he was with her, or the best partner for her and when he was younger he was probably a really cp boyfriend, but he is and has always been an amazing father. His children could only benefit by having him as an active person in their lives. Children are not a possesion to be owned by one parent or the other. They are the product of 2 people and both parents should have equal access and opportunity to love their children and do what they do best for them.

SA seems your niavety knows no bounds - look at all the women on here who have been in realtionships with or have married men who they loved and respected only to find out what utter shits they are a few months/years down the line.

Twinkie it's nothing to do with naivety. They shouldn't have had children with that person. I was with my first husband for 10 years and never had children with him because I was never sure that he would be a good father and he was mentally (but not physically) abusive. Of course everyone makes bad choices and decisions sometimes, but that doesn't then justify making choices about a child like he/she is a posession. My best friend was physically abused by her husband and left him. She eventually went back and at the time I couldn't understand why. She said, she wanted her children to have a mother AND a father at home. She and her husband got help and worked on the issues that contributed to his violence and now 12 years later they are still together, he hasn't hit her since and their children have been able to grow up in a home with BOTH their parents. Of course not every story has a happy ending and maybe SHE would have been better off with someone else and maybe it would have been easier to just leave, but I think her children won here.

Going back to the original post, (poor thing hasn't dared to come back for fear of being hit by a low flying missile)...QueenB described a situation that didn't seem all that dire. Perhaps I didn't understand her clearly, but it didn't seem like she feared for her or her child's saftey (her ex has been seeing the child every week). And in a situation like that I would ALWAYS recommend that the parents (both mother and father) put aside their personal grievances and think of the child who should have both parents actively in their lives.

Queen B My husband left me a few days after birth of our daughter. He has had very little to do with her bar a few supervised (by family member)visits when she was 0-6 months & now we R no longer in touch. I think my circumstances are similar 2 yours. I have seen 3 solicitors to get info on what would happen if in future he went 2 court for a contact order and I have done a lot of my own research. I reccomend highly one of the solicitors (based in Highgate not cheap) but also a part time judge in family court. If you want I can give u her details and or U can email me and I will tell U everything I have found out. This is my 1st post so hopefully I haven't breached any ettiquette!

I can totally sympathise with QueenB, I found it really difficult to sort out contact with my exp. A court order would be binding, but you would be encouraged to try mediation and work out contact between yourselves before it got that far. Court orders are the last resort.

You can get free legal advice from most solicitors, and if you are not on a high income, you should get legal aid.

You do not have to have exp in your property. My exp was violent, so when I came out of refuge, I had a court order to stop him even knowing where I lived.

He does have rights to contact, but you could try a contact center, or request that he takes the child to a public place. To begin with my exp only had contact in public for a few hours at a time.

It is really hard to allow that contact at first, I felt fiercly protective of my babies and found it really hard seeing them go to an idiot who couldn't look after them properly. It does get easier though, and hopefully contact will be good for all of you. The baby needs time with father, and you deserve a break soemtimes too.

SA - I think you are seeing things too black and white. I can feel for men who do nothing and lose contact with their kids, but women do not always know what the future holds. My exp first hit me when I was 4 months preg. Our relationship had been fine until then.

I haven't ever stopped exp from seeing the kids, but after what he did to me, I wanted reassurance that he was not going to be like that with the kids, and for lots men, dealing with babies without mum around isn't so easy.

Interestingly, my exp's new gf thinks i act out of jealousy and spite, cos that is what exp tells her. She doesn't believe the lovely man she was with could ever hit a women. But I have the medical records to prove it.
Sadly it is a repeating circle, when I was with exp, I believed his previous wife was lying when she said he was violent too. It was only after I left him that I found out his ex wife was still on prozac.
There are two sides to every story.

A bit gobsmacked SA. Too many points to say really but I grew up in a household with mental abuse and my life would have been thousands of times better had my father not been around.
And to say that women shouldnt have had children with these men beggars believe!
Just because someone fathers a child doesnt mean they should automatically have access. Being abusive in anyway to the other parent is a crap example to the child and can cause all sorts of problems for that child.

What if the man turns into a tosser after giving birth, which is what happened in my case? What if you love someone so much that you don't want to walk away, you want to try and help them? You promised to do that for them when you fell in love?
Now my x is a different man, who has a women sticking up for him, a woman who he is now lovely to,who is his priority. She has no idea how much grief he gives me.
I am seriously considering dropping access for my x, he is a bad bad father, i didn't know that before he became one.

Poppy1978, I think you are a wonderful example of a mother trying to do the best for her child. Of course you don't always know what the future holds. You made a mistake about your ex. But you are doing exactly what I'm suggesting, which is to, despite having chosen the wrong person to father your child, trying to do the best for your child. I'm sure you thought long and hard about whether contact with a violent father would be the right thing for your child. And having decided that contact would be the best thing for THE CHILD, you as the only responsible parent made sure that your child could have that contact without any danger to themselves. That is the action of a wise loving mother.

I think that's what I meant earlier when I said that each parent might be good at something at not at others. You are good at being the responsible parent, the provider, caretaker etc. Your ex may only be good at being male, but that is something you can never be. It may not be the most important thing in a child's life to have a male in it, but I do believe it has some value.

My dh is the best father ever, but I would never rely on him to feed the children a balanced meal when I'm away. I find reading baby books boring, he doesn't (does that say something about his mentality . So, I am in charge of meals, he's in charge of bedtime stories.

Sorry hercules, I disagree. I don't think that a mother should automatically have any more rights to access to a child than a father.

My dh's ex has custody of their children and uses them constantly as a tool to try to get money (out of me!). She denies access on a whim and is a terrible abusive mother. She deals drugs, her current boyfriend is a heroin addict and there have been 3 armed drug raids on her house. Yet, despite all of that, when my dh went to court for access, the most he got after a lot of expensive mediation (she got legal aid and skipped several court dates without any consequences) was a nonenforceable suggestion from the court she should let him see the children on a regular basis. She is considered the more valuable parent simply because she is their mother. And I think that's wrong.

I didnt say a mother should have more rights! I did say I thought a parent who is mentally or physically abusive to the other parent shouldnt have the same access.
It is better to have no male figure rather than a poor role model although i'm, sure there are other relations/friends who can provide good male role models.
I also think that both parents should be capable of looking after the children eg I would be concerned if dh wasnt able to provide a well balanced meal even if he did read stories. You both take on the responsibility together.

I do think in your case the law has failed. My mother only got to see her children from her first marriage during the holidays and each holiday had to apply to the court as her ex refused to send the children.

Sorry hercules, misunderstood you. I'm a bit sensitive after the latest (useless) green paper.

I think it's unrealistic to expect my dh (or me) to be good at everything. And I think that having stories read every night is probably almost as important as having vegetables with your meals. The problem occurs when neither parent is good at anything or when one parent has unrealistic expectations of the other. (dh's ex gave him an earful because we did not feed her children enough sweets, crisps and fizzy drinks). In my family, both my parents were full time working professors. However, my mother was in charge of the "household" and my father did the finances. My father wouldn't have had a clue how to hire/instruct a cleaner, nanny, builder etc. While my mother was really not too good at investments etc. and didn't particularly enjoy it. That didn't make either one of them a worse or better parent. They were good parents because they worked as a team and each did what they were best at, providing a complete well rounded household. My parents are still together. The difficult part is keeping up this partnership in relationship to the children after the parents have split up. The full partnership is gone, but the parenting aspect of it has to remain and be worked out. In fact, in the case of the ex and the sweets, we tried to accomodate her within reason as it meant that she felt happy about the parenting of her children.

It sounds to me like in your mother's case the law failed too. The problem is in the courts and the system. Unfortunately it mostly hurts the fathers at the moment, but can also be unfair to the mothers.

Not perhaps expecting each to be good at everything but I do think childcare is a joint responsibilty. What if both of you werent good at giving baths? Would that mean your children would never be bathed?
D used to be crap at reading stories but persevered to being good at it.
I do agree to a certain extent about the partnership but often it's the woman who ends up doing the majority.

Re the sweets- sounds like banging your head against a brick wall!

What did you want the green paper to do, SA? I know extreme groups like Fathers for Justice think women who deny access (often, in the case of the men they represent, because of fears for their own or their child's safety) should be imprisoned/ or custody (whatever it's called these days) granted to the non-resident parent. But surely that's just punishing women and children to make men feel better/more powerful. How does it help a child to send his/her mother (or father if he is the resident parent) to prison over child access issues? How does it help a child to force them to move home, leave the enviroment in which they are familiar, possibly move school and lose all their friends, just so the non-resident parent can say 'I won'?
I'm sure there are some examples of women unreasonably refusing access. But I'd bet my house on those cases being vanishingly rare compared to the number of abusive and/or violent men who use access as a weapon to continue to control their ex-partners and children. Sadly the current public debate is just giving these men yet another tool to use to attack their wives and children. Let's not forget that there are tragic cases where women and children have been murdered during access visits.

hercules, of course childcare is a joint responsibility. As it happens, both my dh and I hate baths, so we shower our children instead. In fact I had dh build a special no slip bath/shower for the purpose. He may be no good at vegetables, but we have a beautiful house and ds has the best train table in town. Neither of us like changing nappies, getting up in the middle of the night etc. etc., but we share out those duties as appropriate. If I have to get up early my dh gets up, if he has to get up early, I get up. If the nappy is pooey, I change it, if it's wee, he changes it (works out because there are more wees than poos, but poos smell more). I'm jesting here a little, but I'm sure you and your partner have similar negotiations about the things you do and don't like to do and are good at. As I said before, the problem arises when the relationship breaks down and you no longer have the willingness to do these negotiations out of love for each other. You have to then figure out how to do them out of love for your children.

edam, I wouldn't bet my house on it. I know lots of people whose ex's deny them access to their children out of spite, jealousy, greed, anger, etc. Neither parent should have an automatic greater right than the other. And yes, I do think that dh's ex should be sanctioned in some way for what she has done to his children. Even if that just means forced attendance at parenting classes. Though even that (or jail) probably wouldn't work in her case. Shared custody works extremely well in the usa where it is increasingly standard. The courts begin with the presumption that both parents are equally qualified to have the children live in their home and then make decisions based on the specific needs of the children and issues of the parents. In this country, whether or not the law specifically says so, the assumption is that the mother is the more qualified person to be the primary carer and if the father wants that roll, he has to prove the mother to be incapable of it. I think that's wrong.

Lots of good points sa!

Thank you. All made while supposedly working on a ridiculously difficult roof designed by my boss, who by the way has shared custody of his children by agreement with his ex (who left him for a man she met on the internet).

What if the man in question makes out to everybody he is doing right by his children but behind the scenes does nothing. I have gone out of my way to promote visits and overnight stays, he doesn't turn up but then tells everyone i deny him custody so he can get sympathy and i can get put in the category of bitter twisted woman. What do you do then?

I doubt any court will force you to allow him into your house, that is an odd thing to request.
Perhaps she can spend the night with him if you work toward that, if you feel is a good enough father and you can trust him with her, but sometimes knowing a person has that bad abusive side it is hard to believe in them at all...
Let's get this back to QueenB/s situation, wjhile my eyebrows raised at Sa's comments, we are all "victims" of circumstances often beyond our control.
Deal with each situation separately and on it's merits, my xp was a pretty crap partner, lovely guy, crap dad in the early yrs, but now he is the core of my sons life, despite us never living with him.
It's all luck at the end of the day, you often do not know how men will change after having children, nor how women change too...