Lets Talk About Grief; Why Motherhood Has Been Murdered.
*Trigger warning, disturbing and emotional topic of child loss.
Last week the Ministry of Justice announced a supposedly groundbreaking decision regarding the removal of parental responsibility (rights) for parents who murder their child’s other parent.
“The new rules, set to be introduced as part of the Victims and Prisoners Bill, will create an automatic suspension of parental responsibility from a person who is convicted of the murder or voluntary manslaughter of a person with whom they share parental responsibility.” Jades Law
Lets talk about this carefully. I cannot make clear enough the rage and pain this caused me and others like me. In Family Court’s all over the country every single day Judges are making orders and decisions that are removing (mainly) women’s rights to their own children. Done so under the guise and oppression of the term Parental Alienation they are stripping Mothers of the ability to participate in any meaningful way, if at all, in their own children's lives. Where is the cognitive dissonance in this and the announcement that Murderers and only murderers should be stripped of these rights? Are we equating these mothers to murderers? It feels that way, it certainly looks that way and the consequences are absolutely no different for many women.
Parental Rights or Responsibility means that you participate equally in your child’s life and decisions regarding it, such as where they go to school, where they live, how they spend their time safely, what medical treatment they do or don’t receive, their choices are your choices. Or in cases of alleged Parental Alienation cases, they aren’t. Mothers who had once raised and parented their children perfectly, lovingly and well, mothers who have fled domestically abusive fathers, mothers who have ensured weekly and generous contact with their abusers are being labelled as dangerous and mentally ill, so ill in fact that they are permitted no further contact with their children ever again. This includes what is known as indirect contact, birthday cards, Christmas cards, phone-calls, letters, all banned. Permission to know where they live, go to school, what they do, all cut off. This is the treatment the MoJ are saying should only be reserved to the most heinous crime on the planet, deliberate killing of another human. And yet, these mothers haven’t even got a criminal record, they aren’t addicts or on medication for serious mental disorders, they aren’t hospitalized or incarcerated. They are doctors, teachers, florists, waitresses, ordinary mothers.
The Men’s Rights and Extremist Parental Alienation lobbyists want to see these Mothers (it is only mothers) convicted and charged for the ‘crime’ of Parental Alienation by rebranding it in a mass national campaign as Coercive and Controlling Behaviour, of a child. They want to do this so that mothers can be further punished for leaving their abusers and attempting to regain their autonomy and lives as a single parent and make choices for their children in their best interests without the every day permission and control of their abusers. One might think thats fair. Not according to the current temperature of Parental Alienation and its equation of harm being on par with Domestic Homicide.
We most certainly should not be adding on new ways for abusive litigators to pursue their victims with yet further means of punishment after they achieve the ultimate human pain already, of removing their children. Arguably there is no greater pain that we know as human beings than that of the grief of losing a child. I would argue that to mourn a child that has died might even be easier than one that is alive, somewhere, secretly kept and hidden from you, removed from your life in entirety and you are not permitted to even know what they look like, hear them, see them! This is a prison sentence like no other.
It is never ending grief on a daily, hourly and nightly basis. It is filled with torture, nightmares, triggers, isolation, shame, guilt, stigma, anxiety, depression and sometimes mothers just take their own lives through the desperation of this grief. This is what Judges say is the rightful punishment and course if you kill your child’s parent, so why are we inflicting this pain and punishment on mothers who have done nothing of the sort? There are so many of these erased mothers that are ghosts of their former selves, their lives shattered, their dreams and hopes for their children all snatched and gone. They say that Grief is Love with nowhere to go.
There is no where to send their love, for their children, there is nowhere they can repurpose it, there is nowhere to put it. That type of pain lives inside of us and we have to carry it. We cannot put it down at any moment. It is our cross to bear and drag every minute of every moment we continue to breathe without our children in our lives in any way. It shatters families too , grandparents, relatives, counsins even their little school friends are all ripped away and cut out. The Fathers who ensure this go to the greatest lengths, not unlike witness protection programmes, claiming the mother will kidnapp or kill her children if she knows where they are. The Fathers enjoy inflicting the most grotesque pain and suffering and revel in the control of torturing their victims. I’ve seen one applicant father claim she was a mortal danger to him and the children without a shred of evidence or history to support that. Why are we believeing men when we can’t even believe a single Rape victim?! Why are the courts enforcing this insufferable torture on mothers? Why are we listening to known domestic abusers who use Parental Alienation Experts to have the mothers of their children declared “mad”. Does this remind you of any frightful period of history that swept across every country for hundreds of years? The Witch Trials?
Why would we wish to criminalise these women even after we have tortured them as close to death as anyone can come, by then giving them convictions, criminal records, destroying their employment options for the rest of their lives and making them serve time in prison — for what PA experts say they have supposedly done.
I am trolled by Men’s Rights Activists online arguing that I must have done something so extreme and so despicable to have a no contact order. The answer is simply, no, I didn’t. An unregulated person, calling themselves a psychologist with a completely fabricated CV and no qualifications that gave her any license or ability to diagnose anything, decided that I was mentally disturbed. So significantly that whilst to the entire outside world, my work, my friends, family, neighbours, even my partner, I appeared normal and a good mother, that in fact I had an unseen, ‘dormant’ personality disorder, furthermore that no other psychologist or expert would be able to recognise or diagnose it either as it was so sinisterly well hidden — for my whole life supposedly up until the day they assessed me. This would be as likely as winning the lottery and not even buying a ticket!
But the outcome of that assessment and the court shockingly accepting it and granting full and complete custody and all parental rights to their father is the truth of what happened.
Lets talk about grief; It is lonely. It is the most extreme type of loneliness as very few people can sympathise with it. It carries unbearable stigma that the public cannot fathom. They assume, wrongly, our legal system would never allow anything so insanely unjust to occur. And yet, it is happening every day in secret courts and destroying children and their mothers whilst making a lot of people a lot of money. This is a form of child trafficking. The movement of children from one place to another, against their will for the sole purpose of extorting money.
Those who benefit are not the children, ever. Never ever has any child who has suffered a forced and sudden removal and transfer of residency against their will to an abusive parent done well as a result, mentally or emotionally. There is also little to no follow up done once these transfers are made so even if the children were suffering, suicidal, self-harming, depressed or heartbroken, CAFCASS don’t care. Their job is done, they made hundreds of thousands in the process and thats all that mattered.
Women bankrupt themselves trying to seek contact, protect their children, sometimes even find them, others are forced to go into crippling debt to afford supervision sessions ordered at thousands per month, made by corrupt and heartless Judges.
The pain they suffer and the grief they attempt to cope with is insurmountable. Most I know are unable to work, they are unable to have meaningful friendships or romantic relationships due to the PTSD and the trauma. The grief is terminal. It causes physical pain and manifests in all kinds of painful autoimmune, chronic, idiopathic and debilitating ways. Their decline in mental and physical health is then actively used against them should they ever return to court as reasons why they are no longer fit to parent at all, many lose even the little bits of contact they have when they ask for it to be increased. They are prisoners to their grief and they are owned by their abusive ex-partners on a permanent and continual basis.
We have relegated motherhood to that of being a womb incubator and a human being unworthy of regard in their own right, and for what? To ensure that Men’s rights and access to their children are the only priority. We have obliterated the Human Right to family life specifically to the very people who uniquely create it- women. Their grief cannot be the same as that of a Murderers?
If we are to recognise Parental Alienation as Coercive and Controlling Behaviour in order to criminalise and punish it, equating it to the greatest crime there is, and severing their parental rights, then we are truly a fallen society of Patriarchy and motherhood will never be restored as the sacred and wonderous gift it is. Motherhood is the last frontier for Men to conquer, and I would say, by stealth, by silent and violent means, it has already happened. For decades there has been research after propoganda paper churned out on the damage of fatherless children. Why is the issue not the same for motherless children ripped away against their will? What will become of the next generation of motherless children deprived of maternal love?
