This week the case we’re sharing is a complex one, filled with nuance and challenging conduct.
On the surface, it looks like a court awarding a father contact because of a mother’s alienating behaviour, but a closer look reveals two parents with limited insight into how their actions continue to harm their son.
There are a lot of twists and turns, but it is worth reading the whole judgment, including the expert’s views on the parents.
The judge also criticises the social worker’s Section 37 report looking at the welfare of the boy in the case, calling it woefully inadequate, for being critical of the father but not the mother. The social worker recommended that the child stay in the care of his mother.
Justice Keehan considered the report of limited help because the social worker had not had any direct experience with parental alienation cases.
The NYAS caseworker also concludes that the 12 year old boy should continue to live with his mother. Keehan says in his judgment:
“In her report, she only considered the negative issues about the father and set out the mother’s criticisms of him. There is no consideration at all of the adverse role of the mother in H’s life nor did she give any consideration as to the extent, if at all, to which the mother had alienated H against his father. She accepted H’s expressed wishes and feelings at face value and had no consideration to [the parental alienation expert’s] opinions.”
Keehan also calls out the caseworker for several shortcomings within her report.
The solution offered in the judgment – a complete and total uprooting of the child’s life, away from his school and friends, to distance him from his mother and re-establish his connection with his father by moving him to his father’s home, is another example of how the courts continue to get it wrong.
This kind of solution is deeply traumatic for a child, making it no solution at all.
While this site feels both parents contributed to their child’s distress, there is a far better way of dealing with cases like these, and it starts with the parents, not the child.
Wholesale repatriation is rarely the answer, and is a shoddy and careless way of dealing with these cases. It’s the kind of judgment we’ve come to expect from a court that doesn’t have the time or the inclination to offer sophisticated solutions to complex problems.
You can read the full judgment on BAILII.
Researching Reform 
No need to read full judgement. It’s so harsh on a mother who has fed her child with pain, blood and nights sacrificing her time, soul and body. What she gets at the end is only left with empty hand just because she want to protect her own body part her soul in the form of her children…. It’s disgusting.
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How you can think that the behaviour of this mother merits deepening the child’s abuse even further I do not know. The mother’s attitude is reprehensible and it is good to see a judge take the effort to look deeply enough into a case rather than just take a very poor ‘expert’ report on faith.
It is hard to know what the best outcome for the child could be, but there is a growing body of evidence that children do better away from an alienating parent.
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As soon as I started to read this I said I wager that this is a female judge. In my experience (16 hearings so far) it is female judges that are making horrendous decisions, I can assure you had it been a male judge the child would not have been removed.
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As I began to read this I knew it was a female judge, from experience (16 hearings) it is female judges who make the harshest judgements against mothers, they have little to no compassion or empathy in destroying a mothers existence when they pass judgement. If the judge had been male this would not have happened.
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@A Secret – Too lazy to even read the judgment before letting us have the benefit of your uninformed opinion. “Before Mr Justice Keehan” is stated front and centre in the judgment.
@Natasha – I’m flabbergasted at your analysis of this judgment. Did you read it? It discloses a classic maternal behaviour pattern of emotional child abuse by parental alienation, false allegations of DV and denial of contact (itself a form of DV), and so-called “expert evidence” from a social worker and a NYAS worker, both of whom were without relevant experience and, as is so often the case, appeared to see their role as being an uncritical mouthpiece for the mother.
Dr Braier was the sole voice of reason and to characterise her evidence as disclosing “two parents with [impliedly equally] limited insight into how their actions continue to harm their son” is a massive distortion of that evidence.
I do, however, agree that neither public nor private law cases should just end with judgment and no run-off therapeutic work to bring about a result which is TRULY in the children’s best interests.
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Unless MR Justice Keehan is the first serving high court judge to have undergone gender reassignment I am sorry to disappoint you @Asecret but he is a male.
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