Boy’s wish to live with his mother sways court ruling

A schoolboy who was ordered by the High Court to live with his “wholly deserving” father has been allowed to stay with his mother at the end of an 11-year legal battle.

The father left the hearing in tears, after a judge ruled that to protect the mental health of the 12-year-old boy, who has said that he hates his father, it would not enforce its original decision to remove him from his mother.

The ruling brings to an end one of the longest contact disputes ever seen in an English court. Judge Clifford Bellamy, sitting as a deputy judge of the High Court in London, said it raised serious questions about children who had become alienated from a parent and did not know their true feelings.

The Government is conducting a review of family law, one part of which is whether fathers are being treated fairly in the courts when relationships break down.

The parents in the case married in 1996 and separated some months later before the son was born. The father issued his first application for contact with his son in June 1999 and succeeded, beginning an arrangement that progressed over the years to foreign holidays. The arrangement broke down in February 2006 and over the next four years “immense energy and resources were invested in trying to reinstate a meaningful relationship between father and son”, the judge said. He was particularly critical of the mother for arranging so many out-of-school activities every day of the week so that the boy had no opportunity to see his father. She had opposed and undermined all efforts at contact, the judge said.

In the end, the failure of the parents to agree on regular meetings between the boy and his father, including one broken contact order, resulted in the court taking the extreme step of transferring residency from the mother to the father in January this year. In the extraordinary ruling, Judge Bellamy had said that, although it might be “traumatic in the short term”, the boy should live with his father, although he had not seen him for four years.

The decision was also extraordinary given that the father lives in London with his new wife and family and the mother in the Midlands. The boy was placed in foster care and the family began a programme of therapy. But at a series of introductory meetings in the build-up to the move between father and son, the boy put his head in his lap, put his fingers in his ears and refused to eat and drink or engage in any way with his father.

Social workers at Warwickshire County Council were so fearful of his mental health that they advised the father to give up his efforts to be reunited with his son, to which he “reluctantly agreed”.

When he heard of the decision, the boy volunteered that he would see his father on his terms when he was ready.

This heartbreaking story need not happen to you. At Hylton-Potts we passionately believe in the rights of children to have meaningful relationship with both parents.

Rodney Hylton-Potts has 25 years experience of dealing with difficult mothers.

For more information or a free legal opinion telephone 020-7381-8111 (24 hour service) or email [email protected].