Suffer the children: Trouble in the Family Court (Australia)

This is just a portion of a much longer article appearing in The Monthly, an Autralian publication. Highly recommended.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2015/november/1446296400/jess-hill/suffer-children

Suffer the children
Trouble in the Family Court

By Jess Hill
November 2015

When Erin saw the police lights flashing, she knew it was over. She steered the car to the side of the road, and turned to her two children. “OK guys, this is it,” she said. “We’ve done our best.”

Her teenaged daughter started to panic. “Fuck! Oh my god!” she cried. “I can’t do this. You can’t leave us!” She grabbed for the bottle of Panadol in the centre console, insisting she wanted to die. “No!” Erin said firmly. “Settle, just settle.”

As the police officer approached with a warrant, Erin got out of her car. She asked for time to talk to her two children, and promised she’d follow him to the station. Back in the car, Erin tried to remain calm. “I am so sorry I have put you through all of this. This is not the life I wanted for you. Always remember how much I love you.”

“What’s going to happen to us?” her 10-year-old son cried. “I don’t know,” Erin replied. “You just need to tell the truth.”

By the time the police caught up with them, Erin had been on the run with her children for nine months. She was now confronting a reality she’d been avoiding for years.

Since their children were born, and ever since he’d first held a knife to her throat, Erin had tried to manage her husband’s abuse. In 2012, however, a warning from her GP had broken through her denial. In front of their screaming kids, John had throttled Erin until her eyes rolled back in her head. “If you don’t leave,” her GP warned, “you’re as bad as he is.”

Erin did leave, and took the children to live with her parents interstate. Soon after, the Family Court granted John regular access to his kids. For the next year, Erin weighed her responsibility to her children, who were terrified of their father, against the risks of disobeying Family Court orders. There was a further complication: Erin had consented to the orders granting John fortnightly access – under pressure from her lawyer, she says, who advised that if she didn’t compromise, John could end up with sole custody.