UK: Duping Judge to Bring Children “Home”
From UK, “Five children were sent back to a ‘horrific’ home life after a top judge was duped by their violent parents.”
“Mr Justice Mostyn admitted he was ‘comprehensively and deliberately misled’ last summer, when he returned the children to their abusive family in Birmingham.
They have now been taken into care and will never go back to their childhood home.
One of the boys told his teachers, ‘Mummy hates me, she wants me dead,’ after a red mark was spotted on his neck from where his mother had assaulted him.
The children, who were exposed to regular acts of serious domestic violence, were taken back into care at the end of last year after their father went to the police.
“Describing the father as an ‘excellent witness’, the mother’s testimony as ‘very moving”‘ and both of them as ‘truthful’, he ordered the return of five of their six children, the youngest still a toddler, to the family home.
A year later, he has now told the High Court Family Division: ‘I have to say that I was comprehensively and deliberately misled by the parents’.
The judge said social workers had been right all along about the family and new evidence had revealed the couple’s ‘exceptionally conflicted’ relationship. ”
“His expectations of sending the children back to a stable life after the 10-day hearing had been ‘false’, he told the court.
The court heard the father, described as a ‘somewhat submissive character’, has now admitted being spotted in Birmingham city centre in 2009 ‘in a bloodied state” after being ‘glassed and forced out of the house’ by his partner.”
“He said she had twice failed to attend court hearings ‘because she was sleeping off drink from the night before’ and had confessed to being unfaithful
The father begged for custody, saying he had lied to the court only because he was ‘in the last chance saloon’ and feared never seeing his children again.
He said he was now separated from the mother and there was no chance of her ‘worming her way back’ into his life.
The mother also wanted the children, saying she had turned her life around, but Mr Justice Mostyn said she was ‘living in a fantasy world’.
He ruled that neither parent was trustworthy, saying: ‘They were given a final chance and it totally failed. They have let these children down.
‘It is due to the total failure of parental responsibility that we find ourselves in the position we do.’
The four oldest will now remain with experienced, long-term foster carers and the two youngest go up for adoption.
The judge said his biggest concern was that the two youngest will grow up separately from their four siblings, who will ‘go through a process akin to bereavement’.
But he told the High Court Family Division: ‘These children will remain siblings, nothing can change that. They will be able to chart each other’s progress’.
He said ‘the best life chance’ for the two youngest lay in ‘extinguishing the parental bond’ and starting afresh with a new family.”
[Daily Mail 9/12/11]
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