Cambridge Family Law Practice

A family court judge has denied a mother permission to travel to Asia with her children for 12 months, after she published allegations about the father.

He was from South Africa while the mother held both British and Hong Kong citizenship. She was 15 years his junior. The parents originally met in 2010. They never married but the father did acquire parental responsibility (the legal status of parenthood) when their daughter, now aged four, was born. Her younger brother is now a little over a year old. The family lived in the UK and both children were born in this country.

The relationship broke down after 12 years “amid considerable rancour”, according to Paul Bowen KC, sitting as a Deputy Judge of the High Court. The mother alleged that the father had engaged in domestic abuse and that the children had witnessed this. Shortly afterwards, the father reported the mother to the police, claiming she’d abandoned the children.

Social workers began an investigation into the mother’s claims, using the authority provided by section 47 of the Children Act 1989. This states that local authorities have a duty to investigate when they have:

“…reasonable cause to suspect that a child who lives, or is found, in their area is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm.”

In early January social workers moved the mother and the children to the home of a relative, and encouraged them to break off contact with the father. A few days later, the local authority held a child protection conference, in which the family’s circumstances were discussed with all the professionals involved, including allegations by the mother that the father had engaged in coercive and controlling behaviour. Attendees at the conference drew up a protection plan for the family’s children after concluding that they were at risk of emotional abuse. The parents were referred to counselling, as well as courses in anger management and parenting.

The following month the father was a granted a ‘prohibited steps’ order, preventing the mother from taking the children out of the country. Meanwhile, the father was allowed limited, weekly visits with the children at a church attended by the family.

In April, things seemed to be progressing. The father was granted more time with the children and the mother received permission to take the children on holiday to Spain. The family court requested a report from the local authority on future living arrangements for the children.

The holiday to Spain passed without incident and by December 2023, the father was seeing the children every other weekend, from Friday to Sunday afternoon. The older girl also saw her father on Wednesdays.

Paul Bowen KC noted:

“The …[local authority’s] Report found that both parents were ‘equally complicit’ in causing the children emotional harm from the conflict in their relationship. The father lacked awareness of how his own behaviours could be seen as abusive…This ‘made it difficult to put in place any intervention that can address the acrimony between the parents with a view to reduce the level of risk the children are being exposed to’. The mother, for her part, was recorded shouting at the father during altercations and (he alleged) had physically assaulted him.”

The father applied for formal shared care arrangement, while the mother sought permission to take the children to visit relatives in Hong Kong and Malaysia. The latter country is not a signatory the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction: a multi-country treaty which allows the rapid return of children abducted by a parent. The father again expressed concerns that the mother would not bring the two children to the UK but instead keep them in Asia.

At the hearing before Paul Bowen KC, it emerged that the mother had set up a page on the GoFundMe website to raise funds for legal fees. This had included a photograph of herself and the children, along with their names and details of the allegations of coercive and controlling behaviour that she had made against the father but had not taken to court. The page had since been deleted. The Judge issued prohibited steps order forbidding any further publication. The mother insisted she hadn’t known such publicity was against court rules.

As a result, Paul Bowen KC issued an order banning the mother from making any fresh applications to take the children to Hong Kong and Malaysia for 12 months. He explained:

“I am… extremely concerned about the mother’s willingness to publicise details of this case on a ‘gofundme’ page, in which she has made allegations of coercive control that she has not pursued to a fact-finding hearing [to establish whether or not they were true]. It …was irresponsible, unreasonable and unlawful. That, as I have found, has further undermined the local authority’s efforts to assist and encourage the parents to co-operate in parenting the children. Any further applications to remove the children to Malaysia or Hong Kong during the next 12 months will rekindle the conflict during a period I consider is essential to enable the children to have some stability.”

Meanwhile the father’s application for a shared care arrangement was adjourned for six months, so the local authority could investigate fresh allegations made by the mother at the hearing.

Adam Moghadas, one of the partners here at Cambridge Family Law Practice, comments “This is a complex case involving many allegations and clearly a lack of trust on both sides. Crowd funding websites may seem like a viable option to help cover what can often be very high legal costs in long-running court proceedings, but the utmost caution must be exercised, as this case shows. In this instance, the mother’s actions backfired dramatically for her. As previous recently-reported cases have shown the courts will not stand for the details of proceedings concerning children being made public without the court’s express permission, given only in exceptional and limited circumstances.”

The judgement is available to read here.