Comments by "Banana" (@439bananas) on "Real Stories"
channel.
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The problem is that until recently, the courts allowed perpetrators to have unsupervised access to their children and then the abuser would use that as a pretext to continue the abuse. That is what happened in my divorce ten years ago. My ex had been abusive and I called the police after he tried to run me over, I was only slightly injured and the police did not record it as domestic violence, but as a road traffic accident. During a fact-finding hearing, the Judge described my evidence as an exercise in hyperbole and granted my ex unsupervised access.
I told my solicitor about what was going on during the handovers and said that I intended to go to the police about it. He told me not to, as he said that the particular judge would take a dim view and see it as trying to frustrate his orders and as such I could be held in contempt of court and lose residency. He told me just to try to sell up and move as quickly as possible. I had no choice but to take the first offer on my house and go. My ex took it back to court, saying that I was frustrating contact by moving. This time I represented myself, as I knew if needs be I could plead ignorance on the finer points of the law and not being a lawyer, I stood a good chance of getting away with it.
The defence that I used was that my ex was being abusive at handovers in front of my son and that moving meant that my parents could handle the handovers thereby lessening the chance of our son seeing this sort of conflict and being distressed by it. The opposition claimed that I was lying, so I proffered video evidence, they immediately tried to stop this being shown by saying that my ex had not consented to the handovers being filmed. I came back with the fact that it was filmed on property that solely belonged to me and that they would show whether or not my evidence was true or fictitious. They came back with some legal argument and I managed to counter that in cases involving children that the overriding concern should be the safety and the welfare of the child. That did it, the footage was viewed and contact was bought to an end.
Given the amount of damage this relationship has done to my own life, it does not take much imagination to see that when children are bought up with this as their relationship model this is what they take into life as what a relationship should look like.
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