MY FAMILY COURT STORY – Robert Martin Duff – Case heard:1990

[1582 words – about 2/3 salient facts (more or less) and about 1/3 commentary]

1. My ex-wife used to abuse our kids – boy: DOB 1978, girl: DOB 1980. She used to punch them, hit them about the head and use ‘implements’. On one occasion, when she had the children away at her mother’s house, she kicked by son such that he was left with blue and yellow bruising and caused bleeding.

2. Although my son was the principal victim of the physical abuse, my daughter was terrified by these beatings and used to call it, ‘when Mummy goes mad’. I had seen my daughter turn as white as a sheet from the top of her head to the tips of her toes just watching my son cop a beating.

3. I tried to get my wife to go to counseling but she denied that she had any problems and blamed me for her losing control. She also blamed me for the children’s bad behaviour although the children were always well-behaved when they were with me. In short, I was responsible for her bad behaviour, the children’s bad behaviour and, of course, my own bad behaviour.

4. The attacks on my son were escalating both in frequency and severity, with my wife still refusing counseling and seeing no other way out I decided to separate from my wife and a custody battle before Justice Cohen ensued.

5. The school counsellor at my daughter’s school, Mr Hamilton, had noticed some aberrant behaviour on my daughter’s part and had taken her into counseling. My daughter said that she would be more comfortable talking to a woman and so Mr Hamilton referred my daughter to a local family counseling service in the Blue Mt’s west of Sydney called Gunedoo.

6. My daughter had such a good experience at Gunedoo that my son also asked to attend – which he did although each had separate counsellors.

7. The children both said that they wanted my wife and I to stay together but if we had to separate they wanted to live with me.

8. The Gunedoo counsellors supported the children’s wishes to live with me since, in part at least, they had determined that the children ‘felt safe’ with me and did not ‘feel safe’ with my wife.

9. The children said that they wanted their Gunedoo counsellors to represent them in Court.

10. Robbie Flohm (who is now a judge in the FC) was appointed as the Children’s Separate Representative and Anne Ainslie-Wallace acted for my wife.

11. Ms Flohm and Ms Ainslie-Wallace combined to get an order to prevent the Gunedoo counsellors from appearing in court, on the grounds [pretext?] of ‘protecting the children’s privacy’ despite the children’s stated wishes that they wanted those counsellors to represent them. [I consider the actions of Flohm and Ainslie-Wallace in this matter to constitute a ‘conspiracy to pervert the course of justice’ and if I was Justice Cohen I would be extremely angry that they had done this in my Court].

12. I want to make it clear that my wife never denied the abuse. I suspect she didn’t want to raise it because she didn’t want details of it aired in court however I will probably never know if that was her reasoning or not. Apparently, according to my solicitor, not denying a formal allegation in an affidavit in a responding affidavit constitutes an actual admission which probably explains the allegations of abuse were so readily accepted by all parties including the Court.

13. The court ordered that we both attend a psychologist for assessment. Obviously, ‘my’ counsellor supported my having custody however even my wife’s choice of counsellor, Terry Colling, found me not only competent but preferable as a parent. He referred us to a psychologist Gisela (surname forgotten), for assessment, who also found me competent to parent. My wife refused to see the psychologist and had thereby refused to comply with a Court Order for which she was never even reprimanded. Note: neither Terry Colling nor any other counsellor involved in the process were qualified psychologists so that is why we were referred to Gisela.

14. The court counsellor at the time, Donna Bowen [who I think has now some considerable power in the court counselling system] recommended that the children be ‘split’, ie my wife be given custody of our daughter and I be given custody of our son. On split custody my daughter said to me, ‘that is the worst thing that could happen, the absolute worst thing – then I wouldn’t get anything I want – I wouldn’t get to be with you and I wouldn’t get to be with S.’ [her brother]. Split custody would have removed her from both her protector and her support – I can only gasp at Bowen’s failure to recognize this.

15. My wife claimed in Court that she believed I was incompetent to look after the children. I was not informed beforehand that this would be her argument for custody (and so it should have been inadmissible but it was allowed). Consequently I had prepared no defence for that argument and had no witnesses to refute that this was her true belief. Such witnesses I suspect would have been readily available in her family – although, I couldn’t say if they’d lie for her but I like to think they wouldn’t.

16. It did not even occur to me that she would claim that she believed that I was incompetent since she had left the children in my care for years while she went away and studied and had always looked to me to control the children when she had lost control of them.

17. My wife claimed that the children said they wanted to live with me because I had threatened to kill myself if I didn’t get custody. She had no witnesses to this threat because such a threat was never made. Despite this ‘the threat was treated as very serious by the Court, the counsellors and the seprep and was apparently generally, accepted as the true reason why the children said they wanted to live with me.

18. My wife did however threaten to shoot me with both children as witnesses – the judge however dismissed this as, ‘just something one says during an argument’ despite the fact that it did not occur during an argument. No-one else seemed to regard the death threat from my wife as a matter of any seriousness whatsoever.

19. Justice Cohen accepted that my wife was abusive but blamed me for my wife’s violence and handed custody to my wife who, with the only person who had ever protected the children removed from the house, continued to abuse the children.

20. My son is now a paranoid schizophrenic living homeless somewhere. I suspect my daughter was ‘forced’ to adopt my wife’s point of view to survive emotionally in my wife’s house. She became hyper-functional. She won the university medal and moved to Switzerland. She seems to have become the archetypal ice-queen. Neither of them have made contact with me in many years or given me the information necessary to contact them.

Commentary:

a) I believe I was swamped by the current tsunami of ideology that holds: women are victims and men are perpetrators. Everything else is incidental and the facts of the matter, whatever they happen to be, are simply moulded around that paradigm.

b) Even though everyone agreed that my wife was abusive – they universally blamed me for it. This deftly ‘flipped’ her role, transforming her from perpetrator to victim. It not only worked a flip on her role but mine too – I had been basically ‘a by-stander’ but now I am to blame, I am the perpetrator. And there you have it in one simple action ‘flipped’ into the mould: man is perpetrator – woman is victim – simple isn’t it? . Question: How often do you think a man would get away with blaming a woman for his violence with; court counsellors, children’s representatives and judges? Under this paradigm men are almost always held responsible for their violence while women are almost always excused for theirs.

c) Contrary to a lot of thought in the ‘men’s movement’ I don’t regard this as a ‘feminist paradigm’ and for a number of reasons. Firstly and most obviously, the judge was a man but I will come back to this in a minute because there is a more important reason. I was raised by the feminist and to adopt the attitude that: men are responsible for men’s violence but women are not responsible for women’s violence, is to imply that women do not have the same level of control as men.

d) This was actually the old patriarchs’ attitude and the foundation of their argument as to why women should not be allowed in positions of responsibility, ie because ‘they are not responsible for their own actions’. I believe Justice Cohen to be just such an ‘old patriarch’ and his unwavering support of this explanation highlights the fundamental counter-feminism of this argument.

e) To propose that men are not only responsible for their own violence but also responsible for women’s violence is an even more extreme version of the same prejudice. It implies not only that men control themselves and that women do not, but that men not only control themselves but that they also control women. This paradigm is so contrary to true feminism as to be mind-wrenching. It not only denies that women have just as much control over themselves as men do but portrays them as being ‘under the power of men’.

f) I know that many people who promote this paradigm regard themselves as feminists however this is not true feminism. It may advance a certain woman’s personal cause in a particular case but by seeking to make women ‘victims’ in every situation, they are actually denying the power, responsibility and intelligence that women like my mother fought so hard to get recognized.