Why is this ‘expert’s’ word worth more than a mum’s?

TWO years ago, I got an email from a reader saying she was terrified out of her wits. I’d written an article about men who had used the ‘closed door’ hearings in family law cases to bully and oppress their former partners, and she was afraid she and her children would also be victims of a hidden injustice in a family court.

She was worried that she’d lose custody of them to her ex-husband – whom she accused of abusive and coercive behaviour – on the recommendation of a court-appointed expert.

I agreed to meet her, and she brought a sheaf of documentary evidence of her ex-husband’s behaviour.

At the time, the young children were being handed over to him in a public place, and she had letters from members of the public alerting her to the scenes that occurred after she left, as the weeping children were being forced into their father’s car.

Dismissed

There were written statements from the children’s teachers expressing similar concerns. There was a sworn affidavit from a neighbour who had seen the husband stalking her and watching her house. There was even a Garda report, and all the documents had names, addresses and contact numbers, so that their statements could be independently verified.

But an independent expert, employed to compile a report for the court, had blamed the mother for turning her children against their father. She showed me the report, and it appeared all her independent evidence had simply been dismissed.

The expert had said she was guilty of ‘parental alienation’, a highly controversial and dubious theory, and that this was why the children were reluctant to go with their father. He recommended that the children be taken from her.

On this expert’s say-so, the woman lost custody of her children, and two years later she still hasn’t got them back.

She is a professional, employed in a position of trust, but she is not trusted to care for her own children, on the testimony of this one expert. After speaking to her, I was contacted by other women with similar stories, and more and more harrowing testimonies began to emerge.

One of the most shocking involves a father who was previously jailed for assaulting his wife in front of their young child. And yet the same judge later gave majority custody of the child to that father, on the word of the same expert. The mother had been ordered to ‘produce’ the child, who was physically taken from the court by the father, screaming: ‘The judge is wrong, the judge is wrong.’

At the weekend, our sister paper, The Irish Mail on Sunday, identified one expert who is frequently employed, at up to €8,000 a go, to compile these reports under Section 47 of the Family Law Act of 1995. Several women, who had their children removed from them on his recommendations, spoke to the paper about Mr Jim Sheehan, a self-styled expert on the disputed concept of ‘parental alienation’.

As well as the woman who’d been savagely assaulted by the father who was then given custody of the child, another told of losing custody to a father whom the children had accused of assaulting them. Yet another was blamed for ‘parental alienation’ when she expressed concerns about her ex-husband, but in another jurisdiction he was later labelled a ‘dangerous’ abuser.

Fine Gael TD Bernard Durkan has been tirelessly highlighting the plight of these women, and says that he now has up to 60 cases in which Jim Sheehan was involved.

In the Dáil last year, he warned that ‘if the activities of Mr Jim Sheehan in the courts are allowed to continue, there will be serious consequences’. And, he says, women are still contacting him with their stories ‘at a rate now faster than ever’. Last July, Deputy Durkan again named Jim Sheehan in the Dáil and warned that ‘not everyone assigned by the courts under S. 47 [Section 47, relating to child protection investigations] is an expert’.

Confusion

The problem is the law does not require a Section 47 expert to have professional qualifications of any kind – they can be done by anybody the court appoints.

Family law is a contentious area, of course, and accusations and counter-accusations are commonplace. Compounding the confusion is the fact these cases happen behind closed doors.

Speaking of the ‘parental alienation’ phenomenon, Deputy Durkan says that although it ‘sounds unreal and few people would believe it happens… it happens under the cover of the “in camera” rule where anything can happen and cannot be reported outside the court, and Tusla can’t intervene because it is subject to the rule’.

Justice Minister Helen McEntee acknowledges the current system, where a totally unqualified ‘expert’ can be appointed to make a life-altering report on a child’s welfare, allows the potential for ‘particular abuses to continue in respect of parental alienation, even into the courts’.

If children are being taken from their mothers and placed with abusive men on the say-so of so-called ‘experts’ behind closed courtroom doors, that is a major tribunal of inquiry, and a major redress issue, just waiting to happen.