MUMS TELL OF
DESPERATE mums are fleeing Britain to countries where they feel like penniless outcasts – to save their kids from abusive ex-partners.
Some scared mothers have gone to live thousands of miles away from all they know after courts ordered them to send their children to live with their abusers.
They have risked starvation, arrest and jail rather than stay in the UK and expose their youngsters to more danger, our investigation has revealed.
In the most horrific case, one woman was classed as a high-level domestic violence risk by police who begged her to leave her brutal husband.
Her ex is a paranoid schizophrenic who admitted seven attacks on her during family court proceedings.
Yet the woman was still ordered to let her two boys go and stay with him after a judge ruled being apart from their father was causing them “emotional harm”.
The mum told the Sunday Mirror: “I’ve been faced with an almost impossible choice: Stay in the UK, and put my sons’ lives in danger, or run away and risk the chance we might starve. I chose to risk starving.
“The marriage was traumatic, but the court process abused me all over again.”
The woman is one of a string of mothers who spoke to us on the condition we don’t reveal their exact whereabouts because they’re scared their exes – and the authorities – will track them down.
Today they join our campaign Save Kids From Violent Parents. We studied hundreds of pages of notes on each of their cases during a nine-month probe.
The first mum fled the UK with her sons, aged nine and 12, two years ago. They arrived terrified and broke in a country they’d never visited before.
The mum knows if she returns, she will face jail for child abduction and her kids will be sent to her abuser.
She said: “I don’t speak the language, I don’t know who I can trust. But I’m trapped.”
She’s backing our call for a change in the law to ensure no one who has been convicted of violent crimes, sexual offences or child abuse can have automatic unsupervised access to their children after we revealed 63 children had been killed by known abusers. The ban could only be overturned by a judge after an independent expert was satisfied they’d been rehabilitated.
The same rules would apply to those – like this mum’s ex – who’d had similar findings made in civil courts.
Speaking in her strange new home town, she told us how she endured years of physical, emotional and financial abuse at the hands of the man the courts want her sons to live with.
Police were called to their UK home dozens of times. She said: “I walked on eggshells constantly, in fear every day.
“When I was six months pregnant with my second son, he threw a laptop at me while I was in the bath. It hit me so hard I thought I’d lost the baby.
“Another time, he abandoned us in the snow in the middle of winter when my son didn’t have a coat. We had to walk two miles to a bus stop. He also threw my dog out of a moving car.”
Once her ex was arrested after he allegedly tried to gouge his brother’s eyes out but the case collapsed.
Police offered to help the mum move to a women’s refuge because they were so scared for her safety. She eventually found the courage to leave – but her torment was just beginning.
Her ex spent the next six years battling for access in court. The original judge in the case accepted that the boys’ dad had been repeatedly violent to the mum.
Documents seen by the Sunday Mirror show he ordered that the kids should only have indirect contact with their dad, such as cards and letters.
But when the dad launched a fresh custody bid another judge ruled the boys should see him at a contact centre with a view to starting overnight contact every weekend.
The mum said: “They hadn’t seen their dad for years. Only one of my sons really remembers him, and he said he didn’t want to go because he said his dad twisted his arm last time he saw him.
“At the centre, he was hysterical and refused to go in. I got blamed for alienating him.”
The older son, then eight, told a courtappointed guardian he did not want to see his violent dad.
The younger son, then five, added: “I have everything I need – my mummy, my brother and my teddies. I hope I stay in the same house, I like it the way it is.”
But the dad then applied for an order to force the mum to send the boys to live with him, hundreds of miles away.
She was receiving support and counselling from her local Women’s Aid service and the court tried to force the charity to hand over her personal notes.
The court then ruled the boys should be sent to live with the dad they barely knew. The judge claimed the mum had caused them “emotional harm” by trying to keep them from seeing him.
The mum said: “We had no choice. We had to run. People might criticise me, but what would they have done?”
Many mums choose nations which have not signed up to the Hague Convention on child abduction, a treaty which aims to repatriate children taken from their home countries. Most are thousands of miles away.
One woman sobbed: “There is a warrant out for my arrest so I’m scared they’ll get me if I go back, even though my son is now an adult.
“My mum visited at first, but now she’s too old. It breaks my heart to think that I might never see her again.”
The mum ran in 2010 when a court ordered her son, then nine, to go to his dad. She says her ex was violent to her throughout their relationship and she tried to warn police. He was then convicted of violence against a new
Choice was impossible... stay and put sons at risk or go abroad and risk starving BRITISH MUM WHO FLED ABUSIVE EX WITH HER KIDS