To make text easier to read, ‘child’ or ‘he’ is used. More usually mothers are apart from more than one child.

Ill-Health

• Mother suffers a temporary or long-term physical or mental ill-health crisis, becoming unable to care for her child in the short term.
• She may or may not have a partner.
• She may or may not have friends or extended family nearby.
• She asks Social Services for short-term help or is advised they can offer it.
• She assumes she’ll get her child back once her health has improved.
• Child may be fostered by a close family member.
• Child may be fostered by others outside the family.
• Ill-health continues, perhaps long-term. She may break up with her partner.
• Court intervenes in ‘best interests of the child’.
• After a year or so, child may be offered up for adoption.
• Mother’s ill-health continues or may improve. If child is fostered outside the family, she has little news of, and no contact, with child.
• Sometimes, her former partner, who may or may not be the natural father, may have her child returned to him. He may have a new partner. He becomes the Resident Parent.
• Mother may fight for contact time, Non-Resident Parent status, or she may give up.
• If child is fostered, she may be allowed to send and receive a few letters/photos a year.
• If child is fostered within the extended family, rather than giving her comfort, she experiences intense pain as she sees him developing close bonds with others as the years progress, and as her own bonds with him weaken. At the same time, her relationships within the extended family become more complex.
• Child may be offered for adoption to the extended family.

Abduction Abroad by other parent

• Contact between mother and child is blocked, discouraged or impossible at the beginning.
• Mother may take advice from specialist advice agencies.
• She may choose to seek the help of courts in her country as well as abroad to find her child and to fight for his return or, after a while, to retain contact with him.
• Such legal cases are costly, time-consuming, and require specialist lawyers.
• Success in the courts, after many months and years of costly battles may be measured in terms of allowing her regular telephone contact, visits or email contact with her child.
• Contact, in any form, is dependent on her child’s abductor being reasonable and/or honourable in upholding one or many courts’ decisions.
• Visits to see her child will be dependent on courts’ decisions as well as on distance and costs involved.
• The longer the separation, the more the child becomes accustomed to it.
• After a few years, and having child’s best interests at heart, mother becomes reluctant to upset the child’s new status quo.
• Child becomes used to his new environment, friends, school and new family surroundings.
• Child becomes used to his mother not being in his life, either daily or even occasionally.

Conflict after Family Breakdown

• Child turns against mother after she leaves home to live with new partner (sometimes same gender) or leaves to pursue a career or a new lifestyle. There is no question of her ‘abandoning’ her child. She assumes her mothering role will continue for life but not in the family home.
• Post-divorce, when both parents have been given 50-50 care and all seems amicable, father will suddenly turn child against mother when she begins a new relationship. Father fails to return children for her contact period, and begins a subtle project of assassinating her character.
• Child refuses to see, contact or receive letters, presents, telephone calls or texts from mother.
• Child blocks out positive mothering memories. “I can’t remember anything ‘nice’ she did for me.”
• Telephone calls, text messages are ignored. Letters and presents are returned.
• Child asks court officials, “Can I divorce her?”
• Child refuses contact with mother′s extended family or friends who support her or who attempt to intervene on her behalf.
• Mother attempts to maintain minimal contact or link through school, e.g. reports, parents′ evenings, fetes, concerts, etc.
• Child threatens to withdraw from school or ‘go on strike’ until mother withdraws her presence.
• Child refuses to ‘give permission’ for any of his personal or school news or welfare or photographs to be given directly or indirectly to mother through friends or family.

Abusive Relationships

• Members say, after leaving the family home, they “assumed” their child would ‘sympathise’, having been silent witnesses to a long, sustained and vicious campaign of abuse which, at times, was life-threatening. The abuse might have related to a partner′s problems stemming from mental or physical health issues, or addictions relating to alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, or anger management situations.
• Long-term domestic violence, occasional physical abuse or emotional bullying are common reasons Members have given for leaving home quite suddenly and without preparing their child.
• The assumption that their child would ‘understand’ why they leave suddenly has been proved wrong in nearly every Member′s case.
• In cases of leaving abusive relationships suddenly, there is a classic 3-stage process in becoming a mother apart:
  • i. Having borne the brunt of abuse for many years to protect her child, perhaps having left a few times before but always returning for the sake of the child, mother suddenly reaches a final and decisive crisis point.
  • ii. She leaves suddenly and without warning.
  • iii. Child views this as complete abandonment, turns against mother, and refuses to see her.

False Accusations

• Distressingly and shockingly, some Members who have experienced high levels of abuse from partners, and who leave the family home quite suddenly, find that their child, even those as young as 6-10 years, will lie to solicitors, court welfare officers and other officials about their mother's alleged “behaviour”.
• Members frequently comment on their young child′s use of unusual or mature language to describe this alleged abuse, e.g. “My mother touched me in private places” or “My mother touched me inappropriately.”
• In cases where Members have left home after experiencing extreme domestic violence, they report that false accusations of violence and sexual abuse by a child seem to follow once she declares her firm intention to remain in her child’s life or increases her efforts to do so.
• A case of alleged abuse committed by the mother is steadily built up that she either cannot, or never will be able to, disprove.
• Sometimes the child will say to court welfare officers: “I don't want to press charges”. Nevertheless the stigma of the charge remains and the child′s accusations have to be reported.
• Courts almost always believe children. The term “best interests of the child” is heard so many times it almost becomes a meaningless mantra.
• The emotional effect of these accusations is traumatic and overwhelming for mothers who have willingly and lovingly dedicated years to nurturing, keeping safe and caring devotedly for their children.
• They are numbed into a state of shock that dearly loved children could accuse them of such monstrous and grossly abnormal behaviour.
• Police have sometimes arrived unannounced at Members′ homes to take statements.
• Some Members have lost jobs.
• Some employers have demanded that Members “make a statement of their innocence” to be placed on their job records.
• Members feel their characters to have been stained beyond redemption. They become severely demoralized, depressed, sometimes suicidal.
• They talk about “letting go” of their child.
• Members describe the impact of these False Accusation experiences on their psychological or emotional state of mind to be as numbing and devastating as if they had suffered a severe trauma such as having been a casualty of a major road traffic accident.
• It is entirely possible that some Members, after a lengthy and sustained campaign against them by their child and several members of their family and friends, suffer symptoms akin to post traumatic stress disorder.
• On a slightly positive note, some Members do slowly re-build a new form of contact with their child but the close quality of their former bond is severely reduced and diminished.
• Members who persist, against all odds, in wanting to remain in contact with their child and insist on meeting them regularly have to do so in an approved place with Social Services or a similar agency monitoring and reporting back to the courts on each meeting.
• Contact time is supervised, sometimes for a very long period, and until such time as mother is declared ‘safe’ to be alone with her child again.