My ex coached our children to say my new man had abused them sexually
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Version 0 of 1. I left the father of my three small children five years ago. I’ve always considered myself a go-getting, strong character, an instinctive feminist who was in charge of her own life. But I slowly came to realise that I had chosen a man who was increasingly controlling, manipulative and unduly suspicious to the point that my life was hardly my own any more. I knew the break-up would be tough, and that T’s character wasn’t the kind to cope well with it or make an amicable split easy, but I was so buoyed up by the thought of being free and independent again that I mentally glossed over all that in my determination to get out. If I had known what he would do to get revenge would I still have gone ahead? That’s a call I find impossible to make. There was no one else involved in the split and for six months we struggled on in the same house while I tried to make him see the relationship was not salvageable on any level. We attended Relate counselling, and I remained hopeful we could ultimately get through it and be amicable – or at least civil – for the children who were then two, six and seven. My partner seemed fixated on an unexpected pending inheritance of £40,000 from my great aunt who died just as I said I wanted to end the relationship, and getting what he felt was “his” share, although we weren’t married. He said he would leave if I gave him a letter saying half was his when the money came through. I refused. Eventually he turned nasty, thumping the walls and furniture during rows, refusing to let me sleep by hectoring me until the small hours about the reasons I wanted to leave until I was exhausted and scared. He said: “I will make you suffer for ever for this.” Finally, when I consulted solicitors, he moved out. Naively, I thought that would be it. I found my clothes drawer open and my underwear thrown around my room. Horribly, some of it was bloodstained My first realisation that this was to be a journey through a special kind of hell came when I returned home one early spring morning exactly three years ago to find the children’s beloved goldfish in our pond floating belly-up, in water poisoned by some cement-dust like substance. Worse, when we let ourselves in the back door, we found Jukebox, our black cat, lifeless on the kitchen floor. The vet said that without an expensive postmortem he couldn’t be sure, but healthy young cats don’t usually die suddenly unless they have been deliberately poisoned. Upstairs, where I crept anxiously lest T be lying in wait (my mind in overdrive, the children told to wait downstairs), I found my clothes drawer open and my underwear thrown around my room. Horribly, some of it was bloodstained. I called the police, but there was no sign of forced entry and, as T still had keys, there was an obvious culprit. I told the hysterical children that the cat must have eaten one of the poisoned goldfish (maybe it had), gave no explanation for how the pond came to become toxic and took them to a friend. Then I called another friend to come over, change the locks and install several large bolts on the front and back doors. I was spooked, the children were just young enough to be persuaded that wind had blown builder’s dust on to the pond, the cat’s death was a sad accident and I had changed the locks because the key kept sticking. Fast forward four months to a blazing hot summer’s day. By now I had begun seeing someone new; someone kind, thoughtful and with a young daughter of his own. We had taken things very slowly, mindful of the effects on the children of introducing someone new into their lives, but in recent weeks, sure this was to be a lasting relationship, we had spent some family time together to test the waters. I hadn’t asked my children to keep S a secret – I didn’t want secrets – and assumed the topic would have come up naturally weeks ago when they had told T what they had been doing. In fact, T had been accusing me (groundlessly) of being a whore who was sleeping with every man in town anyway, so telling him I was actually seeing someone seemed irrelevant. It was about 10am when our nascent, newly constructed universe imploded. The doorbell rang and S called up to my study that two police officers wanted to talk to me. His daughter was playing in the garden but mine were away for the day while I worked. The officers asked to talk to me in private and I showed them into the sitting room, confused, my heart thudding with fear that something had happened to the children. They told me that my ex had reported that S was sexually abusing my children. He had made a film of the children making the allegations and they were here to investigate. I remember almost passing out with shock as one of them said, “We aren’t here to take your children away today” – suggesting that moment might yet still come. It’s true that everything goes into slow motion at times of extreme stress. I felt as if I was underwater as the officers watched my reactions carefully (I knew that was what they were doing, even in my distress) and asked me bluntly if I was totally honest with myself. I searched my thoughts – could the allegations be true? I could hear S in the garden with Cicily, who was giggling, naked, in the paddling pool. When S offered to bathe all the children together while I made dinner, was it because he was an abuser? My mind started spooling through the intimate family moments we’d shared together so far. Had the wonderfully helpful, hands-on domestic attitude of a new man actually been something more sinister? When S offered to bathe all the children together while I made dinner, was it because he was an abuser? Had he targeted me as a single mother to get to my children? No. No, he hadn’t. I was absolutely and utterly certain. Not one single alarm bell was ringing in my head. Even as I thought that, I wondered what other women who had been asked this same thing thought. Did anyone ever search through their memories and think yes, it all makes sense now, my partner is an abuser? I voiced an emphatic no. The officers said they needed to talk to S, who was oblivious to the scene being played out in the living room. As I stood up I began to weep uncontrollably. How could T do this to his own children? I stumbled to the garden in shock, turning over what I would say in my mind in those few steps. Despite my utter faith in his innocence I knew I wanted to look him square in the eyes when I told him quietly why the officers were here, detect any faint flinch or fear or dissonance between his expression and his words. I needn’t have worried, his eyes widened and pupils flared as his jaw dropped in stunned horror. “He’s said what?” he exploded, before trying to regain his composure at Cicily’s surprised upward glance from the kitchen table a few feet away. I know I forced myself to colour in drawings and laugh at her silly chatter while S was with the officers, tried to carry on as though our world hadn’t disintegrated, but quelling the rising panic and questions was hard. Just what had the children said – and how had they come to say it? And on camera too. They adored S, loved his silly voices and stupid walks, his invented bedtime stories and absentminded mishaps. When he came out his face was downcast and we were both already physically different, weighted down with the pain and confusion that would only intensify as the ripples from T’s decisively vengeful act spread out in the months ahead. Apart from the horrendous way the children had been used as weapons, S’s job depended on a clean CRB check. What I didn’t know until later was that even an arrest and subsequent complete exoneration would show on his CRB as an indelible black mark, a flag that would end his career, his livelihood, instantly. The officers were kind but brusque as they informed me on their way out that they would return at 8.30am the next morning to interview the children with anatomical dolls and role-playing games. It was hard to know what to say to prepare the children when my parents dropped them off, sunburned and smiling, later that afternoon. In the end, I said some special people who checked that children were happy after parents split were coming to talk and play with them. After they were all in bed, S and I could talk properly for the first time. The enormity of talking to your boyfriend about an accusation that he has sexually abused your children is so profound it’s hard to describe. Of course I told him I knew it wasn’t true, that I was totally sure of that. I couldn’t sleep that night. Our whole future was in the hands of the children. What if they said something as a joke, copied something inappropriate they’d seen in the playground, or T’s manipulation and brainwashing of them was so thorough they believed they’d been abused themselves? S’s life would be over in every way, his own child would be prevented from seeing him, he’d be branded a sick paedophile, and put in prison. His life would be over because he had made the simple mistake of falling in love with me then treating my children as his own. After the officers had interviewed the children they told me immediately that they believed T had coerced and coached the children to make the allegations and that while they still had to complete a full formal investigation they were happy for S to continue staying over at the house, although for his own protection they recommended that he shouldn’t bathe or put the children to bed so if any further allegations were made we would all know instantly that they were false. Innocently, we thought that would be that but the fallout has taken us to hell. I’d like to add “and back” but sadly can’t. All kinds of things we hadn’t thought of cropped up. Who to tell? We suspected from the sudden way play dates at my house were refused, and some playground snubs, that my ex was repeating his allegations or at least alluding to them around town – but it’s hard to ask another mum in the playground if she hasn’t let little Harry come over because she’s heard your boyfriend is a paedophile. We felt utterly isolated from friends as it’s not the kind of life event you drop into post-dinner-party chit-chat. We were forced into our own shadowy world of phone calls from social services taken quietly away from the children and friends, and stomach clenching fear every time a police update email arrived lest there were new allegations. The two eldest children are racked with misplaced guilt and shame at their part in the video The police called S’s ex-wife to ask if she suspected he might be abusing their daughter. After many weeks of going it alone and finally confiding what we were going through to some close friends, it then became a fear that sooner or later someone would think “no smoke without fire”, or even that S might be attacked in the street by people who didn’t know him and had heard whispers that he was a child abuser. Needless to say, the full investigation concluded that my ex had maliciously coached the children to make the false allegations to try to split S and me up, ensure he could never see the children or me again and destroy our new life. My ex was not allowed to see the children for a long time while his mental health was assessed and he attended parenting classes. The case went through the family courts and his contact with them has been supervised ever since. This has put us, and the children, through the most harrowing, intense pressure and challenged every aspect of our attempt to build a new family life together. False allegations of abuse by an ex are increasingly common. In the US, the phenomenon is known as “the nuclear option” – for a reason. My two eldest children are racked with misplaced guilt and shame at their part in the video and often struggle with these intensely adult and difficult feelings. Luckily, the youngest has no conscious memory of it. As they have matured they have come to understand, of their own accord, what they were innocently led to do, how wrong it was, how twisted T was for engineering it and how awful it has been for S. As they get older and understand the true horror of sex abuse and what could have happened to S if the police hadn’t immediately smelled a rat, new layers of guilt unfold. They have had some professional counselling but the cost of weekly private counselling for two children for months on end is huge; and they don’t want to tell their friends that they can’t play after school because they are having therapy. Overworked and underfunded social services staff have been mostly blase about the after-effects. Broken bones take priority over broken emotions seems to be the attitude. As time has gone on, we’ve learned to live with the horror of what T did. For a while S was, understandably, consumed with anger. We looked into slander and personal injury claims and even whether a criminal act had been committed but the law allows no redress for innocent victims of abuse claims like him. One lawyer told me that he saw a couple of false claims like these each year when he started in practice 20 years ago – now it’s dozens a year. Usually it’s mothers trying to get back at men who have left them – he told me he has only rarely come across a case like mine. It has changed our view of people, and the world, for ever. We’ve moved towns and lost touch with many friends as a way of trying to leave the trauma behind. Of course that’s not possible as it’s the children who are most traumatised and rehabilitating their view of adults is an ongoing process. Why would a parent coach their children to allege sexual abuse? Alison Roy, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, says: “I see many varying degrees of children used as weapons but this is especially damaging. Sometimes, when an adult breaks down, the needy and psychologically unwell, demanding child can emerge. “Unresolved traumas, losses and emptiness leave the parent behaving more like a difficult, wounded child - and their own children are used as a vehicle to punish the other parent. The wounded parent becomes what I would describe as “split” or polarised in terms of how people are viewed – similar to the way a young child might see the world, as full of goodies and baddies. Their need to convince others that their partner, ex-partner or a new partner is abusing their children takes precedence and becomes a way of revisiting their own unresolved rage and fear as a child. “It can be hard for professionals to unpick what is happening, especially as all professionals working with children take allegations of abuse very seriously. In addition to this is the battle children can get caught up in, where their parents are collecting ‘evidence’ from their children against their partners/ex-partners in order to make a case in court for custody. “What is devastating to the child is the role reversal and the impact on them of having to placate, care and manage conflict. Their view of the world as a safe place is contorted and they are left feeling that nothing makes sense and they have no idea who the real goodies and baddies are. Children with this perception of the world and adults (who should protect and support them) can grow up with the potential for personality disorders and ongoing damaged attachments, in which intimacy is challenging.” |