At Refuge, we hear all too often from survivors who have been failed by the very systems designed to protect them. This includes the family court system, which can become a whole new battleground for abuse. Not only do perpetrators weaponise legal processes to further harm survivors, but the entire ordeal of seeking safety, security and justice is exacerbated by a chronic lack of understanding about emotional abuse and coercive control among legal professionals.
Content Warning: This post discusses sensitive topics, including mental health struggles, trauma and language that may be upsetting. Reader discretion is advised.
This is Jasminder’s* story.
Never did I think that I would find myself a participant in family court proceedings. Much less did I expect it to be as traumatic as it was. I found the whole experience harrowing, and that’s despite working in the profession as a solicitor.
I’m Jasminder, a British Sikh in my forties with two children. I was married to a narcissist for over 15 years and was subjected to coercive control, as well as emotional and financial abuse throughout.
When I filed for divorced and first entered the court system, I went in with blind hope: that equality and justice would be served, that everyone would finally see what I had put up with for all those years, would understand how I was treated by him, and what he was doing to me and my children.
I trusted. I trusted the legal professionals who were guiding me. I had hope – hope at each court hearing, hope that legal experts would finally see the truth and put measures in place to ensure that we would at last feel safe.
Then the letdowns came, the entire process mirroring the rollercoaster of my abusive marriage. Only it was worse. It was not just him abusing me, now it was the system too. It left me questioning: Was it me? Am I that bad? – just like he had always made me question myself.
The figures of authority in the family courts didn’t believe me. “Where is your evidence?” they asked, gaslighting me, just as he had done. I was traumatised and exhausted from the emotional abuse, coercive control and financial abuse I had endured over not just years, but decades.
They couldn’t see it; the legal institutions that are meant to protect us were blind to the hurt and bruises he caused me on the inside.
After I left him, he made our lives even more of a living hell, including by immediately stopping financial support for the children. I was spinning so many plates, and the abuse wasn’t just ongoing, it was worse. I had to watch my children fall apart before my eyes as he began directing his abuse at them.
On top of it all, I had the court system. The endless paperwork – the paperwork it feels like nobody bothers to read – and the trauma from years of abuse to deal with too. I needed help. Professional, medical help. But instead, I was in court.
In total, I had three cases to deal with: the divorce petition (of course, he refused to sign it to set me free – despite having a mistress – as the ultimate act of control), the children’s case (to decide schooling and contact), and finally, the finance case. They all went through to final hearings – they always do with someone like him. There is no negotiation; you comply, or it’s nothing. He wanted to destroy me, to ensure I had a life that was not worth living.
I was told by my legal advisors not to mention the domestic abuse case, as it would take too long to carry out a fact-find, and my son needed to start secondary school the following year. The judges like to see parents getting along, after all.
So, I had to pretend that I wanted the children to visit their father, that everything was okay, when I knew he was a monster and an undiagnosed narcissist. I had to sit back and watch as he lied repeatedly in the court through his solicitors and in his statements. He told each court that he was not in a relationship, despite having a mistress.
After he physically forced our child into his house to attend contact, he was then investigated by the police. He informed both me and the court that no action would be taken. But when I got home from court that day, I had an email from the police informing me that the investigation was still ongoing.
He played the victim, as abusers do, and the court gave him the perfect stage on which to perform. He revelled in it. He would smirk at me, and it would go unnoticed, allowing him to feed off my stress and reactions even more. He knew I was worried, and he knew how much the children meant to me – making them the perfect target.
He knew the legal proceedings were crippling me in every conceivable way, and he added to this by bringing in the biggest and best legal army that money could buy. Of course, his biggest army was for the finance case, not the children’s case, but even that was unnoticed; and, in the eyes of the law, he was winning. His mastery lay in his ability to lie; he was so calm, and I watched them all believe his lies.
While I remained my usual honest and kind self, I was pitted against him – a compulsive liar – in a system that relies on the honesty of both parties. For the court system to work, there has to be a level playing field, but he had no respect for the courts. To him, he was above the law, above everyone.
I endured two long, painful years of court cases, which would have been even longer had I not pushed things along myself with the paperwork. Far from getting the support we needed and the justice we deserved, the children and I didn’t even leave the courts with enough funds for a home – after decades of never having had what we felt was a real, safe home in the first place.
My traumatic experience in court was a direct continuation of the years of abuse, this time played out on a public stage for everyone to witness. My court cases mirrored my marriage on every level. My voice was not heard, nor were my children’s feelings or emotions considered. The judges would shout at me, belittle me, dismiss my truth – and these were the very people making decisions with profound and long-term effects on our lives.
For the system to produce unbiased and just outcomes, the professionals involved need education not only on the characteristics of the narcissist and the empath, but also on the dynamics of abuse.
They need to understand that abusers will never know how to love their children – they only know how to take.
This was not a “high conflict” case, as the judges repeatedly claimed, expressing an utter failure to comprehend why we, as two professionals, couldn’t just resolve the dispute ourselves. To add insult to injury, I was sent to family therapy with my abuser, something he exploited to intimidate me further. We were also required to attend a Separated Parents Information Programme, to learn how to co-parent effectively. Most damaging of all, the courts ordered the children to have unsupervised contact with him.
Not only did the cases drain practical resources such as my time and money, but the endless court orders, actions and evidence-gathering processes slowly chipped away at me.
To add to the exhaustion, my perpetrator ordered an independent social worker in an attempt to prove parental alienation against me – of course, his allegation was disproved. While I was working full-time and parenting my young children, I was forced to find time to fulfil pointless quests to appease the judges.
There is no coherence across the system as a whole; the courts, police, social workers, and agencies do not work together, and the abuser leverages the gaps.
In my case, he used the separation of the children’s and finance matters to pit the courts against each other, telling one court one thing and the other another. The court process was a continuation of the abuse and pain I had experienced, exacerbating a very slow process during which the children and I were forced to live our lives in limbo – just surviving every day, not living.
To live with an abuser is to not have lived at all, and the court process only stole more of our precious years.
I wasn’t just fighting for my children, or for a home – I was fighting for our lives, and the judges and professionals around us had no idea.
It was a nightmare – only it was real.
*Names have been changed to protect identity
