It’s hard to know how to feel about this. On the one hand I’m overjoyed to be able to see my niece once again, it’s been so long and she has grown up so so much, I don’t want to miss anymore of these precious moments. On the other hand I’m filled with fury that the social services are allowed to dictate the contact between us and to treat myself and my family as if we are all somehow a threat to this little girl who we all cherish. Obviously, I must ignore the sour taste and make lemonade from this situation. Who knows what’s to come and how often I will get to see my niece once the social services and family courts make their final ruling? What I do know is that things can’t get any worse for my niece and my sister, so for now we will all squeeze every ounce of goodness from these bittersweet contact sessions.
My sweet niece. She has intelligence and humour in abundance. You would never know what she has been through and the affection she showed me after so long apart just goes to show you can never break the family bond.
The Judge has taken a daughter away from her mum and there is no turning back. His decision was based on a mixture of lies, twisted statements and rehearsed performances, so on that basis I can’t put much of the blame on him. The father, someone who has gotten away with the most heinous crime possible, is pure evil. However, it is the social services who have helped facilitate this crime and all because they needed to cover their own failings and because it was just an easier task if my sister were to be blamed. They have ignored expert evidence, police interviews and amongst many other things the worst they have done is ignore the testimony of the child herself. Without the Social Services the father would be in prison, undoubtedly. For this reason I feel they are equally guilty in the abuse of my beautiful niece. It’s actually painful to think about it in depth and thankfully I do not have to go over it all again today as I’ve already documented much of what I’m referring to I’m my previous posts.
As things stand, we are now battling it out with the social services so as many of the maternal family members as possible can prove ourselves worthy to the Social Services and become “contact supervisors”.
The reason we are having to do this is due to a psychological report my sister was ordered to undergo. In this report it was stated that my sister could not be trusted to be alone with her own daughter due to her “entrenched beliefs" and her “unwillingness to accept the judgement”. Basically, my sister was faced with a choice. Either she agreed with the ridiculous narrative concocted by the social services, a narrative that says she had accidentally caused the injuries by checking for signs of abuse (injuries that one expert paediatrician said were the worst she’d seen during her career), or she could stick to what she believed had happened and to what she was told had happened by her daughter. If she were to relent and blame herself for something she had never done, the social services would allow her a route to being reunited with her daughter and possibly gain part-custody, possibly. Or, my sister could resist the temptation to clear the name of the father and subsequently the social services, but for this she will be punished with limited access and no chance of a meaningful reunification. As the social worker recently put it to me, “it’s like dealing with an alcoholic, until they admit they have a problem they will never be rehabilitated”. This callous and shameless statement was made to me during my most recent assessment, an assessment I have to undergo in order to be able to supervise my sisters future contacts with her daughter. Due to my inability to bow down to the social workers narrative and my unwillingness to clearly state that I agree with the judgement and that I think my sister is a risk to her daughter, because of this I have already failed one assessment and have probably failed the most recent one also. I will not, and I can not lay blame on my sister for this, no matter what they use as bait. How would it look if in the future my niece speaks out again about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father, or, god forbid, if he abuses her again. If my sister crumbles to temptation and puts on record that she was to blame for what happened and that she agrees with the courts that her daughter made it all up and for some bizarre reason tends to lie about being abused, if she puts that on record then her daughter is truly condemned to silence for the rest of her life and so too is justice and the truth. For the same reasons I will also not crumble and will certainly never give that bitch of a social worker the satisfaction of hearing me agree with her. The social worker in question makes my skin crawl and I feel no guilt in wishing her a slow and painful death, but above that I would much prefer to see the truth come out and have her apologise for all she has done, just before she is led out of the dock and down to a jail cell where she belongs. And if you think what I am saying is harsh or the produce of sour grapes then I would kindly ask you to read through my previous posts.
Returning to the present, we are now in a situation where only my brother has been granted the privilege of being anointed “contact supervisor”, and with that comes questions of what he had to agree upon to be awarded such a position. Now, if I’m writing this post in a competent and coherent manner you’ll already have realised the nuances that come with such a sacrifice. My brother has been granted his position and this could only have been possible if he bent to the will of the social services and their opinions. Obviously as a family we hold no grudges to having one of us playing the game and saying what needs to be said. And having just one family member in this position means mother and daughter can have 4-hours together instead of just 2, which is the maximum allowed at a contact centre. It also means that my sister can have contacts outside the contact centre in more natural surroundings. Last week saw the first of this kind of contact where my brother was acting as supervisor and my sister enjoyed four hours of pure bliss with her daughter at a petting zoo. IT HAS BEEN 3 YEARS SINCE MY SISTER HAD MORE THAN 90-MINUTES TO SPEND WITH HER DAUGHTER AND FEEL LIKE A MOTHER AGAIN. So, after normality has been blurred in such a way as it has been over the last 3 years, being “given” 4-hours is a blessing. And maybe that may seem absurd to someone who’s never had to go through something like this, but put yourself in my sisters position and tell me you wouldn’t leave behind all the insanity for just 4 hours and cherish every minute of that time together with your daughter…
Moving forward, we hope that more of our family will be allowed to become contact supervisors as my brother can only commit to once a month. I am pretty much out of the running for this role as I won’t allow my niece to read in the report she will be given on her 18th birthday that I believe her mother caused the abuse and that I think my niece lied when she said her father abused her, that is something I can not allow to happen. Hopefully, my mother and father will find a way to progress through the assessment without having to give up too much ground. That being said, who would blame them for trading off their true beliefs for the chance that mother and daughter can have time together?