Transcription
So false allegations have become a common feature of Family Court proceedings, and if you're dealing with a narcissistic ex, then I guarantee you that they're inevitable. So in this video, I want to look at why Family Courts so often seem to overlook them.
So first off, let's have a look at what are the systems within Family Court that seem to make them recognizing and acting on false allegations so difficult. So in terms of recognizing them within Family Court, they work on a balance of probability rather than a more black and white based on all the evidence. They need to look at the whole picture, and courts therefore are set up to intervene and then investigate. So contact is often stopped, a false allegation is made, contact is stopped, and during this time, a child could then make claims of their own, having been emotionally manipulated to align with the parent who's initially made these allegations, and then that adds more weight to those initial allegations that are made, meaning there's more likelihood of them believing them.
The second thing is that allegations are often exaggerated and embellished during this time, and then this ends up looking like it's a crisis situation and action has to happen right now. And when things are speeded up in that way, the parts of your brain that you need to make logical, balanced decisions kind of shuts down, and you just make faster-paced decisions, which are often based on the information most easily and readily available to you, which unfortunately tends to be the allegation themselves. So in many cases, the person making the allegations is very emotionally seductive. They believe that they have been abused and that they are the victim. That can really sway opinion over fact.
So what happens when these allegations, why are courts acting? Well, again, this is because if they're not recognized, or even when they are recognized, allegations can keep coming in. And it's a tactic, particularly a narcissist, that they constantly keep you almost on a treadmill. You don't have time to think. And this is what happens within Family Court. Everything is moving so quickly that you don't have time to stop and go, "Right, hang on a minute, let's just look at this, let's just look at that." It's just happening too quick for your brain to be able to break it down. And because of all the other issues, which we're going to look at around Family Court, they don't have the time to be able to slow it down and do that process. They also fail to see allegations as part of the strategy to control the narrative, to undermine you as the other parent, and to punish you by using the children and the court as a weapon. And unfortunately, this all is all happening at a psychological level, and courts aren't trained to spot that. Even if they do recognize the allegations, they won't do anything about it because they don't really understand where it fits in and where it sits with risk.
How does the court's focus on the best interests of the child sometimes sideline the investigation around the validity of these allegations? But in the Domestic Abuse Bill that was released last year, children are now recognized victims of domestic abuse in their own right. Even if it's alleged that they have witnessed domestic abuse, as soon as an allegation of domestic abuse is made, it requires that intervention and investigation that we've just spoken about. This process will then be hijacked by the abuser, by the parent making the allegations, and this is either through that emotional manipulation of the child or bombarding the court with incidents so they don't have the capacity to focus on that detail. By involving the child, you trigger that best interest of the child, and this can trigger a rescuer dynamic within professionals. This triangulates them into playing that role. And when you've got a victim, which the abuser has alleged is them or the children, and now you've got a rescuer, there's only one seat left at the table, and that is of the abuser. And guess who gets that chair? Yep, that's you. The best interest of the child, while absolutely should always be at the forefront, can easily be manipulated and used to the abuser's advantage by going, "Here you go, the child is front and center," and then essentially pestering the child to make those allegations so that it looks like the abuser can go, "Not me, I haven't done anything. It's all the child. Let's do what the child says. The child is telling what they want."
So next, we're going to look at what biases, misconceptions, or even lack of training around high conflict and personality disorders, how does that play into how courts handle false allegations? So first off, let's look at bias. Gender plays a huge part in this alongside everything else I've just spoken about. So there's a narrative that as soon as a father makes a claim that they are innocent and responds to false allegations, then that means that they are failing to take responsibility for their own behavior, and that is taken as being more evidence of them being an abuser. I do want to say that it is true that abusive people don't take responsibility for their actions, but that doesn't mean that denial and saying you didn't do something automatically makes you an abuser. It has to be assessed within the whole pattern of their behaviors. Mothers, on the other hand, who are falsely accused, suffer from a different kind of bias that in my experience, whereby they're almost judged more harshly, and they become a kind of pariah because we have this stereotypical view of a woman as being loving and nurturing and caring. And if someone so emotionally seductive presents a narrative whereby this mother is none of these things, people could be really quick to almost like kick them out the nest. "You're not one of us." So they are removed from being a mother or the stereotypical mother and judged through that lens. And that can be really hard for them then to disprove that, especially when the children have manipulated to say something. So that moves me on nicely to my next one, which is the misconceptions. And I know this isn't totally true, but it does feel like courts think that people don't lie. And that's just crazy, utter madness, because if one person is saying one thing and the other person is saying the opposite, one of them's a liar, one of them is deliberately misleading or is psychologically distorted. What is going on? So someone is lying. So when false allegations are made, I think when any allegation is made, courts should always have their wits about them thinking, "Well, someone here is lying. My job is to figure out who it is." In my experience, it's usually the person that gets in first, the person who makes the allegations first, they're the ones who are believed. Counter allegations that say, "Were you saying I'm innocent? I didn't do this?" then positioned as being the "deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender," which is an abusive behavior.
Now, this whole setup plays beautifully into the hands of abusers who usually have, on the one hand, silenced their victims. So they've never spoken out, they've never dared to tell anyone what they're experiencing at home, what's really going on. They've been gaslit to the point where they don't actually know themselves what's been going on. They question, "Am I the abuser? Is it me? Did I deserve to be treated in that way? Am I being too sensitive?" So they rarely speak up. On the other hand, you've got the abuser who's gone around telling every Tom, Dick, and Harry that they are the victim, that they have been abused, that their ex is crazy, they're a drinker, they're aggressive, whatever the allegations are. So then when it all comes out, there's almost like this plausible deniability of any wrongdoing on their behalf, because when you say what happened to you, everyone's already got in their head that, "Oh, well, they said that they were crazy," or "This is just them trying to cover up their own tracks." And so the abuser can sit back and go, "I told you, I told you they were crazy," or "They were lying," or, you know, whatever the allegation was.
So the next one, this is the training. And I've got mixed views on this, really, because CAFCASS and judges are trained to look at different things. CAFCASS look at the social impact around the child, the welfare of the child, and based on risk to their long-term outcomes. Courts are very much looking at the legal side of it, which side does this fit? Is this person lying? Where does it fit with the law? And so that's what they're trained to look at when false allegations are present. Now, at least one party has got a personality disorder and trauma throughout the whole process. And this means that the tools that the courts do have at their disposal are insufficient. It's not that they need more training. I'm not saying they don't need more training, but in these kind of cases, I'm not sure giving them more training would actually make any difference because they'd almost need to undergo training in cognitive distortion, so some kind of therapy training, personality disorder, so psychology training, and trauma, family systems, attachment. So it would be a hell of a lot for judges and CAFCASS to undertake in order to get them to understand all of this. The biggest concern here is that the tools that they do have aren't being used appropriately, and therefore they are not bringing in people who they should bring in when either they recognize that there's something not quite right about false allegations. We need someone who has got that training to be able to identify those dynamics. Also, what tends to happen is individuals in these positions just aren't aware of their own bias and blind spots, and so that can render them vulnerable to highly manipulative and high-conflict individuals who will use them and try to triangulate them to get their narrative front and center.
So finally, I want to look at how Family Court procedures and the time constraints limit the court's ability to thoroughly investigate and address the claims to false allegations. I don't have all the answers for this, but these are some of my musings. So the courts are currently overrun, and the delays are so long and significant. And unfortunately, when we find ourselves in these positions where huge miscarriages of justice can happen because people rush, they don't pay attention, they get swept away by the emotion of it, and the pressure of their managers telling them they've got to close it, or the system telling them you can't keep them in the process for X amount of time. So they're so eager to close down cases to meet their targets that they make poor decisions and they miss things, sometimes deliberately, in order to make a case look simpler than it actually is. And that's the danger for children. They're not really seen as being an individual and at risk within this. They are seen as being almost a burden to the system. Then when they worked with, they are rushed to make decisions themselves which affect their own lives without understanding any of that. Asking five, six, seven-year-olds, "Who do you want to live with?" when they don't understand time properly, is so harmful for children. Policies as well, their aim is to make things clearer, but actually what they do is they seem to be almost like a blueprint for abusers. "Here you go, this is how you do it. If you want to get false allegations through, here's the policy to do it." We've become almost risk-averse within Family Courts, and we're trying to narrow everything down to the tick-box exercise. And people and this kind of psychology just don't fit in that completely. There's no real consequences early on in the process with false allegations, which means they embolden the person making the allegations to just keep making them. They utilize them as part of their strategy because it works for them. It either gets contact stopped, or it gets everyone focusing on the other parent rather than looking at anything that they're doing. It makes them feel like they're superior and that they are the victim, which feeds that ego and their own personal ideology about themselves. Fact-finding hearings are so long, and in my experience lately, that judges are avoiding them simply to speed up the process. They don't want to do a five-day fact-find, they want to cram it into one or two days. And you can't see everything in these complex cases if you're only looking at through such a small time frame. What this means is that lies are allowed to continue, and truth becomes part of an echo chamber within reports and bundles. So you go to your second hearing, and it's in a report that this happened. You can't then challenge that because the the proof wasn't done then, and it almost becomes a fact. Professionals just don't understand the psychology of false allegations and therefore fail to see how it fits in with the strategy of an abuser and the long-term risk to the children.
Oh, I'm going to be talking in more depth about this within a webinar that you can check out on the website, and that will cover more of this, and it will provide you with some tools to help you to overcome false allegations in your case, or at least have the tools to be able to put forward your side of the story with solid evidence that will get heard.