I know that I don’t have to tell you that there are a lot of evil people in this world.
The ones I’m writing about tonight are all too willing to deprive a child of his or her other parent. It doesn’t matter whether the parent is mom or the parent is dad, the drive to strip the child from his other parent, to destroy the relationship the child has with the other half of himself, to terminate the grounding that the child receives just from being in the company of the other parent, is evil, pure evil.
As you know, we handle child abduction cases under the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction, so, of course I am talking about the hundreds of cases we’ve handled in which a parent steals a child away from home, removing them to another country, hoping to deprive the left behind parent from ever seeing their child again and depriving the child of the love and care of the parent who clearly has the greater capacity to provide those things. Those are evil people.
But I am also talking about parents who falsely accuse the other parent of child abuse. Abuse is a terrible thing. Abuse cannot be tolerated. Abuse comes from small people whose fear, ignorance and anger directs them to try to control their pathetic lives by dominating someone else. As you can probably tell, I’m no fan of abuse.
But abuse is so serious that the false claim of abuse is really a mockery of actual abuse. It makes a joke out of actual abuse. False claims of abuse have a place in hell right next door to abuse itself.
So, a false claim of child abuse is a heinous thing. Using the allegation as a mechanism to drive away the child’s other parent, to pollute a child’s perception and feelings of their other parent is a wicked thing. It is an evil thing.
We once worked on a case where a mother claimed that a father sexually and physically abused the child. All the experts were brought in, DFCS, a Guardian ad Litem, a Custody Evaluator, a psychologist. All of them examined the child and examined the father at great length. At the end of the process, they all agreed, the mother made it all up.
A few years later and the mother tried her deception again. Again, DFCS was brought in. Mother wouldn’t let the child go back to the therapist or any of the other previous experts, knowing that they had already seen through her. Still, again, the findings came in: no abuse. All of mother’s allegations were designed to kick dad to the curb, to get rid of him for once and for all, to execute his ability to have anything to do with his child. The child, though, was a mere pawn to mother’s putrid plan. The harm to the child was irrelevant to the likes of her. The truth is, she had little more regard for the child than she did for the dad.
This story has a happy ending, though. Mother’s evil was on full display. Mother was busted. Mother lost custody. Evil did not triumph.
I wish I thought that evil people never triumph. For example, I would like to think that people who plan to rip children from their parents to lock them into a concentration camp will never get away with it. But that remains to be seen.
For now, we will take on these evil people and their evil ways one by one. For those cases at least, evil people will not triumph; not under our watch.
Michael Manely