I recently commented on an article in the Irish Times where Women’s Aid spoke out about the ‘tsunami of cases’ involving women and children being abused by men during access visits. 

I said that I have been working in family law for nearly 30 years and these statistics in my view are grotesquely distorted. I have absolutely no doubt that very many women attend Women’s Aid and have been victims of violence at home but to portray men as the exclusive oppressors is infuriating and is simply wrong.

My client Mr. A did not attend Women’s Aid. He is a man who was threatened by his wife and more particularly by his wife’s family, that he should stay out of his wife’s and children’s lives. His life was threatened. He stayed away but then felt guilty and missed his children and wanted to be part of his children’s lives and he contacted his wife again but she said that she would not agree to him seeing the children. 

He brought an application to court and outside the court the other side said that they would agree to one hour supervised access in her family home. This was a quite outrageous offer to make and I strongly advised my client to let the matter proceed to court because there was no reason why he could not have the children with him overnight on a regular basis in his own home. Quite incredibly however my client decided to agree to the proposal on the basis that he did not want to fight his wife in court as he feared for the consequences if I made certain allegations against her and against her family. 

There then followed a period of six months where the access was not actually supervised by the wife but was supervised by her father and by her brothers. The supervision consisted of my client being required to sign his name when he came in through the front door and if he was even five minutes early he was not allowed in the door. He then had to sign out at the end of the access visit. On his daughter’s birthday, he brought a camera to take photographs and he was told he could not take photographs. He was told that taking photographs was not permitted by the Court Order (the Court Order was silent on this point). On sunny days he asked could he go outside and bring the children to the park but this was refused. He was allowed in one room and access was physically supervised by his wife’s father or by other male members of her family at all times.

Matters came to a head when on another child’s birthday he attempted to take a photograph with his mobile phone and he had the camera removed from him and when he objected, he was beaten to the extent that he received serious injuries and was detained in hospital for three days. 

He now has unsupervised access outside the family home but that is the price he had to pay. 

Another problem here is that as far as Women’s Aid are concerned, my client does not actually exist. He reported this violence to nobody. He is not therefore even a statistic. He tolerated the access restrictions just so he could maintain contact with his children. We all know that 95% of the victims of domestic abuse are women. My client does not exist.