When a mother lies

At the time of writing the man who was falsely accused by his ex-wife and his 14-year-old daughter of sexually assaulting the latter is still in jail (he had been sentenced for two years). The story has caught the public’s attention because the daughter recanted her previous testimony and admitted that she was told to lie by her mother, yet because of an anomaly in our justice system, there does not seem to be a legal way for the men to be released until the wife and daughter are tried for perjury.

In short, he has to stay in jail despite everything pointing to him being an innocent man because the Judge does not have the power to re-open a case which has been closed. His lawyer is rightly describing this as a miscarriage of justice and it has now gone to the constitutional courts.

I will leave lawyers to argue the legalities of this case, because what I think as a society we should really focus on is what appears to be a growing, alarming trend. There is another current news story on the same lines. To quote the magistrate, “the victim’s mother, had filed several reports with the police on different people, always alleging sexual abuse on her children.”

So what we have is a situation where some mothers seem to think nothing of forcing their children to smear the father’s name with such terrible, false allegations as a form of revenge. Now, I am the first to speak up in favour of women and children who suffer at the hands of abusive men, but when I hear of fabricated stories like these, it feels like we have taken 100 steps back for women who have a genuine case. For what happens when one mother lies, is that all mothers become suspect as to the motives behind their accusation.

Filtering the lies from the truth becomes more and more difficult when you have children in the mother’s custody who are being brainwashed into taking sides to the extent that they are willing to say the most horrific, appalling thing one can say about their father – that he molested them.

This is a dangerous game that these women are playing; a dangerous game using the most vulnerable of weapons – their own children’s trust. In ugly custody battles where the bitterness and rancour can often overpower any sense of reason, parents can resort to the most despicable of measures in order to avenge themselves for any wrongdoing. When the children are used in this way, as they so often are, not only are they scarred for life as they see their parents determined to ruthlessly break each other down, but it will probably taint the way these children behave in their own future relationships.

Lies, manipulation, emotional blackmail – these are the messages which children are receiving from these parents for their own handbook of life. Psychologists and family counsellors drum on about this endlessly and in countries like the US where the family court orders mandatory co-parenting therapy, the one thing which is harped on is to leave the kids out of your own anger towards your ex – but do parents listen? Ha!

What is even more ironic is that the marriage which both parents wanted so badly to get out of is paradoxically doomed to continue, because as long as you make it your life’s mission to destroy your former spouse, aren’t you still masochistically clinging to the arguments and fights of your old relationship which is what made you separate in the first place? If the marriage is over, why keep flogging its ghost to death even though you now live apart?

And, as much as I hate to say this, purely from my observation, I think it is women who have a harder time letting go of the past.

The desire to “get back” at the man you think ruined your life can be very strong in some women, and I personally know of too many cases where the welfare of the child was not only placed on the back burner, but wiped out from the picture completely. It ceases to be about what went wrong between the two of them but about how the woman can screw over the man in the best way possible, from fleecing him of as much alimony as she can (in cases where the woman is reluctant to get a job) to the final weapon of choice in her arsenal: the children. This can range from making visitation rights an ongoing battle, to the kind of false accusation cases we are hearing about now.

(I can already hear you reaching for your keyboard to reply to me. Yes, women get the short end of the stick from men a lot, I know, but I feel it is only right to highlight the fact that there are many decent men around who fall victim to hardened, unscrupulous women as well).

So yes, my sympathy goes to these men whose lives are being ruined, not only because separation and divorce is traumatic enough as it is, but because there are mothers out there who are simply hell-bent on spiteful revenge, even if they have to drag their own offspring through the courts to do it. Mothers often make the mistake of assuming that because “they did all the work” by carrying the child and enduring labour, the children they have brought into the world belong only to them.

How wrong you are.

Children desperately need their fathers too, and our society will be all the poorer if women persist by all means possible to cut men out of the children’s lives for good.