FD24P00534 - [2025] EWHC 717 (Fam)

Analysis

I start first with the allegations made by the mother that the father was coercively controlling of her. This allegation is an overarching one, which is said to be illustrated by all of the behaviour of which she complains. She says that, outside of the allegations of physical and sexual abuse, he behaved coercively to her by limiting her access to money and preventing her from engaging with her family. She said he would talk badly of them, and would disrupt her when she was trying to talk to them on the phone. She also said that he controlled all the money in the family, taking her own wages from her and deciding what it should be spent on. If he gave money to her, he would ask for it back. In the course of her submissions, Ms. More O’Ferrall also pointed to other aspects of the father’s behaviour which she characterised as controlling, for example that the father made the mother go and see a psychiatrist in Israel on the pretext that, should she do so, he would allow the children to travel to Israel to be with her.

The behaviour of abusive individuals will rarely stop at the bedroom door, or be limited to physical or sexual behaviour. It is commonly in the little things as well as the major ones that controlling and undermining behaviour will be seen.

In this case, the surrounding evidence does not support the mother’s contention that she was kept short of money or that her relationship with her family was disrupted by the father or anyone else.

The parents lived in Israel for the first few years of their marriage, and they travelled there quite frequently thereafter. They travelled to see the mother’s family in April 2024 and the mother then travelled again in June. The original return date was only two days after the trip out, but the father obtained the money from his parents to pay for the fare, and the ticket was changed so she could come back later.

I accept that the father arranged for a telephone line so that the mother’s family could speak to her without incurring charges. The mother did not give an account of a particular occasion when a telephone call was disrupted, or suggest that there had been days or weeks on end when she had not been able to contact them. The allegations were vague and unparticularised. It was contradicted by the father’s evidence as to specific matters.

So far as the money was concerned, this family lived on a modest income. The father worked full time and was responsible for paying for the household bills. The mother earned money part time by working in a hat shop which went into the tin in the house or the bank account. In the circumstances, there was very little financial freedom for either of them to spend on luxuries, including going out. I do not find the fact that money was used from the savings tin by the father to pay for certain items to be evidence of financial control. It is not alleged that the mother or the children went without, or that money was not found for things she needed, or visits to Israel. Once again, the mother’s allegations are vague and unparticularised.

I then turn to the sexual allegations in relation to the children. The mother’s case is that she believes the father’s insistence on washing the children’s intimate areas was sexually motivated, as was his wish for them to get into bed with him. She said that the children touched his genitals and that he was aroused.

These allegations were made in September 2024 when the mother returned from Israel. Having read and heard all the evidence about these particular allegations I found them, like the allegations of financial and family control, to be vague and lacking surrounding detail. There was no account of a particular occasion when it had happened, by reference to the time of day, what else was happening, what the children or she were doing. I would not expect details about every occasion, but there was little context even in relation to the most serious allegations. The accounts of what she saw also lack consistency.

At the end of the mother’s evidence I was left with the clear impression that the mother had become suspicious of the father’s behaviour without seeing anything specific. I note that when the children were asked questions about their father in the course of the investigations they did not say or reveal anything to suggest sexual abuse.

Likewise, when the children were spoken to on 30^th September and 22^nd October 2024, neither of them made any allegations about their father hitting or hurting them, nor did they display any fear of him or surrounding distress. On 30^th October, S made no allegations but R said that she had been hit by her father a number of times on the face and the leg and all over. R was subsequently interviewed in January 2025. During the course of this, she stated that her father screamed at them and her mother, and also that he had hit her on various parts of the body. She also said that he had hit her mother, something she knew because her mother had told her.

By the time R was spoken to on 30^th October she had already been spoken to twice and had made no allegations. In this case R was living with her mother and was plainly aware that she was making allegations of some sort against the father, and indeed that she did not like him. The mother has never said she saw the father hitting the children (although she said the children told her this), and the children made no complaint about being hurt by the father by being aggressively washed or cleaned by him, for example, quite the contrary. The mother refers to the children having bruises, but these are not described in any detail.

During the ABE interview R said that her father screamed when he came home from the office, but it was only when she was invited to tell the interviewer if there were things she did not like about him, and whether she had ever been hurt at home that she said ‘maybe father’ and that he had smacked her and pinched her. She was not able to say where he had smacked her, or, beyond that it was in her house, where it had happened. She said she knew her mother had been hit because her mother had told her.

There is always a danger that children who are interviewed several times about allegations of abuse, even without manifestly leading questions, may begin to make allegations which are not grounded in reality. This risk is magnified if the child is living in an environment where there is hostility to the person who is being accused. This does not mean that the child is lying, but that the attitude of the adults is capable of altering their perceptions of past events. They may wish to please those around them. In this case, the children did not evince fear of their father or make allegations about him in the earlier meetings.

The mother’s evidence about the way she and the children were treated by the father during the marriage is very stark. If it was correct that she was routinely physically abused and shouted at in front of the children, and also that the children were repeatedly physically abused, shouted at and humiliated by the father, I think that this would have been apparent to the professionals when they were initially interviewed on 30^th September and 22^nd October 2024. It is not so much that the children did not say anything about it but the fact that their demeanour did not give any cause for concern which is striking. Although I am aware the mother has some concerns about the objectivity of the school, it is also surprising they did not pick up any concerns about the father’s behaviour towards the children, bearing in mind that they were living with him and his parents for the last part of the school summer term and the first few weeks of September.

For all these reasons the reliability of what R told the professionals and police in the later interviews, including the interview in January, must be in doubt.

I then turn to the mother’s allegations of rape and sexual abuse of herself by the father. Some of these allegations do contain surrounding detail, and the mother has repeated them several times. The clearest example of this is the allegation the mother makes involving the wearing of tights. Whilst the father says that he did ask her to wear the tights, he denies the rest of the allegation.

It seems unlikely that such a specific occasion would be the subject of a complete fabrication on the part of the mother although her evidence overall was characterised by vagueness and exaggeration. If she is telling the truth about the father doing that, it begs the question as to why the father did not tell the court that this had happened.

There are other aspects of the mother’s evidence about these allegations which are problematic, however. She says that she told the marital therapist that the father was abusing the children, and that she also told the psychiatrist in Israel he had raped her. Whilst it is not impossible that professionals tasked with helping families would cover up or dismiss such serious allegations, it would still be surprising. There is no hint in the psychiatrist’s report that the mother had told him she was treated so badly. There is no evidence before this court that the therapist here (known as Sara) alerted anyone or said anything, or even signposted the mother to the police or local authority.

I appreciate that the mother was very distressed in June 2024 and it was in those circumstances that she wanted to be given permission not to go to the Mikvah and to go and see her family in Israel. She did not wish to go on and wanted to be allowed to leave the marriage and return to Israel with the children. Whilst I accept that these events could be supportive of the mother’s allegations against the father, they are also consistent with the mother’s unhappiness in the relationship overall, and the realisation that things had reached breaking point.

I also acknowledge that the mother went to see a psychiatrist in Israel, but I do not think that this fact can bear the interpretation that Ms. More O’Ferrall submits it should, and/or that it is evidence of the mother being coerced by the father. I note that when she returned to England it was swiftly agreed that the children could return to her.

It is well known that victims of sexual and other abuse do find it very difficult to speak of this to professionals or other outsiders. They may not fully appreciate what has been happening to them. Yet this is a case where the mother said she did tell professionals at least some of what was happening in the spring and summer of 2024, but that they did not report it. In those circumstances it is more surprising that she did not inform the authorities that the father repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted her during the marriage at the same time she made the other allegations on her return from Israel and waited to do so until the end of October.

There is more support for the mother’s allegations that the father would sometimes shout at her and the children. In the list of things that she compiled for the father (with the help of the therapist) in February 2024, before these proceedings were contemplated, she made a number of requests, including that he speak to her respectfully and not to be angry or critical. She also asked him not to shout at the children. Caring for a household and young children is hard and, at times, unremitting work and the flavour of that document is that the mother felt criticised, uncared for and unappreciated for all that she did. In his police interview the father complained that his washing was not done properly, and he also began to be critical about the mother’s cooking.

The father denied shouting at the children or the mother, but it is not difficult to deduce from what both parents said that they disagreed about various things, for example as to whether he should allow the children into bed with him when they were scared or send them back to their own beds, whether the child who did not like being washed should be overruled, and whether the children should submit to such things as having their ears cleaned. The father also accepted that on one occasion the cleaning had caused bleeding when the child pulled away as he was doing it.

It is obvious that this marriage was unhappy for a substantial period of time. It is also plain that there were tensions around the parties’ sexual relationship. In my judgement, the father downplayed this quite significantly, but there were various points in his evidence particularly in his interview with the police when he acknowledged some of the difficulties. I bear in mind the problems with language, but he clearly said that the mother would frequently say no to him on occasions and also that he had been desperate when he had not had sex for weeks, saying ‘I thought, ok, that’s my life. Maybe all the people are like this. I don’t know’.