Author Lara Feigel has laid bare the brutal and often vilifying nature of child custody battles within the UK family court system, drawing from her own traumatic experience and months of observing proceedings. Her journey reveals a legal landscape where mothers can be harshly judged, not just on their parenting, but on their conformity to outdated gender norms.
A Personal Descent into a Legal Nightmare
Feigel's ordeal began during the pandemic winter when she sought to remain in the countryside with her two children after her divorce. While her ex-husband agreed their two-year-old daughter could stay, he contested custody of their eight-year-old son. Entering the process naively, hoping for an amicable discussion, she was swiftly disabused of that notion.
"I quickly began to feel that I was being judged not only as a mother but as a woman," Feigel recounts. The cross-examination in the witness box was among the most difficult experiences of her life, with a barrister's insinuating voice haunting her dreams with accusations like, "You don't put your children first, do you?"
She lost her case. The court decided to separate the siblings, with her son living mainly with his father and her daughter mainly with her. Feigel was shocked less by the outcome than by the successful arguments used to vilify her, concluding she lived in a culture where independently minded women could have their children taken away.
Observing a System Stacked Against Mothers
Driven to understand, Feigel returned to court as a journalist. Over a year, she witnessed numerous cases in cluttered, carpeted courtrooms, seeing firsthand the exhaustion and despair of parents awaiting judgment. A persistent and pernicious theme, she argues, is the concept of "parental alienation"—a theory introduced in 1985 by Richard A. Gardner which suggests a parent, typically the mother, turns the child against the other parent.
Though Gardner's work is now widely discredited, Feigel observed his ideas slipping in through unregulated psychologists' reports. In this framework, children's wishes are dismissed as mere reflections of their mother's influence. "In case after case, I've seen an imperfect mother lose custody to an imperfect father because their children were in some way rejecting the father," she writes.
Case Study: Lana and the Power Imbalance
In an East London court, Feigel observed the case of a financier father and a mother who was a former immigrant sex worker. The father, eloquent and well-represented, sought full decision-making power and majority custody of their daughter, Lana. The mother, evasive and emotionally raw, struggled within the system.
Her mistakes were laid bare: enrolling Lana in a nursery without consent, producing humiliating evidence about the father's sex life. The court-appointed parenting coach supported the father's claim that Lana's distress during handovers was due to poor preparation by the mother, not genuine upset.
The judge's ruling gave the father everything he wanted, restricting the mother's parental responsibility and granting her just four nights a fortnight with her daughter. The mother's crime, Feigel concludes, was her hatred for the father—a common feature of divorce that the legal system seems designed to stoke.
Case Study: Esther, Ada and the 'Alienation' Expert
In Oxford, Feigel watched a five-year case involving two adolescent girls and an expert witness, Trish Barry-Relph. Barry-Relph, who no longer uses the term "alienation" directly, diagnosed the girls as "unwittingly serving their mother's unconscious needs." She recommended a six-month transfer to the father, requiring the girls to board at school full-time.
The father, representing himself, cross-examined the mother aggressively. The barrister for the children's guardian was entirely on his side. The mother's exemplary parenting was irrelevant; only her failure to co-parent and her distrust of the father were on trial. The court ordered the boarding transfer, with only brief, supervised monthly contact with their mother.
Glimmers of Hope and a Path Forward
Feigel notes there are campaigns for change, particularly regarding the weaponisation of alienation claims against allegations of domestic abuse. The 2020 Harm Panel report was critical, and the government has since announced plans to repeal the clause in the Children Act 1989 that presumes contact with both parents is always beneficial.
Most promising is the Pathfinder courts initiative, piloted in places like Bournemouth. These "problem-solving" courts focus on early intervention and out-of-court dispute resolution, reducing the adversarial winner/loser dynamic. Feigel believes the outcomes for Lana, Esther, and Ada might have been different had their cases been heard in such a setting.
Reflecting on her own life four years on, Feigel acknowledges things have improved as the venom of the courtroom recedes. She and her ex-husband are increasingly able to collaborate for their children. The experience, however, has left an indelible mark, revealing a system that can still tear families apart along the oldest and most painful of fault lines.
This is an adapted extract from 'Custody: The Secret History of Mothers' by Lara Feigel, published by William Collins on 29 January.
