Claire Throssell, her sons and the Doctrine of Unity
Part of an article I first published on Substack on May 9th last year
I am prefacing this piece with a petition from Claire Throssell MBE "Child First: Safe Child Contact Saves Lives” and then reprinting, ‘Mother Knows Best’, published May 9th 2023 on Blue Suburban Skies, where I wrote about her sons’ deaths at the hand of their father.
Message from Claire Throssell MBE, survivor of domestic abuse and Women’s Aid ambassador:
On the 10th anniversary of my two boys’ tragic deaths, it would mean the world to me if you can help me keep the promise I made as they took their last breaths, that I wouldn’t let what they’d been through happen to any more children.
Help me keep my promise and take action by sharing this petition with your friends and family, to help bring these devastating failings in the family court to the urgent attention of politicians.
Together, we can hold the Government to account and demand that the family courts provide greater protection to vulnerable children.
Claire Throssell with Jack and Paul
I wanted to write about what was happening in the Family Court. I had been hearing so many disturbing stories and had myself witnessed a few up-close. It seemed to me that a battle between parents couldn’t possibly help the child and, from what I had heard, the Court only seemed to make it worse.
Since even the Family Court was based on the age-old principle of adversaries squaring up against each other through their legal representatives, there was little hope the proceedings in the Family Court could alter the accusatory/defensive model of traditional litigation.
People seemed to pay lip-service to the idea that the child should be at the centre of any custody hearing and of arrangements between the parents but, looking around, it seemed the child was scarcely in evidence.
Man and wife were traditionally deemed to be one entity in law, this was known as the ‘doctrine of unity’. The wife’s identity was subsumed in the husband’s; she had no separate identity and was not permitted to testify against her husband, even in the case of domestic violence when she was the only witness.
'The reason why the law will not suffer a wife to be a witness for or against her husband is, to preserve the peace of families,' said Lord Hardwicke in 1735.
In those days it was of course a given that the mother was responsible for bringing up the children. The father had other responsibilities. Father and mother, each with their own spheres, came together as a unity, the woman in a subordinate role with no legal place in the outer world and with restrictions on her ability to inherit, to work, to own property, to earn money and to save it. The man had the obligation to provide the income for the whole family.
These were very different roles and each knew his or her place. The roles were not only societal; they were ‘natural’. Women had babies, men had muscles; women stayed at home and nurtured and nourished, men went out to work and dealt with the wider world. Women learned the arts of homemaking and childcare through their mothers and grandmothers. Men learned trades and skills from their elders.
Women may have been subject to their husbands - rape, physical violence and coercive control in marriage were not even concepts let alone crimes - but nonetheless women had an important say over family life. ‘Mother knows best’ was not just an idle throw-away remark; it was an adage with significant meaning.
It wasn’t until 1968 that women were permitted to give testimony in court against their husbands. It wasn’t, of course, only wives who had been treated as possessions of their husbands; children, too, were legally the fathers’ property.
When divorce began to be normalised in the 1960s, women, who until then had had few rights in law, had to attend court proceedings, put their case and undergo cross-examination. At that point, it was still customary for the mother to be in full charge of the children and usually custody was awarded to the mother on divorce.
Organisations calling for paternal rights swiftly got off the ground and before long had become established in the higher echelons of the courts with influence far beyond their weight and vast sums of money poured into defending ‘fathers’ rights’.
Fathers pressed for equal rights over the children and for freedom from any financial responsibility for them, calling for ‘clean breaks’ in divorce.
We muddled on with no-one defending the rights and needs of the children and their mothers until the Wild West of Divorce and Custody led to the Children and Families Act 2014 which seemed to take for granted the traditional system of litigation, pitting parents against each other with no real understanding of the difference between mothers and fathers and no consideration for the effects of divorce on children.
The doctrine of unity may have collapsed but no thought had gone into what should replace it. Instead, the model of adversarial conflict remained the system for deciding the most important thing in life: a child’s well-being.
Mother v. Father is the model for any consideration of custody and the care of children. A phoney idea of ‘equality’ has come to dominate in an arena where equality has for centuries been the antithesis of its policies, and the doctrine of unity, in which one partner is subsumed into the other, has ruled. For the whole of known history mothers and fathers have had different roles. Men have had all the worldly power while women have been in charge of the home.
Divorce has caused an earthquake, shattering this traditional way of life: women are expected suddenly to leave the children while they go out and earn enough to support an entire family (even though it is estimated that that chimera, ‘equal pay’, will take another couple of hundred years to arrive); and men have had to learn to sew and bake, wipe away tears, remember birthdays, check for nits and worry about what to spend their money on now it doesn’t have to go to the family. (Luckily, gaming and gambling help fill the void.)
Recognising the near-impossibility that divorcing parents could find the peace and harmony that the doctrine of unity had claimed to impose, the policy of the Family Courts makes it ‘a requirement for separating couples to attend a meeting to find out about mediation before they are allowed to take disputes over finances or child custody to court (unless exemptions apply – such as in cases of domestic violence).’
‘Finding out’ about mediation may not, though, be quite so easy. Co-ercive control in the mediation room gives endless opportunity for the controlling partner to run rings not only round the other partner but round the well-meaning social workers and counsellors who, however well-trained and perceptive, will not so easily recognise and defend against the manipulations that the other partner will have witnessed over years.
The idea that a case of domestic violence can be so easily dealt with is simply laughable.
The onus is put on the mother even before she gets to court to prove the father’s unsuitability. To prove his violence and controlling behaviour while going through the charade of mediation is a lonely prospect and it simply can’t be done.
We don’t know a great deal about the ‘new family court’. We do know that it ‘will make a number of changes behind the scenes which will make it operate more efficiently for court users’ and we do know that it is not telling us what those changes are.
We also know that it is ‘sending a clear signal to separated parents that courts will take account of the principle that both should continue to be involved in their children’s lives where that is safe and consistent with the child’s welfare.’
Mothers who have done their best to protect their children, and themselves, from violent men now find that divorce gives them no chance of escape. The numbers of mothers who have gone into hiding with their children in different parts of the world as these ill-thought out rulings are made about custody and access, have increased dramatically.
Along with the announcement that mothers will have very little chance to protect their children from violent and controlling men, the Government also announced that ‘The new family court will make a number of changes behind the scenes which will make it operate more efficiently for court users’. They do not explain what those changes are and why they need to be made ‘behind the scenes’.
There is now a salubrious list of women, mainly mothers, who have suffered tragedy and have worked tirelessly to try to correct injustices. Some, like Doreen Lawrence, have been officially recognised and rewarded after years of being dismissed, ignored and side-lined.
Another such indefatigable warrior for justice is Claire Throssell, mother of Paul and Jack, the boys killed by their father on a judge-directed unsupervised visit. Following my searches on Google, I did manage to track Claire down. And just as I did, she turned up on my social media – on a petition organised by 38 Degrees.
Mothers and children are going into hiding. Sounds dramatic but the current custody laws can give them no other means of escaping co-ercive control and violence.
Some don’t escape at all. Filicide, the murder of children by their parents, and familicide, the murder of the whole family by the father, are on the increase.
Claire Throssell couldn’t save her boys but she herself not only pulled through but has become a prominent figure in the movement for the protection of mothers and children.
My memory had been fairly accurate. Her sons had been enticed into the attic by their father who had then barricaded them in and set fire to the house.
Claire had known about her ex husband’s violence, having experienced it herself over the years. She had known too that he was capable of murdering the children. She had done what she could to let the social workers know and to warn them of her fears.
Two days before killing the children, Claire’s estranged husband, Darren Sykes, barricaded a female CAFCASS officer into his house. Amazingly, the officer dismissed his behaviour as ‘normal’, Claire was not told about it and no action was taken. Sykes might well have been practising on the social worker for what he planned to do to his sons. And, like many controlling men, might have been displaying his power and preparing for what was to come.
Half an hour later, he was filmed on CCTV buying petrol cans.
On the morning of the murders, he bought an £800 trainset which he set up in the attic. At the same time he set fourteen fires throughout the house ready to light later after enticing the boys up to the attic and barricading them in.
“I did everything I could to protect my children but what I couldn’t prepare for was the courts not to protect my sons. That judge signed my boys’ death warrant’, Claire said. ‘Had I known about that I would have risked being arrested because I'd never have let them go on that visit, and they’d probably have been alive today.
‘They said nobody could have predicted what he was going to do but my argument is that they shouldn't be predicting how a child is going to be hurt, they should be preventing a child getting hurt.”
One way to do that would be to listen to the child’s mother. She has experienced her husband’s psychotic behaviour, she knows his anger and what he is capable of only too well. But in some misguided sense of ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’, the child’s needs are dismissed in favour of the father’s ‘rights’. A social worker, a judge, is given priority over a mother and the mother’s warnings are ignored.
‘For the first month I was curled up in a ball with their blankets that still smelt of the boys, pulling them over my head,’ said Claire.
That is a mother talking, a mother who knows about feelings and instincts, a mother who should be listened to and taken notice of.
Mothers do not belong in law courts; they belong with their children. You could even say, ‘Mothers know best’ and pay attention when they give warnings.