A MANIPULATIVE mother who did all in her power to turn her eight-year-old daughter against her father – even falsely accusing him of being a paedophile – has herself been condemned as a child abuser by top judges.
And the mother, from Solihull, paid the ultimate penalty for her lies when the Court of Appeal ruled her little girl had rightly been taken from her by social services and placed in foster care.
Following the break-up of her relationship with the father, the mother had accused him of being a child molester.
She did everything she could to poison her daughter’s mind against her dad even though the youngster ‘delighted’ in the time she spent with him.
The mother also tried to exclude the father from school events, said her daughter was frightened of him, informed others of her accusations against him and deliberately took every opportunity to put obstacles in the way of the father-daughter relationship.
Judge Martin Cardinal, sitting at Birmingham High Court, dismissed each and every one of her accusations last year, describing her as a ‘worryingly obsessed’ woman who had come to ‘believe her own propaganda’.
And he took the Draconian step of authorising Solihull Council to remove the little girl from the mother’s care.
Her success in turning her daughter against her father had been so successful that an immediate move into his care had proved impossible, leaving an interim care order and a short-term foster placement as the only viable options.
The mother challenged the decision at the Court of Appeal, claiming she had been treated unfairly and was never told the removal of her daughter was even on the cards.
However, dismissing her appeal, Lord Justice Ryder said: “Given the prevalence of false allegations made by parents against each other, conduct at this level by a parent should be understood to be serious child abuse.”
He added that even if the mother was suffering from some kind of behavioural or psychological condition, she had proved herself ‘bent on manipulation’ and the false stories she had told her daughter about her father were ‘inexcusable and highly damaging to the child’.
He added: “The child had been encouraged by the mother to make allegations against her father despite the child’s own delight in seeing him, in the process of which she had obtained an unhealthy knowledge of sexual issues.”
A spokesperson for Solihull Council said it could not comment on individual cases.
