When emotion interferes, all hell breaks loose.

 

In the last 48 hours there has been considerable publicity about the Sydney businesswoman Melinda Stratton, who fled Australia with her son Andrew last April as a result of a Family Court dispute.
 
Melinda Stratton is the wife of the New South Wales Deputy Fire Chief Ken Thompson, and Mr Thompson had launched an international campaign with posters on bus stops and billboards and over the internet in an attempt to find his son.
 
The mother obviously had heard about this campaign, but has also said she would not return to Australia because she had "lost faith in the Family Court system".
 
Well suddenly the kidnapping response team are saying that the mother can have a second opinion on custody from "an independent expert who's fully recognised by the Family Court of Australia".
 
Now a lot of things are obviously true here.
 
The child should be returned voluntarily.
 
It is not in the four year old's interests to be constantly on the move.
 
Already experts say the child would have been traumatised by the fact that he'd been removed from home and his toys and his friends and his relatives, suddenly and secretly.
 
Then of course if they're located, the child would be subject to further trauma because he most probably would be snatched from the mother by police in the early hours of the morning and placed in a secure detention centre.
 
Then he would be deprived of contact with his mother.
 
Then he'd be stuck on a flight to Sydney accompanied by strangers.
 
Then he could be placed in foster care, again with strangers.
 
Then he could be sent to a new school or a kindergarten.
 
He could then have as many as four foster homes before the matter gets to the Family Court.
 
And there's talk that if the mother returned with him she could be arrested.
 
Now no one condones kidnapping.
 
But it's time that someone took seriously the consequences of marriage failure or relationship failure, and the inability of outfits like the Family Court and the Child Support Agency to deal adequately with these conflicting circumstances and emotions.
 
It is not a question of determining whether the mother or the father, Mr Ken Thompson, is right or wrong.
 
The issue is that when emotion interferes, all hell breaks loose.
 
There are no winners.
 
Throwing the book at this woman, charging her with kidnapping, arresting her and sticking her in gaol is going to achieve absolutely nothing other than further damage to the child.
 
It's a long time ago since divorce or its equivalent was predicated on the notion that it wasn't beneficial to any party to find fault, hence the no-fault provision became the law.
 
Now one party or the other can race off with someone else, can be involved in drugs, can be stealing from a partner, can tell lies and the answer to all of that is, well, this is not relevant.
 
It was thought that the allocation of blame was imposing undue stress, and there was a way around all of this.
 
But it's quite clear that there are many people in relationships and marriage for whom the no-fault provision seems a massive injustice.
 
I'm not suggesting any fault by either party here, I wouldn't know, I don't know either of them.
 
But a woman or a man don't just run off with their child for no reason at all.
 
They feel a sense of stress, a sense of betrayal and an overwhelming sense that the justice system in family relationships offers no justice at all.
 
Cases like this woman and her child highlight the fact that individuals in relationships can be driven to dramatic and potentially fateful behaviour.
 
The Family Court of Australia needs to reassess what it does or doesn't do.
 
This mother says she's lost faith in the Family Court.
 
So have many fathers.
 
Whatever good work it might do, there's one thing it's not much good at, and that's administering justice in circumstances where relationships collapse.