Jared's personal story

I am a young father of 24 years age. I have been a father for 5 years now to my beautiful daughter 5 yrs and my son 3 yrs. After the relationship with my ex de-facto partner deteriorated, I decided to move home with my mother, rather than continue to have the children subjected to our bad moods after arguing more and more continually.

Whilst living with my mother, I had maintained nearly 50/50 shared care of both children. These arrangements had been in place for just under 6 months until an incident occurred, which due to concerns for the safety of my children (after receiving a suicidal phone call from their mother, succeeding a tirade of verbal abuse and threats) I made the decision to retain custody of them while I urged their mother to seek serious mental help. For the three days that continued after the suicidal phone call, I had allowed her to have access to see them under supervision at the house I am living at with my mother. On the third day, my son was subjected to a massive amount of trauma as his mother and grandmother came again to see him at my property, and forcibly removed him from my care, by physically abducting him and running out the front door of the house to an awaiting getaway car. I watched my son, unrestrained and screaming, be driven off the scene at high speed.

The police were called and attended the property, who, after seeing visible signs of the assault that I had sustained by the children's grandmother (trying to restrain me from pursuing my son during the abduction), refused to do anything to the culprit. After the incident, I contacted Child Protective Services, and a family court lawyer. I have since collated an affidavit and contacted the relevant agencies with my concerns regarding the children's welfare and have sought mediation services to be able to have access to see my children again. I have contacted and attended the police station multiple times regarding welfare checks on the children also to no avail. I again had attended the police station to attempt to press charges for the assault that I sustained to which I was told there was nothing that they could do. I was contacted weeks after this incident by my lawyer, only to find out that we were unable to attend a family court hearing until nearly 3 months since I have last seen my children.

As time has progressed I have been continually harassed by the children's mother and grandmother, with false accusations of burglary, stalking and intimidation (which I have had to attend Magistrates Court to give a defence for. The Magistrate was convinced that the story was fabricated to try and sway the family courts and subsequently struck the requested intervention order off the record, resulting in a huge waste of police and court resources and time). I have been subjected to emotional abuse, death threats, physical assault, economic abuse, damaged property and continual harassment all of which constitute a severe case of domestic and family violence that no one seems to want to do anything about. All of this has been documented and evidenced with photographs, text messages, eyewitness accounts, etc.

Throughout this whole process I have done nothing but follow my lawyers' advice.

I have contacted multiple agencies for the children's sake (CPS, DHS) and they don't care to hear it. I have had to seek personal counselling and financial help for myself to cover the upwards of already $10,000 debt she has left me with, not to mention the legal fees.

It seems like there is nothing anybody will do, and it is hard to think anybody even cares to listen. I do not want to play the victim in this, because the real victims in this are the children, and no one is willing to come to their defence. They are being deprived of having a father, and all the extended family that comes with that (uncles and aunties, cousins, nan, etc). I have been met with no help or compassion for the situation by anybody in the system. Something needs to change!

All I want for Christmas is to see my children.

Something needs to happen. It seems that all the rhetoric is swayed in one direction to portray women as the only victims to this kind of abuse. How can somebody abuse the legal system for their own gain and get away with it? False accusations need to be addressed. Parental Alienation needs to be addressed. Male victims need to be taken seriously.

This has been a disgusting eye opener, and what makes it worse is that it seems to be brushed under the table like it isn't worthwhile.