SINGAPORE: A woman defied court orders to return her two children to her ex-husband after spending her birthday with them.
She kept the kids away from her former spouse for a year, returning them only after she was faced with a week’s jail term unless she restored the custody arrangements.
The woman appealed against the court’s decision on her liability, sentence and costs, but had her appeal thrown out. She was ordered to pay costs of S$15,000 (US$11,050) to her ex-husband.
In a judgment published on Wednesday (Jun 28), the Court of Appeal stressed that therapeutic justice should not be misused in “misguided attempts to contravene court orders”.
WHAT HAPPENED
The woman, now 47, filed for divorce in 2012 after a six-year marriage with a husband nine years her senior.
After the divorce, the pair were granted joint custody of their two children, with care and control to the father. The man was to pay a monthly maintenance sum of S$300 to the woman.
The woman was granted liberal access to their children, and was to pick up and return the kids at their father’s home.
In January 2021, the woman wrote an email to Minister Desmond Lee alleging that her ex-husband was physically and mentally abusing her children.
She wrote again to Mr Lee in April 2021, claiming that her ex-husband was “constantly using vulgarities” at her kids and beating them if they did not listen to him. In her email, she noted that a Child Protective Service (CPS) officer who attended the case thought it was “not serious enough for them to take any action”.
Another CPS officer then contacted the woman on May 4, 2021, saying CPS had decided to speak to her ex-husband about the ongoing investigation against him.
The woman pleaded with the CPS officer to inform her ex-husband the next day, so she could first see her children and talk to them. The officer agreed.
The woman then sent an email to her ex-husband reminding him that the next day was her birthday and that she would be having her birthday access with the children.
In her email, she said she would fetch the kids from school and drop them back at his place after her birthday access with them on the same day.
On the woman’s birthday, she sought a personal protection order and an expedited order against her ex-husband, seeking to restrain him from committing family violence against the children.
Both applications were dismissed. Despite this, the woman did not return her children to their father after her birthday access ended.
FATHER ASKS FOR KIDS BACK
The father called the mother to ask why the children had not been brought back home, and the mother said the children did not want to return to him. The man then called the police.
The woman filed an application in court for herself to be granted care and control of the children, while her ex-husband received supervised access.
The ex-husband filed an application seeking an order for the woman to return the children to him and for the care arrangements to remain status quo.
Throughout the various court proceedings, the woman did not return the children to her ex-husband. The kids stayed with her for a year, until a judge ordered their mother to begin serving a week’s jail on May 9, 2022.
This was unless she returned the children by the next day, and complied with other access orders. The children finally returned to their father on May 10, 2022.
The man said his ex-wife had coached their children into recording evidence favouring their mother for use in court proceedings and influenced them to disregard court orders.
The woman claimed she was not obliged to “return” the children because it was for her ex-husband to pick them up.
The judge found that the woman had influenced her children not to return to their father, persistently maintaining that the man would be an imminent danger to the kids.
The children echoed their mother’s words, saying that they could “decide”, citing the “voice of the children”. A CPS officer said he was of the view that it was more likely than not that the children had been coached.
The judge accepted the evidence from the children’s uncle that the children were initially receptive to going to their uncle’s home, but their attitude changed after a telephone call with their mother.
The judge drew an adverse inference against the woman because she failed to disclose communications she had with her children between May 2021 and October 2021.
COURT OF APPEAL’S FINDINGS
The Court of Appeal said that the children had lived with their father uneventfully for a number of years, with no proper evidence of any danger to the children.
In her appeal, the woman argued that the lower court judge had erred in not implementing measures to facilitate “therapeutic justice”.
She argued that the children should be allowed to undergo “healing” and not be forced to return to their father, but the judge rejected these arguments.
The Court of Appeal said the woman has misused the concept of therapeutic justice, which is “a lens of care through which we can look at the extent to which substantive rules, laws, legal procedures, practices, as well as the roles of the legal participants, produce helpful or harmful consequences”.
Instead of using an approach of therapeutic justice herself, the woman proceeded in “a manner that reflected a clear disregard for the objectives of any such approach”.
Instead, she involved the machinery of the state in what was essentially a parental disagreement that ought to have been settled between caring parents, said the Apex Court.
She appealed to a minister, following on with an additional appeal with further investigation. When this failed to give her the result she wanted, she exposed her children to “acrimonious” personal protection order proceedings in a failed attempt to get an expedited order.
“Persisting with the PPO proceedings, she involved the children in giving evidence in court and being cross-examined in those proceedings, bringing them into the center of an adversarial contest between parties,” said the court.
The three judges who heard the appeal said the woman “should have known better than to maintain her innocence in these circumstances”.
“We issue these grounds in the hope that other litigants and their lawyers will understand that therapeutic justice addresses the best interests of children and ought not to be misused in misguided attempts to contravene court orders,” they said.
The court also allowed the man to pay his ex-wife a lump sum of S$43,200 instead of monthly maintenance.