EARLIER this month, Justice Minister Ionas Nicolaou said child abductions and the withholding of access of a child by one or the other parent was on the increase.
According to Europol data, more than 50 incidents of abduction and/or withholding a child from a parent were recorded in Cyprus during the past two years.
Sixteen of these were actual abductions, the most well-known being the kidnapping of Marie-Eleni Grimsrud, 4, outside her kindergarten by masked men hired by her Norwegian father on April 27. The remainder were one parent withholding a child from the other.
Nicolaou said the government had assessed the issue of withholding children and that 2015 legislation had been amended to criminalise these actions.
But, according to Marios Panaou, the founder of the Cyprus Fatherhood Initiative, the current family court system is partly to blame because it tends to view custody battles as an adversarial issue instead of one that does what’s best for the child.
He says the courts need a faster and fairer system when it comes to joint custody as this would prevent many cases of children being snatched or withheld by one or the other parent who may feel they do not have enough access to their children under the current system.
Panaou said the family courts, whether they realised it or not, were turning children into victims of marital disputes and weaponising custody battles rather than trying to prevent them.
Panaou said it begins with temporary custody hearings where children are generally assigned to one parent and not both until custody is finalised, which can often take longer than it should to go through the courts.
This leaves the losing parent, and the child in a state of limbo, which Panaou says “turns the child into a ‘trophy’.
The decision to give temporary custody of a child to one parent, usually the mother, until the commencement of a custody case in court means it is more often than not the father who is only allowed to see the child a few hours a week.
“The system is plagued by continuous postponements, referrals, and bureaucracy which makes it particularly time-consuming, but also profitable for some,” he said.
He also said that in many cases, when a parent who has temporary custody disobeys court orders to allow the ex-spouse to see the child, “nothing much can be done legally to force them abide” other than opening up a new legal front under the mechanisms described by Nicolaou on the withholding of children from one parent or the other.
In addition, Panaou said, temporary child-support orders are issued automatically without a hearing and since there is no joint custody decision at this point, the parent who does not have joint access has to pay up. And, if the parent who does not have custody, fails to pay child support an arrest warrant is automatically issued.
Panaou feels that society does not do justice to fathers in these cases.
“A mentality prevails which sees mothers as the capable parent while fathers have to constantly prove their ability to be a parent,” he said. In addition, he said, fathers are considered more likely to exert violence, which is not true in all cases. Yet all men are put under the same umbrella automatically with no scrutiny as to whether the mother is a fit parent at all.
Another problem with the existing family law system, he said, is that fake testimonies are not punished by the court even when they are proven as such.
“All these put a divorced father in a difficult position making him basically subject to his ex-wife’s whims,” Panaou said.
In such cases, he said, fake accusations of violence against fathers are not uncommon nor is the phenomenon of ex-spouses threatening to drag out final custody hearings indefinitely.
Many fathers, he said, are forced to go to court over and over searching for justice. “This continuing unequal treatment further exacerbates the already tense relations between the parents,” he said.
Children are then forced to endure a hostile parental environment. They are basically ‘orphaned’ by one of their parents who has no choice in the matter, despite the fact that this parent is still alive but cannot gain access to them, merely becomes ‘a visitor’, and is prevented from being an essential part of the child’s life.
Panaou said this leads to many children of divorced parents, when they’re older, to ‘rebel’ and often need help.
“So where does this leave us? Children face a bigger possibility of having psychological problems, and a greater tendency for substance abuse, turning to criminality, lower academic performance or leaving school, early pregnancy for girls, or leaving home,” Panaou said.
This also leads, he said, to increased phenomena of child abductions by their parents.
Parents also are left drained economically “from a system that is designed to do just that”. Fathers, he said, end up in prison due to debt or fake court testimonies.
Intense hostility between ex-spouses also leads to parents and or children to commit suicide.
“All these because of a stupid court mentality that sees the child as a ‘trophy’ and parents as ‘adversaries’,” he said.
“What’s tragic is that lawyers often use the term ‘court recourse’. What recourse? It is the very system that forms the biggest part of the problem,” Panaou said.
He says that with the exception of extreme cases of proven violence in the family, while legal proceedings are underway, temporary child custody should be assigned to both parents. “How things would change, if joint custody was the norm?” he said.
