More Support for fathers claims - Abduction of Andrew Thompson

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Written by Barbara Biggs Australia

Imagine, at a dinner table, one guest is introduced as someone accused of seriously abusing a child, another a convicted murderer. Which would inspire the most contempt?

 

Australian father Ken Thompson, does not have to imagine the answer. He lives with the suspicion of doubt behind people’s eyes every day. His in-laws refuse to speak with him. Mother’s group websites slander him.

 

I first met Ken a few months ago at a talk I gave at a forum, “Are Men the Losers in Family Court?” I was the only female among five speakers, addressing a posse of hostile father’s rights members and representatives of other parenting organisations.

 

As I’d been interrupted and endured jeering comments from the floor, I wondered how I ever became involved. I had never been in the Family Court.

 

When Ken précised his story at question time, I knew immediately who he was. His estranged wife, Melinda*, had abducted their then three-year-old son, Andrew, from Australia after a Family Court parenting dispute in 2008.  She did not trust the Family Court to be able to protect her child after she believed he had disclosed serious abuse by Ken.

 

After the talk, Ken approached me and asked to talk privately.

 

From a low couch in the lounge bar of an international hotel nearby, Ken’s powerful shoulders hunched over preying mantis knees.

 

There was a slight pinch around his cheeks, pulsing unease, as he raised his white wine. He had already announced on the way he wanted my help. I sensed, he thought there was every chance I would not give it.

 

For five years I’d tried not to be dragged into the Family Court issue. I had read stories sent to me with horror, but it was too overwhelming. The machine was too big. Injustices too unbelievable. Family Court is an ugly, intense maze of claim and counter claim. Nobody takes it on willingly.

 

The stories began coming after my own autobiography of child sexual abuse was published in 2003. As a journalist and survivor, parents and grandparents thought I could help.

 

I tried, intermittently, but gagging laws prevented identification. No talent, no TV. Print sometimes covered isolated cases, but all took a wide berth with the more serious abuse allegations such as sexual abuse. I’d throw my hands up. “See, nobody wants to know”.

 

Then, a little girl was thrown over Melbourne’s Westgate Bridge in Australia. Her senseless death lit a fire cracker. For me and all of Australia.

 

I began a petition calling for change in the Family Court of Australia and organized a national rally in five states. Speakers included three of the mothers of 22 children killed in murder suicides since the 1995 shared parenting laws were first introduced. I produced a series of YouTube videos, using actors, to tell stories the media couldn’t.

 

It was against the backdrop of this campaign that Ken had seen my name as the last minute change to the speaker list at Parliament House in Sydney. He felt Melinda would know of, and trust me.

 

He was right. A week after the abduction, she phoned a child abuse expert I was visiting and I spoke with her. After chatting with Melinda, there was no doubt in my mind she believed her son had been abused by Ken.

 

Now, he was telling me Melinda was mistaken. That the evidence collected through several investigations did not support her allegations.

 

I knew up to 95 percent of perpetrators of serious child abuse were intra-familial, a hidden social virus. I never forgot a speech by a Melbourne forensic psychiatrist, Bill Glaser.

 

“Imagine a society afflicted by a scourge which struck down a quarter of its daughters and up to one in eighth of its sons,’ he said. ‘Child sexual abuse…has accounted for probably more misery and suffering than any of the great plagues of history.”

 

Chances are, where there is smoke, there is fire, I thought. But what if, just what if, Ken was innocent? I ate some more nuts. He waited, looking off in the distance before consulting the floor about how to pick his way through my doubt. When he looked up, his face was both dignified and pleading. This was not a man who wanted to ask anyone for anything.

 

He said it straight. “I want you to help me find Andrew”

 

There are currently three separate reviews underway into the Howard Government’s 2006 amendments to the Family Law Act, which strengthened the 1995 shared parenting laws. The Chief Justice, Diana Bryant, has written to the Attorney General saying ‘urgent’ changes are required because parents are being discouraged from raising abuse allegations.

 

If they cannot be proven to the satisfaction of the Court, under these laws, the accusing parent risks losing custody to the other parent, and having to pay both legal costs. Sexual abuse is the most difficult to prove.

 

Father’s rights groups say bitter mothers make abuse allegations up to stop children seeing their fathers.  A woman holding a different view, is a ‘father-hating feminazi’. I have been vilified as such, and worse, much worse, on their websites.

 

Although a member of a father’s support group since Andrew’s abduction, Ken is not shrill.

 

‘When I find Andrew, he probably won’t know me . We’d have to take it slowly. I’d support him living with Melinda  if she agreed to some kind of counselling.”

 

One of my six YouTube parent stories involved a father who had lost his two children to his wife, who his two sons disclosed had sexually abused them, however, by far the majority of cases I’d heard were mothers’ stories.

 

Another Queensland mother recently lost custody to a father convicted of child pornography and facing charges of sexually assaulting his under-aged niece.

 

Under the current system, a Family Court Independent Expert Witness (usually a psychiatrist or psychologist) typically interviews the child and each parent only once.

 

Carolyn Cassidy and her two children were interviewed for fifteen minutes each by her Family Court expert after sexual abuse disclosures. He said the father was ‘certainly’ no risk to the children whereas the mother had ‘social dysfunction’. Six months later the father killed his two boys in a murder suicide.

 

These stories do not dispose me to believing Ken. I clasp my hands in my lap, hopeful of gathering authority there I do not feel.

 

“I could only help if you did two things,” I say.

 

“The first is to take a lie detector test”.

 

One Australian father’s rights group, The Richard Hillman Foundation, has been asking for such tests in Family Court custody cases for years. It’s never been taken seriously despite there being a perception in the Court culture, the media and the public, that most custody dispute abuse allegations are false.

 

According to one survey by Victorian Health Promotion, asking 2800 people that question, 74 percent were prepared to believe they are false. Yet global research indicates 90-95 percent of allegations are true, including Prof Thea Brown’s from Monash University, which found “abuse was real, that it was severe and serious”.

 

A few weeks after our first meeting, Ken and I drive together to Sydney airport where Gavin Wilson is catching a plane back to Adelaide in South Australia. Wilson has been trained by an elite United States’ FBI Task Force. While people say paedophiles and sociopaths can cheat these tests, sitting between us in the hired meeting room, Gavin Wilson disagrees.

 

“Even (serial killer) Ted Bundy failed. There’s a lot of mis-information out there.’

 

I ask about people wiggling their toes to cheat. God, what would I know? I heard that on Dr Phil. Ken offers to, and does, remove his shoes.

 

Wilson wires Ken’s fingers and chest, to measure heart rate and sweat. I observe as a series of questions are answered. Ken and I chat. He is relieved it’s over. Wilson evaluates the charts. Anything above three is a pass.

 

When Wilson announces the score, 12, Ken closes his eyes, hangs his head and expels a year-old sigh. When he looks up, he stares at the wall. I imagine he sees his old life there, before suspicion wafted about him like bad breath. This score is the same as a greater than 96% likelihood that he answered all the questions truthfully. 

 

Possibly more common than deliberate false allegations, are cases where people don’t have the information to interpret children’s sexualised behaviour or language and jump to conclusions anyway. Whatever the truth of Ken’s case, it seems clear it was one where this lack, and panic, led to drastic action with heart-breaking consequences for an entire extended family.

 

The second of my conditions, was for Ken to have six sessions with Fremantle (Western Australia) psychologist, Christabel Chamarette. As a naive graduate, she had, for a decade, treated the worst serial child rapists and murderers. For the past dozen years she had been director of the Perth (WA) SafeCare program, which has treated more offenders and their families than any program in the country – over 700.

 

Despite a recidivism rate of 2 percent and a glowing independent evaluation, the program was de-funded by the Western Australia Government this year.

 

I phone Chamarette to explain Ken’s case.  She’s reluctant to give an opinion without access to the mother or child, but does, initially, agree to read documents written by Melinda.

 

She picks up something nobody else has mentioned.

 

Immediately preceding the two ‘disclosures’, Melinda had been away on overseas business trips.

 

‘Mothers typically feel guilty after leaving young children for an extended period. And children typically behave differently when they return. They’re often withdrawn and uncommunicative,’ says Chamarette.

 

The first ‘disclosure’ occurred when Melinda returned after being away for a week and involved the child saying ‘Daddy was unkind to me’. Although disturbed by the statement, she didn’t count it as a disclosure until six months later, after the second incident.

 

Again, she had just returned from overseas. At bed time, Andrew asked for his dad, who was at work later than usual, to lie beside him and tell him a story as had become their evening ritual. In response to Melinda’s question ‘What else does daddy do (at bedtime)?’, Andrew made a circle with the index finger and thumb of one hand and put his index finger of the other hand in and out of the hole. Melinda said in her statement the child was distant.

 

‘Generally, parents find disclosures difficult to believe. In this case, the mother immediately assumed something abnormal had happened. (Ken found her in Andrew’s  bedroom sitting on the end of his bed in the darkness, cradling him and unwilling to communicate). Rather than questioning what the gesture could mean, abuse was the first and only thing that came to her mind,’ Chamarette says.

 

She goes on to say that the gesture could have many different explanations more likely than the interpretation which seemed to have been made by the mother. There was no mention of distress in the child regarding what he was doing or relating it to his own body.

 

‘I’m not prepared to say anything definitively under these circumstances, but my gut feeling about this case, is that the mother’s overreaction is more typical of someone whose own feelings or fears of childhood abuse were triggered. I have no idea of her childhood experiences, but the fact that she reacted so instantly possibly suggests she may have experienced abuse herself. There are alternative explanations of the toddler’s behaviour which have not been explored or addressed. The mother has made an adult interpretation rather than seeing what the child may have been trying to communicate.’

 

The strain of the past 19 months has taken its toll. Ken was recently hospitalised with double pneumonia. When he recovered he underwent his six sessions with Chamarette. After about nine hours of interviews and being compared to the characteristics of child abusers in her database, Chamarette supported the report furnished by the court-appointed psychiatrist a year earlier with the qualification that she had not had an opportunity to speak with Melinda or Andrew. Chamarette also found the documents containing the evidence for child abuse occurring have other explanations which she believes have not been explored by Melinda.

 

Chamarette says young children may take several sessions to build trust to express distressing incidents. This applies to adults as well.

 

The National Council for Children Post-Separation is asking that in any review of the Family Law Act, all parties involved in Family Court custody disputes where serious child abuse is alleged, be required to each attend six sessions with separate counsellors experienced in dealing with offenders and victims.

 

This would give children the best chance of being assessed and parents being given access to vital expertise which could determine what is really happening. Armed with this extensive information, the Family Court is less likely to get it wrong.

 

Had this been ordered in Ken and Melinda’s  case, their marriage may have been saved and the shattering consequences of what may be misguided allegations of abuse avoided.

 

Even had inappropriate behaviour taken place, treatment is possible. But as the closure of SafeCare shows, perhaps as a society, we are still, sadly for the children, a long way from stemming that plague at its source.

 

Andrew remains missing. Ken continues his search - with my support.

 

* The Family Court of Australia has issued a warning that Melinda Margaret Thompson (who could be using the name Melinda Margaret Stratton) is not to be approached. Anyone having any information about her whereabouts &/or the whereabouts of Andrew John Thompson should immediately contact local police or Interpol.

 

Barbara Biggs is an Australian journalist and convenor of Australia’s National Council for Children Post-Separation www.nccps.org.au.

 

 

References

 

 ADDIN EN.REFLIST Glaser, W. (1997). Paedophilia: The public health problem of the decade. Paper presented at the Australian Institute of Criminology from http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/rpp/12/ch1.pdf - 49k - [ pdf ]