KOCHI: A nine-year-old child, caught in the middle of a divorce and custody battle between his parents, has submitted before the Kerala High Court that he abhors going to court and even hates the judges for having summoned him. The child added that he feels dehumanised and stigmatised, being paraded in front of people as a virtual chattel in the dispute between his parents.
And on cue, considering the trauma experienced by the child, the HC has held that, except in unavoidable circumstances, the presence of children in court halls or premises, for counselling or other statutory proceedings, should be ordered sparingly and with great caution.
A Division Bench comprising Justice Devan Ramachandran and Justice M B Snehalatha issued the directives on an appeal filed by a 30-year-old woman from Kannur, challenging the order of the Family Court, Thalassery, that granted custody of the child to the father and interim custody to the mother. The woman argued that the Family Court order is untenable and contrary to the child’s wishes.
The Bench said that children who see hostility between parents tend to have lower satisfaction levels in their relationships in the future. “The children have gone through high conflict because their parents are unable to solve problems, negotiate interpersonal relationships, and have higher levels of social anxiety. They are also known to experience higher fear of abandonment and rejection, which may lead to traits of Complex Trauma and Personality Disorder,” the court said.
The Division Bench said that when dealing with the increasing number of matrimonial issues, courts often tend not to look at the plight of children with the requisite empathy, not deliberately but in the quest to maintain expediency.
“The parents – consumed by their personal emotions – invariably overlook the trauma of the children,” the HC said.
The court said the child who was present in the court refused to even leave his mother’s hands or to remove himself from her lap, and did not agree to the its repeated suggestions and persuasion to even shake hands with his father, much less talk to him. “When we insisted further, he started crying inconsolably, telling us that he does not trust us, for pushing him to such an excruciating situation,” the Bench said.
The court termed it a classic example of the harrowing and torturous trauma a child suffers when parents are litigating over custody. The court set aside the order of the Family Court. It also set aside the modification made earlier by the Family Court which had decided the Munsiff Court in Kannur as the place of exchange of the child. The HC has restored a previous order that said the exchange could happen in front of the Mahatma Mandiram in Kannur.