Judgement to send boy to live with aunt is driven only by the interests of the child
It's important to consider the boy's complex emotional needs
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Your support makes all the difference.This is a highly unusual set of circumstances. From the very start the judge was focused on the best interests of the child. Following that path, although it’s not easy, is what enables a judge to make the right decision, by keeping the focus on the child.
What the grandparents have experienced is awful but the child is not a chattel. It’s about what’s best for this child in these circumstances.
It is very important to consider the fact that this little boy was described as having very complex emotional needs because he’d been through intense psychological trauma.
The expert psychiatric opinion was that he was going to go through a whole range of emotions in the coming months and years, including guilt and a sense of responsibility.
He will need an enormous amount of emotional support to deal with that and if he went to live with his grandparents, with whom he has no bond at the moment, with the language difficulty as well, it would have been incredibly difficult to deal with that range of emotions.
He would have had to adjust to developing a relationship and a bond of trust with them and learning a language alongside his own emotional turmoil. When you look at it that way and from his point of view, the decision was clear really.
What is crucial in these cases is that the family of the parent who committed the murder acknowledge that what the father did was wholly wrong.
Not only had the aunt and her husband done that but they had also pledged to assist in the developing relationship between the boy and his maternal grandparents in the future.
The writer is chair of the Family Law Bar Association
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