As I pounded away on the cross trainer yesterday, watching the television screens in front of me and trying to reduce the Christmas waistline, up came Judge Rinder hearing a case about child contact and arrears of child maintenance.

He was faced with a father who claimed that he was being denied contact with his daughter and a mother who claimed that the father owed nearly £4000 arrears of child maintenance.

There was nothing particularly unusual about this case. The mother had her story and the father had his story which they both clung onto as self-justification for their past actions.

The father described the relationship as having simply fallen apart whereas the mother was clearly still in pain as she recounted and relived her story of betrayal, rejection and abandonment by the father, not just her but also their daughter who was 18 months old at the time. He had ‘abandoned them’. It was clear that her memories of these times were still very real for her as she and the father both acknowledged that they still do not communicate, 12 years after the separation!

As time went on and their daughter grew up her parents continued to fight. The mother’s main assertion was that the father kept letting them down so felt that she had to stop contact in order to protect her daughter.

From the father’s perspective, the mother made contact with his daughter extremely difficult so he felt it necessary to stop child maintenance. He claimed, among other things that she had given him the wrong date for events to attend so that his daughter thought he could not be bothered.

These two parents simply found ways to exert power over each other and punish each other as the conflict continued, with little regard to how their daughter was seeing things and experiencing her relationships with her mother and father.

The mother described her daughter as no longer seeming to care whether she sees her father or not. In answer to this, Judge Rinder quite rightly questioned what the mother had been sharing with her daughter including complaints and judgements about him, as the mother explained that ‘we don’t keep anything from our daughter’.

In effect, the daughter had many years of experiencing the mother’s narrative about the father including the fact that the mother was now in court trying to get some maintenance for the daughter so, to judge Rinder and all the viewers of this program, such as myself, it should come as no surprise that daughter might feel an allegiance towards her mother and an alienation from her father.

This attitude from the daughter would have been further reinforced by the fact that the mother had met another man about eight years ago who had loved and maintained the daughter as his own. From the daughter’s perspective this would have highlighted the apparent inadequacies of her own father and given her an alternative father figure to love and feel loyalty towards.

As I watched this case unfold, I wondered whether these parents had ever had professional support regarding their parenting relationship and specifically whether they had ever been in mediation to resolve the questions of child maintenance and contact. This was not something raised by Judge Rinder. I just wonder how many Judges in our judicial system give lip service to mediation as we have seen the number of self-represented private contact applications increase significantly and the number of MIAMs (mediation information and assessment meetings) sharply decline. What is going on here!

This case I watched unfold simply highlighted again for me how destructive the judicial system can be in circumstances such as these because it focuses quite naturally (because it is a court after all) on judgement rather than resolution, winning and losing, competition not collaboration and encourages lying and manipulation. It polarises differences rather than respecting differences and encourages behaviour driven by fear of exposure, punishment and self-justification.

In my view, had this couple received the right professional support through mediation and therapy, early on in the separation, the likelihood is that the father would have enjoyed a much better relationship with his daughter and lived up to his responsibilities to maintain her properly and the mother’s pain would have eventually subsided leaving her to reflect on her role in a shared responsibility approach.

Instead, the system has left in its place a bitter mother, still describing father as a snake, a daughter who wants nothing to do with her father and a disgruntled, frustrated father still looking for ways to exert his rights and sense of entitlement to see his daughter.