Reade Saunders

There is always a chair left empty in the Family Court. It is never marked. No one gestures toward it. Yet everyone knows who it belongs to. The child is invoked constantly and present never. Their interests are weighed, balanced, assessed, protected, but their voice does not interrupt the room. It is this absence that gives the proceedings their peculiar authority. Nothing contradicts the adults once the witness is gone.

The court claims to centre the child. In practice, it centres language. Not truth, not care, not stability, but vocabulary. The outcome tends to favour those who can speak longest, smoothest, and safest. Those who understand which words carry weight and which trigger alarm. Those who can translate lived experience into approved phrasing. In this system, fluency is mistaken for fitness.

A father comes to court not to win, not to punish, but to secure peace for his children. He wants them to live without constant conflict, without the slow corrosion of adult hostility leaking into every exchange. He brings what he has. Patterns of behaviour. School records. Messages. Observations made over years, not weeks. He speaks plainly because that is how he lives. He assumes that honesty will be enough.

It is not.

Everything he offers is translated. His children’s words are paraphrased into neutral tones. Their fear becomes anxiety. Their resistance becomes influence. Their longing becomes dependency. By the time their experiences reach the judge, they are no longer recognisable to the children who lived them. The system calls this safeguarding. It is also erasure.

This is the violence of representation. Speaking about children replaces listening to them. Once their inner lives are filtered through reports and submissions, they no longer belong to the child. They become assets in an argument. They are rearranged to fit adult narratives that sound responsible, measured, and safe. The child is protected from speaking because speaking is risky. Silence, it turns out, is easier to manage.

The father notices a pattern. The more he insists that his children’s voices matter, the further those voices recede. He is told the children are central, yet they only appear as summaries. He is told their welfare is paramount, yet decisions are made with astonishing confidence based on second-hand interpretations. He is told delay is regrettable, while months and years of childhood are consumed by process.

Time behaves strangely here. Hearings are short. Childhood is not. What feels administratively reasonable becomes developmentally catastrophic. Each adjournment is framed as caution. Each delay is neutral on paper. None of it is neutral to a child who is growing, adapting, and learning what conflict looks like when adults institutionalise it.

The cost is not only financial, though that cost is relentless. Savings vanish. Work suffers. Energy drains away. Parents who entered the system trying to be reasonable are taught endurance instead. Bitterness does not arrive as a personality flaw. It is manufactured slowly, predictably, by a process that rewards persistence over resolution and compliance over clarity.

This is the system’s central paradox. It is designed to prevent harm, yet it produces conditions that make harm inevitable. It is designed to protect children from conflict, yet it forces adults to fight in bureaucratic forms for years. It insists on balance even when reality is asymmetrical, and calls this fairness. It avoids judgment while issuing life-altering orders.

The chair remains empty. The child grows older while adults argue about their best interests in increasingly refined language. The father continues to try to get their voice into the room, not as a weapon, not as leverage, but as testimony. He discovers that the system prefers interpretation to interruption.

The tragedy is not that the child is unheard. It is that everyone insists they are listening.