“I don’t know. … I just want everybody to be happy!”

Donna Ockenden was on the front pages again last month with the publication of her final report into maternity services at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust.

Every time I hear her name I’m taken back to her appearance on BBC Radio 4  Desert Island Discs last year Desert Island Discs – Donna Ockenden, midwife – BBC Sounds. Her step by step story of the break-up of her parents’ marriage and the horror of her encounter with her local family court is seared in my memory.

A new apparatus is being set up in Scotland to overhaul the system of Child Welfare Reporters. Child Welfare Reporters are independent professionals who are instructed by a court to gather the views of children whose parents are separating and who have not been able to agree arrangements for their future care. The views of children are expected to carry weight in a sheriff or judge’s decisions. The reform was ordered in the Children (Scotland) Act 2020 but has not yet been implemented.

My earnest wish is that those currently charged with creating the new organisation will be required to listen to Donna’s story before they go any further, so that her insight becomes baked into its DNA.

Donna and her siblings loved both their parents. Donna acknowledged that her mother was “troubled”. An explanation of how she came to be so damaged emerged later in the story.

Donna’s father worked abroad on construction projects in the Persian Gulf and Africa, gradually earning his family’s way out of extreme South Wales poverty.  Despite the distance the relationship was close – writing every day; a phone call once a month (to a neighbour’s house. They didn’t have a phone themselves); regular requests on BBC Radio ‘Family Favourites’. Until one day Donna’s mother wrote to her husband that she had found someone else and he was not to come home, and if he did he must stay with his mother.

Donna says, “he’d lost his home, lost his wife, and lost his children.”

One day her mother collected her early from school. She was 14 years old and had expressed some interest in maybe studying law. Her mother said they could go and have a look round a courtroom. That sounded fine but when she got there she discovered she was in the witness box in the middle of a custody hearing with a judge saying, “Your mother wants to take you to Ireland. Your father wants you to stay here. What do you want to do?”

Donna’s answer: “I don’t know. … I just want everybody to be happy!” Pressed for an answer, she said, “I suppose I do, then.”

Her father wept and shouted at the judge, “Don’t take my children away.”

That was in 1970. A whole scaffolding of procedures has been built around family court proceedings in England and Wales as well as in Scotland in the decades since, including the creation here of Child Welfare Reporters.

A Child Welfare Reporter is only brought in where there are proceedings under way in court. Except in the rarest of instances children will have had no role in the design of the options being proposed in court by their parents. It is a limited form of agency when the voice of the child is requested only in terms of options drafted to fit within an adversarial, oppositional framework.

As a small diversion, I recall a video shown at a child bereavement conference last year on the work of a project in Dundee. Children on screen reflected on the relief they felt the project offered after the death of a parent or close family member. One said, “I can talk freely here without having to watch my words that might upset others.”

Children in family court proceedings also need to be able to talk freely. Separation is also a bereavement for most children – losing someone significant from the centre of their life or even from the periphery.  No matter what an outsider may observe about the contribution of one or sometimes both of their parents to the child’s best interests, a bereavement is a bereavement.

Some years ago, Shared Parenting Scotland published Sharing My Parents, a report by intern, Jamie Wark, on the reflections of students at Glasgow University who had experienced family separation as children.

The comments of some participants reflected the mix of self-preservation and selflessness that inhibited them from talking freely at the time.

“I would have liked to have visited my dad more, but I was often a bit worried that it would upset my mum as my dad left my mum for someone else”.

“I’d be being a bad daughter if I said that I wanted to spend Christmas with my dad”.

“My mum is the priority and my dad is the secondary one, and I think that it is always centred around my mum and what is best for her and not for me which I have just accepted now.”

Ahead of the Scottish Parliament elections last May, Shared Parenting Scotland issued “5 Election Calls” to MSPs for the coming session. One was to appoint an independent commission on The Voice of the Child and The Best Interests of the Child. These are phrases which professionals, politicians, judges in family courts use daily. They are important, but in many situations have been hollowed of meaning – discussion stoppers. Noone could be against including the voice of the child in decisions about his or her life. There’s a vast amount of work being done in other countries on how best to hear the voice of children without damaging them. An independent commission would gather best evidence and restore meaning to these concepts that are vital to our children and would assist the architects of the new structure of Child Welfare Reporters in their work.

In young Donna Ockenden’s case, it all went quiet for a couple of months until her mother said they were all going to Ireland for the weekend. They packed the car but Donna saw her mother tip the goldfish down the drain. When the got there she discovered she had been enrolled in a new school and given a new name.

Her mother’s new marriage was poisonous so Donna decided to go back to Wales. Her mother insisted that she stay with her parents and not her paternal grandparents despite revealing the “depravity” of her own childhood experience at the hands of her own father and mother.

Donna Ockenden survived. Her resilience is miraculous. Her empathy for others, and the closeness of her relationship with her siblings, must somehow be rooted in those early experiences. She teaches us as individuals and institutions that if you ask children for their view you have to know when they are talking freely and when they are only making the best of what you are offering. Different things.