Parents who hid tracking devices in children’s gifts advised to ‘take stock’ after judge rejects their evidence

A judge has criticised parents involved in family court proceedings after dismissing their evidence relating to trackers found sewn into gifts for their children.

His Honour Judge Sharpe, sitting at Liverpool, advised the mother and father to ‘take stock, reflect upon my findings and start to work out how they can address the damage they have caused to their own case’.

The fact-finding judgment in BM, Re (Children: Tracking Devices) focuses on trackers which were found sewn into a bag and two toys given to the children, who are currently in foster care, by their parents. The father denied any knowledge of the trackers, while the mother accepted sole responsibility for buying and hiding the devices.

The judge said: ‘I do not believe what the parents tell me and I reject their evidence, not just when it conflicts with other evidence before me but when it does not too. In my judgement the decision to use tracking devices was a parental decision and one in which F [the father] was a full participant. In fact I am inclined to the view that F was probably the driver behind what has turned out to be a disastrous diversion from the progress the case had been making.’

The mother’s oral evidence ‘served only to further undermine what she had previously written’ and ‘layered over all of this is the parents’ failure to hand over phones promptly or at all, their effective fleeing from a court hearing when being informed that phones would be required to be handed over and their failure to allow this part of the litigation process to progress without significant delay.

‘It all adds up to a concerted effort to conceal the truth,’ the judge added.

The devices were ‘part of a wider plan to know where the children were either in terms of where they were living or from where they could be snatched. And probably both’.

The judge described the devices as a ‘serious effort to remove the children from foster care or the purpose of removing them from the protective care of the local authority and back into parental care which has, on an interim basis only, been found to be wanting and which poses a risk of significant harm for these children, if not actual harm’.

Concluding his judgment, he said: ‘The tragedy in this case is that the parents’ assessment was reasonably positive and offered prospects for family reunification which is always the starting point of family court proceedings. In this case as in every other the default position is “why shouldn’t the children be looked after by their parents?”. In creating the circumstances for covertly tracking the children the parents are only providing answers to that question.’