\n<\/p>\n
W<\/span>hen Claire Throssell held her dying son Jack in her arms, she made him a promise: that no more children would die in the circumstances he had \u2013 at the hands of a violent parent, on a court-ordered unsupervised visit.<\/p>\n Jack and Paul, then aged 12 and nine, were killed by their father 11 years ago, when he lured them into the attic with a new train set, barricaded the house shut and used Throssell\u2019s possessions to set 14 separate fires.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I held him in my arms, just like I did Paul,\u201d she said, \u201cI made him one last promise. I said to him: \u2018No more children are going to die like you.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Last week, on the anniversary of the fire, she was invited to meet the prime minister in Downing Street, as the government announced that it planned to repeal the presumption that children should have contact with both parents, under which decisions are made in the family court.<\/p>\n It was guided by this presumption that a family court judge had made the decision to allow Throssell\u2019s ex-husband unsupervised access to their children, despite her warnings that he had threatened to harm both her and them.<\/p>\n That evening, Throssell had returned home from work just after her sons\u2019 father, Darren Sykes, had picked them up. \u201cI missed them by five minutes,\u201d she said. \u201cI was late home, and I missed them for that last hug.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLiterally, 15 minutes later, there was a knock on the door,\u201d she said, \u201cand, you know, I just knew. I opened the door, and there was a police officer stood outside the door, and the car was flashing in the middle of the road. And I said, \u2018What has he done?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n She was rushed to Sheffield children\u2019s hospital and ran through the doors. \u201cI could see them working on Paul,\u201d she said. \u201cHis little body was bouncing off the bed.\u201d<\/p>\n Once she arrived, doctors told her that they were going to let him go. As she held her son, she said police \u201ccame in and said, \u2018You can\u2019t touch him any more, he\u2019s a crime scene.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Claire Throssell at home with a photo of her sons before travelling to London to meet Keir Starmer. <\/span> Photograph: Christopher Thomond\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Paul had been overcome by the smoke and fumes from the fire deliberately started by their father, who also took his own life. She later found out that Jack had died trying to save his brother.<\/p>\n \u201cHe went back for his brother, and he didn\u2019t leave him,\u201d she said. \u201cPulled him, and because he was going backwards, he fell through the hatchway into the fires below.\u201d<\/p>\n And after emergency services arrived on the scene, she said, Jack told \u201cas many people as he could\u201d what had happened, before he was sedated: \u201cMy dad did this, and he did it on purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEven at that point, he wasn\u2019t thinking of himself, he was thinking of me,\u201d she said. \u201cHe was thinking of Paul, and five days later, he died believing that he\u2019d saved Paul\u2019s life, because I never told him different.\u201d<\/p>\n A serious case review following her sons\u2019 death said that Sykes\u2019s actions could not have been predicted \u2013 a finding that Throssell disputes.<\/p>\n \u201cI told the courts that he\u2019d kill them,\u201d she said. \u201cI told them what would happen. I couldn\u2019t predict how, but I knew he would do it, and I was just minimised, ignored and invisible.\u201d<\/p>\n A Cafcass (children and family court advisory and support service) officer had met with Paul at school, and he had told her his father would make him sit at the table and eat peas until he was sick.<\/p>\n Sykes was granted five hours of unsupervised contact, against the boys\u2019 wishes. They did not feel safe with him, and would spray themselves with her perfume before they left, Throssell said.<\/p>\n \u201cI defy any judge to see children crying and physically holding onto you, physically shaking, and saying they don\u2019t want to see their dad,\u201d she said, \u201cand see how they felt as a parent, having to say to them, \u2018You\u2019ve got to go.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAs parents, we\u2019re supposed to protect our children, not send them into danger,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n After returning from visits, she said \u201cit\u2019d take at least a day to regulate them again and make them feel safe, get them to smile again, because there were lots of tears.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes, they weren\u2019t staying overnight, yes, they weren\u2019t there at meal times, but they were still being abused, still being hurt, and he was taking away their childhood piece by piece by piece, and I couldn\u2019t do anything about it.\u201d<\/p>\n After her sons\u2019 death, Throssell was left with nothing; she had spent all of her savings on legal fees fighting to try to keep her children safe. At their funeral, she wore her sister\u2019s shoes, stuffed with newspaper, because they were two sizes too big; she couldn\u2019t afford to buy a pair of her own.<\/p>\n Sykes had cancelled their home insurance before setting the fires, and had written to the bank saying she was responsible for the \u00a350,000 mortgage; the house was eventually rebuilt by community volunteers.<\/p>\n At that point, she said, \u201cI could have given up, hated the world, hated everybody in it, become bitter, give up, die.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut then, what about these two?\u201d she asked, pointing to framed photographs of her boys behind her, on the wall of her living room in Penistone, South Yorkshire. \u201cThey didn\u2019t deserve that. They deserve a legacy. They deserve to be known.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Paul (left) and Jack. Their mother has campaigned since their death for a change in the law. <\/span> Photograph: Christopher Thomond\/The Guardian<\/p>\n It was when she was at her lowest that the charity Women\u2019s Aid got in touch, she said, and she was \u201cshocked\u201d to discover that her sons were the 18th and 19th children to be killed after a court had awarded contact with a parent.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter what I experienced in the family courts, I teamed up with Women\u2019s Aid and we started the Child First campaign to repeal presumption of contact,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe system is so flawed, it protects bad practice. It protects misogyny, it protects oppression and it protects fear,\u201d she added. \u201cYou run away from the fear, you walk into a family court and it\u2019s there again.\u201d<\/p>\n Earlier this year, she asked the charity to produce another report, to find out how many more children had died since Jack and Paul.<\/p>\n \u201cThe report said exactly 19 more children, and I sat on the floor there and cried,\u201d Throssell said, pointing to a spot on the floor of her living room in front of an armchair, \u201ccurled up and cried, because I\u2019ve still not kept that promise, not just to Jack and Paul, but to every child that\u2019s at risk.\u201d<\/p>\n In the last 30 years, the charity found, 67 children have been killed by a parent who was also a perpetrator of domestic abuse, in circumstances relating to unsafe child contact.<\/p>\n The figures do not include Sara Sharif, who was killed last year by her father and stepmother. The family court had been involved with the family since before she was born.<\/p>\n \u201cWe couldn\u2019t have achieved such seismic change without Claire \u2013 her dedication, her drive and her courage,\u201dsaid Farah Nazeer, the chief executive of Women\u2019s Aid.<\/p>\n \u201cClaire has been the central pillar in our campaign work around this,\u201d she added, \u201cand we will continue campaigning and working together until the wellbeing and safety of children becomes ingrained in family courts.\u201d<\/p>\n Cafcass said last week that it welcomed the government\u2019s decision to repeal the presumption of parental involvement.<\/p>\n \u201cChildren\u2019s experiences of parental separation, conflict and, in the worst cases, further abuse and harm can be obscured by a legal presumption of contact,\u201d a spokesperson said.<\/p>\n \u201cPutting children\u2019s safety at the heart of family court proceedings that are about them is what we must and will continue to prioritise at Cafcass.\u201d<\/p>\n The news of the government\u2019s decision came out of the blue, Throssell said; she received a call from Women\u2019s Aid asking if she could come down to London because the government was planning to make an important announcement.<\/p>\n Her MP, Marie Tidball, then the Labour candidate, had come up to her at an event at her son\u2019s school, and made her a promise that if she was elected she would fight to repeal presumption of contact. But Throssell didn\u2019t know that it would definitely happen, and she didn\u2019t expect that it would happen so soon.<\/p>\n While repealing the legislation \u201cdoesn\u2019t take away the sting of walking into an empty room\u201d \u2013 \u201cI have to live with that silence every day,\u201d she said \u2013 it has allowed her to keep her promise to her boys. She hopes the new law might even be named after them.<\/p>\n \u201cI came out of Downing Street, and it felt so different knowing that a promise is going to be kept, the last promise that I made to Jack and Paul,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I first walked up that staircase, it was a real mountain to climb, I was still looking at the floor,\u201d she added. \u201cWalking down that staircase, I could finally hold my head up and feel that I\u2019d done something.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Claire Throssell held her dying son Jack in her arms, she made him a promise: that no more children would die in the circumstances he had \u2013 at the hands of a violent parent, on a court-ordered unsupervised visit. Jack and Paul, then aged 12 and nine, were killed by their father 11 years<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31331,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[9999,681,166,7142,2217,632,4611,8847,3033,12831,637],"class_list":{"0":"post-31330","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-boys","9":"tag-child","10":"tag-children","11":"tag-die","12":"tag-father","13":"tag-killed","14":"tag-mother","15":"tag-promise","16":"tag-protection","17":"tag-sheffield","18":"tag-years"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31330\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/31331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}