The book really consists of two intertwined stories: how Tansley’s own family was targeted for destruction by a raging spouse intent on revenge for imagined acts of betrayal, and how she succeeded completely with the sanction and assistance of the state.

Tansley describes how he arrived home from a business trip to find his wife and children gone. There was a message from his wife on his answering machine: ”We are in a safe place.” He couldn’t find out where they were for almost three weeks until one day he received a letter from her lawyer informing him that his wife and children were in a shelter for abused women. Tansley first observes the double standard that will define this process: “What if I had packed up the four children and taken them from their mother’s care for three weeks without word of where they were?”

At the time, Tansley was the Executive Director of a Family Service Agency. In that role he had often worked cooperatively with women’s shelters, sharing funding from the same source. He knew right away what the implication of his wife taking the children to a shelter was: he was now guilty until proven innocent. His wife was not at risk of assault and he had not thrown her out. She didn’t need a shelter, in fact she had a perfectly safe and well-provided home. But he realized what her actions would mean for him: “There was minimally an implied allegation here; after all, how could you get in a women’s shelter if you were not abused? I worked for the government. I ran programs for the government.”

Tansley had now been sucked into the Kafkaesque world of the Canadian family law industry. Fathers in this world have to answer to the invisible grand inquisitor: “Why did you abuse your wife and children? Why did you abandon them? Why are you an incompetent, useless father?” The long, grueling path of kangaroo courts and Stalinist show trials now began. Any attempt to defend himself was considered vexatious lying, proof that he was a malevolent threat to his family. Although the details of each horrific story are different, the end result is always the same. The children will be taken from you and given to the mother. Since the mother will then have the children most, if not all, of the time, you will have the financial responsibility of paying for all of them. In essence, they will strip your babies from you and then make you pay for the privilege.

The book proceeds to detail each step on this tortuous road. Like most Canadians, Tansley had believed he lived in a just, fair society. Now he finds any justice is denied him. “I was shocked that in Ontario, Canada, I could so easily be eliminated from the lives of my children . . . I had been a committed, involved, caring father and now it seemed I had no definable rights, no ability to see or speak to my children, no legislation to protect my role, nothing.”

Meanwhile, his wife stalks him, continually confronting him with the children in public. She assaults him verbally and physically in front of witnesses. “If the roles were reversed, if I had stalked Sally, raced to block her vehicle so she could not leave, created a disturbance in a public place, assaulted her friend in front of the children . . . I would have immediately been in jail, lost custody of the children and been reduced to supervised access.” But no one is willing to support him. The authorities dismiss his complaints in the usual manner, how can a big, strong man be afraid of a woman?

As he continues the long, drawn-out process of motions, hearings, case conferences and filing affidavits, Tansley identifies three issues that constantly recur in the thousands of stories similar to his:”There was an ongoing demand that I must pay for everything. There was this feeling of entitlement related to money or support. Secondly, despite everything that we both would understand from working in the field of social work, Sally repeatedly put the children in the middle of the conflict…Finally, there were the emotional threats and using the children’s activities that they loved to bully me.”

Again and again, Tansley is denied his basic rights as a father:” And so it happened, again I was reduced to a visitor in lives of my children. To say that I was dumbfounded would be a gross understatement. I was past puzzled to bewildered, shocked, in disarray.”

While the media is rife with stories about “Deadbeat Dads”, nowhere is it ever mentioned, let alone quantified, how many children are systematically removed from their father. Statistics of domestic violence by men are easily available, while the fact that about 2,000 middle-aged Canadian men a year commit suicide while their families are being destroyed with the assistance the state is ignored.

“I know we have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I have read these rights. They have yet to apply to me when it comes to my role with the children. Even as I explain that Sally packed up our four children and left me with only a voicemail, I fell compelled to justify myself, my role. This is the essence of bias.”

Robert Tansley has experienced this invisible, uncivil war first-hand and his book bears witness to this outrageous tragedy.

Next Review . . . . .