DOMESTIC violence and coercive control were issues considered by the Consistory Court of the diocese of Exeter when a mother was granted her petition for a college to exhume and rebury in a unique location the stays of her baby, since she was unable to go to the grave because she was afraid of the newborn’s father and his family.
Owing to the underlying circumstances of the case and the necessity to protect the privacy of the parties, particularly the mother and her dead baby, the court didn’t provide any details which may discover them or the locations involved.
The baby, a woman, died shortly after birth in 2022, and is survived by a twin sister. The mother’s account was that the kids were conceived inside a highly abusive relationship and that she was assaulted by the daddy on several occasions during her pregnancy, with the result that her children were born prematurely at 23 weeks.
The baby was buried within the churchyard of the village where the couple were then living, and which was the house base of the daddy, his parents, and other members of his family.
Six months after the burial, the mother managed to free herself from the connection and sought help from local domestic-abuse professionals and the police. She subsequently returned to live near to her own parents, in a village a substantial distance from the one where her baby is buried.
The father was prosecuted for offences arising from his abuse of the mother. He pleaded guilty on the Crown Court to intentional suffocation and coercive behaviour inside an intimate relationship, and was sentenced to a complete of two-and-a-half years’ imprisonment.
The mother suffers from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and may be very scared of the daddy and his family. She doesn’t wish to revisit the scene of her abuse, and can’t contemplate going to the village where her baby is buried. She was, subsequently, unable to go to the grave; she said that her “heart aches daily” because she was not near to the newborn and will not visit the grave.
Her petition was for the newborn’s stays to be exhumed from the churchyard where they’re interred, and for them to be reinterred within the churchyard of the village where she now lives. The priests-in-charge of every of the 2 parishes gave consent for the move to happen.
The father is known as on the newborn’s birth certificate, and subsequently had parental responsibility for her during her very short life. Although the mother didn’t wish the daddy to be given notice of her application, the diocesan Chancellor, the Rt Hon. Sir Andrew McFarlane, who can also be the President of the Family Division of the High Court, said: “The petition couldn’t proceed all at once being given to [the father] and . . . not to present notice would, along with denying him justice and fair process, simply store up difficulties if an exhumation were to happen.” In a letter from prison, the daddy refused to consent to the exhumation.
Ecclesiastical law proceeded on the idea of the overall presumption of permanence which arises from the initial act of Christian burial, and disturbance of stays which have been buried in consecrated ground might be permitted only as an exception to that principle. The Court of Arches had contemplated that where there had been a real mistake made on the time of burial, that could be a sufficient exception to permitting exhumation.
The Chancellor said that, while there had been no “mistake” made within the selection of the newborn’s burial site, the fabric before the court demonstrated that it was probable that the mother’s “ability to recommend a contrary proposal had been wholly suborned by [the father’s] coercive and controlling influence on her at the moment to the extent that she’s going to have lacked sufficient freedom or autonomy to do aside from accept his selection”.
There was also “a pressing pastoral need”, the Chancellor said, for the mother and her surviving daughter to have the ability to go to the newborn’s grave “frequently, in circumstances where they could feel at peace and never in fear”, and it might “simply not be possible” for them to go to the village where the grave was situated. That was so even through the current period of the daddy’s imprisonment due to his family’s presence there, and more generally due to the “highly negative feelings that returning to the village would generate” for the mother.
The Chancellor took account of the daddy’s views that the newborn’s stays shouldn’t be disturbed. But those views could “only be afforded limited weight within the circumstances of this case”, the Chancellor said. The undeniable fact that the daddy’s relationship with the mother was highly abusive had been established beyond doubt by his guilty pleas, and by the substantial prison sentence that had been imposed even after awarding him a reduction in length to reflect his guilty pleas.
The need for the mother to have continued protection from him was also established by the undeniable fact that he was subject to a restraining order stopping his visiting the mother’s home area, and that the Family Court had ordered that he should have no contact together with his other daughter, the surviving twin.
Taking all those matters into consideration, the Chancellor said that the circumstances were sufficient to ascertain an exception to the overall principle against exhumation. If a real mistake could be considered exceptional, “it must surely be the case that a ‘selection’ of burial site made by a mother, whose ability to decide on any site aside from that dictated by her abuser in a long-term, violent, coercive, and controlling relationship must even be able to being considered exceptional,” the Chancellor ruled.
The Chancellor also accepted the Archdeacon’s opinion that there have been strong pastoral grounds for granting the applying. That opinion was one other way of acknowledging the exceptional nature of the case as providing justification for removing the newborn’s stays from the village where they were interred, and allowing them to be reinterred within the churchyard of the village where the mother now lived.
