We have another friend who is going through a divorce.
He too is anglo, and his wife is Chinese.
What makes their circumstances so exceptional to me is that having known them for about 7 years, I have always considered them to both be responsible, decent and level headed.
They have a 6 year old son, which they seem to dote over, and they were both clearly very good parents.
Now in the past Ms B made some incidental but ominous comments about the wife, which I disregarded at the time. Ms B told me that the wife would bitterly complain in private about her husband, but there was no substance to the complaints. Ms B described the complaints as being "child-like" and repetitious in nature.
Had my wife not told me this, I would never have thought this woman was child-like, nor someone who complained about her husband behind his back. She just seemed too nice and empathetic in public. In fact, she really won me over as a great mother and a great wife.
But clearly I was wrong!
Well, this couple separated about a year ago. Since then the husband has wanted to see the child 3 days per fortnight, but the wife refused. She would only agree to 8 hours per fortnight.
So after failing to get anywhere in mediation, the husband filed for greater access to his son via the Family Court.
In response his wife filed allegations of child sexual abuse.
Now I won't go into detail about these allegations, but to say that they are completely preposterous and bizarre.
I read the wife's statement and the allegations in full, as did Ms B. We both agreed that the wife was either lying or she is so disturbed by the divorce that she is deluding herself. In fact I had to pinch myself a number of times as there was no logic in the ramblings, apart from references to women's intuitition and references from the internet about bed wetting being linked to child abuse. She also supplied some selective snippets from the internet suggesting that any form of shared care was disruptive to children.
My final take was that this was all about child support, given that in Australia child support reduces if the child sees the other parent on overnight stays. Its the only way I can understand what has happened.
But now to my point, and this is eerily similar to one of the comments by a poster to a previous post.
The husband has hired a solicitor and barrister to represent him in Court.
He told me recently that while in a briefing with his barrister, the barrister said that in his experience, Chinese born wives are particularly malicious during divorce. In fact he mentioned that of the 5 most spiteful wives that he comes across per year in his work as a barrister, about 3 tend to be Chinese born.
Now make of this what you will, but if true, it is a worrying statistic for many fathers out there.
