15-Year-Old’s Heartbreaking Letters Complicate Custody Battle
Nicole De-an, displaying a photo of herself with her teen daughter, claims her ex-husband is abusing her daughter and that the Department of Children and Families is ignoring those claims. (Photo: Sentinel & Enterprise News)
A 15-year-old Massachusetts girl who is living with her father under court orders has been leveraging abuse allegations against her dad and pleading with the Department of Children and Families (DCF) to be able to live with her mother — but her charges have fallen of deaf ears, claims mom Nicole De-an.
“If DCF is not the voice for the child,” she told the Sentinel & Enterprise News. “Who do you go to?“
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This is just the latest battle in a longtime and complex custody war over the teen, but one that raises a significant question in general: Who determines living arrangements for a teenager in the midst of a custody fight? And why wouldn’t it be the teen herself?
“If a 15-year-old really wants to live with her mother and the court isn’t allowing it, you have to wonder why,” Kenneth Neumann, a New York City-based family mediator and psychologist who has no involvement with the case, tells Yahoo Parenting. He adds that there’s no way to tell exactly what’s happening based solely on this week’s newspaper story.
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“This is a pull-at-your-heartstrings kind of case. Your knee-jerk reaction is, ‘Oh, this is terrible — the dad is abusing the kid, and no one is doing anything.’ But the question is, did the legal system do this right, or have they really botched it up? There is no way to tell from simply reading this,” he says. “There are a lot of holes in this story.”
In letters reportedly written to the court and to the DCF, the teen has said, “I would like to live with my mother, please,” and, “My social worker is telling me that I should go home with my father, after I already told her that I do not feel comfortable going back to my father’s house.”
The father in the case is Nathan Gary. (Photo: Facebook)
De-an, of Fitchburg, Mass., told the Sentinel this week, “Every time my child cries out, they bypass it and say it’s nothing. She’s old enough to know what abuse is. She told DCF he was abusing her, and DCF is ignoring what she’s saying and put her back in that situation.” According to the story, De-an (it’s not clear whether this is her last name or not) works at a local community center; she did not return a message left for her there by Yahoo Parenting.
The father, Nathan Gary, also did not respond to a request for comment from Yahoo Parenting. On his Facebook page, a photo of him posing with his daughter in June notes, “Why can’t kids stay little forever? My baby’s getting old.” Other photos depict the teen playing in high school basketball games, carving Halloween pumpkins, and posing before heading to her homecoming dance. One, of her sipping a glass of soda, says, “She’s a pain in my ass, but I love this friggin’ kid.” Two videos show the girl giggling and driving, with her dad gently teasing as he films her from the passenger seat.
Massachusetts DCF spokeswoman Andrea Grossman tells Yahoo Parenting, “While we cannot disclose details on cases due to privacy reasons, a letter to DCF from a child alleging they had been abused would spark immediate action, including a safety check on the child and a review of the case. Ultimately, custody decisions are made by the court system.”
The custody case has been ongoing for almost a decade, according to the Sentinel story, with Gary being approved by a judge for custody in 2007 based on “better resources for the child’s future.” De-an then lived with her mom. Gary made a request for “full or split custody” that was dismissed, and things proceeded nicely for a while, according to DCF caseworker reports — until 2012, when a new caseworker informed De-an she did not have custody and removed the daughter from her home. She was placed in DCF custody and lived with Gary under a temporary order, now “temporary legal and physical custody.” His daughter reportedly began alleging abuse in 2014.
“I am here to talk about my abuse by my father, like when one time, he was mad and he pushed and shoved me into the bathroom and he shoved me into the towel rack, and another time when we were in the car and he grabbed my arm and twisted it back,” she wrote in a letter in May, according to the Sentinel, also alleging slaps to the face, pushes, shoves, and squeezes. “I told the social worker and the counselors, since the beginning of counseling in February, what was going on, but they keep listening to my father only.”
Said De-an, “My daughter is calling out to me because she wants to see her mother, and he’s not letting her. I’m really worried about her mental state.”
Neumann says there are a couple of main possibilities regarding what’s happening here. “It’s possible he is abusing her and they’re not doing anything. It’s also possible that this kid has been coerced by the mother to say these things and that they are in fact not true,” he says, adding that allegations of abuse are taken seriously by the system at any age and that an outside investigation of the DCF’s actions might be warranted at this point.
“But by 13, 14, 15, if a kid really wants to live with the other parent, you really go along with it,” Neumann notes. “Let’s assume there was no abuse allegation but she still wants to live with the mother. Why wouldn’t you let her live with the mother? The only reason is that someone concluded, at some point, that the mother is not competent. So what we’re really debating here is the caseworker’s conclusion. Either she’s right or she’s wrong.”
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