I am a father trying to get fair custody of my youngest son Alexander. I moved to Portugal before Brexit to protect my children's rights to freedom of movement and tried to take care of my son. After 3 years of unfair legal decisions, last year I won an important appeal which guaranteed my son's right to parental equality and parenting. But justice was so delayed that it was denjed--I did not have the resources to build on that win.

Over the past years, I have come to understand that what I have been living through is not a single conflict or misfortune, but a convergence of personal, legal, familial, and human-rights struggles that have unfolded over a long period of time and at great emotional cost.

At the centre of all this is my son, Alexander, and his fundamental right to have a caring, loving, and present father in his life. That right was denied for years, not because I posed any danger to him, but because of narratives, power imbalances, and institutional failures that were eventually exposed as unjustified.

For three years, I was subjected to what felt like emotional torture. I was barely allowed to see Alexander at all, and when I was, it was under strict supervision at CAFAP, in a small room with a large observation window, where every interaction was monitored and reported on. The experience was deeply dehumanising and resembled interrogation more than parenting. During that time, I was required to regulate myself perfectly under constant surveillance, knowing that any misstep could be used to justify further restriction.

Eventually, the Supreme Tribunal of Justice ruled clearly and unequivocally that there was nothing which could reasonably justify limiting such an important right as Alexander’s right to equal contact with his father. The Court described the lower court’s approach as disproportionate and unreasonable. It rejected the argument that I was “dangerously obsessed” with Alexander’s development simply because I had insisted he receive speech therapy. The Court recognised that my concerns were grounded in professional evidence, including reports from his school and letters from his paediatrician, as well as evaluations carried out in more than one country.

That decision brought legal vindication, but it could not restore the years that had been lost. Justice delayed had already become justice denied.

Alongside the legal struggle, there was a parallel collapse of family support which has been one of the hardest things for me to comprehend and accept.

My mother initially encouraged me to fight for Alexander, expressing concerns of her own about his care. Yet when I acted on that encouragement and went to court, she wrote a letter supporting a reduction of my contact and failed to disclose the very concerns she had raised with me. When I later confronted her about this, she told me she assumed I would tell the court myself. That omission had real consequences.

The second betrayal was even more damaging. My mother explicitly committed to helping me secure housing for myself and my children and went so far as to release £250,000 in equity from her home. On the basis of that commitment, I made plans and relied on her word. At the last minute, under the influence of my sister, she withdrew that support. This was not just a financial withdrawal; it sabotaged my ability to provide stable housing, undermined my custody position, and directly reduced my capacity to parent.

What makes this especially hard to accept is that my mother had previously said she believed breaking such promises was dishonourable. Years earlier, she had criticised my father for withdrawing promised help even when he had cancer. Yet she did the same to me, not out of necessity, but out of fear, influence, and avoidance of conflict.

Whenever I try to raise these contradictions with her, she accuses me of pressuring or bullying her. This is profoundly distressing, given that I am the one who has repeatedly been displaced, evicted, and stripped of housing and access to my children through dishonest behaviour, coercion, and institutional bias.

My sister has played a central role in this. She has been protected her entire adult life — protected from work, from financial consequence, and even from spending the trust fund she inherited at 25, which my mother helped conceal so she could continue receiving means-tested benefits. Despite this, she has consistently denigrated me and my father while taking no account of our achievements or sacrifices.

I, on the other hand, pursued higher education to the level of a master’s degree, learned several languages fluently, lived and worked internationally, and overcame a disabling repetitive strain injury by adapting through assistive technology. I went on to have a ten-year career as a technical writer and gained advanced professional certification. After the traumatic loss of my first son, Benjamin, in childbirth, I went on to have four healthy children — two boys and two girls — whose lives have enriched my mother’s own life in tangible ways.

Yet I am repeatedly told that “money can’t solve Stephen’s problems,” as if providing housing and stability for children were a moral indulgence rather than a necessity.

My sister frames her actions as protecting children from conflict, believing that if there is any conflict, the father must remove himself. In practice, this logic hands custody to the mother by default, ignores property rights, and erases fathers from their children’s lives. In my case, it involved threats to cut off promised funding unless I left my own apartment in Porto — behaviour which a lawyer correctly described as blackmail.

There is also a profound ideological rupture here. I was raised in a family that opposed apartheid, believed in equality and human rights, and supported workers’ rights through the Labour movement. It has been deeply painful to realise that these values are now applied selectively — that equality is defended in the abstract but denied in the home, that human rights are championed politically but not when it comes to fathers and children.

I also struggle to reconcile my sister’s claimed Christianity with her actions. Scripture is clear that one cannot love God while failing to love one’s brother, and that bearing false witness includes harmful omission. Yet she wrote to the family court without disclosing that she had witnessed Alexander’s mother failing to feed him adequately or restricting food from his sister. Silence in such circumstances is not neutrality; it is complicity.

The cumulative effect of all this has been exhaustion, grief, and moral bewilderment. I came very close to achieving parity time and even alternate residence after the Supreme Tribunal decision in early 2024. But years of struggle had depleted my resources. When my mother withdrew legal support at a decisive stage, my lawyer eventually resigned unpaid, and momentum was lost. What could have been a new chapter for Alexander was stalled by inconsistency and unilateral surrender.

Today, I live with the painful knowledge that my mother’s actions have also sabotaged her own opportunities to be a grandmother. My children live in different countries. She is elderly and ill. The only realistic way she could see her grandsons again would be if I had the support she once promised and then withdrew. This loss was not inevitable; it was made.

Despite everything, I have not given up. I have made a tactical retreat, not a moral one. My own experience as a child of separated parents, and as a father in a high-conflict international custody dispute, has taught me how easily children are drawn into distorted narratives and how important it is for a boy to grow up knowing his value.

This struggle has never been only personal. It is about Alexander’s human rights: his right to a father, his right to safety from authoritarianism and xenophobia, his right to British culture and family, and his right to European citizenship — one of humanity’s most important experiments in peaceful democratic coexistence.

I continue because being a man is not something to apologise for. Men deserve equality in the home just as women deserve equality in the workplace. I have always believed in equality, human rights, and freedom — and I still do.

What I ask now is not pity, but clarity. Not blame, but accountability. And not resignation, but continued solidarity.

The custody proceedings here have been difficult. ALEXANDER'S mother has tried to alienate him, and has taken him several times to Russia since I have been here, in violation of court orders, so I have a good case to get a better custody decision.

But due to the systemic discrimination against fathers in the family courts, I haven't got it yet.

Even so, last year I won an important appeal in the Supreme Tribunal here in Portugal which rejected all the arguments my son's mother had used to try to limit my contact and stated that "nothing could justify limiting such an important right as Alexander's right to enjoy equal parenting".

This is in line with the latest legal opinion on custody. Some years ago, it used to be considered that when a couple separated, the children should stay with the mother, and that the father's role was to send child support money, with some visitation in return. Nowadays, it's considered that it's just as important for children to have time with their father as with their mother. But society and lower level courts tend to ignore this advice and act as if we are all still living in the past.

They think their role is only to protect mothers and forget the rights of children to have two parents.

So fathers like me tend to get unfair and repressive measures such as supervised visitation. I spent 3 years during which I was only allowed to see my son in a supervised visitation centre for a couple of hours a week. We missed out on 3 summers when other dads were taking their sons to the park and to the beach...

But even though the Supreme Tribunal in this jurisdiction has ordered that my son has equal time with me, his mother is still trying to push me out of his life. In January she stopped his overnight weekend visits, and during the summer, instead of sharing the time equally as ordered, she took him to Russia for most of the holidays so that I couldn't see him. She travelled without the correct documents, which i hold, and did not bring him back in time for school.

In fact, as I write this, he is still in Russia, and unlikely to be back for his 8th birthday which is this week. She says that she is waiting for a visa to be issued, so that she can enter Portugal with him, but she could easily return him to Portugal if she would cooperate with me. But she won't.

So once again I am asking for custody of my son, and I need help to get that. It's the only way; I have tried sharing custody but his mother won't accept parental equality or court orders.

So, as I can't appeal against Tribunal decisions alone, I have to pay a lawyer to help. I have just started working with one again. She has 15 years of experience, and she believes I have a chance to win.

So, once again, I am reaching out and asking for support. If you can make a contribution to my gofundme, it will help me to overcome the systemic bias and discrimination against fathers in the family courts here, and ensure that my son's rights to have two parents is respected.

By the way, in addition to trying to push me out of his life, my son's mother also has a history of not feeding him properly, and of denying him speech therapy. But instead of giving me custody so that I could provide this, I was awarded supervised visits.

The photo is of my son and me at a supervised visitation centre where we met for 3 years after I applied for custody of my son. . If you can help me to help my son, I will be very grateful.