The big read in the venerable New Yorker magazine this week is a profile of West Virginian parents, Michael and Leah, and their destructive conflict over vaccinating their children. During the pandemic, Leah emerged from the pits of the TikTok rabbit hole believing that vaccines were dangerous. Michael, who wanted the children vaccinated as normal, watched slack-jawed as the marital relationship slid into open conflict. He felt like he was “living in crazy town”, he told the writer Ruby Cramer. Then the children got sick with suspected measles – and suddenly they were in a custody dispute in the family court.
Cramer uses the family’s fight as a lens on the “Make America Healthy Again” movement (aka Maha), the unhinged, ever-shifting, vaccine-sceptical, research-killing policies of Robert F Kennedy jnr, the man chosen by Donald Trump to guide and protect the health of all Americans. Cramer’s achievement is to show in heartbreaking detail how fringe beliefs migrate into an ordinary family’s life, blow up in parental arguments over basic, proven healthcare and inevitably make their way to the judges of the family courts to adjudicate upon.
Well, you may be thinking, isn’t that the essence of Trumpian America. Think again.
In a Dublin District Family Court hearing last Friday, a woman sought an emergency protection order against her husband. It was a decision that had been a long time coming.
She believed she was a victim of coercive control to the point where she “wasn’t allowed” to have her children vaccinated during the pandemic years, years she described as “horrendous” due to her husband’s behaviour. He was “defiant” against the government regulations then and remains so even now, she told the judge. Last week, “he started up again saying ‘it’s all going to come out soon’ about the conspiracy, about the Covid lockdowns, that it was all fake”.
He “doesn’t believe” that their child’s eating disorder (anorexia) is a mental illness and has put the child “through hell”, claiming the child “deliberately stopped eating” and “destroyed” the family. His behaviour has been “threatening”, she said – mentioning a time when she spent about €4 from their joint account on a hot chocolate for their child – and she feels “unsafe” at home with him. Their younger child had “pleaded” with her to “get him to leave”.
The man was not in court to hear the temporary protection order granted against him, or that he could be arrested should he put his wife in fear for her safety again. Still she showed concern for his welfare, saying she rarely sees him eat and that he has lost weight. “It’s very sad; I think my husband’s not well,” she said.
We know nothing else about this woman or her family – reporting from the family law courts is heavily restricted for good reason – but hers is a story we don’t often hear.
We can try to imagine those terrifying early times of Covid when people in her position fought to protect children while their fathers or mothers went further down the rabbit hole.
We all know a few people like him from Covid days. Some went to secret parties with a knowing shrug, others went on the anti-vaccine/anti-mask/anti-lockdown/anti-paedophile marches, seething with grievance and victimhood, sneering at the “sheeple” buying the fake news while their own “research” told them that 5G caused the virus and Bill Gates was using the vaccine as population control. Or that the whole thing was a giant hoax.
Families who end up in court are unhappy in strikingly similar ways
Now that we can afford to be blase about the miracle of the vaccines and have the luxury of arguing the toss over who got it wrong, it might be helpful to cast our minds back for a moment and imagine how families confined in small spaces coped with that internal division. More especially how they retained their sanity in the knowledge of being controlled physically and psychologically in the home by someone hopelessly in thrall to conspiracy theories.
It remains a shocking incongruity that at a time when protecting lives was becoming the single, selfless, common global endeavour, the Garda were so sure that many more men than usual were going to batter, strangle, stab, rape and break many more women and children that within a few days of the first lockdown they would launch Operation Faoiseamh (meaning relief), a proactive unit to keep in touch with women known to have been victims of domestic violence. The anticipated spike was chilling precisely because it was so predictable.
And sure enough, within a month reports of domestic violence had surged by 20 to 30 per cent over the previous year, according to Garda figures. Alcohol no doubt was a huge factor as always, combined with confinement. Then stir in the tech bros’ catastrophic let-’er-rip approach to Covid conspiracies. There may never be a metric for the number of good families thrown into chaos and broken by those monetising policies. But Michael and Leah and the woman in the Dublin family court and all their children should be added to that long, long list of plaintiffs.
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