Protection Order for Abusive / Threatening Texts
Hey all,
I have majority care of my daughter (12.5) and this has been in place for almost 6 years. She has a phone that her Dad pays for.
He lives 5 hours away and came to our town in the weekend demanding to have our daughter in 48 hours time. I said no as he hadn’t cleared by me before telling our daughter, it wasn’t his weekend and he has so much extra time with her in the last couple of years, it is starting to take the piss, ie turn up for mothers day for his mum and expect to have her all day.
Anyways, my daughter was at her friends house and when she came home, I went through her texts with her and found so many texts about guardianship issues, him harrassing her to message him back, putting me and other family members down. After some discussion, we decided it was a good idea to block him for a day or two as he would not stop messaging her and I could see she was overwhelmed in this situation.
He has thrown an almighty shit fit saying I am breaching our order (all it says in our order about technology is that she can video call when she likes and to be scheduled time on a Wednesday) and he’s taking me back to family court. He has not exercised facetimes on Wednesday in over a year, despite me telling him to keep this up rather than rely on texting each other. He keeps harrassing me now with messages and telling me I’m a liar and the tone often quickly esculates to more accustory and almost threatening in tone.
He was physically and emotionally abusive to me (one of the many reasons we split) and has done numerous things to me over the years. However the texts are actually stressing my daughter out and she is feeling really anxious and doesn’t want to talk to her dad. I am trying to be civil and end the conversation when I can feel it ramping up but he won’t stop messaging me accusing me of god knows what and I don’t feel like I can block him without shit really kicking off. He will not respect any boundary and keeps sending countless messages late at night goading me.
It’s wearing us both out and this has gone on repeatedly for the last 18 months over issues, but especially when he can’t get his own wah. I really want to do something to better protect ourselves from him and I am unsure if my daughter will feel comfortable going into his care next weekend.
I have ordered her a new phone with stricter rules in place for their communication but he is also losing his shit over that too and this breaches the order?? She’s a pre teen, she doesn’t want to text her parents every hour of the day
What can I do? Can I get a protection order?
I know we can go back to family court, he will fight me all the way to get what he wants, not what our daughter wants and by the time we get to a judge, he will most likely let her pick what to do..