About ten years ago, I was standing in my son's junior school classroom. The teacher had stuck up on the wall the best essays on the topic: 'How I Spent Last Weekend.' One caught my attention.
Not for this little boy a visit to the zoo or the excitement of a football game. Instead, he had chronicled a weekend's battle between his divorcing parents.
'Mum calls dad names on the phone,' he had written in his laborious handwriting. 'We had cake for tea. My sister and I cry.' The teacher caught my eye. She had put up that story on purpose.
'I want the parents to see what divorce they are doing to their children. They should be ashamed of themselves,' she said.
My son recently bumped into that little boy. A decade on, he is 18, has dropped out of school and is on drugs.
Sir Nicholas Wall, the President of the Family Division of the High Court, agrees that something has to be done. He has accused separating couples, especially those from the middle classes, of using their children as 'both the battlefield and the ammunition' to try to score points in their personal disputes.
'There is nothing worse, for most children, than for their parents to denigrate each other,' said the country's most senior family court judge. 'The child's sense of self-worth can be irredeemably damaged.'
Six years ago, my husband and I divorced. It came as a great shock. But we were all too aware our children were just becoming adolescents - and that adolescence is perilous enough without warring parents.
We tried, not always successfully on my part, never to criticise each other in front of the children. Very occasionally, I even managed to emphasise his good points (of which there are many) - it was quite hard when at the time all I wanted to do was murder him.
A female friend was shocked. 'Why aren't you using the children against him?' she asked. 'I would.'
Her reaction is not unusual. The battlefields Sir Nicholas Wall describes are too often of the wife's choosing. This is because most divorces are initiated by women due to their husband's infidelity, as the fatherhood research body Fathers Direct points out.
These women are hurt and they want to get their own back through the children, money or both. They are determined the husband is as much divorced from his children as his wife.
One wealthy man I know finds himself, despite his riches, at the beck and call of his former wife.
'How can my wife hurt me? How could she bring me to my knees?' he asks. 'Through my children.'
The strategy is very successful. This otherwise powerful man submits to every capricious demand.
'With just two hours' notice, I had to cancel an important meeting and take them to the dentist,' he said. If he refused, his wife said, he would not see them for a month.
An advertising director found himself equally powerless when his wife suddenly moved from London to the Midlands with their two sons.
'She did not tell me. One day she just stopped answering the phone. Until then I had been seeing my sons every weekend,' he says.
By the time the case reached court, the sons were settled in a new school. The judge admitted that what the woman had done was illegal, but because it was in the best interests of the children to be with their mother, he did nothing.
'She had got away with effectively kidnapping my children,' said the father. His relationship with his sons has all but broken down. Their new home is too far for them to come to London. When he goes to see them, he has to stay in a hotel.
'The children get bored in an hour or two,' he says. 'They have their friends and their sports, which they would rather do instead.'
He tells me he finds the situation 'so goddamn painful. I try to play the role of a father - but how can I when I have been deliberately moved to the periphery of their lives?'
The situation leaves many men I have interviewed distraught. They describe the loss of their children as 'an emotional amputation' or 'a living bereavement'.
It is no wonder that within two years of divorce, half of fathers lose contact with their children.
As one man said sadly, divorce 'leaves many fathers on the edge of a bloody great abyss. Many fall off and are never seen again'.
Douglas Alexiou, one of London's pre-eminent family lawyers, agrees that the wife holds all the cards in a divorce case.
'Court order after court order is served. The wife claims the children are ill or just do not want to see their father,' he says.
'There is very little a court can do if a mother has poisoned the minds of her children against the father. There is no sanction against the mother apart from a jail term - and no court will do that.
'Perhaps one day a judge will be bold enough to jail a mother and finally set an example.'
In all this there is only one real victim - the children. If one of those wives was handed an axe and ordered to hack off a limb of her child, she would be appalled. Yet so many women are happy, even gleeful, to commit the equivalent emotional amputation on their children by depriving them of their father.
U.S. author Kathleen Parker in her excellent book Save The Males points out that in depriving a child of their father, 'we reduce a child's chance of a successful and happy life.
'Growing up without a father is the most reliable indicator of poverty and all the familiar social pathologies affecting children, including drug abuse, truancy, delinquency and sexual promiscuity.'
But this misery is not only the fault of the parents. The family court system is adversarial and encourages couples to fight, says Nadine O'Connor, campaign manager at the lobby group Fathers4Justice.
And change, she says, will be a long time in coming - until lawyers stop making their own killing from warring parents, children will continue to be used as weapons.
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