ISBN-13: 9781434332110 / Angielski / Miękka / 2008 / 572 str.
Browsing through the beautiful memories of her Eastern European childhood and, later, the hardship of her life during the Balkan conflicts and as a non-EU immigrant in Britain, Ivana Kelly sifts through the personal recollections of "stable, happy" marriages all around her, both from the past and present, and wonders if, apart from very few exceptions, " happy" marriages may have always been and will be, for most of us, just a fantasy concealed behind a mask of pretence. Having had a marriage from hell and a chilling divorce in the notorious British secret family courts, the author stumbles across a hidden world of the most severe form of misogyny rampant throughout Europe and North America, the world in which good, devoted mothers, as a possible result of the fierce campaign of fathers' rights groups, are seemingly massively losing custody of very young children, even babies, to extremely chauvinistic, manipulative, either abusive, or violent, irresponsible, obsessively selfish or even, apparently, paedophilic husbands who commit "matricide" towards their own children so that they continue to control their mothers or get better financial deals. While scores of academics and journalists have warned of the Narcissistic, dangerous nature of most of the custody fathers, their pleas have, for decades, fallen on deaf ears. Unsuspecting women are still being tricked into surrogating, young children are still being put through gruesome pangs to please their egocentric fathers, chauvinistic judges and sycophantic court child "experts," seemingly, rub their hands with glee at this form of torture of the very people they are supposed to protect, and the world of, the author observes, sadism towards voiceless women and children, discrimination, xenophobia, racism and, maybe, widely talked about, corruption, seems to be gaining frightening strength. And daily, lives of thousands of "hostage" children are being irreversibly damaged.