ANNA, 37

When Anna split from her husband after 11 years, her boys, aged six and nine, didn’t want to see their father. She says it became increasingly hard to get them to go for their weekend visits. He would resort to pulling them away as they clung to her, peeling their fingers from around her neck.

‘I wasn’t trying to keep them from seeing him,’ she says. ‘I just didn’t want to force them to go. He said they didn’t want to go with him because I had bad-mouthed him. He couldn’t accept that they didn’t want to be with him because he had behaved so badly.