Young mother pleads for help from Special Envoy, Women’s Department over alleged coercive and financial abuse by children’s father who made her lose her job, took away her car and washing machine

By Breaking Belize News Staff: A young mother who claims she is trapped in a cycle of coercive and financial abuse at the hands of her children’s father, a prominent attorney and businessman whose father is a sitting Minister of Government, is pleading for help from the Office of the Special Envoy, the Women’s Department and the National Women’s Commission.

The young mother, identified as Selia Stephen on Facebook, said she has faced months of alleged financial, emotional and psychological pressure since leaving the relationship and quitting her employment with the father of her children.

Stephen claims that after she found another job, he stopped arranging for the children to be picked up from school and stopped paying the babysitter, which she says caused her to lose the job. She further alleges that he took away the vehicle she used to transport the children, stopped paying for their daughter’s tutoring and even removed the washing machine after she refused to return to work for him.

“At every turn this man has found ways to create chaos to force me back into the abusive situation with him I ran from,” Stephen wrote.

She also alleges that he sometimes refuses at the last minute to take the children during scheduled visitation weekends, has withheld child support since December and is attempting to block her decision to enroll the children in public school because it is more affordable and easier for her to manage transportation.

Screenshots shared alongside the matter, purportedly showing messages from a contact saved as “Kids Dad,” contain a string of insults and remarks about money and the children. In one message, the sender calls Stephen a “dead beat mother” and says, “if you move her I will simply spend the savings on my woman n book a trip from that money u dying for.” The sender also repeatedly calls her a “dummy” and “ghetto,” and later writes that another person “might get the 1000 to prepare your child.”

Stephen further claims she has a restraining order against the children’s father for alleged harassment and for showing up at her home after she told him she did not want him to know where she lived. Despite that, she says he has questioned her sanity in court and succeeded in having the court order her to attend counselling with him.

Now saying she is at her “wits end,” Stephen is asking where women in similar situations can turn after what she describes as repeated failures by the courts and police.

“I am not asking for sympathy, I am at my wits end and seeking some kind of help to get out of this coercive and mental abuse,” she wrote, directly appealing to the Women’s Department, Special Envoy and Women’s Commission.

Stephen said she believes the alleged conduct is intended to “break me financially, emotionally and mentally.”

The allegations and the authenticity and authorship of the message screenshots have not been independently established. A response from the father of her children was not included in the material reviewed for this story.

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