Dungeon Wall-of-Blame: “Mom? Can I borrow your Collar?”

A Halifax man fears a judge will send his three teenage children back to live with their mother, a dominatrix who admits to dressing her teenage daughter in bondage gear and posing for photos with her in a sex dungeon.

The daughter, then 15, posted the photos, which include a shot of her wearing a dog collar and leash held by her mom, on the Internet last June.

When the father saw those, he called child protection workers, who alerted Halifax Regional Police.

On the advice of a child welfare worker, all three teens moved out of the home. The kids were allowed to return to their mother in July but authorities seized them again in November when it came to light that the same teenage girl was working as a makeup artist for pornographic photo and film shoots in their apartment building.

“I’m a liberal guy, but you have to get boundaries in your life when you have kids,” said the father, who can’t be named for fear of identifying the children.

He’s not arguing for custody of the children at the hearing in Halifax family court later this month. The kids are living with relatives and seem to be doing well there, said their 45-year-old dad.

But he’s worried the judge will give the children back to their 42-year-old mother.

“She’s arguing the kids are not in need of protection,” he said Wednesday of his estranged wife, whom he met when they studied at Dalhousie University.

Court documents paint a strange picture of the woman’s mothering style.

She was aware of the racy photos of her daughter on the web and “did not see any problem with the pictures, saying her daughter wanted to become an ‘alternative model,’ and they were ‘funny pictures,’ ” says a report that Jean Webb, a lawyer with the provincial Justice Department, wrote last month for Associate Chief Justice Robert Ferguson.

A social worker who visited the home “noticed marijuana, a roach clip used to smoke marijuana, and whips in the living room, all of which were in plain sight of the children,” Ms. Webb wrote.

Both the mother and daughter, now 16, “acknowledged a ‘dungeon’ being downstairs from their apartment and both admitted to being in the ‘dungeon,’ ” she wrote.

When the mom got her kids back last summer, she signed an agreement to “co-operate with any services and supports that the Department of Community Services department considered necessary, provide a safe and secure environment for the children free from adult language, information and materials, insure the children are sheltered from inappropriate associations” and to work on turning her life around, Ms. Webb wrote.

But in November, authorities got several tips from confidential sources about the teenage girl “being exposed to ‘adult’ conversations concerning sex shoots between adults,” Ms. Webb wrote, noting that the same sources expressed concerns about pot use in the home.

When social workers visited the home, the mother acknowledged her daughter “had applied makeup for an adult entertainment photo shoot. An odour of marijuana was detected.”

The mom, who did not respond to an interview request from The Chronicle Herald, acknowledged smoking pot. But court documents say she told social workers she wasn’t willing to attend counselling and would not send her children, some of whom have missed a considerable amount of school, back to class until this month.

Based on that evidence, a judge sent the three teens to live with relatives.

In an attempt to get her children back, the mother has hired Andrew Pavey, a Halifax lawyer suspended for 18 months by the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society in 2001 for professional misconduct. He had sex with a female client, gave her money for crack cocaine and used the drug with her. He was representing the woman, who was pregnant at the time, in a child custody case.

In the case involving the three teens, Mr. Pavey has argued some of the evidence from a social worker be struck from the record as “false, scandalous, frivolous or vexatious,” say court documents.

In a report written Dec. 29, Mary McGrath, a psychologist who met with the mother, says photos the woman posted on the Internet “depicted domination, degradation and humiliation of men and women (predominantly women), including what appeared to be (the mom) in bondage, women bound with rope, naked women in chains and women wearing gags.”

Ms. McGrath tried telling the mother such photos “could normalize this behaviour with impressionable children and present a skewed outlook on future relationships,” say court documents.

The mother “said she had never considered it from that perspective, instead having thought that this could actually help her children to develop a liberal and tolerant outlook on life.”