Category: Domestic Violence

A judge “erroneously” found that a mother committed an act of family violence against her son when she prevented him from spending time with the father because she feared he could be harmed, a court has found.

The father had been violent to the woman, and to an older child of his from a different relationship, when his former partner withdrew his access to the child soon after its birth in 2016, the federal circuit and family court found.

But Justice Michael Jarrett also ruled last year that this act by the mother should be regarded as family violence, given legal definitions designed to capture behaviour often characterised as coercive control, and granted the father shared parental responsibility of the boy.

The mother appealed this decision, arguing on six grounds of appeal that Jarrett had erred in fact and law when he made the order for shared parental responsibility in part based on the finding that she had committed an act of family violence.

In a judgment published last week, the federal circuit and family court appellate jurisdiction found Jarrett “erroneously” described the mother’s action as family violence, but dismissed her appeal.

Despite Jarrett’s decision regarding family violence being found “erroneous”, the woman’s appeal was not upheld.

Deputy chief justice Robert McClelland and Justice Peter Campton found in their reasons that this was because despite the mother having established an error by Jarrett, the “error did not affect the result of the proceeding”.

Source: Judge ‘erroneously’ found mother committed family violence by denying son access to violent father, court finds | Australia news | The Guardian

A family lawyer has urged Australian women to get behind proposed amendments to the Family Law Act, which would abolish the default presumption of parents spending equal time with children.

While fathers’ rights groups have been around since the 1970s helping fathers to see their children, there are fewer organisations specifically for supporting separated mothers, one family lawyer has argued in an open letter to Australian women.

Mediator, arbitrator and accredited family law specialist Lynette Galvin said that “this shouldn’t be a gender issue, but it is”.

The exposure draft of the Family Law Amendment Bill became available to the public for consultation on 30 January this year — and is open for submissions until 27 February.

Ms Galvin has been a family lawyer for over 35 years — and has been practising since before the amendments and after the amendments, seeing their impacts.

“On behalf of the children of the future, I am asking all women who have anything to say to make those submissions, so that this time, the men’s rights groups are not the loudest voices to be heard.

Ms Galvin warned that “if women don’t get heard” now, a whole generation of children could be negatively impacted, and added that the 2006 amendments “favoured fathers over mothers”.

Source: Open letter calls for support of amendments to Family Law Act after previous laws ‘favoured fathers over mothers’ – Lawyers Weekly

There are no national Australian data on people’s perpetration of domestic or sexual violence. While we have good data on violence victimisation, we know far less about violence perpetration.

The State of Knowledge Report on Violence Perpetration, released today, reviews the current data and research on who perpetrates domestic, family, and sexual violence, how, and why, in order to enhance national efforts to end this violence. Here’s what it found.

One of the consistent findings from victimisation data, legal system data, and survey self-reports is that most violence is perpetrated by men.

Apparent findings that men and women are using domestic violence at similar rates must be interpreted with caution, for four reasons.

First, most studies are just “counting the blows”, measuring any use of a set list of violent acts. They may lead to false positives or over-reporting, including of harmless and innocuous behaviours.

Second, there is evidence men are less likely than women to report their own use of violence.

Third, women’s violence is more often in self-defence than men’s.

And fourth, even where overall rates of the use of various violent acts are similar among males and females, males’ use of violence typically is more frequent, severe, fear-inducing, injurious, and harmful than females’ use of violence.

Few perpetrators are held to account for their crimes. The vast majority of perpetrators of domestic and sexual violence do not ever come to the attention of police or legal systems.

Source: Who is perpetrating domestic, sexual and family violence?

Many have looked to Victoria to gauge what a multi-billion-dollar government commitment to family violence reform can deliver.

Among the significant reforms from the royal commission that have been implemented:

• the Family Violence Information Sharing Scheme, which enables sharing of information between organisations to support family violence risk assessment and management
• a new framework that supports practitioners to effectively identify, assess and manage family violence risk
• the creation of specialist family violence courts
• the introduction of the Victim-Survivors Advisory Council to ensure individuals with lived experience are consulted in the ongoing delivery of the reforms
• and the establishment of Respect Victoria, an organisation dedicated to the prevention of violence against women and family violence.

Last year was another horrific year for violence against women. A woman in Australia was killed by male violence every six days. We must do better.

Source: Victoria has implemented all 227 recommendations from its royal commission into family violence. So was it a success?

New legislation will overhaul family law, including the onus on ‘shared parental responsibility’ but more needs to be done to give children a voice.

It abandons the presumption of “shared parental responsibility”, which has been widely misunderstood to mean shared care. This may be an achievable goal for families that do not need to go to court to make safe arrangements for their children’s care, but is unsuitable if not dangerous for families with the complex needs and risk factors that come before the court.

Instead, the bill proposes that the child should be at the centre of every legal determination.

Significantly, the child’s views will be given greater prominence in the legislation, rather than being treated as optional extras.

Independent children’s lawyers – whose role is to ensure evidence relevant to the child’s “best interests” is put before the court – will also find it more difficult to circumvent the requirement to actually speak to the children whose “best interests” they are meant to represent.

The fact that children’s safety and views have not been the guiding principles in family law for almost two decades ought to be a matter of public shame.

In 2023, Australian children have fewer rights under the Family Law Act than they did in 1975, when it was first enacted by the Whitlam government.

The dangers that attend highly adversarial family court proceedings have been raised in evidence in successive inquests into child deaths, such as the murders of Jack and Jennifer Edwards by their father, the murders of Jane and Jessica Cuzens by their mother, and the murders of Darcey Freeman, Eeva Dorendahl, Jessica and Patrick Dalton, and Luke Batty, by their fathers.

Under court orders, children are routinely forced against their will into supervised (and unsupervised) contact arrangements with alleged perpetrators of domestic violence and child sexual abuse – including cases in which abuse has been deemed likely, probable, or even proven.

The court should not be exempt from obligations under the National Principles for Child Safe Organisations, an outcome of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. It should also be required to conform to Australia’s human rights obligations, as a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The draft Family Law Amendment Bill gives effect to key recommendations in the Australian Law Reform Commission’s 2019 review of the family law system. These changes were shamefully stalled by the former Morrison government.

The proposed legislation will require family report writers and Chapter 15 experts – who tender evidence and provide services to the court – to at long last be regulated for standards and quality.

The court’s failure to adequately regulate these standards has led to glaring injustices, such as the infamous case in which an accused paedophile was used as a court expert to provide advice on allegations of child sexual abuse.

The bill makes some attempt to address litigation abuse, a widely documented phenomenon in which a perpetrator seeks to weaponise the legal system – sometimes launching multiple actions across a variety of legal jurisdictions – in order to intimidate, harm, inflict financial damage, threaten and harass a victim. The court will be given more power to throw out such cases than it has at present.

Many parts of the bill seek to clarify existing arrangements, such as setting out the circumstances in which a parenting order can be changed.

This may have some impact on litigation abuse, but it is unlikely to assist victims who have agreed to unsafe children’s arrangements out of fear, or a lack of financial resources. It also does not help, for example, a self-represented litigant whose English-language skills are not at the level that a fast-paced adversarial legal action requires.

Another glaring omission is the need to more strongly regulate the activities of the private legal profession, including obscene profiteering.

The bill addresses some unintended consequences of privacy provisions contained in the act. But it does not allow adults whose parents went to court when they were children to openly talk about the ways in which the court’s decisions impacted their lives.

Source: Labor’s proposed family law overhaul makes some important changes, but omits others

Draft changes, released on Monday by Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, would roll back Howard government requirements for both parents to be consulted in long-term decisions about their children’s future. 

The reforms are expected to anger elements of the father’s rights movement and its champions in Parliament, but one expert says it must occur for the courts to be workable when parents are in serious conflict.

Domestic violence campaigners have welcomed the proposal, saying the move will prevent partners from weaponising the courts against their families.

A 2006 change to the law inserted a presumption that parents would share responsibility for making decisions about a child’s long-term future, and obliged Family Court judges to consider whether custodial care should be split equally.

Recent statistics released by the Family Court revealed a risk of family violence in 80 per cent of parenting disputes before the court, and a risk of child abuse in 70 per cent of cases.

The government hopes the change will make the family law less confrontational and less apt to be used as a means for one parent to harass or aggravate another.

Source: Family law shake-up to overturn one signature Howard-era reform