The study’s findings are consistent with global trends in custody proceedings where mothers — and children — are being punished for bringing child abuse to the court’s attention. This is driven by a considerable ideological shift in family courts over the past few decades that has made it far more difficult for mothers to protect children from abusive fathers.
Family courts have been overwhelmed by a “pro-contact” culture that leads them to believe that it is in the child’s best interests to maintain contact with a father even if he has been abusive toward that child, and even if he continues to pose a threat. Furthermore, the priority given to contact over safety means that courts are motivated to disbelieve allegations of abuse, and ignore or excuse them when the evidence is substantial.
This pro-contact culture has been advanced into family courts by “fathers’ rights” and other male supremacist groups as not only a way to avoid consequences for abusive behaviors, but in order to reassert male household dominance due to a belief that this is a natural order that is being undermined by social advancements in women’s rights and capabilities.
Through obsessive barking that family courts are riven with “false allegations,” and through the use of the nefarious counterclaim of “parental alienation,” these groups have constructed a narrative that women are driven by spite and are actively seeking to remove fathers from their children’s lives without merit. The goal has been to misdirect the sympathies of courts toward abusive men, and direct the suspicion of courts toward protective mothers.
Yet their assertions that false allegations are rife in family courts cannot be substantiated. A recent study from the United States concluded that women (and children) rarely fabricate stories. An extensive Canadian study found that alongside the rarity of these fabrications by women and children, it was men who were far more likely to make intentionally false reports in custody proceedings.
Source: How Australia’s Family Courts Are Failing Children – The Diplomat