Sky News investigates how family courts are leaving abused women feeling like they are ‘on trial’.
During our investigation, we have spoken to numerous women with similar experiences of the family court system, which is where judgments are made on behalf of separated parents over the custody and care of their children.
For many in the system, a child’s contact with both parents has long been prioritised by judges over anything else – even where there are allegations of abuse.
“I was seeing victims really struggle to go through the family court, where domestic abuse and child sex abuse was being minimised,” Victims’ Commissioner Claire Waxman told Sky News.
“All the domestic abuse victims who I’ve met, they’ve all said the same to me: ‘If I had known then what I know now, I would never have left the abuse. I would have rather stayed in an abusive relationship than go into the family courts.’
The government and the courts insist that change is coming, with legislation introduced to repeal the automatic assumption that contact with both parents is always in the child’s best interest, over and above concerns about their safety.
[Ed: Unfortunately we have made that change in Australia and in some cases it has made things worse for mothers who are often being prevented from all contact due to having been accused of parental alienation when they have made allegations against the father. We need a rebuttable presumption in favour of mothers retaining care, at least in relation to infants and small children.]
Source: ‘I was manipulated and silenced’: Inside the secret courts failing women | UK News | Sky News
In Gronow v Gronow, the 1970s High Court decision that found against a presumption that an infant and young child remain in the mother’s care, Justice Murphy dissented. He said that such a decision could not be validly reached (the overturning of the presumption) on a lack of sustained and validly compiled research. He said that that was precisely why the Institute of Family Studies had been founded and was itself stipulated in and created by the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth). The other judges operated on the basis of (baseless) assumptions that in the 1970s changes had brought about parity between mothers and fathers vis-a-vis care of infants and young children. They (the majority) were operating on pilot – that is, smart (sic) thinking that they were being progressive in their approach, when there was no research supporting their position at all, and research that was available and became increasingly available indicated that women’s and men’s activities within the home had changed little if at all from the existing position of women’s taking on the major caring role (of husbands and children) and men had not come to any realisation that maybe they ought to play a role in this, much less an equal role.