Family Courts "not taking domestic abuse allegations seriously"- new research

[user1471451327]

www.lawgazette.co.uk/law/family-courts-not-taking-domestic-abuse-allegations-seriously/5066271.article

This is unsurprising if depressing.

This is one of the reasons I did not leave earlier. Also why I have had to delay divorce until the children are old enough to keep themselves safe.

No Surprises.....my experience of the family courts was that the process felt the same as the abuse. All power with others and lots of allegations and suggestions that I was overreacting and (worse) that the children were being coached by me (not true). That abusive husbands were not abusive fathers and that without me he would be fine (he wasn't and isn't).
Having said that we are all better off without him here and I would still encourage women to go and to give their children a safe haven even when they have to go unsupervised to their father. You are better able to give them tools to survive when you are outside it than from inside...even if that seems unlikely.

I think that is the main problem TBH that abuse of the other parent has nothing to do with abuse of the child or the child’s welfare.

Shared parenting has muddied the waters too as it did in Aus.

This is at odds with the approach of social care such that it is possible for SC to threaten to take DC away if the mother doesn’t keep the DC from the father but then when it gets to court for the father to be given unsupervised access and the mother chastised.

Another part of the problem is that court generally is for ‘high conflict’ cases. Judges do tend to tar both parents with the same brush, though not always.

Re a friend of mine, her nutcase ex keeps bringing cases all the time. She has never brought a case but they were both ordered not to apply to court again.

DV can be seen as ‘parents fighting’ rather than one parent abusing.

This was all touched on in the Universal Credit thread, wasn't it?

The family courts need to recognise that one aspect of domestic abuse is the involvement of authorities by the abuser against the abused - which is why these men represent themselves in proceedings because getting their ex-partners back in court as many times as possible is the abuse.

abuse of the other parent has nothing to do with abuse of the child or the child’s welfare

Yes - the Children Act is a wonderful piece of legislation. But only if women's equality is there or thereabouts. But if you roll back women's equality, as austerity has done, it becomes yet another tool to beat poor mothers with.