The findings are the result of a project called herEthical AI, which trains computers to identify attitudes among judges that it warns is resulting in the retraumatisation of domestic abuse survivors in the family courts.
Examples found through the research include characterising a woman as a “deeply troubled mother with mental health difficulties unrelated to the father’s behaviour”; referring to an attempted strangling as a possible “prank”; or concluding that it was improbable that an “educated professional” would not speak to anyone else while “inappropriate and wrong” sexual relations were happening.
The result, according to Roda Hassan, founder of Riverlight, a nonprofit that provides advocacy services for domestic abuse survivors and is collaborating on the project, was that “at the moment there’s no real way to hold judges and magistrates accountable” for what goes on inside courtrooms, other than through “very expensive and difficult” appeals processes, requiring specialist legal knowledge which many survivors cannot afford.
Riverlight has worked with survivors whose transcripts have included phrases such as “you’re a silly girl” and “you could not have been raped because you were married to him”.
Just a few paragraphs from a longer article at https://www.theguardian.com/law/2024/oct/08/family-court-judges-victim-blaming-language-domestic-abuse-cases-ai-project