After consultation with the Commonwealth Attorney General’s Department on the new specialised trauma-informed legal services pilot for victims and survivors of sexual assault, Health Justice Australia was invited to make a submission to the design process.
You can read Health Justice Australia’s submission here, including their recommendations for flexibility in funding and design, and outcome measurement.
Infants (<1 year old) are the age group in Australia with the highest rate of involvement with child protection. Many jurisdictions across Australia and internationally are implementing policies focused on prenatal planning and targeted support.
This study investigates Australian trends in prenatal and infant child protection notifications, substantiations and out-of-home care; and the extent of over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander infants.
“The tendency of family courts to dismiss the history of domestic violence and abuse in custody cases, especially where mothers and/or children have brought forward credible allegations of domestic abuse, including coercive control, physical or sexual abuse is unacceptable,” said Reem Alsalem, UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women, in a report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva on Thursday.
A history of intimate partner violence against women was often neglected in family courts and shared custody or parental authority, treated as the default ruling, regardless of the child’s perspective.
“When custody decisions are made in favour of the parent who claims to be alienated without sufficiently considering the views of the child, the resilience of the concerned child may be undermined.
“The child may also continue to be exposed to lasting harm,” Ms. Alsalem said. She also called out the failure of child custody processes to use child sensitive approaches that focus on the best interest of children.
Click here to read full article
Former Federal Labor MP Emma Husar is running a campaign to get a Royal Commission into the Family Courts, with a particular focus on how Section 121 of the Act, which mandates that people can’t speak publicly about proceedings, negatively impacts victim survivors, particularly children, and is a form of systems collusion with perpetrators.
The survey is asking for anonymous stories of people’s experience with the system which you can find here
Emma Husar’s email for this work is [email protected]
The Labor government’s Family Law Amendment Bill 2023 is making its way quietly through Australia’s federal parliament. It will become one of the most important laws passed this year.
It proposes to overhaul the family law system to make it “safer and simpler for separating families to navigate, and ensure the best interests of children are placed at its centre”.
We should celebrate the fact this bill is passing through parliament. It shows the government has responded to insistent calls for change to protect families.
But here’s why it doesn’t go far enough in addressing family violence…
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Interesting new research from La Trobe University, WEstjustice and Fitzroy Legal Service on the Family Violence Intervention Order (FVIO) system. The process of analysing the narratives in FVIO applications highlighted important questions about how these narratives are crafted; when and to what degree they might be altered during the application process; and for what purpose. For instance, anecdotal evidence suggests that court registrars play a significant role in editing, rewriting, and restructuring the narratives in AFM applications. However, registrars are largely invisible in this process since there is no record of their contributions or changes to AFM’s narratives.
There is no clear, transparent, or easily accessible map of the process of applying for an FVIO for anyone involved, from AFMs through to Magistrates.
The lack of a clear map makes the process of applying for an FVIO opaque. It is difficult to understand what information is important at each stage of the process, and why, and the various roles of the different actors involved. The absence of a map also prevents practitioners and researchers from understanding the level of consistency in the application process for AFMs. Improving transparency and access to information about the FVIO application process would improve AFMs access to justice.
Domestic abusers will be barred from repeatedly dragging their victims through courts and a legal presumption of shared parenting responsibilities will be scrapped in what domestic violence campaigners say will prevent partners from weaponising the courts against their families.
An exposure draft of family law amendments released by Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus aims to put children’s welfare at the heart of legal decisions by replacing complex factors judges need to consider with streamlined principles surrounding the child’s best interests.
Courts will be given a new power to restrain someone from persistently filing family law applications against a partner if it is likely to cause them harm.
Once this order is in place, further applications would first be assessed to ensure that they are not “vexatious, frivolous or an abuse of proceedings”.
To read full article, click here
This report produced by AIFS and ANROWS sets out insights from three parts of a four-part research program which summarises the views of legal professionals and judicial officers. The report sets out findings from contravention matter court file analysis, an online survey of separated parents with parenting orders and an analysis of international approaches, and synthesises findings from all four parts of the research.
Among other things, it finds a lack of mechanisms in the family law system to monitor the implementation of parenting orders, and that the family law system is not well equipped to adapt to issues with parenting orders either.
Kids are at the heart of many family law disputes. The “best interests of the child” are enshrined in our family law legislation as the paramount consideration when making parenting arrangements.
Over the past decade, there’s been much debate about whether or not our family law system really listens to how children feel about arrangements that are made for their care. How well are children’s voices heard in family law matters that affect them?
And there’s consensus that reform is needed to how our family law system operates, in order to produce better outcomes for children. The only real question now is: how will change be practically achieved?
When the recent spate of Government family law inquiries was completed, various recommendations and official responses were made on many different aspects of the family law system, including the subject of children’s participation.
Several recommendations on this were made for the Government to consider, and in turn, in its responses the Government flagged the intention to bring about reform in this area, but cited the need for more research to guide policy.
To read full article, click here
The Lighthouse model is an innovative approach dedicated to helping families navigate the family law system with a focus on risk screening.
The Lighthouse model is an innovative approach taken by the Courts to screen for and manage risk, with a primary focus on improving outcomes for families involved in the family law system.
The Lighthouse model was initially piloted in the Adelaide, Brisbane and Parramatta family law registries, and has now been expanded to include all 15 family law registries for parenting and parenting and financial cases, as follows: Adelaide, Brisbane, Cairns, Canberra, Dandenong, Darwin, Hobart, Launceston, Melbourne, Newcastle, Parramatta, Rockhampton, Sydney, Townsville and Wollongong.