Justice Myths for Family Court victims.

Photo by Stewart Munro on Unsplash

So many women who have suffered domestic abuse say they are trapped in a never ending cycle of abuse long after leaving their abuser. Litigation abuse, parenting abuse, denigration, false allegations, stalking, harassment, the list is extensive and long. I advocate and campaign for female victims who are falsely accused and destroyed through the family courts by their abusive ex’s. Social workers and legal systems are routinely the direct source of the abuse, indirectly puppeteered by the abuser in the persistent background. Collusion and persecution by satellite professionals in the process has been a consistent pattern and is the largest misunderstanding of those reaching the family courts for the first time. Victims of domestic abuse and child sexual abuse, there is a myth that Justice will protect them, and tragically this is absolutely not the case. AVA’s project called Staying Mum reported on this following two years of research with victims who had lost their children through the family courts and why. That research report can be read with this link.

“The most common grounds for the removal of children were abuse or unfit parenting by mothers.

• Abuse allegations against mothers included emotional abuse through parental alienation, or ‘coaching’ children to disclose domestic or sexual violence. In some cases, mothers were subject to counter-allegations of physical violence against partners and children.
• Mothers were judged to be unfit parents most commonly on the grounds of their mental health.

• These allegations of abuse, neglect and poor parenting made and accepted during family court proceedings contrasted greatly with mothers’ own experience of domestic abuse and motherhood, and aligned with perpetrator narratives of events.”

This is a difficult topic to explain to anyone due to strongly entrenched belief that social services, courts and police protect victims, help people and serve the public justly. This is simply completely untrue in the Family Courts.

I do not mean that there are no well-meaning social workers and police officers out there doing heroic and ethical work, but it is a clear systemic problem that the vast majority of these public services are not safeguarding and protecting the real victims. Serial abusers, persistent domestic abusers, real sociopathic perpetrators and sadistic, manipulative, pathological liars slip right by these front line protectors entirely undetected. How? Because they are charming, full of what appears to be deep concern, genuine fear, societal beliefs of vulnerable traits of what victims should look and behave like and false narratives carefully manipulated by the patriarchy and Mens Rights campaigns to never believe mothers, that they are all vindictive and that they are all mentally ill.

I have yet to see a real victim actually display the full package of ‘victim’ markers. I have seen and heard many abusers adeptly act like the perfect victim to reverse the status, flip the script, confuse the professionals and muddy the water so badly that in just a matter of minutes, the real hysterical victim, the angry, shouting victim, the enraged or even shaking and silent victim, suddenly becomes the police and the social workers only focus as perpetrator and source of all harm.

Anyone who has suffered domestic violence will tell you that there is no formulaic response to the impact it has or the traumatic affects that linger and remain. There is however a set formula of what is called cross-allegations by perpetrators who skillfully employ ways to decieve and ‘pass’ as the perfect father. They will mimic their victims real responses, deceive, twist, alter and ultimately turn the professionals, Police and Social Workers, courts and judges against the real victim.

Here are some tragic and true examples of how this can happen;

The abuser will always use the attack method of denigrating the victims integrity at the very first opportunity. Lets say both parties have been drinking, an incident occurs, both are arrested and both are questioned. One is visibly injured, screaming, crying, the other, uninjured, calm but takes immediate control of the narrative. The victim will likely be genuinely frightened, because she knows that if she says anything bad about her abuser, the consequences are far worse than what she has just suffered. She will more likely than not downplay, dismiss and minimise absolutely every aspect of the incident and very sadly often take a large portion of the blame voluntarily, often sub-consciously. Sentences like, “I shouldn’t have said anything /I should have just left / I shouldn’t have been talking to that person / I knew it was a bad idea going out / I should have gone to my friends house instead / I should have called a cab….” what the victim is doing is trying to offer mitigating excuses for her abuser whilst at the same time accepting suggesting it was a mutual blame situation.

In stark contrast the real perpetrator will say almost immediately “She’s always drunk / She’s always like this / I’m sick of putting up with this / I’ve had enough / She’s a disgrace /She’s a druggie / She’s messed up in the head / She’s got serious mental health problems / She cheats on me / She’s done this before you know / I knew this was coming, it’s always the same / I just don’t know what else to do /She needs to get help…”

These two sets of phrases immediately set a tone. The victim is blaming herself, the perpetrator is snidely working every angle into the conversation that he is the disappointed and hard done to other half that suffers the stresses, problems and upset that she causes him. Mental health will always feature in every single real perpetrators narrative of the victim within the first few minutes if dealing with a real nasty liar. And it will remain there. Each time she calls the police he will embellish upon it further — “I knew she was getting worse, I’ve told her she needs to see a doctor, I was warned she was crazy when I married her, I feel sorry for the kids, I wish there was more I could do to help her…” This narrative mushrooms with each and every police and social worker interaction. With every single opportunity seized, no matter how small, no matter how fleeting, whether it is a teacher at the school gate, or the desk sergeant booking him, every single opportunity to cast doubt over the victims integrity, credibility and believability will be pushed to the absolute limit.

This is where social workers and police are failing the very most for abuse victims. In the testing of statements. My own police records report dozens of false allegations made by my ex husband that were both untested, unsupported by evidence and poorly transposed by subsequent police officers in subsequent incidents. This is called sloppy migration reporting. Here is a direct example:

“Father has contacted his private medical help-desk to disclose concerns about his ex-wife alcohol misuse, 2 bottles of wine a day, is obtaining prescription painkillers from an unknown source, is suicidal and leaves the children unsupervised and has been prosecuted for animal neglect” The date of this was 4 years post separation.

To anyone with a brain there are a number of really large reg flags here —

1. Why would he be contacting his medical health provider about concerns of his ex-wife alcohol 4 years after they haven’t lived together or had anything to do with one another other than the children?
2. What evidence of proof does he have of any of these very serious concerns? Is he sitting outside the house, watching her, filming her, checking through all her bins for pill packets and wine bottles?
3. What does he stand to gain by making this social care referral?
4. How many of these types of allegations has he made?

Unsurprisingly the second, third and fourth reports through social workers and subsequent court reports that refer back to this allegation and referral read like this:

“The mother drinks 2 bottles of wine a day, leaves the children unattended, prosecuted for animal neglect and has a drug problem”

As you can see it goes entirely untested. The victim often never even sees these reports, or the allegations until months or years later when in court, by which time they are engrained into the fabric of the newly emerged male victim claiming his status after a long standing set-up. The myth is that women are equally manipulative, equally violent and equally likely to commit domestic violence. The less likely she ‘looks’ as a perpetrator the more this concept is inverted and snarls back to the victim negatively. Many women have told me over the years, the better their job was, the more they earned, the younger, prettier, more well spoken they presented, the better dressed they were, the more the police and legal systems drew considerable dislike to them, especially Judges, as if they were instantly viewed as tempting malevolent sirens, to be avoided at all costs and their looks and appearance a cover for their dark nature. This is a serious problem. There is a tiny window of what the perfect victim looks like, height, weight, skin colour, clothes, hair, make-up — it is a very precise image in most social workers and police officers minds that simply does not exist in the slightest.

Something we are suggestively convinced of is that changes to laws, amendments to Bills and Acts, such as the Domestic Abuse Act, are recognised instantly by the courts and connected public services. I have spoken with countless Doctors, therapists, social workers, Judges, police officers and more, who either don’t know the changes to the laws, or have little to no knowledge of how they should be implemented.

One social worker I spoke with in 2022 said she had never heard of the Harm Report as it was not on the Local Authorities recommended reading list!

New inclusions of legislative safeguarding measures often take years to trickle down and reach the average end users, this includes elderly and deeply out of touch Judges and social workers. Non fatal strangulation and children as victims in their own right as witnesses to domestic abuse are not being taken into any consideration in the family courts, despite them being a recognised crime in the criminal system.

Family Court is nothing like criminal court and almost all victims expect that there will be sanctions that penalise wrongdoing applied to the perpetrators and their assistants if they can evidence and demonstrate abuse or even litigation tampering and corruption.

Sadly there are absolutely no sanctions made against men in the family court system. This is the most controversial broad issue our courts are guilty of. Legal rights and women’s rights and the right to a fair trial is certainly a gender discrimination issue being deliberately ignored by Family Court Judges across the globe. Female victimisation is a gender inequality failure across the entire justice systems; greatest myth to pervade and remain in the family court, is that we are given the rights to a fair trial. In every case I have assisted, heard, supported or followed, has seen adversarial attack that is gendered inequality, entrenched discrimination beliefs, and does not recognise trauma, fear or concern for domestic abuse for women and children.

Threat, fear, gaslighting, coercion and non-physical dynamics of abuse are not recognised as of any moral concern, let alone legal concern in Family Court. I feel apologetic in writing this, as it must come as a crushing statement to read for anyone who has experienced these aspects of abuse. Victims will tell you that threat and fear is very often far more pervasive, consistent and psychologically damaging than a physical fist or physical damage. Bruises heal, but fear remains constantly. It is this fear that is affecting mothers and their children post-separation, going deliberately and loudly shouted down by any and all fathers rights groups and every parental alienation proponent. I have seen repeatedly that multiple psychologists, both regulated and unregulated labour under the wrong beliefs that Judges and courts are fair, just and consider evidence. It is rare for Family Courts to consider domestic abuse in any context, and most victims who raise domestic abuse, the possibility of removal of a child doubles and rises immediately to probable and likely.

CAFCASS is universally claimed to be ‘the voice of the child’ — this is absolutely false information. Just a quick google search on trustpilot provides a chilling and accurate feedback on what CAFCASS are and do to children and victims of abuse in the Family Court. What the public and court users should be aware of is the strong and persistent links between CAFCASS and AFCC. The AFCC is a huge network across America and reaching wider, embedded in Christian rights, fundamentalist ideologies and the largest lobby for the pervasive use of Parental Alienation globally. Any person claiming to be associated with the AFCC network, founding members, experts, and professionals, should be avoided at all costs. CAFCASS holds extreme views that are counter to any trauma-informed approach to parenting, domestic violence and single mothers being perfectly adequate and loving parents. The myths surrounding CAFCASS role in Family Court to both users and Judges are sinister, leaving victims of abuse in the dark when seeking protection, support or a voice. There are unregulated parental alienation experts that claim to have an active role in training CAFCASS employees and one of the largest concerning training outlets is Roehampton University.

The Family Justice Council has yet to pass any public comment on the issues of Parental Alienation directly, and until they do so, all social workers and all CAFCASS officers will continue to be misinformed about the true impact of abuse on mothers and children and the weaponsisation and re-victimisation we are forcing all victims to endure at the hands of belligerent and ignorant court systems and frontline workers. Negligent misunderstanding of controlling behaviour, litigation abuse, corrupt legal representatives, warped psychological experts with specific agendas and deliberate refusal to correctly and accurately report evidence and fact differently to opinion and statement means we are failing. We need to explain to the public and every mother in this country, that you will not be protected in the Family Courts, by a social worker, nor a police officer if you are a victim of abuse, not in the way the public assumes or thinks.