The domestic violence triage system

Twenty-five years ago, a dad from Fathers4Justice decided the best way to draw attention to the anti-male bias in the UK family court system was to put on a Spider-Man costume and dangle on a crane over Tower Bridge for six days. He'd been refused access to his four-year-old daughter. It became national news.

He was part of a small army of British dads who went on to scale Buckingham Palace dressed as Batman, hurl purple flour bombs at Tony Blair, and storm a live BBC lottery show with placards reading "Family Law Lotto, Next Time It Could Be You!"

Bob Geldof joined the cause, speaking out about his own custody fight and his "deep loathing for those who would deign to tell me they would ALLOW me ACCESS to my children – those I loved above all, those I created, those who gave meaning to everything I did, those that were the very best of us two and the absolute physical manifestation of our once blinding love. Who the fuck are they that they should ALLOW anything?"

Yet after two decades of cranes, costumes and Geldof's fury, no one with actual institutional power ever stood up and said: yes, you're right, the system is anti-male.

Then last month a women's legal organisation walked into Parliament and dropped a report claiming - plot twist - that it's actually mums who've been getting steamrolled by the system all along. No crane required. Just a press release and a few MPs nodding along.

The report is advocacy research at its finest. Scratching the Surface: Victim-Blaming and Bias in Family Court Judgments was produced by Right to Equality, a group of feminist legal activists who went looking for evidence that the family court is biased against women - and came back with evidence that the family court is biased against women.

Co-director Dr Charlotte Proudman says the report grew out of her own years at the bar: "As a barrister, I have stood in family courts and watched judges normalise abuse, trivialise trauma and silence survivors."

Proudman's right to equality, it turns out, doesn't extend to male victims, who are entirely absent from this study of 91 published family court judgments - scrutinised, with the help of AI, for evidence of victim-blaming.

Out of the roughly 55,000 private family law cases that ran through English and Welsh courts in 2025 alone, the report's "evidence" rests on a hand-picked sample of just 91 judgments. 27% were selected because they were already known to contain victim-blaming. Another 23% were cases Dr Proudman personally represented.

And what did this cherry-picked sample turn up? "Widespread and concerning evidence of victim-blaming language and attitudes – often directed towards mothers," the report concludes. 72.5% (66) of all judgments contained at least one instance of judicial victimâ€blaming. Across the 91 judgments, 530 instances of victim-blaming were logged in total - overwhelmingly attributed to judges.

Their classification system was built to detect bias against mothers and nothing else - no category for judicial bias against fathers, no effort to flag genuinely false allegations by mothers identified by a judge. And the execution matched the design: no checks on whether independent coders actually agreed on what counted as "victim-blaming," no attempt to test whether the findings would hold up under scrutiny. Not even a pretence of rigour. As economics blogger Tim Worstall put it: "Bin it, it's nonsense."

The sad truth is, they don't need rigour. They can walk this into Parliament, get a room full of MPs nodding along, and watch it become the basis for policy. What's genuinely ominous is where the report's logic is heading next.