The domestic violence triage system

The real story here isn't the statistics. It's the intent. A judge finding that a domestic violence allegation was false isn't treated by Right to Equality as a judge doing their job. It's coded as victim-blaming. Questioning the evidence behind a domestic violence claim is, in itself, the offence - a deliberate move to put domestic violence allegations beyond question.

We've already watched this exact move play out in the criminal courts, where rape shield laws have steadily restricted cross-examination of complainants in sexual assault trials. Scratching the Surface applies that same principle to a different battleground: domestic violence allegations in family court. Don't test the allegation, the logic runs, because testing it is the harm.

Buried in this feminist report is something genuinely radical: a campaign to redefine due process itself as misconduct. That such a profoundly anti-democratic idea got a respectful hearing in Parliament tells you everything about where this is heading.

It's a real win for British feminists. But even they must be green with envy looking at what the sisterhood has pulled off in Australia. Thirty years ago, this country led the world on family law reform, built around one simple idea: kids do better with both parents in their lives after divorce. Three decades of feminist lobbying later, that idea has been quietly buried. What's left isn't a family court. It's a domestic violence triage system that occasionally remembers to ask whether the father can see the kids on weekends.

And even that occasional question is now buried under ludicrous claims of family violence that have swallowed the money, the court time and the legal aid budget - everything. The case that sums up the whole fiasco is Pickford & Pickford.

Two parents. Two kids. A dispute that, stripped to its essence, came down to this: should the children spend four nights a fortnight with their father, or five.

That question took eleven days of trial, spread over twelve months, plus a further appeal to a five-judge Full Court - decided 20 December 2024. The children were 9 and 7 by the time it was finally resolved. They were 5 and 3 when it started.

Four years. Five judges. Eleven trial days. To decide between four nights a fortnight or five.

The trial judge found "family violence" - not from any proven physical incident (the only assault allegation was thrown out by a magistrate and then rejected again at trial), but from the mother's own subjective sense of feeling coerced and controlled. On that basis, he ruled that even one extra night with their father would put the children at "unacceptable risk."

The Full Court eventually threw that finding out. Justices Austin and Williams put it in the driest possible terms: "What danger could emerge on the fifth night to threaten the children's safety which danger would be absent on the previous four nights? The question is incapable of a rational answer."

Rational answers are in short supply in the family court system right now. The definition of family violence in Australian legislation has exploded as Emeritus Professor Patrick Parkinson of the University of Queensland points out in a recent LinkedIn post. It has expanded from a sensible 51 words before 2011 to an elaborate 533-word construction, with layers upon layers of definition, and sub-categories of sub-categories. And the scope keeps expanding. A few cross words, an unpaid bill, a pattern of behaviour that made someone feel controlled - all can now form the basis of a family violence claim. Parkinson, one of Australia's most respected family law scholars, is blunt: the courts are now drowning in irrelevant claims.

Which brings us to the astonishing number that tells the whole story. The family court's most recent annual report shows 86% of parenting cases now allege family violence, up from 80% in just four years. That means with almost every couple going near the court, someone - most often the mother - is ticking the box claiming to be a DV victim and demanding special treatment.