False Allegations are a small factor in the Family Courts

Wednesday 13th May 2009 11:22 AM« Back to Listing

Even one of the strongest family violence critics admitted that in a majority of child abuse cases had substance in it.
DR Richard A Gardner, the man who coined the term Parent Alienation Syndrome stated, "The vast majority ("probably over 95%") of all sex abuse allegations are valid". Gardner, R.A. (1991). Sex Abuse Hysteria: Salem Witch Trials Revisited . Cresskill, NJ: Creative Therapeutics (pp. 7, 140).
Like the recent report about St John's Ambulances "Hush Money for sex abuse victims" fathers rights will have us all believe that most mothers and children are liars when it comes to allegations in the Family Court.
This was not true for Cassandra Hasanovic who died at the hands of her ex partner. The Family Court ignored her pleas and ordered her to return resulting in her death. The Founder of the Anonymums Collective Stated, "The falsely accused are among the privileged in the family courts, they can obtain costs and are not required to provide much evidence as the court rules upon the level of substantiation".
In the National Plan to reduce Violence against Women and Their Children it was stated, "The Family Law Amendment (Shared Parental Responsibility) Act 2006, however, represents a potential obstruction to a just and integrated response to family violence in Australia". Members of Anonymums not only agree to this statement, they understand the grave consequences that surround this lucrative bill.
Even the Prime Minister said, "As a nation, the time has well and truly come to have a national conversation - a public national conversation, not a private one - about how it could still be the case that in 2008 so many Australian women could have experienced violence from their partner... It is my gender - it is our gender - Australian men - that are responsible. And so the question is: what are we going to do about it? ...There are no circumstances in which the threat of violence against women is acceptable. There are no circumstances in which the thought of violence against women is acceptable. That on violence against women, we have simple, clear policy in two words: zero tolerance."
"It's a move in the right direction and will save the government compensation money in the long run" a spokesperson for Anonymums stated.
The Founder of Anonymums added, "When Diana Bryant said "Family Violence is the Core Business of the Family Court", many victims have begun to wonder why such force was imposed upon them in a system that is meant to protect them from such things.
Take "Family Violence" and "Core Business" out of this phrase and it becomes clear what she meant when she said this.
Family Violence Victims held captive by the court and perpetrator means that the protective parent will guarantee a great deal of money.
The message becomes clear, "To protect your children, save your life - We will need the children's home, life savings and anything else you have". Either way, the victim is cornered by a bunch of legal clauses and unless they can produce more than what is required for a homicide, the child or the intimate partner violence victim is at the abusers mercy".
The Australian Human Rights Commission made the Following Statement about False Allegations, "HREOC is well aware of the concerns of some individuals and community organizations that false allegations of family violence are regularly made.
For example, i n its submission to a review of legislation regarding protection orders, the Lone Fathers' Association states that protection orders "are employed as a routine separation procedure" by women to force their husbands out of their homes, without any violence having occurred, "and/or as a vindictive retaliatory act".
HREOC would caution against accepting this contention uncritically. There is no doubt that Family Court proceedings often are accompanied by allegations of domestic violence and the use of protection orders.
However, this may reflect the fact that domestic violence often escalates when couples separate.
Australian data demonstrate that women are as likely to experience violence by previous partners as by current partners and that it is the time around and after separation which is most dangerous for women."
This was in 2005. It's been four years since this was noted and many lives at stake, some are embedded upon gravestones, a remembrance of a time when children were once again seen and not heard. For further information contact:Emily TaylorWriter(888) 203-6750
Press release published by Seeking Media. http://www.seekingmedia.com.au/

Blood shed on the family Courts hands is spilling out

More power needed for abused kids

12:00a.m. 5th May 2009

 

| By Rae Wilson

Sunshine Coast parents marched in Brisbane on Sunday demanding more power fo children who say they are abused. Photo:Contributed

When her three-year-old boy came home from an access visit with his daddy asking to be touched in private places, a Sunshine Coast mum was aghast.

But she truly reached a dark place when she learned there was nothing she could do about it.

The mum, in her late 30s, was among a contingent of Sunshine Coast parents who donned red hoods at a rally in Brisbane on Sunday to signify the blood of Australian children they say is shed by Family Law Act decisions.

The death of four-year-old Darcy Freeman, who in January was thrown from Melbourne’s West Gate Bridge in broad daylight, shocked the nation.

While her family’s story is just one of thousands of custody battles gone wrong across Australia, it has proved to be the catalyst in the push for family court reform and nation-wide rallies on Sunday.

Sally, not her real name, said she hoped the rally would “make people aware of exactly what’s happening and hopefully give others a voice”.

“I left my son’s father when he (my son) was about 10 months old. His father wasn’t interested in him and didn’t want a child,” she said.

“Then when I left he decided he did. We ended up in the family law court and it got nasty.

“When he turned three, he came home and asked me to put my fingers into his bottom.

“I reported it to the child safety department but they said children of that age really don’t have a voice.

“Until he tells an independent third party, they can’t act.

“Because he doesn’t have the verbal skills to tell a third party, he has to keep going back to his dad.”

Sally said it was empowering to see more than 50 people standing up and saying enough is enough.

“I know what’s happening and I’m being forced, like many other mothers and fathers, to send a child into an abusive situation,” she said.

“The family law court is helping the abusers continue their behaviour.

“It’s such a detrimental situation for the child. It can mentally scar them.

“You go through such intense periods of anger to falling in a hole because you can’t do anything to help.

“You feel completely powerless to the stage where some days you sit there and don’t want to function, sometimes you just can’t.

“Your child should be living a happy carefree childhood like we did, he shouldn’t have to be going through all this.

“But also your child is growing in front of you and you’re missing most of it because you’re so stressed and worried for them.”

A Sunshine Coast domestic violence worker, who has a background in child safety, said she believed a dedicated taskforce to investigate claims of abuse, particularly for non-verbal and disabled children, was paramount.

“My background is child safety and I do acknowledge each matter needs to be taken on its own merit but there is a gender issue with the discrediting of women no matter what they say,” she said.

“There’s a lot of problems surrounding women being disbelieved and disempowered in the family law courts.

“The court is hell-bent on giving access to men under any circumstance – that’s what appears to be happening at the moment.

“The statistics from the courts recently have shown custody primarily going to the female parent, with about 30% going to the other parent.

“In most cases, that’s appropriate but when there’s extreme violence or sexual abuse, 30% of the time is a hellishly long period for a child to spend time with a parent that’s abusive.

“There needs to be a more immediate response to concerns and there needs to be an attitude in the family law court process among various levels of staff that is more proactive towards women than it has been for some time.”

Dictatorship: Send The Child To The Father Or Else

Mother jailed for denying access to boy's dad

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Caroline Overington | May 05, 2009

Article from: The Australian

THE Family Court sentenced a mother to six months in prison for refusing to let a father see his 11-year-old son.

The mother, who cannot be named because it would identify the boy, spent 16 days behind bars before the sentence was stayed on appeal.

The judge, federal magistrate Jim Brewster, acknowledged that the boy would be "quite traumatised" by the idea of his mother, with whom he had lived since 2001, being jailed. But, he said, he wanted to deter other parents from acting the same way. Parents would not be permitted to "usurp the court and flout court orders" and decide a child could not have a relationship with the other parent.

It is believed to be the first time in two years that a mother has been sent to prison for refusing to provide a father with access to his children.

In 2007, soon after the Howard government's changes to family law were introduced, a judge jailed a pregnant woman for denying a father access to their child on Christmas Day, Father's Day, and the child's birthday, saying her actions had been "deliberate, calculated and malicious".

The Full Court of the Family Court has since ruled that the sentence in the latest dispute was too harsh, releasing the mother from jail, and putting her on a two-year good behaviour bond.

The parents were in a relationship between 1995 and 2001; the child was born in 1997. The boy lived with his mother between 2001 and 2007, when the father was granted access.

But he didn't see the boy at all during 2007 because the mother took him from his home state, NSW, to Queensland and then Western Australia, where she enrolled him in school under the name of her new partner.

It took police in three states, aided by federal officers, a year to find them.

Sending the mother to jail, the judge said it was "clear that it is not in (the child's) best interests that his mother should be sentenced to a term of imprisonment". But it was in the "interests of children in general that a punishment should be imposed which will act as a deterrent to parents acting in the way that the mother has done".

The mother told the court she understood that "not complying with the orders has made a bad situation worse".

May Day Rally: A Gathering for a good Reason

Anger at law that fails children

• Adele Horin
• May 4, 2009

Emotional...rally organiser Barbara Biggs with supporters in Sydney yesterday. Photo:Sahlan Hayes

THE names of 22 children killed by their fathers on access visits hung from a makeshift clothesline in a city park yesterday as more than 100 women and some men gathered to vent their anger at the Family Court of Australia and the law it must enforce.

At the emotion-charged rally, a mother named Carolyn pinned a photo of her two sons to an orange and a blue T-shirt on the line where their fate was revealed: "shot and killed". She tried to talk but handed her story to rally organiser Barbara Biggs to read.

"When the police came to the door, I was the one who told them my boys were dead," she said. "I didn't grieve when it was confirmed. I'd already spent seven years grieving every time they went on an access visit. Every time I feared they would not return."

The rally was part of a national campaign to push changes to the Family Law Act, which critics say is putting children's safety at risk after amendments in 1995 and 2006 put greater emphasis on shared parenting.

Some women in the crowd covered their faces with scarves to protect their anonymity but others spoke openly of their experiences and expressed anger at the law's strict confidentiality provisions that they said protected the perpetrators of abuse and violence, not the children.

The act prohibits the media from reporting identifying details of families involved in Family Court proceedings, even when the children are dead, or have reached the age of 18 and wish to tell their own accounts of court-ordered access.

A Sydney University academic, Lesley Laing, told the rally and its supporters that women with abusive or violent partners enter a family law system where the "ideological view is that shared parenting is the norm and anyone opposing that is swimming against the tide".

She said almost 50 per cent of Australians surveyed believed women in custody battles made up or exaggerated claims of abuse and violence even though the evidence was to the contrary.

Carolyn said the day she left her abusive husband in 1995 he had threatened to kill the children. It took him another seven years to do it.

She said it was unfortunate that 1995 was the year the act began to change in favour of fathers' rights. The boys' father had originally won custody but when that was reversed two years later, she reluctantly agreed to access visits, having been told by the court she was malicious.

Few in the crowd were dry-eyed when Carolyn's words were read: "How many children must we bury before something is done about this failing judicial system that is supposed to be there to protect our children?"

A 13-year-old boy who had come with his mother and grandmother from a regional town to attend the rally said he had been the subject of a custody battle for more than five years. He was required by the court to live with his father, who wanted to take him overseas. "I want to live with my mum," he said, "and maybe see my dad once a month for an hour or two."

Also coming under fire from speakers were court-appointed experts, including psychologists and psychiatrists who, it was charged, made hasty assessments of parents that carried huge weight in court.

Carolyn said a court-appointed expert had assessed her as having difficulties with "social functioning" and "anxiety" while her ex-husband was said to have a "reasonably balanced profile" with no pathological or criminal features evident.

Courts may be keeping violence in the home

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Australian Associated Press

Family violence against women and children is a national scandal, a rally was told on Sunday.

Former federal parliamentarian and advocate for the prevention of violence against women Phil Cleary says courts may be complicit in maintaining violence in the family.

"If those in the family courts can see no relationship between violence against women and violence against children they are part of the problem," Mr Cleary said.

"The violence is a blind spot, a dark spot and, quite candidly, it is a national scandal."

Mr Cleary's sister Vicki died 22 years ago at the hands of a violent partner who received less than four years' jail.

Dionne Fehring, whose two children from her first marriage, 17-month-old Jessie and 12-week-old Patrick, were murdered by her husband in 2004 after he was given custody of them while she was in hospital, told her harrowing story.

She has since remarried and has two children from her second marriage.

"I want women to see you can move on from these tragic circumstances -  you don't have to be a victim," she said.

The former principal lawyer at the Women's Legal Service Victoria, Sarah Vessali, said the courts maintained "some kind of unrealistic belief that some kind of contact with a parent is better than no contact - no matter what that parent had done in the past".

She said that in many cases the issue of family violence is never raised in the courtroom in custody cases.

"Some of these people tell me that they have been actively discouraged from raising the violence, that they should be looking to the future and not to talk about the violence because that's historical," Ms Vessali said.

"Others say they have been disbelieved by so many people in the past that they don't even try to raise the issue any more."

Ms Vessali said legal aid funding had been cut, which meant more people were appearing in the Family Court unrepresented.

"They are trying to work out how (the) family law system, which is not straightforward ... and at the same time personally deal with the perpetrator of violence against you – it just doesn't work."

She said the contact centres, used by the court to enable children to meet the other parent in a safe supervised environment, are struggling to meet demand.

"The contact centres I have been dealing with have waiting lists six to nine months - that doesn't work because the other parent wants contact with the child now."

Young mother fled to Sydney to save her life

Young mother fled to Sydney to save her life

Paola Totaro Herald Correspondent in London

May 2, 2009

Cassandra Hasonovic...convinced she was going to die at the hands of her husband.

CASSANDRA HASANOVIC was convinced she was going to die at the hands of her husband but her pleas for help - in Australia and Britain - fell on deaf ears.

"He said he was going to chop me up in little pieces and post me piece by piece to my family," she told police more than a year before her death.

The nightmare tale of the mother, 24, who was dragged out of a car and stabbed to death by her husband in front

of her mother and two young sons in July, neared its climax in a British court yesterday.

Mrs Hasanovic died hours after begging British police to drive her to a safe house: "I live in fear for my safety. I am so scared of him."

Her story was recounted this week during the trial of Hajrudin Hasanovic, 33, who was last night found guilty of murder and sentenced to 18 years in jail.

The jury learned how he was to have been deported to his native Serbia after losing custody of his children, following his conviction for sexually assaulting his wife.

They heard a damning story of a woman whose fears were ignored by authorities in two hemispheres for more than 12 months.

The five-year marriage ended in May 2007 after the sexual assault and Mrs Hasanovic fled to Australia, where she had relatives.

She lived in the safety of Sydney's western suburbs in the fervent hope of seeking custody of her sons.

But Lewes Crown Court, in West Sussex, heard that Australian authorities insisted she return to Britain, arguing the case had to be pursued there.

Philippa McAtasney, QC, who opened the case for the prosecution, told the court that she returned to Britain at the cost of her life.

In the months that followed her return, police were called to several violent confrontations between the couple, and officers equipped the young mother with a panic alarm.

Mrs Hasanovic's mother, Sharon De Souza, broke down as she described the terror inside the car on July 29, when her son-in-law appeared from nowhere and lunged at the car as she prepared to drive her daughter and grandsons to a refuge.

In the panic, the car's central locking was de-activated, allowing Hasanovic to reach into the back seat, where his wife was sitting between the boys, and drag her from the car.

"I just remember trying to start the car and the alarm went off and I could not get the car started … I could see a figure coming towards me in the shade …" Mrs De Souza said.

"I looked up again and he was staring towards me. I just thought: 'Oh, my God."'

Mrs De Souza said that she then got out of the car and desperately tried to call police on her mobile phone, but her hands were shaking uncontrollably.

She then saw Hasanovic drag her daughter from the car, leaving her face down on the pavement.

"She was lying on the ground. Her eyes were open and she was not moving at all.

"I didn't realise she was dead. I said: 'Come on, hold on, you're going to be OK.' I could see the blood [but] I could not take it in and I remember hearing the boys screaming."

Bryant Finally calls for urgent changes to family law

Judge calls for urgent changes to family law

Adele Horin

May 2, 2009

NEW provisions in the Family Law Act may be dissuading women from raising allegations of family violence and should be removed, the Chief Justice of the Family Court, Diana Bryant, has said.

She has written to the Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, about her concerns and suggested "urgent consideration" be given to repealing parts of the act.

Of particular concern is a section dealing with the awarding of costs against the party that maliciously raises untrue allegations of violence or makes untrue denials. It is widely and wrongly interpreted in the community to mean that costs will be awarded against the party if they cannot prove the act complained of actually occurred.

Because of concerns about this section, people were "rarely" filing the form required under the act to bring allegations of family violence to the attention of the court, the judge said. "I understand the reason is that parties are concerned that they will be ordered to pay costs if they do not prove the allegations of violence. Basically, this section is only relevant in cases where a person makes a malicious allegation that is found to be untrue [and] applies with equal force to false denials."

She has urged the Attorney-General to give urgent consideration to repealing the section because of the "strong" misunderstanding in the community.

She also wants the Attorney-General to review the sections of the act that have promoted the view that parties will be considered "unfriendly" if they raise allegations of violence.

One section, for example, requires the court to consider the "willingness of each child's parents to facilitate and encourage a close and continuing relationship between the child and the other parent".

"It may be the myth that raising allegations of violence will result in a mother being branded unfriendly arises because of these sections," she wrote in answer to questions from the Herald.

Justice Bryant's public intervention comes amid a national campaign by women to highlight the alleged failure of the act to keep children safe from violent and abusive parents.

The Safer Family Law campaign, organised by the journalist and author Barbara Biggs, has 14 videos on YouTube that use actors to tell the Family Court stories of six real-life parents and two children, as well as videos of 10 professionals voicing disquiet about the law's impact on children and three journalists expressing concern about the confidentiality provision of the act. An online petition for reform of the act has garnered about 3000 names.

The campaign will culminate in rallies tomorrow, including one in Sydney at Cook and Phillip Park at 11am.

The sake of the children

May 2, 2009

Divorced and separated fathers get a greater share of child care, but this has not always benefited offspring, writes Adele Horin.

The young man, mingling with family and friends at his 19th birthday party, is so confident and happy it is hard to imagine the frightened, clingy child he once was. It is clear people adore him. His mother had fought like a tigress to see him like this: well-adjusted and well-liked. The father who had sexually abused the boy from a young age had been an antagonist - but not the main one. Her true adversary had been the Family Court, which had ordered the boy to visit the abuser for years after the parents separated. It had decided the mother was a liar and manipulator, and it was only when irrefutable corroborative evidence of the abuse finally came to light that the court did a U-turn and ordered all contact between the boy and his father cease.

"Whatever abuse happened to my son, I knew with a supportive mother and counselling he would have gotten over it," says Katrina*, who is a veterinarian, articulate and measured. "What was really difficult was the court process that turned our life into a nightmare."

It is one of the hardest jobs in Australia to be a Family Court judge trying to determine who is a liar in custody battles that involve allegations of child abuse or domestic violence.

But it is harder to be a parent that has failed to convince a court of the veracity of a child's accusations and be forced by court orders to send him or her, kicking and screaming, on regular visits to the abuser - or else be in contempt.

Critics of the Family Law Act say the ideological pendulum has swung so decisively in favour of children having contact with both parents after divorce that children's safety and psychological wellbeing are compromised. Changes to the law in 1995 and in 2006 have put greater emphasis on the importance of - in effect - the father's presence in children's lives.

But critics say the changes created a catch-22 for many mothers. If they raise issues of domestic violence or child abuse, mothers run the risk of being viewed as an "unfriendly" parent, likely to thwart contact, and inimical to the philosophy that guides the court. Children lose if mothers stay silent about violence or abuse, and may lose if their mothers speak up.

Whatever words are written in law to protect children from harm, too many children end up spending time with violent or abusive fathers, the critics claim.

Dr Lesley Laing, a senior lecturer in the faculty of education and social work at the University of Sydney, recently interviewed 25 women who have tried to protect their children in the family court system. "Police will tell a woman to leave a violent husband. The Department of Community Services says leave him or you lose your kids," Laing says. "But if she does leave and ends up in the Family Court, she's told to get on with him. If she tries to be protective of her children, she puts herself immediately outside the ideology of the court. Our policies are crazy."

For a decade, anecdotes about the plight of these women and children have circulated through women's refuges, women's legal services, and domestic violence and sexual assault counselling services. And a small group of academics including Laing, Professor Freda Briggs, associate professor Dale Bagshaw and Dr Amanda Shea Hart, have continued to collate family law cases, involving abuse or violence, that ended with questionable outcomes for children.

Having examined 20 family court judgments made in the five years after the 1995 amendments, Hart concluded that "dominant and repeated statements [by judges] reflected an assumption that fathers' presence was required for children's future wellbeing and development, in spite of evidence that the fathers had been violent toward the other parent and that some children repeatedly stated that they did not want contact with them".

But, in the absence of large studies, mothers' versions remain contentious. It is never easy to dispute a judge's findings.

Governments have heeded men's voices, complaining of Family Court bias, and the large well-funded research projects that showed a staggering one-third of children never saw their fathers after divorce and many wanted more contact.

But since four-year-old Darcey Freeman's father allegedly threw her from Melbourne's West Gate Bridge in January, to the horror of morning peak-hour crowds, critics of the system have seized the day. The alleged actions of the father, who is due to appear on murder charges this month, sparked a call from the federal Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, that there be a review into how the family was treated by the judicial system.

A national campaign to highlight the dangers children face under the family law will culminate tomorrow in rallies across the nation. The Sydney gathering is planned for 11am at Cook and Phillip Park. The Safer Family Law campaign is led by Sydney journalist Barbara Biggs, the author of In Moral Danger, which is about her experience of child sexual abuse.

The campaign involves 14 videos on YouTube that use actors to portray six parents unable to tell their stories because of Family Court confidentiality provisions. Another video uses young actors to tell the stories of two children sent on court-ordered access visits to abusive parents; 10 professionals appear in other videos; and three journalists speak about the problems of the court's secrecy provisions.

An online petition calling on the Federal Government to amend the law to better protect children has garnered about 3000 names. It calls on Australia to follow New Zealand where the onus has been shifted to violent parents having to prove they are safe before custody or access is considered. "Since my book was published in 2003, I've had 2000 emails, some of them harrowing Family Court stories of how children were taken from mothers who were trying to protect them," Biggs says. "They thought I could help."

She says many mothers are in a bind - either lacking corroborating evidence of the violence or sexual abuse, or liable to be labelled "alienating, hysterical or neurotic" if they take their children to psychologists or sexual assault counsellors.

That is what happened to Katrina. When her four-year relationship broke up, she was supportive of her two-year-old son having regular contact with his father. But that changed when her son started to come back "crying and distressed" from visits, and told her, in the vernacular of a preschooler, what had happened to him in his father's house. Then he started to refuse to go on visits. "We as women find it hard to believe, and good men, too - we don't like to think our fathers, brothers, uncles are doing these things," she says. "But I believed my son from the beginning."

Her former partner launched a series of punishing court actions to have contact enforced and then to have full custody. And while Katrina retained custody after a long trial, the court insisted the boy go on contact visits. "My son was told if he didn't go, it would be his fault if I went to jail."

The court experts concluded the boy had concocted the allegations and that Katrina was alienating him from his father. When the boy, at 10, was still refusing to go on visits, police were twice sent to enforce access. On one occasion two police officers met the boy at school and dragged him screaming from his mother's car.

The breakthrough came in the middle of a second trial initiated by the father when the boy was 11. The father, remarried and with a stepdaughter, had been accused by the girl of having sexually abused her. The stepdaughter complained to the police and her complaint, along with affidavits from other relatives, were provided to Katrina and then to the Family Court.

The court imposed a no-contact order, except through emails and letters, and the son has not seen the father since. "But there was no apology," Katrina says.

Since her experience, the 2006 reforms to the Family Court Act have included a number of provisions to protect women and children. The presumptions of shared parental responsibility and consideration of children having to spend equal or substantial time with both parents do not apply in cases where there is reasonable grounds to believe family violence has occurred.

However, a widespread perception remains in the community, including among lawyers, that the shared parenting ideology trumps other considerations.

Vera* says her husband was in jail for attempted murder after having stabbed her 31 times when she left him. She has been advised recently by two separate solicitors not to approach the Family Court for an order to prohibit contact between the father and her children till they are 18.

From jail the father had launched a court action to force the children to visit him. The mother had won a temporary no-contact order that has lapsed and she wanted to make it permanent. "But I was advised it could backfire on me if I went back to court and he challenged me," she says. "Both lawyers said it would be like opening a Pandora's box."

The Chief Justice of the Family Court, Diana Bryant, denied provisions in the act on family violence were not effective. She said in every case in which violence is alleged the court must weigh up the benefit to the child of having a meaningful relationship with both parents and the need to protect the child. Neither principle was more important. "It is a matter of the evidence and facts in each case."

As well, the standard of evidence required to prove allegations of violence was less than in other jurisdictions. Hearsay and opinion were allowed. "Even so, the violence must be proven to some extent, and at least to the extent that the court can find that there is an unacceptable risk" to the child, she says. "Courts are not entirely evidence-free zones."

Justice Bryant, however, admits many "shibboleths" and "myths" remain in the community about the act. She has urged the Federal Government to consider amendments to sections of the act that have led to misunderstandings and may dissuade women from raising issues of violence and abuse. Among them are sections that have led people to believe costs will be awarded against them if they raise allegations of violence that are later not proven; and that a party will be branded "unfriendly" if they raise allegations of violence.

"I do not fully understand how some of these shibboleths have come about," she says. "However, the fact they have is concerning and, in my view, makes it essential for the Attorney-General to have a close look at whether there should be some amendments to overcome these problems."

*Real names changed as required by the Family Law Act