Family law is failing kids

Imagine for a moment that you are going through divorce or separation and you fear that your ex-partner is harming your children.

You seek help from community services who advise you to remove your children from harm’s way, but you are prevented from doing so because your ex-partner has shared custody ordered by the Family Court. You go back to court to review shared parenting, but a lack of evidence results in your ex-partner retaining unsupervised access. Your children remain at risk of ongoing harm. Unfortunately, this scenario is not an isolated case.

That’s why three major inquiries into the ability of the family law system to respond to family violence were conducted by the Australian Institute of Family Studies, Family Law Council and Family Law Reform Professor Richard Chisholm. They concluded that the Family Law Act and its principle of equal shared parenting were unintentionally undermining the legislation’s clear aim to protect children from child abuse, neglect and exposure to domestic violence — via redwolf.newsvine.com