22/07/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/14cDmv2e3cp/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Content warning: family court, removal of children, child sexual abuse, domestic and family violence, trauma.
Our doctors sit with women and children who are trapped in the family court system. What they describe is not justice. It is a second site of harm.
They describe paying hundreds of dollars an hour to see their own children under supervision. Selling everything and losing their home to keep fighting. Losing income because the system demands so much of their time and mental capacity that maintaining work becomes impossible. Being on the verge of homelessness, or moving back in with their parents because they have nothing left. Having their counselling records subpoenaed. Seeking help for their trauma, only to have that help-seeking turned into evidence of their instability. And being unable to speak publicly at all, because anything a mother puts on the record can be used to argue she is unfit.
Doctors Against Violence Towards Women exists because we see the impacts of violence and the system failures that compound it, and we are committed to using our voice to help effect change.
Recently, ABC News reported on a mother who disclosed serious domestic violence, was labelled a "difficult witness," and lost custody of the children she had raised since birth. The children's father had lived overseas, missing the first 20 months of his son's life. His daughter, born after proceedings began, had met him once. Both children are neurodivergent and need additional support. Her children were four and seven. The court gave their mother just over four hours to hand them over and forbade her from seeing them again until they turned 18. Child services itself found the father "may struggle with managing parenting," specifically because he had no relationship with his daughter and his son had high needs. She woke crying for her mother for weeks. It took 10 months of both parents working together to have the orders withdrawn. The father himself said the judgment was wrong and returned them.
This is one example of a pattern of systemic failure and systems abuse in the family court that is having catastrophic impacts on women and children, and despite growing awareness, these injustices are still occurring. Women are told not to report abuse because it will jeopardise their case. Children who disclose their father's abuse are routinely disbelieved and told they have been influenced by their mothers. Mothers are blamed when their children do not want to see their father and labelled mentally ill or "alienators." Safe parents exhibiting protective behaviour are being punished. Judges are ordering children not to see their mothers, not to see their therapists, and to live with someone they are afraid of.
A 2021 analysis of 521 Family Court judgments found that in fully contested cases involving child sexual abuse allegations, judicial officers expressed belief the allegations were true in just 14 per cent of cases. Researchers working with the National Centre for Action on Child Sexual Abuse describe this as the reverse of what the evidence tells us about disclosure. The research confirms what our doctors are hearing in their consulting rooms.
Read the ABC's full report: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-17/alleged-dv-victim-loses-custody-of-children-in-family-court/106826526
Here is what we know clinically. Follow the trauma from the beginning. First there is the violence itself, years of living in fear inside your own home, surviving a perpetrator while protecting your children. Then there is leaving, which we know is one of the most dangerous times. But for women with children, leaving does not mean it is over. The family court system requires them to remain entangled with their perpetrator for years. At a time when she needs to focus on recovery and finding safety, the system places her in years of litigation, cross-examination about the worst moments of her life, and the constant threat of losing her children. That would dysregulate anyone. No mother strapping her children into a police car is going to present as calm and coherent. Trauma changes how people present. A victim-survivor who is fragmented, distressed, or "difficult" in the witness box is showing the neurobiology of everything that has been done to her, not unreliability.
Composure is not credibility.
This is the cruelest loop in the system: the perpetrator traumatises her, the court process traumatises her again, and then the court reads her trauma as evidence against her. The more she has survived, the less credible she appears.
And when the orders come down, the trauma does not stop with her. It passes to her children. Abruptly severing a child's primary attachment relationship is not a neutral administrative outcome. It is a clinically recognised harm. This is a system that retraumatises a mother, then goes on to traumatise her children. The very children it exists to protect.
If you are living this right now, we see you. You are not alone. The exhaustion, the fear of your own words, the feeling that telling the truth could or has made everything worse, these are experiences shared by thousands of women across this country. The system is failing you. You are not failing your children.
The national policy response is not keeping up. Legislative reforms have been made. The court has introduced risk screening and specialist lists. But the numbers are moving in the wrong direction: the proportion of parenting cases involving allegations of family violence has risen from 80 to 86 per cent in four years, cases involving allegations of child abuse have risen from 70 to 77 per cent, and cases alleging four or more risk factors have increased from 66 to 73 per cent.
The Australian Government's Second Action Plan on domestic, family and sexual violence, the plan that will shape the next five years of national policy, proposes five priority areas. The family law system appears only in passing. The consultation paper classifies family law services as part of a "non-specialist workforce" that "may come into contact with victim-survivors," as though the court that determines where children live and who they live with is peripheral to their experience of violence. There is no dedicated analysis of the family court as a site of harm and no commitments to examine, fund, or strengthen how the family law system responds to domestic and family violence.
How can a national plan that claims to deliver a whole-of-system response to ending violence against women and children dedicate pages to online platforms, workplaces, schools and dating apps, but fail to substantively address the family court? This is a system that is retraumatising victim-survivors and forcing women to remain entangled with their perpetrators for years. It is removing children from protective parents. And in cases where the evidence of who is causing harm is overwhelming, it is awarding custody to the parent perpetrating the violence, inflicting harm and trauma on the very women and children the plan exists to protect.
Without the family court, this plan is incomplete.
Women and children are paying the price. It is time to act.
Sources: Webb, Moloney, Smyth & Murphy, 'Allegations of child sexual abuse: An empirical analysis of published judgements from the Family Court of Australia 2012-2019,' Australian Journal of Social Issues, 2021. ABC Specialist Reporting Team, July 2026. DFSV Commission Yearly Report to Parliament, 2025 (Recommendation 27). ANROWS Second Action Plan Consultation Paper, May 2026. National Legal Aid, FCFCOA parenting case data, May 2026.
If this post raises anything for you, support is available:
1800RESPECT: 1800 737 732
DVConnect: 1800 811 811
Full Stop Australia: 1800 424 017
Rainbow DV Helpline: 1800 497 212
13YARN: 13 92 76
MensLine Australia: 1300 789 978
In an emergency, call 000
