17/06/2026
Random thought on domestic violence against partners.
It doesn’t have to be physical.
It can be emotional.
It doesn’t have to be just at home.
It can be at court.
False charges. False statements. Refusing to attend. Refusing to collaborate. Attacking inside and outside court. Etc. Hence prolonging the procedures.
In my years of seeing domestic violence against women, one of the precautions I told them is they need resilience to withstand all these.
And the irony?
The syariah court.
Can be the enabler of such abuse.
There is a pattern that researchers, legal practitioners, and clinicians across Australia have now documented extensively. When a victim-survivor of coercive control separates from a perpetrator, the control does not end. It adapts.
One of the most significant and least understood ways it adapts is through the family law system itself.
This is not a fringe observation. Data from the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia indicates that approximately 80 per cent of parenting cases filed involve at least one major risk factor, including family violence. And yet many of the professionals operating within that system are still working from frameworks that were not designed to recognise coercive control as a pattern, and that can be exploited by someone who understands exactly how they work.
Here is what that exploitation looks like in practice, drawn from peer-reviewed Australian and international research.
Research from the University of Queensland interviewed 65 Australian women engaged with the legal system because of intimate partner violence. The women described strategies used by their partners to continue controlling and having access to them after separation through legal processes, including requesting last-minute adjournments and extending mediation time. One woman described her perpetrator explicitly stating in court: "The more I get her into court the better it is for me." The Victorian Parliament's Law Reform Committee documented a Legal Aid client who had attended court 60 times in a single year and remained caught in proceedings for 19 years.
This is not a custody dispute. It is coercive control.
Published research across common law jurisdictions including Australia shows how repeated litigation, economic abuse and false parental alienation claims are used to continue a perpetrator's dominance under the guise of parental involvement. Research consistently identifies that perpetrators' control of family finances during a relationship leaves them better resourced to fund legal disputes post-separation. This financial imbalance means victim-survivors are often unable to afford legal representation while perpetrators use their resources to extend coercive control, deliberately depleting the other party's ability to stabilise, move, and rebuild.
Every adjournment costs money she does not have. Every new application requires a response. The legal process itself becomes the instrument of harm.
Australian Institute of Family Studies research found that two-thirds of women in studies on post-separation abuse reported that perpetrators' tactics to undermine the mother-child relationship had continued or escalated after separation. This includes making reports to child protection services, not out of concern for children, but as a mechanism to maintain contact, surveillance, and legal leverage over the protective parent.
For children, the consequences are direct. Children living in households where a protective parent is under sustained legal and financial pressure experience the instability of that directly. Research documents anxiety, behavioural changes, difficulties at school, and complex trauma responses in children exposed to post-separation coercive control. These are symptoms systems often attribute to a "high conflict" separation rather than to one parent's deliberate, ongoing pattern of harm.
Research interviewing Australian women engaged with the legal system because of intimate partner violence found that women's engagement with legal processes is frequently experienced as an extension of a perpetrator's coercive control rather than a resolution of it. Survivors described attending repeated court dates only to face last-minute adjournments, defending counter-applications they knew to be baseless and designed to exhaust them, and navigating a system that required them to relive their abuse at every step. As one woman in the study described it: the legal process did not feel like access to justice. It felt like one more arena in which the abuse continued.
When a patient presents with anxiety, exhaustion, financial stress, or deteriorating mental health and mentions they are in the middle of family law proceedings, that is a clinical signal. Asking about the relationship history, the pattern of behaviour, and whether she feels safe are clinical questions. They belong in the consultation.
What women going through this need from the health system is to be believed. To have the pattern named, not just the symptoms treated. To be connected to services that understand what post-separation coercive control looks like.
The 750+ doctors in the DAVTW network see this in consulting rooms across Australia. We exist to name what we see, and to make sure the healthcare system is equipped to respond to it.
The form of the control changed. The function did not.
If you or someone you know needs support:
1800RESPECT: 1800 737 732 (24hr)
DVConnect: 1800 811 811 (24hr)
Full Stop Australia: 1800 424 017 (24hr)
Rainbow DV Helpline (LGBTQIA+): 1800 497 212 (24hr)
13YARN: 13 92 76 (24hr, First Nations)
MensLine Australia: 1300 789 978 (24hr)
Emergency: 000
Women's Legal Service in your state provides free specialist DFV legal advice for women navigating family law proceedings.
Sources
- Australian Institute of Family Studies (2023). Coercive Control Literature Review.
- Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia (2021). Media release, November 2021.
- Douglas H (2018). Criminology and Criminal Justice, 18(1), 84-91.
- Parliament of Victoria Law Reform Committee (2008). Inquiry into Vexatious Litigants.
