The Domestic Violence Triage System

- Australia's Family Court has been taken over. Britain is next.

Twenty-five years ago, a dad from Fathers4Justice decided the best way to draw attention to the anti-male bias in the UK family court system was to put on a Spider-Man costume and dangle on a crane over Tower Bridge for six days. He’d been refused access to his four-year-old daughter. It became national news.

He was part of a small army of British dads who went on to scale Buckingham Palace dressed as Batman, hurl purple flour bombs at Tony Blair, and storm a live BBC lottery show with placards reading “Family Law Lotto, Next Time It Could Be You!”

Bob Geldof joined the cause, speaking out about his own custody fight and his “deep loathing for those who would deign to tell me they would ALLOW me ACCESS to my children – those I loved above all, those I created, those who gave meaning to everything I did, those that were the very best of us two and the absolute physical manifestation of our once blinding love. Who the fuck are they that they should ALLOW anything?”

Yet after two decades of cranes, costumes and Geldof’s fury, no one with actual institutional power ever stood up and said: yes, you’re right, the system is anti-male.

Then last month a women’s legal organisation walked into Parliament and dropped a report claiming — plot twist — that it’s actually mums who’ve been getting steamrolled by the system all along. No crane required. Just a press release and a few MPs nodding along.

The report is advocacy research at its finest. Scratching the Surface: Victim-Blaming and Bias in Family Court Judgments was produced by Right to Equality, a group of feminist legal activists who went looking for evidence that the family court is biased against women — and came back with evidence that the family court is biased against women.

Co-director Dr Charlotte Proudman says the report grew out of her own years at the bar: “As a barrister, I have stood in family courts and watched judges normalise abuse, trivialise trauma and silence survivors.”

Proudman’s right to equality, it turns out, doesn’t extend to male victims, who are entirely absent from this study of 91 published family court judgments — scrutinised, with the help of AI, for evidence of victim-blaming.

Out of the roughly 55,000 private family law cases that ran through English and Welsh courts in 2025 alone, the report’s “evidence” rests on a hand-picked sample of just 91 judgments. 27% were selected because they were already known to contain victim-blaming. Another 23% were cases Dr Proudman personally represented.

And what did this cherry-picked sample turn up? “Widespread and concerning evidence of victim-blaming language and attitudes – often directed towards mothers,” the report concludes. 72.5% (66) of all judgments contained at least one instance of judicial victim‐blaming. Across the 91 judgments, 530 instances of victim-blaming were logged in total — overwhelmingly attributed to judges.

Their classification system was built to detect bias against mothers and nothing else — no category for judicial bias against fathers, no effort to flag genuinely false allegations by mothers identified by a judge. And the execution matched the design: no checks on whether independent coders actually agreed on what counted as “victim-blaming,” no attempt to test whether the findings would hold up under scrutiny. Not even a pretence of rigour. As economics blogger Tim Worstall put it: “Bin it, it’s nonsense.”

The sad truth is, they don’t need rigour. They can walk this into Parliament, get a room full of MPs nodding along, and watch it become the basis for policy. What’s genuinely ominous is where the report’s logic is heading next.

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.”

The Australian family court’s most recent annual report shows 86% of parenting cases now allege family violence, up from 80% in just four years.

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.

And it works a treat. They call it the “silver bullet” — because of how completely it stacks the deck in favour of the alleged victim. Usually, the process is well in hand long before anyone gets near a courtroom: a quick word to police with the right allegations, and dad’s out of the house — sometimes for years, and if he’s lucky, paying through the nose for the privilege of supervised contact just to see his own kids.

By the time it does reach court, the status quo argument finishes the job. The longer dad has been kept at arm’s length, the harder it is for him to claim any real, ongoing relationship with his own children — and mum, having been the one left holding the fort, becomes the court’s obvious choice as full-time carer.

Fathers occasionally play the same card, though with less frequency and generally less effect. And for those seeking maximum impact, there are even more powerful silver bullets available: allegations of sexual assault against the mother, or child sexual abuse — accusations so serious that they can remove a parent from a child’s life almost instantly, sometimes for years, long before anyone has tested whether they’re true.

Amazingly, with violence allegations the system usually doesn’t even bother to test the evidence. The case just winds its way through procedural hearing after procedural hearing, month after month, until it finally lands on verdicts for the parenting and property matters that actually needed deciding. And having done their job — keeping dad out, tilting the status quo, shaping the outcome — the violence allegations simply drop by the wayside, unexamined and unresolved. It’s sickening.

The silver bullet entitlements used to come with a bonus: guaranteed legal aid. But here’s where the constant feminist reengineering of the system turned around and bit them. The sisterhood decided victims shouldn’t have to be cross-examined by their alleged perpetrators, so a law was introduced banning it outright. Trouble is, someone still has to do the cross-examining — which meant funding legal aid lawyers for every self-represented man facing a DV allegation. Then those lawyers needed time to read the brief. Mission creep set in, and with it, runaway cost. The result: a legal aid system now in funding crisis, swamped by accused men suddenly entitled to free representation.

Own goal, ladies. Own goal.

Here you have it — a full-scale takeover of the family court system, achieved over three decades of relentless lobbying, at staggering cost. The Commonwealth has tipped hundreds of millions into DV triage infrastructure and risk-screening bureaucracy that grows every year. All funding a system that processes allegations, most of which are never tested, never resolved, simply left to do their work and quietly dropped. Meanwhile parents’ legal bills burn through savings that should be feeding and housing their children, rich family lawyers retire early, and damaged kids watch it all from the sidelines.

The human cost dwarfs the financial one. Children routinely lose fathers — not because a court found him dangerous, but because the system was designed to make that the path of least resistance. And what of the estranged dads, cut off from their children by allegations that were never tested? Some simply don’t make it. The suicide rate among men going through family court is not a statistic anyone in Parliament seems eager to discuss.

All of this is done, we are told, in the name of keeping children safe. What a joke. The DV capture of the family court hasn’t made Australian children safer. It has made it easier to weaponise trivial, sometimes fabricated allegations to push fathers out of children’s lives — and deliver mothers a bigger slice of the marital cake. That’s not child protection. That’s a system that has been gamed.

And now they’re exporting the model. In October 2025, the UK government announced it would repeal the presumption that children benefit from having both parents involved in their lives after separation — the same presumption Australia scrapped in 2024. The Courts and Tribunals Bill, currently at committee stage in the House of Commons, will remove it entirely. Courts will no longer start from the assumption that contact with both parents is good for a child — every case will be assessed on its own facts, with domestic violence a mandatory first consideration.

Australia did it first. Britain is right behind. And somewhere, a small army of feminists is nodding with satisfaction — no crane required.