Source document: https://docs-lawep.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/1697634878244.pdf (Australia)
Dr Heather Nancarrow, CEO, ANROWS & Michele Robinson, Director, Evidence to Action Parliamentary Hearing Notes 1 Parliamentary inquiry into a better family law system to support and protect those affected by family violenceSubmission 73 - Supplementary Submission I acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional owners of the land on which we meet.

I pay my deepest respects to the spirits of their ancestors and to their elders past, present and future.
I would like to thank the Committee for the opportunity to assist its inquiry.

My colleague and I wish to emphasise three aspects of our submission.

First, I will explain why we focus on violence against women.
Second, I will expand on the distinction between coercive control and fights, and third, Michele will emphasise ANROWS’s research, led by Dr Rae Kaspiew from the Australian Institute of Family Studies to illustrate the current limitations of the family law system in relation to domestic and family violence.

Further research commissioned by ANROWS from the recently published PATRICIA project led by Professor Cathy Humphreys from the University of Melbourne, demonstrates the need for a coordinated approach.
Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS).

 ANROWS was established under the First Action Plan of the National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children 2010-2022: Building a strong foundation.

 ANROWS is an independent not-for-profit company limited by guarantee.

 It is primarily funded by the Commonwealth and all state and territory governments through a core grant.

 The Company members are the Commonwealth and the states and territories of Australia.
 The role of ANROWS is to produce and disseminate evidence to guide policy and practice in support of the objectives of the National Plan.

 ANROWS has three cores intersecting functions: o Knowledge production o Knowledge translation and exchange; and o Leadership.

Its work is relevant to all 6 national outcomes of the National Plan: 1.

Communities are free and safe from violence 2.

Relationships are respectful 3.

Indigenous communities are strengthened 4.


Services meet the needs of women and their children experiencing violence 5.

Justice responses are effective 6.

Perpetrators are held to account and stop their violence.

 The first task for ANROWS was to establish a National Research Agenda to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children.
 The National Research Agenda provides four strategic research themes mapped against the National Plan and reflects priorities for knowledge production for the next 3-5 years, as identified by the field.

 In addition to producing evidence under this Agenda, ANROWS also monitors and distributes evidence produced by others relevant to the National Research Agenda.
Parliamentary inquiry into a better family law system to support and protect those affected by family violenceSubmission 73 - Supplementary Submission  Further information about the Agenda can be found on the ANROWS website.

Why do we focus on violence against women?

In general, men more often experience violence than women.
 ABS 2012 Personal Safety Survey reveals: o 1/2 of Australian men, compared to 1/3 Australian women, has experienced violence since age of 15. o Regardless of the gender of victims of violence, the perpetrator is most often a man.

 There are important differences in the nature of violence against women and violence against men.

 Men most often experience violence in a public place.

 Women most often experience violence in their home.
o Men are most likely to experience violence perpetrated by a man who is not known to them.

o Women are most likely to experience violence perpetrated by a man who is their current or former partner; or another family member.

o IPV & sexual violence are the most prevalent and pervasive types of violence against women in Australia.

The Personal Safety Survey also reveals that in Australia: o 1 in 6 women, compared to 1 in 19 men, has experienced physical or sexual violence by a current or former partner.
 Before proceeding further, I would like to say a few words about terminology.

Here I have used the words “intimate partner violence”, which is more precise than family violence, since the Inquiry is focussed on matters predominantly related to separating couples.

  It is also important to be more precise in the way that the violence itself is described: that is, the need to distinguish between coercive control and fights.
In his book, Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life, Evan Stark argues that it is not violence per se, but the assault on autonomy, liberty and equality that makes intimate partner violence particularly insidious and distinguishes men’s and women’s violence in intimate partner relationships.

 A defining feature of IPV against women is that it is often motivated by a desire for general control over the life of a woman (an attack on her autonomy).
 Strategies to achieve this may include: o physical, sexual, verbal and/or emotional abuse; o stalking, deprivation of liberty, intimidation and harassment.

 Coercive control does not fit easily into legal frameworks.

 It has however, been incorporated into definitions of domestic or family violence in several jurisdictions, including the Commonwealth Family Law Act 1975.
2 Parliamentary inquiry into a better family law system to support and protect those affected by family violenceSubmission 73 - Supplementary Submission  Importantly, the FLA includes the concept of coercive control as an overarching context in its definition of family violence, rather than simply one of a list of behaviours.

 However, we are not aware of any available evidence on the way this definition is being interpreted and applied in the Family Court.
 Further, we are concerned that the Family Violence Best Practice Principles on the Family Court of Australia website cites the typology of violence developed by Kelly and Johnson (2008) without any reference to the critiques of that typology.

 There are two major concerns with the typology that we draw to your attention.

1.
1.

The typology is premised on actual physical violence, while coercive control may be achieved through non-physical abuse, such as threats, intimidation, and psychological manipulation, or mind games.

The absence of actual physical violence does not necessarily make coercive control less frightening, harmful or ultimately lethal.

2.

Of particular concern in the context of the Family Court is the notion of Separation instigated violence.
The Best Practice Principles describe this type of violence as being “instigated by the separation where there was no history of violence in the relationship or in other contexts”.

 The absence of a history of violence does not mean the absence of violence.

A history of physical violence may not have been reported prior to separation, and a history of non- physical abuse, alone, is even less likely to have been reported.
 Johnson, himself, commented on the difficulty associated with the “separation-instigated violence” category, noting it could be coercive control (which he originally called “intimate partner terrorism”, perpetrated almost exclusively by men against women) or it could be situational couple violence (or fights).

 Thus a misrepresentation of this category could put women and their children at increased risk of violence, including homicide.
 On the other hand, Flood (2003) illustrated how men re-name their own experiences of verbal conflict, name-calling, and stereotypically feminine ‘nagging’ as ‘verbal and emotional abuse’ and this Wangmann (2009, 2010) illustrates how this has resulted in manipulation of state domestic violence law to undermine counter-claims of women seeking protection orders.
 The point is the commencement of the violence is irrelevant; it is the nature and intent of the violence that is critical and getting this wrong could be fatal.

 This highlights the importance of specialised expertise at the earliest possible opportunity in the Family Law System.

 Typologies of violence is an emerging field and even specialised domestic and family violence workers require specific training in this area.
 To this end we endorse the Women’s Legal Services Australia “Safety First in Family Law” 5 Step Safety Plan and refer specifically to step 5a – the establishment of a national accreditation ad monitoring scheme with mandatory training for all practitioners who prepare family reports.
 ANROWS funded research led by Dr Rae Kaspiew from the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) using a mixed method approach: 3 Parliamentary inquiry into a better family law system to support and protect those affected by family violenceSubmission 73 - Supplementary Submission  analysed large-scale datasets, including two complementary datasets of over 16,000 separated parents; and  conducted in-depth interviews with 50 women across Australia who have personal experiences of family violence and engaged with government and community services, including domestic violence, child protection and family law services.
47 separated 46/50 no longer live with perpetrator.

 For the purposes of our evidence to this Inquiry we focus on the results of the in- depth interviews from the research, with women who had:  Experienced pre-separation severe domestic and family violence (control and coercion 37/50; 10 women experienced threats to kill or attempts to kill)  Between them, 142 children– mothers reported most had experienced some form of abuse directly, including witnessing family violence.
 Ongoing contact with the abusive partner after separation: 54% women (27 mothers with one or more children who live with or have substantial overnight time with father.

 Key findings fall into four key areas: 1) Impact of domestic and family violence on parenting; 2) Adverse consequences for children; 3) Significant limitations of the family law sector to address needs of parents and children against a background of family violence; and 4) Systems abuse 1.
Impact of domestic and family violence on parenting.
 Women’s physical and emotional capacity to care for children was diminished;  Confidence in mothering undermined;  Mother’s focus – protect children from child abuse and domestic and family violence exposure; and compensate for the deficits in other parents parenting or the abuse children had experienced through domestic and family violence;  High levels of stress and anxiety requiring therapeutic support;  Financial abuse and consequent financial hardship;   fathers were directly abusive to children, and inattentive and inconsistent in their fathering; fathers were manipulative, with the effect of undermining mother- child relationships, used controlling tactics, denigrating of women in general an abusive to mothers in particular, which resulted in some children mirroring and adopting similar attitudes towards their mothers.
 Domestic and family violence continued or escalated for at least two-thirds of the women and their children following separation (increased financial abuse: 17/50 before compared with 30/50 after).

2.
Adverse consequences for children 4 Parliamentary inquiry into a better family law system to support and protect those affected by family violenceSubmission 73 - Supplementary Submission  Co-occurrence of domestic and family violence and child abuse – 45/50 women reported one or more direct child abuse, child witnessing domestic and family violence and or direct domestic and family violence by perpetrator;  Many children who spent time with their fathers after separation continued to experience stress/anxiety as a result of previous or continued exposure to the father’s abusive behaviour;  Adverse consequences for children include anxiety, sleep problems, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, behavioural and social problems and difficulties at school.
3.

Significant limitations of the family law sector to address needs of parents and children against a background of family violence.

 Key limitations in the family law system identified in the interviews include: o a lack of family violence expertise o disjointed service delivery; and o an emphasis on shared parenting after separation, which meant that ongoing relationships with fathers were sometimes emphasised at the expense of protection from harm, exposure to family violence, and child abuse.

4.
4.

Systems abuse  A significant proportion of women also faced circumstances in which various services and agencies, including child protection and family law, were being used by their ex-partners to perpetuate systems abuse and financial abuse.
 Examples of systems abuse (29/50) include: o Exploitation of the intersections/inconsistencies between family law, child protection, and criminal legal systems; o raising counter-allegations and unjustifiable applications in family law, parenting processes (including mediation) or protection orders; o abuse perpetrated through post separation parenting arrangements o manipulative engagement or non-engagement with family law services to exhaust personal and financial resources of women, including legal aid and; o non-compliance with court orders and child support; o exhausting women’s legal and financial resources; and o using civil law processes to cross-examine women when fathers acted as self-represented litigants.
(Kaspiew et al, 2017) 5 Parliamentary inquiry into a better family law system to support and protect those affected by family violenceSubmission 73 - Supplementary Submission A Collaborative or integrated approach A systemic approach to protecting the best interests of the child depends on effective operation and interaction between three components: the domestic and family violence service sector; the statutory child protection system; and the family law system.
The PATRICIA project, commissioned by ANROWS and led by Professor Cathy Humphreys, illustrates through five case studies and case reading projects that the links to the family law arena (family relationship centres, family assessments, dispute resolution processes, Federal Circuit Court, family law court) were “disturbingly absent from the collaborations between domestic and family violence and child protection services” (Humphreys and Healey 2017).
Policy and practice recommendations from the PATRICIA research highlight that: o there is a need for high risk assessment/referral teams with policies that ensure that more effective protocols are developed and have positive impact on the family court arena and mitigate post separation child abuse; and o practitioners across sectors should be trained and supervised to document the impact on children of living with fathers who use violence to ensure that evidence is available to support continued protection of children.
Concluding comments This evidence from both Kaspiew et,al 2017 and Humphreys and Healy 2017 underscores the urgent need for responses to family violence in the family law system that recognise:  domestic and family violence informed responses in the family law system;    the detrimental impacts of domestic and family violence on parenting; the need to restore parenting capacity and repair parent–child relationships; individualised and nuanced assessment of children’s needs and the capacity of each parent to meet those needs, instead of a presumption of shared responsibility;  an integrated collaborative practice framework with domestic and family violence services and child protection; and  the role of the Family Court to make appropriate referrals to family violence perpetrator interventions.
These responses must be informed by substantial expertise in relation to domestic and family violence, including: a) a deep understanding of the characteristics and gendered nature of coercive control (almost exclusively perpetrated by men) versus fights (characteristic of women’s use of violence and some men); and b) the way in which tactics of coercive control extend to the manipulation of systems to perpetuate ongoing abuse.

References Flood, M. (2003).


Deconstructing the culture of sexual assault: Violence prevention education among men.

Conference paper presented at Practice and prevention: Contemporary issues in adult sexual assault in New South Wales.

University of Technology Sydney.

6 Parliamentary inquiry into a better family law system to support and protect those affected by family violenceSubmission 73 - Supplementary Submission Humphreys, C., & Healey, L. (2017).
PAThways and Research Into Collaborative Inter- Agency practice: Collaborative work across the child protection and specialist domestic and family violence interface: Final report (ANROWS Horizons 03/2017).

Sydney: ANROWS.

Johnson, M. P. (2008).

A typology of violence: Intimate terrorism, violent resistance, and situational couple violence.

Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England.

Kelly, J.

B., & Johnson, M. P. (2008).


Differentiation among types of intimate partner violence: Research update and implications for interventions.

Family Court Review, 46(3), 476-499. doi:10.1111/j.1744-1617.2008.00215.x Kaspiew, R., Horsfall, B., Qu, L., Nicholson, J. M., Humphreys, C., Diemer, K., … Dunstan, J.

(2017).

Domestic and family violence and parenting: Mixed method insights into impact and support needs: Final report (ANROWS Horizons 04/2017).

Sydney: ANROWS.

Wangmann, J.

(2009).


'She said...' 'he said...': Cross applications in NSW apprehended domestic violence order proceedings.

(Unpublished doctoral dissertation: Faculty of Law), University of Sydney, New South Wales.

Wangmann, J.

(2010).

Gender and intimate partner violence: A case study from New South Wales.

UNSW Law Journal, 33(3), 945-969.


7 Parliamentary inquiry into a better family law system to support and protect those affected by family violenceSubmission 73 - Supplementary Submission