Part two of a two-part series providing a snapshot of the main findings and discussion from a literature review on specialist approaches to managing sexual assault proceedings.
Central Queensland University
Victims’ experiences with family court specifically in relation to their mental and physical health. Two main themes are presented here:
1) physical and mental health experiences associated with family court proceedings, and
2) parental alienation allegations as a weapon to trap, silence, and pathologise mothers.
Domestic abuse is known to be harmful to victim-survivor mothers’ well-being, and women are disadvantaged by gender-biased systems in England. Less is known, however, about victims’ experiences with family court specifically in relation to their mental and physical health. This study begins to redress that balance.
Re-identifying IPV as torture could serve as a means to raise awareness and educate professionals, including the police, child protection services, and family counselors, to recognize the stakes of abusive relationships and acknowledge the harm of normalized violence.
This article draws on the experiences of 54 women victim-survivors of coercive control in Australia who had experienced legal systems abuse within criminal and civil protection order systems.
An overview of the gender-bias and lack of understanding of the impact of DV in European courts.
Coercive control in the context of domestic and family violence. Focus on Australia.
A brief history of how claims of “parental alienation” have been used to minimize child abuse and domestic violence in the family court system throughout the globe.
Drawing on interviews with children and mothers who have experienced coercive control-based domestic violence, this ground-breaking book sheds light on the impacts of coercive control on children, how it is perpetrators who must be held accountable for those impacts, and how resistance by children and mothers occurs. Resistance happens in everyday life, not just in response to incidents of violence. Breaking free from coercive control is not a one-off event but a sustained battle for safety and recovery in which child and adult survivors need supports and professional interventions that work.