Violence is ubiquitous. Its diverse forms have destructive consequences and significantly affect the lives of people, families and communities worldwide. Its negative consequences include substance addiction, depression, suicide, school dropout, unemployment and recurrent interpersonal difficulties. Violence affects the lives of millions of people with long-lasting impact. It hampers development and recovery in conflict-ridden countries exacerbating societal divisions, perpetuating poverty, spreading crime and occasionally leading to war.

Global status report on violence prevention 2014

This qualitative study explored the experiences of 22 domestic violence survivors attempting to negotiate safe post-separation parenting arrangements through the Australian family law system. Their allegations of violence put them at odds with a system that values mediated settlements and shared parenting. Skeptical responses, accusations of parental alienation, and pressure to agree to unsafe arrangements exacerbated the effects of post-separation violence. Core themes in the women's narratives of engagement with the family law system-silencing, control, and undermining the mother-child relationship-mirrored domestic violence dynamics, suggesting the concept of secondary victimization as a useful lens for understanding their experiences.

Secondary Victimization: Domestic Violence Survivors Navigating the Family Law System:

Feminism’s achievements regarding violence against women are a key target for the fathers’ rights movement. This article provides an overview of the impact of the fathers’ rights movement on men’s violence against women. It documents the ways in which fathers’ rights groups in Australia have influenced changes in family law, which privilege parental contact over safety, particularly through moves toward a presumption of children’s joint residence. They have attempted to discredit female victims of violence, to wind back the legal protections available to victims and the sanctions imposed on perpetrators, and to undermine services for the victims of men’s violence.

/pdf/fathers-rights-and-the-defense-of-paternal-authority-in-51nnxxnzmv.pdf

“Fathers’ Rights” and the Defense of Paternal Authority in Australia

Public interest in child custody and access has intensified under the guise of gender neutrality and without adequate attention to gender based violence. A study of formal systems’ responses to abuse by intimate partners identified child custody and access as a central issue. Interviews with women revealed that upon leaving abusive partners, women’s work involved the contradictory requirements of preserving the children’s relationships with, yet protecting them from, their fathers. Interviews with service providers and document analysis illustrated how certain practices, policies and ideologies create and sustain these requirements. Findings illustrate that gender analysis and accounting for violence in custody and access practice are necessary to the safety of women and children.

http://www.atira.bc.ca/AdvancingHealthCareWorkshop/IfIKilledYou.pdf

If i killed you, i'd get the kids: Women's survival and protection work with child custody and access in the context of woman abuse

The report is a benchmark study based on data relating to a period prior to the 2006 reforms to the family law system and will be used to assist in evaluating aspects of the reforms. It provides some challenging findings about the frequency of allegations of violence and abuse and the amount of supporting material around those allegations. This Australian Institute of Family Studies research report was commissioned by the Australian Government's Attorney-General's Department as part of its Family Law Violence Strategy.

Allegations of family violence and child abuse in family law children's proceedings: a pre-reform exploratory study

This article examines the production of new narratives of ‘selfish motherhood’ in family law, in the context of disputes about parent-child contact after separation. In the first section, I draw on my empirical research of contact enforcement litigation to tease out the contradictions and gaps between the dominant, or ‘stock’, stories of contact disputes, and some ‘counter’ stories that have emerged from the study. The second part of the article looks at the ways in which recent shared parenting reforms have combined with particular features of the Australian family law system to create a new classification of ‘bad’ parent – the ‘no-contact mother’. The analysis focuses on the constraining effects of this reconstruction upon women who raise concerns about a father’s capacity to care for the children. 1 . INTRODUCTION: A RIGHT OF CONTACT The past several years have seen the emergence of a number of new discourses of parenthood in family law, discourses that centre on ‘an idealized vision of the symmetrical family where power and roles are equal’. In Australia, this has occurred against a backdrop of legislative reforms that established a new regulatory framework for postseparation parenting. The new laws promote the idea of a co-operative parenting project between separated parents, including providing children with a qualified ‘right to know and be cared for’ by both of their parents after separation. In many ways the changes resemble the private law provisions of the Children Act 1989 (UK), and similar proposals have also recently been considered in Canada and Hong Kong. Indeed it has been suggested that there is a ‘contemporary cultural †This article is based on papers presented at the Socio-Legal Studies Association Conference, Bristol, England, 4–6 April 2001, and the International Law and Society Association Conference, Budapest, Hungary, 4–7 July 2001. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Patricia Matthews who spent many hours wading through the files that are canvassed in this article. I would also like to thank Susan Boyd, Richard Collier, Belinda Fehlberg, Reg Graycar, Rae Kaspiew, Jenny Morgan and John Dewar for their helpful comments on an earlier version. *Faculty of Law, University of Melbourne, Australia.  Oxford University Press 2002

The ‘No Contact Mother’: Reconstructions of Motherhood in the Era of the ‘New Father’

This article describes the main findings of a three-year Australian Research Council funded project examining the operation of the Family Law Reform Act 1995 (Cth), which involved interviews with and surveys of judges, lawyers, court and private counselors and mediators as well as various stakeholders in family law reform. The findings suggest that the law's exhortations to shared parenting are not reflected in flexible work arrangements, nor do they map the reality of the caregiving arrangements among the population of separated parents with children. In particular, the research found that some of the changes made to the statutory scheme resulted in a positive failure to protect the welfare of children adequately. The research suggested that: new concepts and orders introduced into the Act provided greater scope for harassment of the primary carer or resident parent by the non-resident parent; shared residence arrangements were sometimes made for questionable motives, such as reduction of child support liabilities; and that many women felt coerced into 'consenting' to unsafe contact orders, where there was a risk of violence from the father. A significant finding was the large increase in often non-meritorious applications brought by non-resident parents alleging breach of contact orders.

The Family Law Reform Act 1995: The First Three Years

This article looks at the outcomes of recent custody law reform inquiries in Canada and Australia, and examines the ways in which the reform processes in each country dealt with the claims of the various stakeholders and the emerging empirical research on post-separation parenting. Although the outcomes of the two processes were significantly different - one espousing a belief that 'no one size fits all families', the other promoting different approaches for differently situated families with a preference for shared parenting - it is argued that both reflect the moderating influence of the empirical evidence on the claims made by disaffected consumers of the family law system, a characteristic that distinguishes them from Australia's 1995 custody reform process.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm?abstractid=1412941

Reforming Custody Laws: A Comparative Study

/pdf/reforming-custody-laws-a-comparative-study-37azui1re2.pdf

In recent years the UK government has increasingly promoted the use of mediation in family law matters, particularly in cases involving children, and there has been continuing debate about whether ...

Mandatory mediation of family disputes: reflections from Australia

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

Helen Rhoades

Author Tools

Chat about Author

Papers

The ‘No Contact Mother’: Reconstructions of Motherhood in the Era of the ‘New Father’

The Family Law Reform Act 1995: The First Three Years

Reforming Custody Laws: A Comparative Study

Reforming Custody Laws: A Comparative Study

Mandatory mediation of family disputes: reflections from Australia