The family courts are complicit in abuse - and the government looks away

How can a government that pledges to halve violence against women and girls ignore the state-sanctioned arm of that violence?

Photo by Dragon White Munthe on Unsplash

Amongst the chatter about Chinese espionage and economic growth, the crises at home fester and grow, without a second glance from politicians.

This week, a damning new report from Loughborough University and the Domestic Abuse Commissioner has laid bare what survivors, campaigners, and we at The Lead have been saying for some time: England and Wales’ family courts aren’t just failing survivors, they are complicit in state-sanctioned abuse.

The study, which examined nearly 300 child-arrangement case files and observed over 100 hearings, found that domestic abuse featured in almost nine in ten (87 per cent) of cases. Yet judges routinely treated it as background noise. In over half of those cases, courts ordered unsupervised overnight contact between children and alleged abusers.

It’s a finding that should horrify anyone who believes the family justice system exists to protect children. Instead, it exposes a culture that prizes “contact at all costs,” even when that contact compromises safety, sanity, or – in the worst cases – lives. If this all sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Less than a year ago, The Lead published Trauma Factories, our investigation into the family court backlog and how it has trapped 100,000 children in limbo. We revealed that women are forced to share parenting with their abusers, lawyers are burning out, and judges are making life-altering decisions under crushing caseloads.

One of the survivors I spoke to was Lucy. She told us how her ex-partner used the courts to maintain control long after she escaped. Yet despite years of coercion and violence, Lucy was ordered to maintain contact arrangements that left her and her child terrified. At one point, the courts even forced Lucy to go no contact with her child, to prove that the child’s wish to be estranged from their father was genuinely theirs — not her influence.

Survivors like Lucy described the courts as a continuation of abuse by the state. Today’s findings confirm that bleak reality.

The report’s authors blame an entrenched “pro-contact” culture: a legal presumption that a child’s best interests always mean maintaining a relationship with both parents, no matter the history of violence or coercion. This ideology runs so deep that evidence of abuse is often dismissed as mere “conflict” or “he said, she said.”

Child abuse is an uncomfortable truth, but it is a national epidemic, so often misunderstood. Here at The Lead, we have repeatedly shown how politicians manipulate rhetoric around child abuse for political gain — spotlighting minority-group grooming gangs while turning away from the fact that young people are far more likely to be abused by a family member in their own home. We have also written extensively about rising misogyny and sexism, culminating in a failure to take women’s concerns seriously. These narratives do not exist in isolation. In the courts system, women who raise legitimate safety concerns are accused of alienating fathers, and children’s fears are minimised as manipulation. The message is chilling: better an unsafe family than no family at all.

There are both moral and political failures here. The government’s Violence Against Women and Girls strategy is meaningless if its own courts undermine it in plain sight. Ministers promise to “halve violence against women” but refuse to touch the tangled-up court system, yet another instrument of abuse for unscrupulous parents intent on control. Politicians rightly scrutinise systemic failures during the grooming gangs era with horror, launching a well-overdue statutory inquiry, yet they turn away from the state-sanctioned abuse endangering thousands of children in their own homes.

This weeks’ report makes one thing clear: the 2020 Harm Panel Review changed little. Despite years of pledges, pilot schemes, and “Pathfinder courts,” nothing fundamental has shifted. The system remains opaque, under-resourced, and allergic to accountability; cases drag on for months; survivors lose everything.

It’s easy to talk about “learning lessons,” but the lessons have been written, reported, and screamed for years. What’s missing is political will, the same political will that can be found when the far right exploits institutional failings and abuse for its own agenda.

The family courts aren’t just overwhelmed, they are complicit. And until the government confronts that truth, every promise to protect women and children is just another state-sanctioned lie.