‘Not accountable to anybody’: Commissioner slams Family Court judges over attitudes to women

Some Family Court judges still hold horrendous views about women and believe children should be forcibly removed from parents they want to remain with, says the nation’s domestic violence commissioner.

“There are judges who think that at the moment, and they are not accountable to anybody; there is no way to shift that,” Micaela Cronin, the national commissioner for Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commission, said.

Speaking to this masthead, Cronin said that, while the reform agenda “is shifting the attitudes and culture of ‘the middle’ of the judges who are making these decisions ... but [regarding] the outliers, it’s not. It’s the outliers who do hold some of the horrendous views about women”.

Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commissioner Micaela Cronin said there is no accountability for harmful decisions made by the Family Court.Ben AppletonAs federal MPs, including Allegra Spender, Monique Ryan and Zali Steggall, call for more scrutiny around how the court system can be weaponised, Cronin said examining how the Family Court handles children’s wishes and the impact of its decisions is one her two top priorities. The other is focusing on how to reduce record rates of sexual assault.

Releasing the commission’s 2026 report to parliament on Wednesday, Cronin described the Family Court system as often “another source of harm” (for women and children).

“When people seek protection, accountability and support, the systems around them should help keep them safe. Too often, that is not what is happening,” she said.

Cronin also said claims made to parliament’s inquiry into the relationship between domestic, family and sexual violence and suicide, that women were advised by lawyers not to include family violence or child abuse allegations in court proceedings because it could be seen as an attempt to alienate children from the other parent and manipulate the case, were credible.

Janine Rees, co-founder of the victim-survivor advocacy group the Family Court Accountability Network, said women were being driven to despair by protection orders being overridden by Family Court judges and forced contact being imposed, and that the parliamentary committee must recommend Family Court involvement is considered a risk factor in suicide-death reviews.

“Children are being removed from their mothers when they disclose abuse and domestic violence,” Rees said. “There is just no oversight [of court decisions], nowhere the mums can go when their children are taken. We are pushing for an urgent inquiry.”

Melbourne woman Diana, who cannot be named because her children are on court orders, said she was advised by her barrister not to include any references to family violence or coercive control in her court statements because “the Family Court hears this all the time and won’t believe you”.

“He said ‘you’ve got to take this out, or they will destroy you’,” Diana, who works in the corporate sector, said. She had previously reported it, the other lawyer discovered this and “threw it at me that it was just lying, and I am a liar”.

This, coupled with the terrifying nature of being in court, “absolutely tore me apart”, Diana said, as did being falsely portrayed as an illicit substance user.

That it took years for custody orders to be adjusted allowing her unsupervised access to the children “could have tipped me over the edge ... which it pretty much did – that’s how I ended up not being able to stand up for myself. If you read it, it must be true”.

NSW MP Allegra Spender told this masthead she believes Cronin’s office should be given more powers.

Spender is one of 14 crossbenchers who have written to the prime minister asking for the commission to be made a statutory authority to allow it to compel data, audit spending, and track whether government-funded measures are working.

A spokesperson for the Family Court said it recognises legal processes can be misused “as a means of continuing coercive control, including by imposing financial and psychological harm on another party”.

“Judges and staff are highly trained to identify patterns of systems abuse, and have introduced measures that address systems abuse while preserving procedural fairness and legitimate access to justice,” the statement said.

Spender will write to Attorney-General Michelle Rowland asking her to instigate an independent report on the system “to identify family law abuse”, and said constituents and sector groups had convinced her the government must attend to how the Family Court is used to perpetrate abuse.

The Australian Law Reform Commission’s 2022 recommendation that a federal judicial commission be established as an oversight mechanism, which was committed to by the then attorney-general Mark Dreyfus and would have offered a layer of protection against court abuse, never eventuated.

A paper published earlier this month by Griffith University criminologist, Associate Professor Silke Meyer, in the journal Violence Against Women noted Family Court abuse was being used to inflict long term financial and psychological harm on female victim-survivors as a form of “post-separation coercive control”.

It included interviews with victims of this, and defined how legal systems were being used by perpetrators and stated an “urgent need for systemic reform to recognise and disrupt post-separation coercive control in family law proceedings, ensuring safer and more equitable outcomes for victim-survivors”.

Cronin said that though there were examples of great judges who make sure they listen to children’s voices and victim-survivors’ lived experience, there must be ways developed to tackle instances where this does not happen.

“We need to ensure in systems that children’s voices are heard in other ways throughout the process that they aren’t at the moment,” she said.

The court spokesperson said courts had made significant changes lately and continue to review and strengthen their family violence response and engagement with people with lived experience, specialist services, legal assistance providers, governments, researchers and other stakeholders.

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