Everyday business in family courts: why the system must change for domestic abuse survivors

New research from the Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s Office exposes the extent to which domestic abuse is “everyday business” in the family courts – present in nearly 90% of cases. Yet too often, the system still fails to recognise or respond effectively to the realities of abuse, leaving survivors retraumatised and children at ongoing risk. 

This report echoes what survivors, practitioners and our own research repeatedly tells us: the family justice system is used as a way to abuse and leaves many child and adult victims in continued contact with and being harmed by the abusive parent.  

A system not fit for survivors

The Commissioner’s findings mirror our evidence of survivors being told to not “make a fuss,” or that raising abuse could harm their case (report: Don’t Complain).While professionals tell us that their understanding of coercive control, trauma, and post-separation abuse is inconsistent and often inadequate (report: Hit and Miss).  

The Commissioner’s report evidences that over half of the reviewed cases are granted unsupervised overnight contact with an abusive parent, reflecting this lack of understanding – and a “pro-contact” culture that too often prioritises parental rights over child safety. 

The attitudes, values and beliefs of the judiciary and professionals across the Family Justice System can have lifelong impact on child and adult victims – traumatising, silencing, and placing them in dangerous situations. 

There is a critical need for transparency and accountability.  

Training, trauma-awareness and survivor-centred reform

The Domestic Abuse Commissioner rightly calls for systemic change. SafeLives’ work reinforces this, and we support this call for change. It requires lived expertise to be heard, so that it can influence and hold to account the practice, decision making and commissioning of the family justice system and all inter-connecting systems.   

Understanding the dynamics and impacts of abuse is essential for all involved in family court. We know that our specialist training for family lawyers significantly improved legal professionals’ will and skill to recognise coercive control, respond empathetically, and reduce retraumatisation. However, our Hit and Miss report shows that access to such training remains uneven, with many professionals still unclear how to identify and respond to patterns of domestic abuse and coercive control. 

Without consistent, high-quality training that challenges values and belief systems, survivors will continue to be disbelieved, minimised, and engaged with in a way that discourages talking about the abuse.  

Too often the family court system dismisses domestic abuse as ‘historic’, highlighting the misunderstandings of domestic abuse and its longstanding impacts, including post-separation abuse and coercive and controlling behaviour.  

What we are doing to improve the system

To end domestic abuse, the family court system must be reformed to improve the experience of adult and child survivors, prioritising their safety and centring their voices.  

Our part in this includes working closely with Cafcass to challenge and help improve their engagement with and response to domestic abuse victims and perpetrators. This partnership resulted in recognition that we need to work from the inside out and the secondment of two colleagues to identify and embed survivor-informed best practice and ensure that transformation is grounded in lived experience. 

We also deliver specialist training for family lawyers co-designed with survivors and legal experts, to improve recognition of coercive control and strengthen child and survivor focused advocacy. 

These initiatives align with the Commissioner’s call for reform and demonstrate that change is possible – but only if properly committed to, resourced and scaled. 

Next steps

SafeLives supports the Pathfinder pilot currently operating in six family court areas, which shows promising early signs of shorter case durations and better survivor experiences. However, as the Commissioner emphasises, robust monitoring of outcomes for both children and adults is essential, alongside national roll-out. The application of the reporting mechanism set out in the Commissioner’s report is key to understanding if adult and child survivors have better outcomes and experiences under Pathfinder. 

To achieve meaningful change, we urge the Government to: 

• Encourage transparency across the family justice system whilst protecting the privacy and wellbeing of the children it is responsible for keeping safe. 

• Publish the findings from the review into the presumption of parental contact. The pro-contact culture within the family justice system must end when there is domestic abuse. Children are victims in their own right, and their experiences and the impact of this must not be minimised in the name of parental rights. 

• Embed mandatory, trauma-informed domestic abuse training across the family justice system that is co-created and delivered with survivors and the specialist domestic abuse sector 

• Revise the C100 and C1A form; survivors tell us it needs to change and these small changes can make a significant difference to the experience of the family court process. 

• Invest in data, evaluation, and accountability to ensure reforms deliver measurable safety and wellbeing outcomes. For too long, the domestic abuse sector has called for routine data collection on domestic abuse, we hope that this report will encourage the Ministry of Justice to oversee development of this data collection.   

Putting humanity back into the process

Child and adult victims and survivors deserve a family court system that recognises the complexity and lifelong impact of abuse, values their voices, and prioritises their safety above all else. Children should never be left in or put at harm. The Government’s forthcoming VAWG strategy provides a crucial opportunity to act – investing in training, resources, and reform so that families are made safer, sooner.