Now, Even the Guardian has Covered the Horrid Murders and Mayhem in the Family Courts!

Finally, Objective Reporting and Research are Happening in the U.K., unlike the U.S., but Obstacles Continue

When approaching Family Court, one is not dealing with a normal judiciary. It is no accident that women and children wither and die, if not are gruesomely murdered, once they enter these “Courts”. Decades of lack of transparency and accountability have created not only an industry that profits from further victimizing victims, but a culture of psychopathic jurists assisting psychopathic killers. Using the “Court” to cover up one’s crimes through abuse of judicial process is the same as a “doctor” setting up a hospital to lure in unsuspecting victims for one’s lust for cruelty. Only these “doctors” are rare, since the judicial system keeps them in check; there is no such outside system to keep the judicial system in check. As a result, courtroom abuse, torture, psychological murder, and physical murder have become commonplace in the secret Family Courts. They escalate and multiply harm in the following manner: if a child needs to stay with a nurturing parent, they take the child away; if a child needs to be kept from a dangerous parent, they imprison the child with that parent; only the good parent is supervised, in order to prevent reports of child abuse; only the innocent parent in incarcerated, in order to prevent reports of judicial abuse. They wield their authority over police and child protection like no other court, so that no one dares defy. Meanwhile, the good parent’s and other witnesses’ wealth, possessions, profession, reputation, and social supports are drained and destroyed, so that no one can fight back and no credible witnesses remain against these predatory “Courts”. This happens to tens of thousands of children per year in the U.S. alone — and the adults who love them — and a thousand children are documented to have been murdered between 2008 and 2024 (without counting the perhaps even greater number of suicides). There should not be an expectation of internal reform; only the Court of Public Opinion can save these innocent lives. Since the U.K. government has forced its Family Courts to open to researchers and reporters, some objective analyses are getting out, and now even the Guardian Editorial Board has picked up on the matter, but challenges remain:

The Guardian View on the Family Courts: The First Principle Must be Safety

The system is entrusted with difficult and sensitive decisions, but more must be done to prevent violent fathers from harming children

3 Oct 2024

The 10th anniversary of the murder of Claire Throssell’s two young sons, Jack and Paul, is a horrifying reminder of the catastrophic consequences that can follow when the family justice system makes mistakes. The serious case review that followed their deaths, in a house fire deliberately started by their father, concluded that the court should have considered suspending the boys’ contact with him. Ms Throssell had left the family home due to domestic violence and had warned that he had told her he could understand why men killed their children.

Case reviews are supposed to be learned from. But a decade later, there is plenty of evidence that poor decisions are still being made when domestic violence victims come before family judges. Last month a convicted rapist, Kristoffer White, was stripped of parental responsibility for his daughter — but only after the child’s mother appealed an earlier ruling that permitted unsupervised contact.

Nineteen children were killed by fathers who were allowed contact with them between 2005 and 2015, in England and Wales. Others have been harmed. A report from the Ministry of Justice in 2020 contained 72 recommendations aimed at tilting the culture of the family court away from a presumption of contact with both parents, towards a greater emphasis on safety. But these have not all been implemented, while legal aid cuts continue to have adverse effects. A domestic abuse perpetrators’ programme abolished in 2022 has yet to be replaced.

More positive recent changes include the inclusion of coercive control in 2021’s domestic abuse act. This was part of a broader shift towards a more holistic understanding of the dynamics of abusive relationships. But it is hard to tell to what extent this is reflected in the courts or the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service — which represents children’s interests in family law cases, and has also faced criticism for past failings.

Nicole Jacobs, the domestic abuse commissioner for England and Wales, is due to lead a study on the way abuse allegations are handled. In July, Sir Andrew McFarlane, the family court’s president, reported that trials in two areas of a new, child centred and less adversarial approach to private law disputes had been “far more successful than even its most ardent supporters would have anticipated”. Another pilot, of family court reporting by the press and legal bloggers, has been extended beyond its initial three locations.

Huge gaps in the published data remain a sticking-point. Case numbers are in the public domain. In 2022 there were 52,204 new private law cases involving children, and 16,384 public law cases where children’s services were involved. But statistics on children’s involvement in proceedings and on the orders made by judges — and how these vary over time and between regions — are lacking. So are many other details that could help inform, and improve, policy and practice in a system entrusted with difficult and highly sensitive decisions. The risks to families in which fathers are domestic abusers, or sex offenders, remain the most serious concerns.

Senior judges have indicated their support for a more open system. But a lack of resources hinders progress. The anonymisation unit that was supposed to enable more judgments to be published does not exist, due to a lack of funding. And this means that no one — not journalists, lawyers, campaigners or the public — can learn from them.

(The original article is published here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/03/the-guardian-view-on-the-family-courts-the-first-principle-must-be-safety.)

Here is another article in the Guardian:

Research by herEthical AI Reveals Attitude of Disbelief and ‘Stereotypical Assumptions’ about Survivors in England and Wales

Family Court Judges Use Victim-Blaming Language in Domestic Abuse Cases, Finds AI Project

Rachel Hall

8 Oct 2024

Judges in the family courts are using victim-blaming and gender-biased language towards domestic abuse survivors, AI analysis of judgments and appeals in England and Wales reveals.

The findings are the result of a project called herEthical AI, which trains computers to identify attitudes among judges that it warns is resulting in the retraumatisation of domestic abuse survivors in the family courts.

Examples found through the research include characterising a woman as a “deeply troubled mother with mental health difficulties unrelated to the father’s behaviour”; referring to an attempted strangling as a possible “prank”; or concluding that it was improbable that an “educated professional” would not speak to anyone else while “inappropriate and wrong” sexual relations were happening.

The idea for the project originated with a campaign called Breaking Bias run by Right to Equality. Charlotte Proudman, its founder and a barrister, said the AI model could “look through the nitty gritty to find patterns of behaviour in the language used” and reveal “stereotypical assumptions” about victims of domestic abuse, as well as a lack of understanding around coercive and controlling behaviour and how trauma impacts memory.

She said the findings underscored the need for greater training on domestic abuse in family court proceedings to help rebuild low levels of public trust in the fairness of the judicial process.

“There’s an attitude of disbelief — victims have reported feeling gaslit, victim-blamed, dismissed in the courtroom setting, some have described being cross examined as equivalent to being raped all over again — which is one of the most harrowing things I have heard. That’s horrendous. The courts are there to protect victims not to make it worse,” she said.

One problem she identified was the “adversarial” system, which can retraumatise survivors of domestic abuse and has a “deterrent effect” on others thinking of coming forward.

HerEthical AI, a startup that brings together academic experts in psychology and machine learning, along with a retired police inspector, plans to publish a journal article with its findings, as well as helping survivors make the case to be tried by a different judge or file complaints against them.

So far, it has used freely available judgments and appeals, but the project is crowdfunding to buy transcripts to better understand what is going on in courts. The cost of a court transcript comes per folio, which consists of 72 words — the cheapest being 80p a folio and going up to £1.91 a folio. This is often out of reach for domestic abuse survivors, who may have taken a financial hit to leave their abuser.

Hazel Sayer, a member of HerEthical AI and a research fellow specialising in gender-based violence at Bournemouth University, said this meant that family courts could be a “secretive environment, lacking accountability and transparency”.

The result, according to Roda Hassan, founder of Riverlight, a nonprofit that provides advocacy services for domestic abuse survivors and is collaborating on the project, was that “at the moment there’s no real way to hold judges and magistrates accountable” for what goes on inside courtrooms, other than through “very expensive and difficult” appeals processes, requiring specialist legal knowledge which many survivors cannot afford.

Riverlight has worked with survivors whose transcripts have included phrases such as “you’re a silly girl” and “you could not have been raped because you were married to him”.

One woman Riverlight is working with is Sarah (not her real name), who was shocked by the attitude of her judge when she tried to claim full custody of her children after leaving an abusive relationship. She had been pushed while pregnant, and had testimony from a GP who saw the bruises as well as recordings of her partner being verbally abusive.

She felt that the judge’s priority was ensuring the children would still have access to their father, even though she was frightened to leave them alone with him. “I was accused of not being child-focused by bringing up the abuse that me and the children suffered,” she recalled, adding that the judge’s attitude was “you need to put it in the past and move on”.

As a result, she said, “my mental health was horrendous, I was having nightmares, I started CBT through the NHS to help me cope”. She added: “I actually doubted myself about whether I should have left because now I have to hand over my children and not be there.”

(The original article is published here: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2024/oct/08/family-court-judges-victim-blaming-language-domestic-abuse-cases-ai-project.)