When Protection Becomes Punishment Family courts must wake up to post-separation abuse

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Every year, thousands of survivors — mostly women, but not exclusively — walk into family courts hoping for safety. Hoping for protection. Hoping someone will listen.

And every year, too many walk out retraumatised, disbelieved, and financially broken.

Not because the abuse didn’t happen.

Not because the evidence wasn’t there.

But because the system still doesn’t understand coercive control — especially how it continues after separation.

It’s time to stop failing families. It’s time to stop punishing protection. It’s time for justice.

1. Family Courts Must Recognise Post-Separation Abuse

Leaving an abuser doesn’t end the abuse. It often intensifies it.

Post-separation, abusers weaponise the system:-

• Using child contact as leverage

• Withholding money or support

• Making threats through solicitors

• Refusing to co-parent or communicate

• Filing repeated legal applications to maintain control

Yet the courts still rely on outdated assumptions:-

• That abuse ends when the relationship ends

• That both parents are equally safe

• That contact with both parents is always best — no matter what

This is dangerous.

Post-separation coercive control is real, it’s damaging, and it must be treated with the same seriousness as physical abuse.

2. Stop the Weaponisation of Contact Orders

Too often, abusers exploit the family court process itself to continue their control.

They don’t want parenting time — they want power.

They use the court to intimidate, delay, and drain their former partner’s time, energy, and finances. Meanwhile, children suffer in the crossfire.

What needs to happen:-

• Stricter gatekeeping to block repeated or vexatious applications

• Child-focused decisions that put safety before ideology

• Consequences for those who weaponise the legal process

This isn’t about “parental rights.” It’s about child protection.

3. Financial Abuse Is a Safeguarding Issue

Family courts still treat financial abuse as a civil matter. It isn’t. It’s a tool of coercive control — and it directly harms children.

• Refusing to pay child maintenance

• Deliberately under-earning to avoid responsibility

• Withholding money as punishment

• Leaving one parent to shoulder every cost of care while the other funds litigation

This is economic sabotage. It’s child neglect by proxy. And it must stop.

Courts must:-

• Treat non-payment of child maintenance as a red flag

• Recognise financial abuse as part of the abuse pattern

• Stop penalising protective parents for lack of contact when no support is being provided

4. Courts Must Be Trauma-Informed

Survivors are expected to remain calm, logical, and legally fluent — while fighting to protect their children from someone who terrified, and continues to terrify them.

But trauma doesn’t present neatly. And abusers often appear composed, charming, and well-prepared.

Judges, barristers, Cafcass officers, and social workers must be trained to recognise:-

• Coercive control and emotional abuse

• Trauma responses (why survivors may appear “emotional” or “disorganised”)

• Gendered patterns of abuse

• The impact of neurodivergence, disability, and complex trauma

Family court should not be another site of abuse.

5. Children Deserve to Be Heard—And Believed

Too often, children’s fears are dismissed. Their voices are silenced under the catch-all term “parental alienation” — even when they’re describing real harm.

We must stop asking why a child doesn’t want contact — and start listening to what they’re saying.

We need:-

• Proper, independent safeguarding assessments

• Age-appropriate, trauma-informed support for children to share their views

• An end to the misuse of “alienation” as a tool to silence abuse allegations

Children don’t reject safe, loving parents. They reject harm.

Change Is Not Optional — It’s Urgent

We cannot keep saying “in the child’s best interests” while ignoring their trauma.

We cannot keep forcing survivors to spend thousands just to keep their children safe.

We cannot pretend family court is neutral when it enables abusers to weaponise the system.

What needs to change?

• Everything that lets coercive control hide behind court orders and legal jargon.

• Everything that punishes survivors for speaking up.

• Everything that leaves children unprotected.

We are not asking for special treatment.

We are demanding safety, accountability, and truth.

Because every child deserves peace.

And every survivor deserves to be heard.

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Deanna Newell Family Law

Advocacy for truth-tellers, survivors, and the children who deserve better