Source: Radio New Zealand
RNZ / Dan Cook
One of the country’s top judges commissioned work to see how families in custody battles could be screened for domestic violence, but officials shelved it.
Documents released under the Official Information Act (OIA) show principal Family Court Judge Jackie Moran travelled to Sydney to scope out two programmes effectively screening court participants for family violence to help inform judicial decision-making.
It also revealed the court did not know if people experienced such violence.
Domestic violence survivor Laura (real name withheld for legal reasons) said when she told the Family Court about the abuse her ex-partner inflicted on her, she then had to provide evidence.
“That’s the only context in my life when I’ve gone somewhere looking for help and just automatically not been believed or to have things minimised. When that’s your personal safety or that of your child, that’s really confronting.”
After she left her partner, the Family Court found she had been subjected to abuse by her ex – including surveillance and stalking – but declined her application for a protection order.
Laura said she would have benefited from an independent safety risk assessment for domestic violence, and was disappointed work on such a project stopped.
“Anything would have been helpful. My experience was that I had to do it all on my own so any extra tools would have been very helpful.
‘I’m disappointed, because I think that they’re relying on the existing systems – but the question is, are the existing systems working? Are the existing systems evidence based? We still have some of the worst domestic violence statistics in the world. That to me suggests that perhaps something at the front end isn’t working.”
Backbone Collective advocates for survivors of domestic violence and requested a raft of official information about the risk assessment project.
Manager and co-founder Deborah Mackenzie said the response showed Moran had started the work, but it had been shut down at steering committee level in 2023.
“To see that they had interest and appetite from a very powerful stakeholder, the principal Family Court judge, was just incredible – but then to learn that they just decided that it was too hard, too costly, and they just stopped work on it, it really just ripped any sense of hope away.”
A Ministry of Justice presentation included in the OIA response stated they did not know if people coming to the Family Court had experienced family violence.
“It was breathtakingly bad to read that not only did the policy people know what the issues are in the Family Court they were actually looking at remedies similar to what Backbone and others in the sector had been recommending for many years,” Mackenzie said.
Family Court Judge Jackie Moran. Supplied
Moran travelled to Australia to learn more about Lighthouse and DOORS – two programmes that helped identify safety risks for those in the family law system to help inform judges’ decision-making.
A few months later, she received a letter from ministry officials advising the Family Violence Sexual Violence steering committee had decided not to progress work on a risk assessment tool.
“The development of a risk assessment and management system would be a multi-year project requiring significant financial investment and changes to I.T. systems and operational processes,” the letter said.
“To be successful, risk assessment would rely heavily on a specialist workforce to support participants in the risk screening process. The family violence workforce, including psychologists, social workers and programme providers is at capacity and struggling to employ adequate numbers of staff.”
The letter said the Family Violence Sexual Violence team recognised “the benefits of a risk assessment system and will remain engaged with the Lighthouse Project team to track their progress”.
Mackenzie was concerned there was no official screening tool in the Family Court for domestic violence.
“It looks to us, from what we have, that they made the decision at a team meeting, that’s what it looks like and then Judge Moran was informed. What a sad missed opportunity that was.”
She was also concerned that the project was shelved after a report recommending sweeping changes for children’s safety in the judicial system appeared to have been buried.
The report was completed in 2022 but never publicly released, even though officials warned that not releasing it looked like it was being hidden.
Ministry of Justice group manager for commissioning and service improvement Lance Harrison said court staff may identify risk factors informally then refer the participant to a support service that must conduct formal risk assessments.
He said family violence response training was also provided to people working in the courts.
“After reviewing Australian models, the ministry found barriers in the New Zealand context that meant the models would not be suitable, including limited specialist workforce capacity and differences in how cases are managed between court jurisdictions,” Harrison said.
“Additionally, significant financial investment would be required and extensive changes to systems and processes would be needed to implement a robust risk assessment process when a large work programme was already underway in the Family Court.”
He said the Ministry of Justice was part of a cross-government work programme aimed at eliminating family violence and sexual violence, guided by the Te Aorerekura National Strategy.
Mark Henaghan. University of Auckland
Family law expert and University of Auckland professor Mark Henaghan said having a proven tool to assess court participants’ risk of family violence is crucial.
“It doesn’t surprise me, it more upsets me. I think the Family Court would know that there’s a lot of violence underneath many cases that go through the Family Court and it’s important to be able to pick it up early.”
“That seems a very bureaucratic approach – it could be written to any new system. It’s always going to cost you a bit more, it’s always going to create change.”
Backbone Collective called for the Minister of Justice to fund and champion work to ensure victim-survivors of family violence are offered opportunities to disclose abuse to the Family Court and for those disclosures to be managed by specially trained staff.
University of Auckland associate professor of law Carrie Leonetti said it was incredibly frustrating to learn work on a risk screening tool had stopped.
“It appears that at the end of the day they decided that adopting meaningful screening or meaningful risk assessment was just too hard. My read of the documents is they concluded we’re not trained for this, we’re not resourced for this, we’re not even going to try,” she said.
“The fact that both risk screening and risk assessment are utterly foreign to our family court in cases involving family violence is a gross failure.”
Leonetti is also a professorial lecturer in law at George Washington University’s domestic violence programme.
She said risk screening is the initial step while assessments were more involved and could result in evidence that can be used in court – something she said is lacking for family law in New Zealand.
“The failure to engage in evidence based risk assessment doesn’t just mean our court is flying blind or engaging in a random and arbitrated decision making process, they’re missing risk. They’re labelling as low risk situations that are in fact high risk.”
Moran declined an interview. The Ministry of Justice said she had “nothing to say on the matter”.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
