Activists Use ‘Domestic Violence’ to Stack Australia’s Family Courts Against Men – and Britain is Next

Twenty-five years ago, a dad from Fathers4Justice decided the best way to draw attention to the anti-male bias in the UK family court system was to put on a Spider-Man costume and dangle on a crane over Tower Bridge for six days. He’d been refused access to his four year-old daughter. It became national news.

He was part of a small army of British dads who spent decades performing stunts designed to draw attention to the bias in the court. Bob Geldof joined the cause, speaking out about his own custody fight and his “deep loathing for those who would deign to tell me they would allow me access to my children”.

Yet after two decades of cranes, costumes and Geldof’s fury, no one with actual institutional power ever stood up and said: yes, you’re right, the system is anti-male.

Then, last month, a women’s legal organisation walked into Parliament and dropped a report claiming — plot twist — that it’s actually mums who’ve been getting steamrolled by the system all along. No crane required. Just a press release and a few MPs nodding along.

The report is advocacy research at its finest. ‘Scratching the Surface: Victim-Blaming and Bias in Family Court Judgments’ was produced by Right to Equality, a group of feminist legal activists who went looking for evidence that the family court is biased against women — and came back with evidence that the family court is biased against women.

Co-Director Dr Charlotte Proudman claims the report grew out watching judges normalise abuse during her years at the bar. Proudman’s right to equality, it turns out, doesn’t extend to male victims, who are entirely absent from this study of 91 published family court judgments — scrutinised, with the help of AI, for evidence of victim-blaming.

The report’s ‘evidence’ rests on a hand-picked sample of just 91 judgments. 27% were selected because they were already known to contain victim-blaming. Another 23% were cases Dr Proudman personally represented.

And what did this cherry-picked sample turn up? “Widespread and concerning evidence of victim-blaming language and attitudes – often directed towards mothers,” the report concludes. 72.5% (66) of all judgments contained at least one instance of judicial victim‐blaming.

Their classification system was built to detect bias against mothers and nothing else — no category for judicial bias against fathers, no effort to flag genuinely false allegations by mothers identified by a judge. And the execution matched the design: no checks on whether independent coders actually agreed on what counted as ‘victim-blaming’, no attempt to test whether the findings would hold up under scrutiny. Not even a pretence of rigour.

The sad truth is, they don’t need rigour. They can walk this into Parliament, get a room full of MPs nodding along and watch it become the basis for policy. What’s genuinely ominous is where the report’s logic is heading next.

The real story here isn’t the statistics. It’s the intent. A judge finding that a domestic violence allegation was false isn’t treated by Right to Equality as a judge doing his or her job. It’s coded as victim-blaming. Questioning the evidence behind a domestic violence claim is, in itself, the offence — a deliberate move to put domestic violence allegations beyond question.

We’ve already watched this exact move play out in the criminal courts, where rape shield laws have steadily restricted cross-examination of complainants in sexual assault trials. ‘Scratching the Surface’ applies that same principle to a different battleground: domestic violence allegations in family court.

Buried in this feminist report is something genuinely radical: a campaign to redefine due process itself as misconduct. That such a profoundly anti-democratic idea got a respectful hearing in Parliament tells you everything about where this is heading.

It’s a real win for British feminists. But even they must be green with envy looking at what the sisterhood has pulled off in Australia. Thirty years ago, this country led the world on family law reform, built around one simple idea: kids do better with both parents in their lives after divorce. Three decades of feminist lobbying later, that idea has been quietly buried. What’s left isn’t a family court. It’s a domestic violence triage system that occasionally remembers to ask whether the father can see the kids on weekends.

The case that sums up the whole fiasco is Pickford and Pickford.

Two parents. Two kids. A dispute that, stripped to its essence, came down to this: should the children spend four nights a fortnight with their father, or five.

That question took 11 days of trial, spread over 12 months, plus a further appeal to a five-judge Full Court — decided December 20th 2024. The children were nine and seven by the time it was finally resolved. They were five and three when it started.

The trial judge found “family violence” — not from any proven physical incident (the only assault allegation was thrown out by a magistrate and then rejected again at trial), but from the mother’s own subjective sense of feeling coerced and controlled. On that basis, he ruled that even one extra night with their father would put the children at “unacceptable risk”.

The Full Court eventually threw that finding out. Justices Austin and Williams put it in the driest possible terms: “What danger could emerge on the fifth night to threaten the children’s safety which danger would be absent on the previous four nights? The question is incapable of a rational answer.”

Rational answers are in short supply in the family court system right now. The definition of family violence in Australian legislation has exploded – a few cross words, an unpaid bill, a pattern of behaviour that made someone feel controlled — all can now form the basis of a family violence claim.

Which brings us to the astonishing number that tells the whole story. The family court’s most recent annual report shows that 86% of parenting cases now allege family violence, up from 80% in just four years. That means with almost every couple going near the court, someone — most often the mother — is ticking the box claiming to be a domestic violence victim and demanding special treatment.

And it works a treat. They call it the ‘silver bullet’ because of how completely it stacks the deck in favour of the alleged victim. Usually, the process is well in hand long before anyone gets near a courtroom: a quick word to police with the right allegations and dad’s out of the house — sometimes for years, and if he’s lucky, paying through the nose for the privilege of supervised contact just to see his own kids.

By the time it does reach court, the status quo argument finishes the job. The longer dad has been kept at arm’s length, the harder it is for him to claim any real ongoing relationship with his own children — and mum, having been the one left holding the fort, becomes the court’s obvious choice as full-time carer.

Fathers occasionally play the same card, though with less frequency and generally less effect. And for those seeking maximum impact, there are even more powerful silver bullets available: allegations of sexual assault against the mother, or child sexual abuse — accusations so serious that they can remove a parent from a child’s life almost instantly, sometimes for years, long before anyone has tested whether they’re true.

Amazingly, with violence allegations the system usually doesn’t even bother to test the evidence. The case just winds its way through procedural hearing after procedural hearing, until it finally lands on verdicts for the parenting and property matters that actually needed deciding. And having done their job — keeping dad out, tilting the status quo, shaping the outcome — the violence allegations simply drop by the wayside, unexamined and unresolved. It’s sickening.

Here you have it — a full-scale takeover of the family court system, achieved over three decades of relentless lobbying, at staggering cost. Meanwhile parents’ legal bills burn through savings that should be feeding and housing their children, rich family lawyers retire early, and damaged kids watch it all from the sidelines.

All of this is done, we are told, in the name of keeping children safe. What a joke. The domestic violence capture of the family court hasn’t made Australian children safer. It has made it easier to weaponise trivial, sometimes fabricated allegations to push fathers out of children’s lives — and deliver mothers a bigger slice of the marital cake. That’s not child protection. That’s a system that has been gamed.

And now they’re exporting the model. In October 2025, the UK government announced it would repeal the presumption that children benefit from having both parents involved in their lives after separation — the same presumption Australia scrapped in 2024. Every case will be assessed on its own facts, with domestic violence a mandatory first consideration.

Australia did it first. Britain is right behind. And somewhere, a small army of feminists is nodding with satisfaction — no crane required.

As one of Australia’s first sex therapists, Bettina Arndt began her career discussing sex on television and training doctors and other professionals in sexual counselling at a time when such topics were largely taboo. Her current – and even more socially unacceptable – passion is exposing Australia’s unfair treatment of men through the relentless weaponisation of laws and policies that portray women solely as victims. Her decades of advocacy for fair treatment of men in the Family Court included serving on key government inquiries. Bettina makes YouTube videos and blogs on Substack.