The Weaponisation of Courts Against Fathers is a Warning for Britain

We talk endlessly about parental alienation as something one parent does to another — a campaign, waged in the shadow of a family court, usually to turn a child against a father. But there is a bigger, colder version of the same thing happening. It isn’t run by a vindictive ex. It is run by the state, at industrial scale.

Imagine Greater London with more than 100,000 domestic violence orders in force at any given moment — orders capable of cutting a father off from his children immediately, with no trial, no evidence tested and no finding ever made. That’s what’s happening in New South Wales, according to the state’s own Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR). Its population is almost exactly London’s, and 100,000-plus is about how many such orders it currently has in force. Scale that to the whole of the UK and you get something approaching 900,000 orders in force nationwide, if Britain’s system worked at the same rate as the Aussie version.

Britain is already building a version of the same machine under a different name. That’s what makes Australia’s deplorable situation so relevant.

In 1987, NSW issued 1,462 apprehended violence orders. By last year the number was over 52,000 — a rise of more than thirtyfold.  And this explosion happened while physical violence was falling. Government survey data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows the rate for men down from 10% to 6.1% since 2005, for women from 4.7% to 2.9%. Between 2016 and 2022, there was no significant change in physical violence for either sex — while the protection orders kept climbing regardless.

A system expanding this dramatically while violence declines isn’t tracking danger. It’s tracking something else: policy settings and a bureaucracy that keeps growing no matter what’s actually happening in people’s homes.

These orders are based on allegations which are rarely ever tested. Of 44,537 applications in NSW in one recent year, just 609 were dismissed after a defended hearing where evidence was actually examined — roughly one in 70, according to the Local Court of NSW’s own Annual Review. The Court doesn’t publish how many cases went to a defended hearing at all, but anecdotal reports suggest that for the great majority of cases, no one ever tests the evidence.

Most orders are made ‘interim’, before any hearing, and can be granted whether or not the man has even been told about them. One study of Victorian courts, cited by the Australian Law Reform Commission, found the median hearing lasted three minutes. Three minutes, to decide whether a father loses his children.

Where cases aren’t simply uncontested by default, they’re often settled by consent, without the man admitting any of it is true — because fighting costs money, time and the real risk of losing anyway. That decision still carries the full weight of a proven order.

And it rarely has anything to do with physical violence. Of recent court finalisations, barely half involved an actual assault charge, according to BOCSAR. A third involved “intimidation or stalking” — a category that officials themselves admit typically means threats and verbal abuse, nothing more. Of the assault finalisations, roughly one in three ended with no charge proven, either withdrawn or not proven.

Australian law’s definition of domestic violence includes simply “causing a family member to be fearful”, with no requirement that the fear be reasonable. The label is doing enormous, undifferentiated work, covering everything from a punch to a heated argument over money — and the system responds the same way regardless.

That’s the big lie at the heart of this whole stinking shitshow. The authorities know exactly what is going on. They know huge numbers of children are cut off from decent, caring fathers because a system built to catch dangerous men is instead sweeping up men who did nothing more than argue, or raise their voices, or simply get accused. And the bureaucrats and box-tickers who run this circus just look the other way.

The label may often be fiction, but the consequences are not. The moment an order is made, it typically comes with no contact at all — not reduced, not supervised, none. Children are swept in automatically. NSW has a specific provision meant to carve out contact arrangements for children, but it’s attached to barely one in 10 final orders, and almost never at the interim stage, which is the stage that matters most. The family court that might sort all this out takes well over a year to reach trial in ordinary cases, longer still in complex ones. By the time anyone looks, a child may have already lost one to two years with a parent, on the strength of an allegation nobody ever tested — and family courts then treat that enforced absence as evidence the new arrangement is ‘stable’, using it to justify making it permanent. The system creates the absence, then claims it serves the child’s best interests. That isn’t child protection, it’s child abuse. The system is marking its own homework.

Some fathers end up paying for the privilege of merely seeing their own children, in a supervised contact centre, under watch, every word noted down for use against them later. The overwhelming majority of parents stuck in this position are fathers, according to a national evaluation commissioned by the Australian Institute of Family Studies. Most never get a clear path back to normal contact, and nobody even tracks what happens to the families who simply disappear from the system — priced out by fees that can run into tens of thousands of dollars, or worn down by conditions so restrictive that continuing feels pointless.

And if a father pushes back, he can end up behind bars. Nearly half (46%) of all adults in New South Wales prisons are now on remand — legally innocent, awaiting trial, the highest proportion ever recorded, according to BOCSAR’s most recent custody data. Domestic violence offences are the single largest driver of that growth, and one in three people on remand is there over an alleged domestic violence offence. Some of these men are fathers who breached an order simply trying to contact their own children. An order with a no-contact condition, no lawful way back in, and a criminal offence the moment he tries anyway — that’s a machine for turning a father’s love for his children into prison time.

Nobody designed this system to alienate children. But that’s exactly what it’s doing, at scale, every single day.

Fathers in the UK need to take heed of what has happened in Australia and look hard at where their own country is heading. One of the very few Brits sounding the warning is Rick Bradford, who writes under the name William Collins, and has spent years tracking these dire changes on his excellent blog, The Illustrated Empathy Gap. Throwing Children to the Wolves is a good place to start.

This issue deserves far more public scrutiny than it gets. Australia didn’t see this coming until it was already in place. Nobody can say Britain wasn’t warned.

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.