The article is about changes to legislation. From the article these include "The proposed broadening of the definition of domestic violence aims to improve the Court's ability to recognise cases where children are at risk with a parent of either gender by 'flagging' those risks."

Turning the issue into a parent gender war distracts from the most important point that children need protection from domestic violence which is

"the use of a variety of tactics over time in the history of a relationship, long before it arrives at the court. Domestic violence does not occur as a "one-off" and so men and women accused of domestic violence that have not been violent over the history of the relationship will have nothing to fear."

Thanks for that info slowenkein.
I totally agree that the madness of family domestic violence rarely starts after separation of parents.

ANY history of ANY kind of proven domestic violence, prior and/or since separation and ensuing custody disputes, should ring alarm bells for family court judges.

If the judges then grant any unsupervised custody of children to a violent parent of either gender, then they have only themselves to blame if the kids come to any harm.

Any new laws should include accountability for judges that make obviously poor decisions re custody arrangements simply because they want to seem politically correct and give 'equal' access to both parents.

Suze

Thank-you for including the word "proven" in your last post. No-one is disputing that people who have definitely hurt kids need to be kept away from them. The issue is the burden of proof. If it is set too low, kids end up with the parent who is the best liar and kids become entangled in this bitter war between feuding parents. If it is placed too high, real allegations are disregarded. Father's groups fought to ensure that allegations needed to be backed up with more evidence, so others simply broadened the definition of domestic violence to include more things and we are back where we started.

Ammonite

Robert was clearly arguing for the retention of a system that is as fair as we can make it and against changing it to unfairly benefit women. It cannot reasonably be argued that he is biased.

Robert wrote “We need safeguards around any increased action based on accusations to ensure that the accuser can't gain tactical advantage from the accusations. Something the maternal bias crowd either dismiss outright or just refuse to acknowledge.
Posted by R0bert, Thursday, 30 June 2011 8:53:08 AM

RObert- the evidence has conclusively illustrated that the problem is not “accusations” by accusers that has led to increased action or advantages for the accuser. To the contrary- accusations have not been taken seriously or heeded. Instead they are minimised to the detriment sometimes where it has resulted in the death of children after a court order relevant to that child has been made. In fact, in 1994 the Australian Law Reform Commission reported that
“[they] received many submissions that evidence of violence against a spouse is often excluded or discounted at different stages of the legal system and that the Family Court often does not give proper weight to the existence and effects of violence.”

In addition, the report detailed information as follows:

9.24 Attitudes of lawyers. Submissions said that in some cases the Court is not made aware of the history of violence or that the woman opposes access because of violence. Lawyers appear to be reluctant to ask the Court to deny access as they believe such an argument would not succeed. Delegates at a recent conference noted a lack of reported Family Court judgments which deal with violence against women.
Reported cases are an important reference for legal practitioners and an increased reporting of judgments which deal with violence would help solicitors to develop a better understanding of the Court's attitude towards it.

The ALRC report also reported a mothers' experience that-
"On many occasions I was virtually being intimidated into allowing access which made me feel guilty and ashamed to stay with my initial decision or to say that I want to deny access.
Solicitors told me I had the right to ask for denial but whenever it became an issue (even before a hearing) I was told it would be impossible, that I should show the judge that I'm doing everything to enable the father access. I was constantly being trapped into agreeing with solicitors. Solicitors informed me that if I did not agree to some form of access the judge would decide and I might not be happy with this decision. . .
. . . Solicitors informed me that if he has sexually abused a child or if he is a mass murderer, then he might be denied access. Death threats meant nothing to solicitors. But for the woman in fear of her life and that of the children, she had to keep going until blood was shed.”

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/alrc/publications/reports/69/vol1/ALRC69.html
I would argue instead the information in this and most other reports demonstrate just how difficult the system has become against either gender when they want to express their fears for their children from harm by other parent. More often but not always, these protective parents are mothers.
In 2009, there were three more dead children after their mothers have tried to raise their fears about the father. I don’t believe that you can seriously claim that the problem is false accusations?? Do you have an objective basis for making your claim? What is your basis for stating that “the maternal bias crowd either dismiss outright or just refuse to acknowledge.” Perhaps you are dismissing the evidence and refusing to acknowledge the evidence.
I am the writer of this article and I am trained to analyse and critique argument. On what objective basis do you make your claim?

happy "I don’t believe that you can seriously claim that the problem is false accusations?"

Why does it have to be all or nothing? More thorough investigation of claims of abuse is essential but without safeguards in place it can easily become a tool to establish patterns of residency etc. The reality is that a lot of the time it's going to be hard to prove abuse or genuine risk (and even harder to prove innocense).

Some obviously want to err so far on the side of caution that any accusation would see the accused treated as guilty, others would want to see the same standards of proof that we'd require to send someone to jail. Neither really works to produce good outcomes when it's about child protection and warring parents.

Whatever we do kid's will be harmed, some mixes reduce that risk but we can never entirely remove it. I do believe the most effective thing we could do at the moment would be to work on taking away the winner takes all approach. In particular property settlements based on child residency at the time of seperation give both parents reason to fight for patterns of child residency that are not about the childrens best interests. There are plenty of other factors but that's one we could do differently.

Reduce the stakes and tension around seperation, child custody, property settlement, child support etc as much as we can. The proposed amendments leave in place all the incentives to fight over child residency, to make false claims, to deny legitimate ones etc whilst seemingly writing open checks for accusers and then expects people to behave better.

Do you really believe that without safeguards in place and increased control when accusations are made people won't be more inclined to make either completely false accusations or highly exagerated ones (especially given the nature of seperation)?

R0bert