Post-separation Parenting Arrangements Research Articles

Understanding the information experiences of parents involved in negotiating post-separation parenting arrangements

The paper presents findings from a study into the information experiences of people needing to make post-separation parenting arrangements. Data was collected from 20 participants, through in-depth, semi-structured, telephone interviews. Thematic analysis identified five major themes: Following, Immersion, Interpersonal, History and Context which depict the information experiences of the participants. The findings can be used as an evidence base to inform the design and delivery of support and services provided by government agencies and other community groups supporting the legal information needs of individuals and families. The work extends current understandings of information experience as an object of study in the information science discipline.

Practitioner Perspectives on Collaboration across Domestic Violence, Child Protection, and Family Law: Who's Minding the Gap?

ABSTRACTAustralia has two legal systems that address safety where children have been exposed to domestic violence: the state- and territory-based statutory child protection systems and the federal family law system. Numerous reports and recommendations have attempted to address the jurisdictional gap between the state and territory systems of public law and the federal system of private law that result in different approaches, which have implications for survivors of domestic violence attempting to establish safe, post-separation parenting arrangements. This article describes the findings of 5 focus groups with 54 domestic violence, child protection, and family law practitioners in both front-line and managerial positions. These focus groups explored participants’ perspectives on the opportunities for, and barriers to, collaboration for children’s safety across the three sectors in response to calls for improving service integration. While common ground from which to build collaboration was identified, there were different views about the potential role of child protection services in cases involving the family law system. This indicates the need to build common understandings of the nature and risks to children of post-separation domestic violence.IMPLICATIONSComprehensive responses to children exposed to domestic violence require the collaboration of the child protection, family law, and domestic violence services.Efforts to enhance service integration need to address both cross-jurisdictional legal barriers and to build common understandings of post-separation domestic violence.

Child Participation: Overcoming Disparity between New Zealand’s Family Court and Out-of-court Dispute Resolution Processes

This article considers children’s right to participate in the context of private law disputes concerning their post-separation, day-to-day care and contact arrangements. In New Zealand the approach to ascertaining children’s views has been both long-standing and systematic for contested proceedings within the Family Court (via children’s legal representatives and judicial meetings with children). However, major reform of the family justice system in 2014 shifted the emphasis to new out-of-court processes for resolving post-separation parenting arrangements. The reforms were disappointingly silent on the issue of children’s participation in the new Family Dispute Resolution services, particularly mediation. A disparity has thus arisen between opportunities for children’s engagement in New Zealand’s in-court and out-of-court dispute resolution processes. Research evidence and international developments in Australia and England and Wales are reviewed for the guidance they can offer in remedying this in New Zealand and elsewhere.

Secondary Victimization: Domestic Violence Survivors Navigating the Family Law System.

This qualitative study explored the experiences of 22 domestic violence survivors attempting to negotiate safe post-separation parenting arrangements through the Australian family law system. Their allegations of violence put them at odds with a system that values mediated settlements and shared parenting. Skeptical responses, accusations of parental alienation, and pressure to agree to unsafe arrangements exacerbated the effects of post-separation violence. Core themes in the women's narratives of engagement with the family law system-silencing, control, and undermining the mother-child relationship-mirrored domestic violence dynamics, suggesting the concept of secondary victimization as a useful lens for understanding their experiences.

Social Science or 'Lego Science'? Presumptions, Politics, Parenting and the New Family Law

This article argues that the introduction of a presumption that equal shared parental responsibility is in the best interests of children into the Family Law Act in 2006 has contributed to inappropriate, and even damaging, post-separation parenting arrangements for some children. The author suggests that the presumption and its legislative link to equal and substantially shared care time orders have created a 'lego-science' that shared parenting is almost always good for children, but this lego-science is a pseudo science which is not consistent with the complex reported social science about shared parenting. The foundation of the lego-science is the presumption, but expressions like 'meaningful relationships' contained in other sections build a legislative or 'lego-bridge' to the time provisions. This lego-bridge has been reinforced by the case law. This article argues that a presumption was an inappropriate legal tool to use in the discretionary culture of family law decision-making because it encourages a 'one size fits all' approach. Further, presumptions are legal fictions that become dangerous when believed. The fact that the reforms were driven by fathers' rights groups provided a charged socio-political climate in which legal fictions were more likely to acquire the aura of truth. It also seems that the safeguards against the application of the presumption and the making of share care time orders were drafted in a manner that has allowed them to be ignored, creating a gap between the apparent legislative intent - to provide exceptions - and how the law actually plays out in the courts and the community - with the safeguards by-passed at times. The article concludes that fundamental reform of the Family Law Act is required again.

Resisting the march towards 50/50 shared residence: rights, welfare and equality in post-separation families

In recent years, a normative model of equal shared parenting post-separation has become firmly entrenched in the minds of some policy makers and legal practitioners. This has been due, in no small part, to the high-profile campaign of fathers' rights groups. In attacking what they perceive as the gender bias inherent within the family justice system, fathers' rights groups have argued vociferously for a presumption in favour of shared residence post-separation, with the child's time being split on a roughly equal 50/50 basis between the mother and the father unless the child's welfare dictates otherwise. Although the Labour government resisted calls to introduce such a presumption into the Children Act 1989, the recent case law of the Court of Appeal on the use of shared residence orders risks pushing us towards a position in which 50/50 shared residence will indeed become entrenched as the normative model for organizing post-separation family life. This article warns strongly against any such shift in post-separation parenting, arguing that greater use of 50/50 shared residence is neither supported by the empirical evidence on children's welfare nor by the vociferous rights-based arguments of disaffected fathers for equality, justice and fairness in determining post-separation parenting arrangements.

Family violence in children’s cases under the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth): Past practice and future challenges

The issue of family violence poses one of the most significant challenges in making post-separation parenting arrangements. Australian Institute of Family Studies research on allegations of family violence in family law children’s proceedings (Moloney et al 2007) has confirmed that under the previous family law framework, the issue of family violence was not dealt with effectively. This article examines the legal context for the report’s findings in Part I and considers how family violence will be dealt with under the new family law system in Part II.

Feckless fathers and monopolizing mothers: Motive, identity, and fundamental truths in the Australian Public Inquiry into Child Custody

This paper presents findings from a discursive analysis of Hansard recordings of the public hearings of the Australian Public Inquiry into Child Custody. Using a synthesis of membership categorization analysis, sequential conversation analysis, and rhetorical analysis, the study shows how two witnesses, and the committee members they interacted with, oriented to a normative requirement to talk in terms of being motivated by children's interests. Building on discursive psychological research into ways that categories-in-talk can imply and infer things about psychological concepts such as motive and identity, this paper shows how motive and identity were a salient participants' concern in a setting where an important social issue was being contested. A contribution is the illumination of several common ideas that formed part of people's sense making about parenting practices and what children purportedly need. Some implications of an uncritical acceptance of these ideas by psychologists, researchers, and people influential in assisting families with post-separation parenting arrangements are suggested.

Changes in patterns of post-separation parenting over time: A brief review

In Australia, there has been considerable interest in recent years in the policy and practical implications of sharing parental care and responsibilities after separation – concepts that have culminated in the Family Law Amendment (Shared Parental Responsibility) Act 2006. While there is now good information on the prevalence, demography and dynamics surrounding different patterns of parenting after separation, not a great deal is known about the extent to which patterns change for individual families over time. This article reviews international and Australian studies that shed light on the stability of post-separation parenting arrangements in relation to shared and sole care. The notion of ‘stability’ is shown to have several dimensions, not all of which are necessarily beneficial to children. The implications ofplacing a greater focus on how post-separation parenting arrangements evolve over time are discussed in the context of child focused dispute resolution and decision-making.