Domestic Violence Law Reform and Women’s Experience in Court: Th ...

Feminist Law Reform

Second-wave feminism’s initial activism around domestic violence in Australia focused on the establishment of women’s refuges and the achievement of justice for battered women who had killed violent partners (see, e.g., Genovese, 1997, 2000; Laing, 2000a). Attention also turned to the inadequate policing of domestic violence, although, unlike in the U.S., aggressive criminalization has never formed part of Australian feminist strategies around domestic violence, and mandatory arrest and no-drop policies have never been a feature of the Australian scene. Rather, civil protection orders came to be seen as something of a panacea for the problems of policing, whether by encouraging or bypassing police action.

Protection order regimes were enacted throughout the Australian States and Territories during the 1980s⁵ following a series of taskforces and reports on domestic violence, which noted its high incidence in the community, as evidenced by the high proportion of police time spent on domestic violence calls, the money spent on women’s refuges, the proportion of hospital casualty admissions attributable to domestic violence, and so on (Graycar & Morgan, 1990, p. 277). In Victoria, the relevant legislation was the Crimes (Family Violence) Act (1987).

Concerns about the way in which domestic violence was dealt with (or rather was ignored) in family law cases began to be expressed by academic commentators and women’s advocacy groups in the early 1990s, and by the mid-1990s the Family Court’s appellate case law was beginning to reflect these concerns. The Family Law Reform Act (1995), which came into force in mid-1996, for the first time specified that any history or future risk of family violence affecting a child was to be taken into account in determining the best interests of the child in residence and contact proceedings.