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

The form consisted of three parts: a series of standardized questions about the case, the proceedings, and the outcome; a running sheet, on which I recorded all speaking roles in the proceedings, including the status of the speaker, the start and finish time of the speech, and the content of the speech; and demographic questions about the woman involved in the case. The process of observations in each court and statistics from the court observations are described in chapters 3 and 5. The cases observed are referred to by means of code numbers: “M.C.n” for cases in the Magistrates’ Court, and “F.C.n” for cases in the Family Court.

In the Magistrates’ Courts, I also observed domestic violence court support programs in action and spoke informally to magistrates and support workers, taking notes of these interactions. These are referred to as “Field notes.” In the Family Court, I identified cases to be observed by means of an initial review of files. This process and its results are also described in chapter 5.

I conducted interviews with lawyers and support workers to supplement the data gained from court observations and from women litigants. The interviews were semistructured and were conducted face-to-face at a location of the interviewee’s choosing, in accordance with a preprepared interview schedule (see appendix B). I took handwritten notes rather than tape recording during the interviews, as my aim was to gain specific information based on the interviewee’s professional experience rather than to generate a rich source of narrative data that could be used for quotation. I recruited interview subjects on the basis of my knowledge of feminist practitioners working in family law/domestic violence, as well as the practitioners I observed in court, and then by the “snowball” method, as my initial interview subjects recommended others with experience and/or a high profile in the field. My aim was not to recruit a representative sample of domestic violence and family law practitioners in Melbourne, but rather to gain the views of those who had the most experience acting for women with a background of domestic violence in the kinds of proceedings in which I was interested.

In total, I interviewed 18 practitioners: 11 solicitors, 4 barristers, and 3 support workers. Nine of the 11 solicitors were in private practice, while 2 worked in community legal centers. Eight of the 11 had experience in both intervention order applications and family law proceedings. Two had experience only in family law, and 1 had experience only in intervention orders.