Family Court Review Bothe Welcome And Overdue

The announcement by the Justice Minister of a review of the roles and functions of the Family Court both a welcome and overdue , says Steve Taylor, Director, of 24-7 Ltd, a Private Practice Counselling and Mediation organisation.

"The ill-fitting, tattered legal jigsaw that currently exists within the Family Court system is cumbersome, expensive, philosophically counter-intuitive, conflicted, discrimatory, unjust, and simply unsuitable in its attempt to best serve families in crisis - the New Zealand Family Court system is a fractured matrix unfamiliar with the best practice evidence for working with families in a either a legal or best-practice context, and is dominated by a number of poorly performing Lawyers who are either ideologically opposed to, or simply ignorant of such evidence" says Mr Taylor.

The Economic and Social Research Councils commissioned 2010 report "Understanding Society" http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1361166/Living-parents-important-chi lds-happiness-material-wealth.html#ixzz1FHW39S3Z graphically illustrated that children regarded the separation of their parents as a more negative influence upon them than living in poverty.

In the Journal of Child Development http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31086977/ns/health-kids_and_parenting fathers were found to have twice the influence of mothers in reducing risky sexual activity in girls.

The American Psychological Association have now appointed a sub-committee to investigate the growing validity of "Parental Alienation Syndrome" http://www.benzinga.com/pressreleases/10/08/m408660/american-psychiatric-ass ociation-considers-parental-alienation-for-the-d a process that occurs when one partner to a break-up actively undermines the other partner in front of the child. PAS is now being considered for inclusion in the DSM V, which is the diagnostic "bible" for Psychologists and Psychiatrists worldwide.

The latest evidence also reveals that 90% of the Domestic Violence Programmes that inform Family Court opinion and judgments are subjectively based, as opposed to evidence based http://www.saveservices.org/downloads/SAVE-DV-Educational-Programs and a plethora of studies (551 to be exact) have demonstrated the reality that domestic violence is carried out roughly equally between both men and women http://nzfather.wordpress.com/2011/03/22/press-release-time-for-women-to-now -find-their-own-colour-ribbon-to-fight-female-on-male-domestic-violence-says -nz-fathering-network

In the United Kingdom, the President of the Family Law Division, Lord Justice Wall, has highlighted a number of deficiencies in the British Family Court system that are currently being reviewed, including the absence of enforcing Parenting orders; the utterly inappropriate role of the legal adversarial system within most Family Disputes; having different judges hear the same case; poor due diligence by Family Court Lawyers; the likely abolishment of legal aid for Family Court hearings, and the role of compulsory mediation for both parties to a dispute. Sadly, all of these problems exist in the New Zealand Family Court system as well, and attempting to train Lawyers to become non-adversarial is an ambitious nonsense, as a number of my own clients would attest to, given their own negative experiences of Lawyer-led Mediation within the Family Court setting" says Mr Taylor.

I share Justice Minister Simon Powers' concerns regarding the Family Court spending increase of 63% from $83.9 million to $137.1 million since 2005, and would go so far to say that such an increase is both unnecessary and unsustainable, especially in the absence of any meaningfully validated Outcome Research that demonstrates a positive cost-benefit analysis of this increase"

ENDS

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