Stan Korosi

Selected Australian parenting decisions show that family law may identify serious relationship undermining harm only after delay and interim protective arrangements have changed the child’s circumstances. By then, cumulative relational rupture can make safe repair substantially harder and, in some cases, no longer practicable.

Australian family law operates within a wider state and territory protective-order system. Protective separation can therefore occur before allegations of family violence or child abuse have been fully investigated or finally determined. When those allegations enter federal parenting proceedings, s 67ZBB separately requires the court promptly to consider what evidence-gathering and protective orders, if any, are appropriate.

These processes do not legally establish the allegations as true, but they can materially change the child’s circumstances while the evidence is being tested. No equivalent named and rapid pathway ordinarily responds to alleged relationship-undermining conduct unless it is identified as child abuse, including a risk of serious psychological harm. This creates an asymmetry in the timing and practical effect of the system’s response.

Relational Justice is best understood as a framework for implementing established rights to family life, safety, identity, participation, equality, fair process, and effective and accountable state action. The framework is not a claim to five new, independently enforceable human rights. Family relationship ruptures, especially ruptures in parent-child relationships arising from parental separation and divorce, are the context that tests Australian public institutions' implementation of human rights for children, parents and families. Central proposition: When public institutions exercise power over children and family relationships, they must consider safety and relational continuity together. They should protect children and adults from established or credibly imminent harm while avoiding unnecessary rupture of safe and significant relationships. Any restrictive intervention should be evidence-informed, necessary, proportionate, minimally disruptive, time-limited and reviewable, with identifiable responsibility for its relational consequences.

This submission adapts the principles-led framework previously developed for the Second Action Plan to End Violence against Women and Children to the narrower statutory task under section 54J of the Crimes Act 1900 (NSW). It focuses on the policy objectives and terms of Part 3, Division 6A, its operation, its impact on communities, and the evidence needed to determine whether change is justified.

This submission also addresses broader systemic matters only to the extent that they bear directly on the policy objectives, operation, training, monitoring or community impacts of Part 3, Division 6A and the matters specified in section 54J. It does not ask this review to determine family-law disputes or create a separate offence of ‘parental alienation’ or any other offence.

It asks the review to ensure that serious conduct which intentionally uses a child or a safe parent–child relationship to coerce or control a current or former intimate partner is recognised and investigated under the existing offence where its elements may be satisfied.

The Second Action Plan is unlikely to improve substantially on its predecessor if it intensifies the same gender-led organising model while adding services, coordination and enforcement. Additional activity does not itself demonstrate improved safety for women and children. Greater integration can reproduce the limitations of the existing model more efficiently unless the theory guiding assessment also changes.

The central proposition of this submission is that relational power abuse is not a gender category. It is a social and relational phenomenon expressed through conduct: a person uses violence, coercion, fear, dependency, a child, a valued relationship or an institution to dominate another person or destroy a safe and beneficial relationship.

Its forms, severity and population distribution vary. Its existence and responsibility in an individual case cannot be determined by sex, gender or another population characteristic.

Population evidence remains essential. It shows that women experience some serious and lethal forms of violence at higher rates, and should shape prevention, service capacity and initial screening. It also shows that men experience partner violence and abuse, including violence and abuse by female partners.

Population patterns cannot establish who used relational power abusively in a particular family. That requires case-specific evidence.

Relational justice therefore places domestic-violence coercion and parental alienation, a form of coercive relational exclusion, at the same level of analytical recognition. This does not assert equal prevalence, identical conduct or equal severity. It means that neither category is presumed true or dismissed in advance. Each is treated as a possible manifestation of relational power abuse and assessed through the same requirements of source attribution, evidence, context, proportionality and review.

The victim-perpetrator distinction is indispensable when describing an established and instrumental act, and assigning responsibility. It becomes misleading when converted into a permanent identity applied to every relationship and contested event. A person may be victimised in one context and use relational power abusively in another. Available evidence shows that coercive behaviours occur across gender boundaries and family configurations. Recognising that complexity does not mutualise all violence or erase asymmetry. It attaches responsibility to conduct rather than identity.

Children are not made safe simply by eliminating the parent accused of family violence, just as they are not made safe by preserving contact regardless of evidence. An allegation should trigger protection, inquiry and proportionate caution; it should not automatically become proof. Safety and relational continuity must be assessed together through the least relationally disruptive effective intervention.

This submission argues that current Australian suicide prevention and domestic, family and sexual violence (DFSV) policy settings are not yet sufficiently specified to explain, or prevent, a substantial subset of suicide deaths associated with family relationship rupture during separation and divorce (the psychosocial category ICD-10 Z63.5). The dominant DFSV victim–perpetrator framing captures important forms of harm, but on its own may under-specify coercive relational dynamics, social causation, and institutional responses that can intensify suicidality in both women and men.

The submission identifies a significant policy blind spot in national suicide data. In 2023, there was a ratio of approximately 3:1 male-to-female overall suicide mortality, and approximately 4:1 in this category (Z63.5). In absolute terms, almost one man every day and nearly one woman every four to five days dies from suicide in this category. This prevalence pattern warrants a more targeted prevention response than generic “relationship problems” framing.

A central proposition is that parental alienating behaviours (PABs) and related parental alienation presentations should be examined as one under-recognised form of coercive relational and parenting dynamics affecting both men and women within family relationship rupture. The claim is not that all cases are alienation, but that some coercive pathways may be insufficiently recognised in current suicide prevention settings.

The submission argues that Australia’s National Suicide Prevention Strategy recognises family relationship disruption as a suicide factor but does not yet provide a sufficiently targeted response for this high-risk presentation. It recommends a practical policy package: targeted evidence review, improved data and case-review capability, gender-inclusive risk identification, pathway-specific interventions, specialist service commissioning and evaluation, evidentiary safeguards, and practitioner training.

This submission argues that current Australian suicide prevention and domestic, family and sexual violence (DFSV) policy settings are not yet sufficiently specified to explain, or prevent, a substantial subset of suicide deaths associated with family relationship rupture during separation and divorce. The dominant DFSV victim–perpetrator framing captures important forms of harm, but on its own may under-specify coercive relational dynamics, social causation, and institutional responses that can intensify suicidality in both women and men.

The submission identifies a significant policy blind spot in national suicide data: in 2022, the psychosocial category “disruptions to family relationships by separation or divorce” (ICD-10 Z63.5) was recorded in a substantial proportion of suicide deaths for both men and women, with markedly higher male mortality. This prevalence pattern warrants a more targeted prevention response than generic “relationship problems” framing.

A central proposition is that parental alienating behaviours (PABs) and related parental alienation presentations should be examined as one under-recognised form of coercive relational and parenting dynamics affecting both men and women within family relationship rupture. The claim is not that all cases are alienation, but that some coercive pathways may be insufficiently recognised in current suicide prevention settings.

The submission argues that Australia’s National Suicide Prevention Strategy recognises family relationship disruption as a suicide factor but does not yet provide a sufficiently targeted response for this high-risk presentation. It recommends a practical policy package: targeted evidence review, improved data and case-review capability, gender-inclusive risk identification, pathway-specific interventions, specialist service commissioning and evaluation, evidentiary safeguards, and practitioner training.

Like many social science presentations, gendered theories and parental alienation may be considered contested concepts. They both rely fundamentally on the subjectivity of lived experience and assessment of structural factors that cannot be directly discerned. If, as the Irish Examiner claims, the Irish Government should not rely on contestable theories, then governments cannot rely on the gendered theory of violence to guide their policies either.

This false contestability argument has significant adverse implications for formal bodies responsible for legislation and public health policies. The WHO accepting GFV as an essential public health issue affecting women but not accepting PA as a public health issue affecting men, women, and children is contradictory. It is an example of how the false claim that PA is contestable but GFV is not (or that GFV is contestable but PA should still not be accepted) drives policies that harm significant populations that GFV regards as politically incorrect.

Gendered theories’ systemic entrenchment, ideological rigidity, and dogmatic nature render them more contestable. The same rigorous scientific explanation applied to PA should also apply to GFV. A shift towards inclusive, evidence-informed policymaking is essential for equitable justice and support for all affected families.

Amending the Family Law Act in the manner proposed does not reflect social and community expectations about the role of family relationships in protecting and nurturing children regardless of the family configuration. Such changes would reduce the scope of the children’s best interest only to protection from gendered forms of family violence acceptable to the stakeholders informing the proposal. Stakeholders advising the proposal appear to ignore research and evidence that does not support their presumption that family violence only impacts women and children.