Pia Akerman | April 15, 2008

FAMILY law experts have called for changes to legislation that emphasises joint custody, arguing it is putting children back into potentially dangerous situations where they risk being abused.

A conference of social policy and law experts and practitioners in Adelaide has heard amendments to the Family Law Act that came in under the Howard government in 2006 have effectively tied the hands of judges who would wish to more severely limit contact between parents and children in high-conflict families.

Dale Bagshaw, conference organiser and co-ordinator of the University of South Australia's Centre for Peace, Conflict and Mediation, said the amendments, which stressed parents sharing duties and responsibilities for children, were having dangerous consequences in some cases.

"It's of great concern that children are now being not only encouraged but in some instances forced by parenting orders to go into situations where there's a risk of either them witnessing violence or being directly abused themselves," Professor Bagshaw said.

"With the changes to the act, there's now more priority given to this notion of shared parental responsibility than there is to the best interests of the child. There's a good deal of disgruntlement amongst practitioners with the change."

Professor Bagshaw, who served three years on the National Council for the Prevention of Child Abuse, said family law practitioners felt the reference to shared time between parents should be removed from the act.

The conference organisers would form a working party to take the outcomes to government and the judiciary.

"We're focusing very much on the outcomes for children," Professor Bagshw said, "and the outcomes for children have not been positive."

A spokesman for Attorney-General Robert McClelland could not say whether the Labor Government was considering rolling back the amendments, or what Mr McClelland's position was.

Carol Bruch, a member of the executive council of the International Society of Family Law and an adviser on family law to the US Secretary of State, said research showed frequent contact with both parents was not necessary for a child's healthy development, and that the quality of the parent-child relationship was more important.

"All of the pressure towards 50:50 or 35:65 physical care arrangements are quite unusual in the world, and are of great concern to the people here," she said, warning that the courts could be compounding harm to children in conflicted families instead of alleviating it.


http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23540915-5006787,00.html





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