A system that re-abuses victims is not a system fit for purpose

You don’t get four conjoined domestic abuse cases heard speedily by the President in the Court of Appeal - in the middle of a pandemic upending the family justice system - when just a few scattered women feel their children’s safety has been compromised by the courts. 

You get it after years and years of ravaged lives… when thousands of traumatised victims of domestic abuse have raised their voices in frightened whispers because of the terror that a judge will take a dim view and your children will be transferred to your abuser. You get it only after those thousands of victims have gathered and talked to each other still petrified under the radar; when extraordinarily courageous individual survivors of their partners’ violence have organised and spoken out; when hundreds of women wearing masks because they are still so scared not just of their former partner but of the courts’ ire protest in front of Parliament; when they have wept in the offices of their MPs who themselves - I know this because they tell me I see their...

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