Shared parenting was enshrined in changes to the Family Law Act in 2006, but as Malcolm Knox discovers, the only thing that many separated parents now share is confusion, isolation and heartbreak.
Anna* and her ex-husband had been sharing the care of their three-year-old daughter and two-year-old son for nearly a year when she noticed a change in the toddlers’ behaviour.
“We’d split up when they were very young and had a shared parenting agreement,” she says. “Then, one day, my son said his grandfather had ‘done a wee’ on his stomach. As I watched them, they started to act out in a highly sexualised way, putting toys in their anuses and licking each other’s genitals, and my daughter said she’d touched her grandfather’s doodle.”
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Stunned — sexual misconduct had not been part of her marriage split — she asked her ex-husband, Michael*, to stop the children sleeping over with his parents. “He refused and I agonised for a week over what to do,” Anna says. “But I just thought if it was another child, I would certainly report it.”
If only it were that simple. Going through the criminal justice system was unthinkable for Anna, as the children were too young to give evidence. Reporting it to community services risked having the children put into state care.
So Anna took her evidence to the Family Court, setting off a nightmarish chain of events. By the end of it, she would find herself accused of manipulating her children to deny Michael access and be designated an “unfriendly parent” under the auspices of the Family Law Act. The court deemed her mentally unstable, reducing her access. In a turn of the tables two years ago, a Family Court judge ordered that Michael have sole custody of the children.
“After a three-day trial, the kids, who’d been living with me, were taken away,” Anna says, breaking down. “I wasn’t even allowed to say goodbye to them. They didn’t have clothes, toys, anything. They were just gone, like that, and security took me out of the building like I was a criminal. The only lesson I learnt was, don’t report sexual abuse because if you do, you will lose your children. Reporting it was the worst thing I ever did.”
Professor Freda Briggs of the University of South Australia says, “A third of women who lose their children in the Family Court are labelled mentally ill.” She calls Anna’s case “the victim’s dilemma — if you report violence, you risk seeing less of your children, who, because of the action taken against you, end up spending more time with the abusive parent”.
If not for changes to the Family Law Act in 2006, Michael would not have had regular access to the children in the first place. If the separation had taken place 10 years ago, Anna would probably have had sole custody.
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Yet after several years in which men’s groups lobbied against a perceived bias in the Family Court, the Howard government changed the law to favour “shared parenting”, recognising that children’s interests were best served by substantial time with both parents. The new law said children “have the right to know and be cared for by both parents, regardless of whether their parents are married, separated, have never been married or have never lived together”. The Gillard Labor government is now attempting to reverse some — but not all — of those changes.
*Names changed for legal reasons.
Read more of this story in the June issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
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