Children at risk

How help itself can become abuse
The Honourable Chief Justice, Alastair Nicholson, is as difficult to tie down as the kangaroo in that Rolf Harris number.

The week before he was due to arrive in Auckland for the child abuse congress, the Australian family law expert was in Darwin at a family court sitting. He was, said his Melbourne office, out of the said office quite a bit of the time. It was something of an understatement.

Last year Nicholson chaired a world congress in San Francisco. He is the president of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts and the founding president of the Australian Association of Family Lawyers and Conciliators.

Since 1984 he has also been the chairman of a charitable organisation devoted to the care, accommodation and counselling of former prisoners.

On top of that, he and his wife are long-time members of a group called Kids in Care which provides emergency foster care to children. His honour's house has been temporary sanctuary for many of them.

So he ought to know something about the shortcomings of family courts -- the topic on which he will address the congress.

The problem is essentially, he says, a constitutional one in Australia, based on the fact that "Australia's founding fathers -- and they were all men -- lived in a very different world from the one we inhabit today."

Because the constitution is based on a society which did not formally recognise "any cohabitation arrangement other than marriage" the Australian system still lacks a "unified legal system for the management of matters in which child abuse or protection is an issue."

Although Nicholson is primarily concerned with the way family courts function in Australia, he says that discussions about the "possible advantages of unified family courts are relevant to us all."

Nicholson's particular concern is that structures in place to deal "primarily with disputes involving children" may result in disadvantaging already disadvantaged children.

"One of the particular concerns in any legal system in which children are involved is that the mechanisms designed to assist them can just as easily become agents of abuse themselves.

"Thus children who are subjected to a number of medical examinations, whose accounts are trivialised or ridiculed, or whose cases are delayed, are clearly the victims of institutionalised abuse."

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