POST-SEPARATION ABUSE: AN IGNORED PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS AND PREVENTABLE INJUSTICE
Although domestic violence is perceived to end when women leave their abusive partners, for many, separation means more insidious gender-based violence, namely post-separation abuse. Post-separation abuse occurs when legal, judicial, health, and child protection systems do not protect, and even harm, women and children. This institutional betrayal compounds the impacts of intimate partner violence on survivors and their children.
In 2023, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls found that abusers use family courts as tools to continue their abuse and coercion, discrediting mothers who are seeking to protect their children. In such cases, “deeply embedded gender bias” and the judicial disregard for facts, laws, and ethics, including children’s best interests, can render the judiciary a “battering tool”, causing harm to children and mothers, and crumbling trust in justice systems.
Findings such as those from the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls unequivocally show that reforms are urgently needed to ensure judges, lawyers, health professionals, and child protection workers treat post-separation abuse as a serious crime.
