Allegations of child sexual abuse: An empirical analysis of published judgements from the Family Court of Australia 2012–2019
Date
2021
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Australian Journal of Social Issues
Abstract
Allegations of child sexual abuse pose agonisingly
difficult issues for families, family law professionals
and the courts. We present data from the population
(N=521) of Family Court of Australia judgements
containing allegations of child sexual abuse published
in the Australasian Legal Information Institute's
Australian database. Our data cover all in-scope
judgements published between mid-2012 and mid-2019,
of which 71 dealt with cases that were uncontested.
A further 70 were contested but the allegations were
abandoned before the end of the trial. We classified
the remaining 380 cases as “fully contested”. Of this
group: (a) in 14% of cases, judicial officers expressed
a direct or clearly implied belief that the allegations of
child sexual abuse were true; (b) risk of sexual harm to
a child was found in 12% of judgements; (c) when no
risk of sexual harm was found, judges were more than
twice as likely to regard the allegations as genuine but
mistaken rather than to have been deliberately misleading; (d) just under two-thirds of allegedly unsafe parents had the time they spent with their child(ren)
increased by the court; and (e) in 17% of judgements,
children's living arrangements were changed to the allegedly unsafe parent.
Description
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Article
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Keywords
International Resources, Australia, family law, social policy, child sexual abuse, child welfare
Citation
Webb, N., Moloney, L. J., Smyth, B. M., & Murphy, R. L. (2021). Allegations of child sexual abuse: An empirical analysis of published judgements from the Family Court of Australia 2012–2019. Australian Journal of Social Issues.