The first protest took place last Friday 22 June, to highlight the need for a rebirthing level of change to our family law and Family Court. A small but vocal group made this need clear to those involved with the Court and to many public passing through the area. A toy suction gun was used symbolically to target some of the many undesirable features of our Family Court.

The next protest will be next Friday 6th July in Tauranga. I understand the Family Courtrooms in Tauranga are now on levels 1 and 2 of McLean House, 26 McLean Street. This building is right behind the main Tauranga Courthouse at 46 Cameron Road.

In order for our family law and its administering Court to be a positive social force in NZ the level of change required is such that the present system needs to be discarded and replaced rather than tinkered with. So we call to kill the Family Court; it kills families.

How do we reject thee? Let me count the ways (or at least the first 21 that come to mind):

1. It is a secret Court. Secret justice is no justice. This unaccountability to society has enabled the Family Court for decades to prosecute a radical feminist agenda and in many other ways to damage children and their parents. There has been some legislated reduction in the secrecy but judges still have to give specific permission for any information to be released to the public, rather than excluding particular information on valid grounds. The terrible outcomes for children, permanent damage to parental relationships and the many suicides driven by this Court remain hidden from the public under its shroud of secrecy. The arguments used to justify ongoing secrecy are little more than slogans that do not stand up to close inspection.

2. It is fatally flawed from the outset to expect lawyers in the form of judges to be able to determine the best interests of children. They don’t have the training or knowledge to do so. Their privileged socioeconomic circumstances impair their understanding of reality for ordinary people. Although they sometimes seek advice from people with at least some relevant training in child development and interpersonal psychology, much family law is written to allow Family Court judges almost unbridled power to make whatever decision their particular ideological stance prefers.

3. Lawyers are used to interview children, to ascertain the children’s wishes and to report back to the Court accordingly. Lawyers do not have the training to do so adequately. To communicate effectively with children of various ages and to understand what the children are communicating requires (among other things) a deep knowledge of child development, psychology, projection, transference and counter-transference, communication dynamics, the effect of context and how to determine the influence of pre-inteview coaching and/or parental alienation efforts. Lawyers’ attempts to communicate with children are often experienced by those children as confusing, manipulative or abusive. It is not uncommon for children to deny they meant what the lawyer ended up claiming they said. Lawyers for child will usually take advantage of this role in order to influence the judge in ‘read between the lines’ fashion with that lawyer’s own opinion about either parent or what the judgement should be, and judges will often allow this influence by their esteemed colleagues regardless of the merits of those esteemed colleagues’ biased views. The whole process of ‘ascertaining children’s wishes’ is often redundant because the judge can ignore those wishes at a whim, e.g. by following the lawyer for child’s preference against the children’s apparent wishes, or by appointing yet another lawyer ‘to assist the Court’ to provide another way to ignore the children’s apparent wishes.

4. The claimed ‘principle’ that the ‘best interests of children’ are the Family Court’s priority is fatally flawed. It may sound like a laudable idea but it is unrealistic and in practice it’s a convenient fraud to justify whatever decision a judge prefers. For example, mummy’s happiness will often be prioritized as promoting the children’s best interests whereas in the next breath those alleged ‘best interests’ will be used to justify decisions that unnecessarily damage daddy’s relationship with his children.

5. Family Courts will often allow women to remove children far away from their loving fathers by claiming that the best interests of the children will be served if mummy is happier, more supported etc in the new faraway place. This of course is duplicitous in assuming that father’s devestation is irrelevant to the children’s best interests.

6. Related to the fallacious ‘children’s best interests’ priority is the (sometimes stated) idea that parents have only responsibilities and only children have rights. This underlies much of our family law but it is fatally flawed. Parents are doing the most important job in the country and they need to have strong, clear rights to do that job adequately. They cannot be responsible for their task if they don’t have rights enabling them to meet the responsibilities.

7. The Family Court supports CYFS, the other leading family-wrecking agency in NZ. The Court will tend to believe social workers over parents and often acts as little more than a rubber stamp service for CYFS wishes. Vendettas by social workers against particular parents who have displeased them will often be supported by the Family Court.

8. Feminist ideology consisting to a considerable extent of false feminist propaganda has shaped our family law and this has resulted in a fatally flawed system. Much of that propaganda has been thoroughly discredited by subequent research but our family law is so fundamentally riddled with it that it is beyond repair. False beliefs underlying much of our family law and/or Family Court practice include: ‘mothers are better / the only necessary parents’ (the mother principle), ‘partner violence is committed mainly by men and against women’, ‘domestic violence is mainly done by men and arises from our history of patriarchy and men’s ongoing need to exert power and control’, ‘any expression of anger, frustration or disagreement by a man equals violence’, ‘women don’t lie’, ‘women are disadvantaged and need special support’, ‘mothers only care about the wellbeing of their children’, ‘male approaches to rearing and disciplining children are worthless and undesirable’, ‘after separation women deserve more than half of a man’s previously-earned assets because women have sacrificed so much in their role and women are disadvantaged economically in our society generally’, ‘after separation women deserve to be kept economically in the fashion they were accustomed to when the family was intact’.

9. The Family Court frequently practises misandry. To some extent it is required to do so by its empowering legislation, but much misandry results from the extent to which Family Court personnel have been captured individually by feminist propaganda. For example, any untested allegation of domestic violence when made by a woman against a man will tend to be accepted as fact and the Court will use DV legislation immediately to damage the accused father’s relationship with his children, to remove various civil rights from that man and to order the man under threat of imprisonment to a form of periodic-detention requiring him to attend and submit to feminist indoctrination centres with cute titles such as ‘Living Without Violence Courses’. Of course, threatened violence by the state supports the domestic violence industry. And all this often with no testing of the allegations whatsoever and indeed no communication to the accused man about the proceedings at all on a ‘without notice’ basis, and otherwise always with no fair trial and on the convenient basis of ‘balance of probabilities’ rather than any solid evidential requirement. Yet when men make allegations against women, the Court is highly likely to protect an accused woman and her relationship with children from orders or impact except in the case of the most compelling evidence. Also, the professional assessors (psychologists etc) employed by the Family Court have always been carefully selected to ensure they will promote feminist ideology over sound research-based knowledge.

10. The Family Court has a sinister and probably illegal arrangement that allows judges to decide whether a complaint against Court-appointed psychologists will go to the Psychologists Board. This means that litigants subjected to a psychologist’s assessment are deprived of normal levels of protection against professional misconduct, bias etc and psychologists who behave unethically continue to be used by the Court.

11. The Family Court practices economic plunder. It’s happy to keep accepting applications from women and their lawyers paid for under legal aid, then to allow men (who were the main economic providers in the family) to be financially ruined if they want to protect their children and their relationships with their children. Nice scam.

12. In addition to misandry, the Family Court has always shown bias against men/fathers and in favour of women/mothers. Family law is largely based on feminist propaganda to begin with, and Court personnel tend to be even more captured by feminist propaganda than the average person is because they are regularly subjected to training and seminars from feminist organizations but avoid men’s perspectives and wisdom. Often all professionals in a hearing are women and primarily support female litigants. Despite constant denials by the Family Court that it is biased towards women, many litigants have experienced such bias at first hand and the figures speak for themselves when it comes to the gender direction of decisions in contested cases.

13. The Family Court invites lies, false allegations and perjury. Even when strong evidence of perjury is presented the Family Court very rarely refers those cases for criminal investigation or prosecution. The Court’s responses in this respect are also heavily gender biased. When the evidence of a male litigant is believed to be false the Court is likely to berate that male and to make decisions assuming all or most of that male’s evidence is untrustworthy. Yet for women’s perjury the Court is more likely to excuse it and to sweep it aside whilst assuming everything else that woman said can still be accepted as reliable. Believe me, I have seen this happen with my own eyes. Yes, this does happen less frequently in the opposite gender direction.

14. The Family Court routinely punishes and damages children by wrecking their relationships with parents, usually their fathers, on the basis of untested allegations and under the assumption that any allegation of partner violence means the accused man presents a risk to his children as well. This is even the case for any claim by a woman that she might sometimes feel frightened even though the man has never actually done anything violent. This means that nearly all children whose fathers are accused of violent potential are harmed by the Family Court in order to protect that tiny proportion whose father would cause them violence. An analogy would be to make all Christchurch children live outside in the cold while aftershocks continue in order to protect those few who would otherwise die in a house collapse.

15. The Family Court and its empowering legislation have bought into a dogmatic feminist religion concerning ‘violence’. Even before Bradford’s no-force-in-discipline law, the Family Court supported CYFS’ self-styled ‘zero tolerance’ crusade against loving parents who saw any role for smacking. Of course, serious and/or deliberately harmful violence should not be tolerated. However, the Family Court’s absolutist attitude to ‘violence’ under a ridiculously broad definition amounts to superstition. It’s foolish to see minor or even moderate forms of violence as necessarily overriding all other considerations including the importance of a child’s family and relationship with biological parents. The nonviolence religion is also sexist in that it is primarily male forms of responding that have been defined as violent whereas many female forms of violence have not. The administration of this religion is further sexist in that men and women are treated very differently for exactly the same behaviour. Fundamentally, the nonviolence religion is hypocritical from a justice system that uses physical violence as its enforcement and that does emotional violence daily to children and parents through its decisions.

16. The Family Court often destroys what trust and rapport there might have been between separated parents.

17. The Family Court promotes immorality and defends people’s right to breach marital vows sexually and otherwise. This insidious influence on our society is the kind of thing that has brought down previous civilizations (but all those boring lessons from history are so male aren’t they?). And any complaint by a man about the woman’s infidelity, immorality or relationship unfairness will be defined as violence or harassment eligible for a Protection Order.

18. The Family Court has administered the trashing of the concept of marriage, rendered marriage disposable, irrelevant and meaningless through the feminist invention of ‘no-fault divorce’. When one breaches undertakings made in a real contract there will always be penalties of some kind. But breaching marriage vows or the verbal contract implicit in de facto relationships is more likely to be rewarded in the Family Court, especially for women who breach that contract.

19. The Family Court administers sexism in applying the ‘clean break’ principle. It supports mothers in achieving a clean break from their ex partner and a total absence of obligations towards the ex, whilst enslaving fathers to continue paying for her lifestyle. This is essentially male bondage and trafficking of men for their labour.

20. Family Court processes are cumbersome and often protracted, insensitive to the time perspective of children and leaving children insecure for large proportions of their lives. Protracted proceedings tend to increase the Family Court’s market share and the income of its practitioners.

21. The Family Court increases the risk of serious violence between litigants and it also stimulates suicides among litigants and children.