May 25, 2023
Family Court failing children says legal scholar
There’s a warning the operation of the Family Court is putting children at risk of abuse by ignoring their human rights.
Carrie Leonetti, an associate professor at the University of Auckland Law School, says while there has been a lot of focus on Oranga Tamariki using uplift warrants to remove children from their whanau, what’s overlooked is the use of the Care of Children Act to arrest children who refuse to attend contact sessions with a parent.
She says in some cases this is because they have been abused by the parent, but their disclosures are routinely ignored.
She says the Family Court seems poorly equipped to determine matters of fact.
“When children disclose abuse, say for example to their lawyer for the child, the lawyer for the child doesn’t call Oranga Tamariki and doesn’t call the police who are the agencies in the best position to determine whether these kinds of claims are true or not and whether children have ongoing safety risks or not. They just assume pretty much automatically that the disclosures are untrue,” Ms Leonetti says.
She says international research shows that children’s disclosures of abuse in the context of parental separation are not true in about 4 percent of cases, but the warrants treat them as if they are untrue 100 percent of the time.