Weaponised domestic violence orders - state sanctioned parental alienation

We talk endlessly about parental alienation as something one parent does to another. It is usually pictured as a campaign, waged in the shadow of a family court, to turn a child against a father. But there is a bigger, colder version of the same thing happening. It isn't being run by a vindictive ex. It is being run by the state, at industrial scale.

In New South Wales alone, more than 100,000 domestic violence orders are in force at any one time - more than double the number seven years ago. Nobody keeps a national count, but on NSW's rate, the true figure across Australia is likely well over 300,000. Mothers are mostly the ones protected but since the children's arrangements run through her, contact with the children stops too. A father is cut off from his children immediately, with no trial, no evidence tested and no finding made.

This is state-imposed alienation. How many children it touches, nobody knows, because the government that runs the system has never bothered to count. People everywhere know it is happening and no one wants to talk about it.

Nobody, except David Smith. That's the name a West Australian dad is using in his campaign to expose what is going on. Boy, is this a man with a mission. He wrote three books and then created an amazing podcast series – All Kids Lives Matter – which is a data-driven investigation into "how Australia's family-facing systems fail the children they claim to protect - and what the evidence says would fix them."

Data driven is right. This extraordinary series of over 70, 13-minute episodes has pulled together evidence from every conceivable source to prove how dismally children are being let down by the current system. And every fact, every statistic is backed by solid references. Amazing stuff.

David had written to tell me about this herculean effort. We talked but I didn't find the time to do the required deep dive into his material until this week, when I happened to be pulling together information to expose the role of apprehended violence orders in aliening fathers from their children. But then I struck gold!

Weaponised, Season 2 of David’s series, covers much the same ground I was working on but he’s stumbled across some amazing research information I had never seen before. Here I’ve just included the Weaponised section from Spotify but do listen to the whole, incredible podcast series. (Or you could listen on YouTube here).

Go to his website for the rest of his series. And for those of you keen to use this valuable resource, here’s the transcript, plus the references.

So, my thanks to David for much of the data I've used here. It's long and data heavy, but crammed with vital facts people need to know – hopefully a useful resource for politicians and policy makers.

The scale of it

But back to my blog. I want to start by explaining how we got to this situation.

Something changed in this country, and it changed fast. In 1987, NSW Local Courts issued 1,462 apprehended violence orders, which at the time were available only between people in a domestic relationship. In 2025, 52,757 domestic AVOs were commenced, a rise of more than thirty-fold, and by the end of the year 107,830 were in force at once. About 85% of final orders run for two years or more. Queensland tells the same story. DVO applications there rose 44.4% in a decade (2008–09 to 2017–18) - a 22.6% increase even after accounting for population growth. This is not a NSW quirk, it is a national pattern.

Note, these orders go by different names across the states - AVOs in NSW, different labels for protection orders elsewhere. They work the same way everywhere.

This expansion happened while physical violence was falling, according to the government's own ABS Personal Safety Survey. For men, the rate fell from 10% to 6.1% since 2005. For women, it fell from 4.7% to 2.9%. Those figures cover violence from anyone, not just partners.

Defenders will say the orders helped drive that fall, and some undoubtedly protect real victims. But the men's decline came from fewer assaults by other men, mostly outside the home and more often by strangers than by people the victim knew, which no domestic order touches. And between 2016 and 2021-22 the ABS found no significant change in physical violence for either sex, while the orders kept climbing.

A system expanding this dramatically while violence declines is not obviously tracking danger. It is tracking something else: policy settings, definitions, and a bureaucracy that keeps growing,regardless of what is happening in people's homes.

Almost none of it is ever tested.

Here is the number that should be nailed to the door of every family violence unit in the country: 609. That is how many of NSW's 44,537 AVO applications in 2023 were dismissed after a defended hearing, where evidence was tested and found wanting. Roughly one in seventy.

The Court doesn't publish how many cases went to a defended hearing at all, or how many of its 35,621 final orders were made by consent. Nobody does. But everything else we can see points the same way: for the great majority of cases, no one ever tests the evidence.

Most of these orders are made as "interim" orders - a supposedly temporary, stopgap measure imposed before any hearing, meant to hold the situation safely until the matter is properly heard. In NSW, an interim AVO can be made "whether or not the defendant is present or has been given notice". Get that - the bloke doesn't even need to be told he's about to be done over!

One study of Victorian courts, reported by the Australian Law Reform Commission, timed the median protection order hearing at three minutes. Three minutes to decide whether a father loses his children.

In practice, across Australia, the "temporary" order is often as far as a case ever goes.

Western Australia is the starkest example: under its Family Violence Restraining Order system, if a respondent doesn't return a form within 21 days, the interim order simply becomes the final order. He is never heard. Other states arrive at the same outcome by a different route - not through inaction, but through pressure to consent. In Victoria, even among respondents who actually turned up to court, 69% of final Family Violence Intervention Orders were still made "by consent" rather than contested. In NSW and Queensland, the law lets a respondent consent to the order without accepting that any of the allegations against him are true - consent "without admissions." He isn't saying he did it. Often on his lawyer's advice, he decides it isn't worth the fight - because fighting costs money, time, and the risk of losing anyway.

It is often lousy advice. An order made "without admissions" still carries the same real-world consequences as one that was contested and proven:

• It can bar a firearms licence for years. In NSW, anyone subject to an AVO within the past ten years cannot be licensed. In WA, disqualification runs for the life of the order plus five years.

• It can lead to a Working with Children Check being cancelled or refused.

• It must be considered by the family court when deciding where a child sleeps at night.

It is outrageous that men are so often told an order "without admissions" is no big deal. Men need to know that living with an AVO means being perpetually at risk of being charged with a criminal offence. All it takes is a breach - namely, any contact with the protected person that the order prohibits. And because children are automatically caught up in these orders, that prohibition usually extends to them too. For a father separated from his children, that means even a text wishing his own child happy birthday can constitute a breach. And a breach is a crime. He can be arrested. He can end up in jail.

This makes ordinary contact a minefield, no matter how careful a man tries to be. A determined ex-partner can turn up at his workplace with the children in tow. She can arrange for them to "bump into" him at the shops. However it happens, the moment he responds - waves, says hello, sends a text - he has breached the order. And just like that, Dad is safely out of the way. Behind bars.

In Weaponised David has dug out statistics, from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, drawing on ABS criminal court data showing about 39,600 defendants faced criminal courts in 2023-2024 with breaching a violence order as their principal offence. He points out that means more than one hundred people, every single day, walk into a criminal courtroom because of a document no criminal court ever issued.

"A document issued fast, in a civil court, on the civil standard, is the tripwire for mandatory prison. That is the hybrid. Civil to obtain. Criminal to break," he explains.

That design choice - civil to obtain, criminal to break - is the hinge the whole appalling system turns on. David does a magnificent job showing just how bizarre and dangerous it proves to be.

Much of it has nothing to do with violence

What makes my blood boil is that the public assumes this entire system exists to protect women from dangerous men. That is the story everyone has been told, and it is why almost no one questions how the system actually operates. But the reality is most of these orders have nothing to do with violence at all.

Nobody publishes what conduct lies behind the civil orders themselves, so the closest window is the criminal courts. In 2024, BOCSAR counted 37,916 domestic violence court finalisations in NSW. 54% involved an assault charge. 35% involved intimidation or stalking, a category BOCSAR's own research says typically involves threats, intimidation and verbal abuse, not stalking in any conventional sense. And 40% involved a charge of breaching an existing order. Many finalisations involve more than one type of charge, so these categories overlap. Of the assault finalisations, roughly one in three ended with no charge proven, either withdrawn or not proven.

Once a matter reaches the family court, the definition widens again. The Family Law Act defines family violence partly as behaviour that coerces or controls a family member, or "causes the family member to be fearful". There is no express requirement that the fear be reasonable. The examples run from assault to repeated derogatory taunts, all under one label.

The ever-expanding label "domestic violence" is doing enormous, undifferentiated work. It covers everything from a punch to claims of a heated argument over money, and the system responds to the label the same way, regardless of what actually happened.

None of this is new to the people who run the system. Australia's own Law Reform Commission said it out loud back in 2010: an interim order "may be made for a number of reasons that do not reflect the level of risk, or evidence, of family violence." That was fifteen years ago. Nothing has changed.

That's the big lie at the heart of this whole stinking shitshow. The authorities know exactly what is going on. They know huge numbers of children are cut off from decent, caring fathers because a system built to catch dangerous men is instead sweeping up men who did nothing more than argue about money, or raise their voices, or simply get accused. And the bureaucrats and box-tickers who run this circus just look the other way.

A fiction with real teeth

Violence protection order. The label may often be fiction, but the consequences are not. The moment one of these orders is made - often before the father even knows it exists - it typically comes with a standard condition: no contact at all. Not reduced contact. Not supervised contact. None.

NSW has a specific condition, Order 6, that carves out contact arrangements for children. In 2022–23 it was attached to only 11.8% of final orders (4,136 of 34,937), and rarely at the interim stage, which is the stage that matters.

NSW law presumes that children will be included as protected persons. Yet more than half of frontline domestic violence services told the NSW Department of Communities and Justice's own 2024 review that children are "rarely" listed. Either way, the father is barred from contacting the mother, and every arrangement for the children runs through her.

The review doesn't spell out what happens when Order 6 is missing, but the consequence is plain: breaching an ADVO condition is a criminal offence, so without clear contact arrangements a father who reaches out to his own children risks a criminal charge.

The AVO's no-contact condition then becomes the status quo in the Family Court by default - not because a court reviewed it and confirmed it was still needed, but because the only process that could establish new contact arrangements, a family court parenting case, takes a median of 14 months to reach trial. For the small number of cases too complex to resolve any other way, the median wait for a judgment is 26 months. More than a third of final-order applications are still unresolved after a year.

By the time anyone looks, a child may have already lost one to two years with a parent - on the strength of an allegation nobody ever tested. And that absence doesn't stay neutral. Family courts routinely lean on what's called the "status quo" - the arrangement the child has already been living under - as evidence of what's now stable and familiar for them. The system creates the absence, then claims it serves the child's best interests. That isn't child protection, its child abuse. And it's a system marking its own homework.

Paying to see your children

From there, the pathway often leads to supervised contact, where the parent - usually a father - pays for the privilege of seeing his children. Often seeing them in some sterile, fluorescent-lit room at a contact centre, a stranger with a clipboard sitting in, every word and gesture noted down, ready to be used against him in court.

Among parents interviewed for the national evaluation of contact services, 82% of those spending time with (rather than living with) their children were men. Of the fathers on final orders, 57% had supervision with no end date, and only 40% had any provision for moving to unsupervised time. Across all cases, only 24% showed a clear transition.

What happens to these families afterwards is simply not tracked. The national evaluation of these services - the government's own review - admits it is "a gap in the evidence". Did the father ever get back to normal contact with his children? Did contact just quietly stop? Nobody knows, because nobody has ever gone back to find out.

As I have described in a previous blog, anecdotally, many simply disappear from the system - priced out by fees that can run into tens of thousands of dollars or worn down by conditions so restrictive that continuing feels pointless. The government has never bothered to collect the data that would tell us either way.

Even the dads who win that precious piece of paper - a court order giving them contact with their children - aren't necessarily better off. A 2022 national study of parenting order compliance, commissioned by ANROWS, surveyed 470 parents and carers, 88% of whom reported non-compliance with their orders. The researchers also examined a random sample of 300 court files where someone applied to enforce an order, and fathers were the applicants in most of them. Only 6% of those applications were upheld, and a fine was imposed in 0.4%.

And if he pushes back

Shockingly, 46% of adults in NSW prisons are now on remand: legally innocent and awaiting trial - the highest proportion ever recorded, according to BOCSAR data. BOCSAR says about half of the growth in remand over the past two years is due to more domestic violence defendants being held in custody before their court date, and one in three adults on remand is now there over an alleged domestic violence offence.

Some of these men are fathers who breached an order trying to make contact with their own children. Nobody publishes the exact breakdown. But the mechanics are plain enough:

• an order with a no-contact condition;

• no built-in pathway to see his children;

• a criminal offence, one that can mean remand, the moment he tries anyway.

That is a machine for turning a father's love for his children into prison time.

What I've since learned about Britain

While I commend David for his excellent work pulling all this material together, I take issue with a few points. In his podcasts he suggests the UK does a far better job of examining the evidence before protection orders are issued. That's not what I'm hearing from the UK. William Collins, who writes the excellent British blog The Illustrated Empathy Gap, says the system there is deteriorating rapidly. The UK has lowered the rank of police officer needed to authorise its new protection notices, specifically to increase their use. England and Wales now issue more than 37,000 non-molestation and occupation orders a year, and the number keeps rising. On paper, British family courts are supposed to investigate disputed abuse allegations before limiting a parent's time with their children. But Collins says this rarely happens in practice. Outcomes depend largely on the view of the court's welfare officer and on the individual judge. As he put it to me, the resident parent enters court holding all the cards and leaves still holding them.

I should also mention that David is far more restrained than I would be. He never names the feminist ideology that I believe is the driving force behind this whole scandalous state of affairs.

Call for Action

Every episode of David Smith's podcast series ends with "The system must change. Children deserve better." And he spells out the questions we should all be asking of our members of parliament to make this happen. I urge you to listen to his podcasts and help them get the attention they deserve.

His work is a real inspiration and a significant public service.