Weaponised domestic violence orders - state sanctioned parental alienation

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.