The Minister Is Right About Family Justice. But Reform Needs Infrastructure, Not Just Sympathy

By Samantha Avril-Andreassen
Founder, SAFECHAIN™ | Author, The Architecture of an Unbreakable Soul

When I read Alison Levitt’s remarks on the family courts this week, I felt two things at once: relief and urgency.

Relief, because at last a justice minister has said plainly what too many women and children have known for years: the family justice system in England and Wales has not treated them fairly. Urgency, because recognising injustice is only the beginning. If reform is to mean anything, it must be translated into operational reality.

Levitt was right to say the system is “not good enough.” She was right to describe the retraumatising nature of proceedings in which victims can be cross-examined repeatedly in ways that deepen harm rather than resolve it. She was also right to challenge the use of “parental alienation” as though it were a settled scientific concept, when even ministers are now openly questioning its definitional and evidential basis.

I do not approach this as a commentator standing at a distance. I approach it as someone who has lived the consequences of institutional fragmentation firsthand.

I experienced a system in which one part of the state did not meaningfully connect with another. I saw how courtroom narratives can harden into outcomes even where wider records, financial patterns, safeguarding concerns, or trauma evidence tell a more complex story. I saw how legal process can become a site of exhaustion rather than justice. And I learned the hard way that when agencies operate in silos, the burden of coherence falls on the most vulnerable person in the room.

That is not justice. It is administrative blindness.

The government’s move toward a more child-focused court model is important. Reporting this week indicates that child-focused courts, already piloted in Dorset and North Wales since 2022, will now become the standard model for all section 8 cases involving child arrangements. That is a serious shift away from purely adversarial practice, and it should be welcomed.

But reform will stall if we treat culture change as sufficient on its own.

The deeper problem is structural. Courts make life-altering decisions in an environment where relevant information is often fragmented across institutions. Financial representations may sit in one place, corporate or property records in another, safeguarding indicators elsewhere, and health evidence somewhere else again. When those systems do not meaningfully connect, inconsistency is not an accident. It becomes a feature.

That is the gap SAFECHAIN™ is designed to address.

SAFECHAIN™ is a safeguarding and procedural-integrity framework built around one central proposition: justice systems cannot protect people properly when evidence, risk, vulnerability, and institutional knowledge remain disconnected.

Its purpose is to create continuity where the system currently produces fragmentation. It is designed to support a model in which safeguarding concerns, trauma-related participation needs, financial disclosure integrity, and cross-agency risk indicators are not treated as separate afterthoughts, but as part of one accountable architecture.

In practical terms, that means moving beyond a process where each institution sees only its own slice of the problem. It means building a system where relevant triggers are visible, where vulnerability is not misread as unreliability, and where the integrity of a case does not depend on whether an already-traumatised person can personally carry every piece of evidence from one institutional silo to the next.

That is why the current reform moment matters.

If ministers are serious about rebalancing the family courts, then the next question is unavoidable: what operational infrastructure will make that rebalancing real? A child-focused model is promising. Better protection from retraumatising process is necessary. More scrutiny of unregulated experts is overdue. But unless reform is matched by systems that improve evidential continuity, accountability, and cross-agency visibility, the old failures will simply reappear in a newer vocabulary.

This is not a call for more rhetoric. It is a call for implementation.

The family justice crisis is not only a question of law. It is a question of architecture: what the system sees, what it ignores, how institutions communicate, and who pays the price when they do not.

The Minister is right to say the system must change. The task now is to make sure reform is not merely announced, but built.

That is the work SAFECHAIN™ exists to do.