The family courts are not failing by accident. They are failing by design

When Justice Minister Alison Levitt said the family courts in England and Wales are “not good enough” for women and children, she did more than make a political observation. She confirmed a truth that many survivors have been forced to learn in private: the system is not merely under strain; it is structurally unsafe for too many of the people it claims to protect.

Levitt was right to describe a system in which women have been treated unfairly. She was right to criticise the kind of adversarial process that can leave victims of abuse effectively cross-examined into exhaustion. And she was right to challenge the lazy authority sometimes given to “parental alienation” in cases where abuse, fear and coercive control should be examined with far greater seriousness.

But there is a harder truth still.

The family courts are not failing only because individuals get things wrong. They are failing because the architecture itself allows critical information to remain fragmented, vulnerability to be misread, and process to overpower reality.

That is why reform cannot stop at better language.

The government’s decision to roll out Child Focused Courts nationally is significant. The Ministry of Justice says the model has already cut the average length of cases by around seven and a half months in pilot areas, and is backing national expansion over three years with funding for more social worker capacity and domestic abuse specialists. Senior judges have also welcomed the rollout, describing it as a more holistic and less adversarial approach.

That is progress. But progress is not the same as completion.

Because the real problem is deeper than courtroom tone. It lies in what the system can see, what it cannot see, and who is forced to carry the burden of joining the dots.

A family court may be asked to make life-changing decisions while relevant information sits scattered across separate institutions: financial records in one place, safeguarding concerns in another, health evidence somewhere else, risk indicators elsewhere again. When those systems do not meaningfully connect, truth becomes vulnerable to performance. The party with the clearest narrative, the strongest representation, or the greatest procedural stamina gains an advantage that has little to do with safety and far too much to do with survival.

And that is where the deepest injustice lies.

Too often, the person living with trauma is expected to function as their own archive, investigator, and translator. They must retell, re-explain, re-document, and re-prove. Their distress is then read not as evidence of harm, but as inconsistency. Their exhaustion is mistaken for unreliability. Their effort to survive becomes part of the case against them.

That is not simply unfair. It is a structural defect.

For years, we have spoken about family justice as though it were mainly a matter of legal balancing: mothers and fathers, contact and safety, allegation and defence. But this week’s announcements show that even government now understands the crisis is not just legal. It is systemic. It is about how institutions communicate, how evidence travels, how risk is assessed, and whether vulnerability is integrated into procedure or left outside it.

This is why I argue that the next phase of reform must be infrastructural.

If ministers truly want a family justice system that protects women and children, then they must go beyond changing the mood of proceedings. They must build mechanisms for continuity, visibility and accountability across the agencies that shape case outcomes. Reform must mean more than softer language in a still-fragmented machine.

It must mean a system that can recognise patterns earlier.
A system that does not force traumatised people to become case managers.
A system in which safeguarding evidence is not trapped in silos.
A system in which participation impairment is not mistaken for lack of credibility.
A system in which legal outcome is less dependent on tactical endurance and more dependent on institutional truthfulness.

That is the real test of this moment.

Not whether government can admit the system has failed. It now has. Not whether judges and professionals can welcome change. Some already have. The real test is whether this country is willing to build a family justice structure that does not repeatedly require the vulnerable to survive the very process meant to protect them.

The minister is right.

But if reform is to be real, it cannot remain rhetorical. It has to become operational.

And until that happens, too many women and children will continue to pay the price for a system that still knows how to speak about harm more easily than it knows how to prevent it.

Samantha Avril-Andreassen is the founder of SAFECHAIN™ and author of The Architecture of an Unbreakable Soul. Her work focuses on safeguarding integrity, procedural fairness, evidential continuity, and cross-agency reform in domestic abuse and family justice systems.