Reports, One Chain: Reading the Domestic Abuse Commissioner's Findings Alongside Scratching the Surface

Two Reports, One Chain: Reading the Domestic Abuse Commissioner's Findings Alongside Scratching the Surface

A SAFECHAIN™ analysis

Author: Samantha Avril-Andreassen FRSA

Organisation: SAFECHAINN Ltd (Company No. 12038453)

Two reports published within the past year examine different parts of the family justice system. Everyday Business, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner's October 2025 report on the family courts review and reporting mechanism, examines what happens before a case reaches a judge: how domestic abuse is identified, recorded, and carried through the system. Scratching the Surface, published by Right to Equality in 2026, examines what happens once a case is decided: the language and reasoning used in 91 published family court judgments.

Read separately, each report stands on its own evidence and reaches its own conclusions. Read together, something else becomes visible. Neither report is wrong. Both are examining different points in the same chain.

What Each Report Found

Everyday Business is based on a review of 298 case files and 95 hearing observations across three family court sites, alongside focus groups with survivors and interviews with judges, magistrates and Cafcass officers. Domestic abuse was raised as an issue in 87% of the case files reviewed and in 73% of observed hearings — though it was treated as a live issue in only 42% of those hearings. The report identifies four structural barriers operating across the system: a pro-contact culture, adversarialism, resource limitations, and silo working between agencies.

Scratching the Surface analysed 91 published family court judgments containing allegations of domestic or sexual abuse, using a taxonomy of victim-blaming language developed with herEthical AI. It found that 66 of the 91 judgments (72.5%) contained at least one instance of victim-blaming by a court professional, most often a judge, with 530 such instances identified in total. The most common forms were discrediting the victim-survivor's account (233 instances), behavioural blame (173), and trivialisation (99).

The two reports describe different stages of the same process. Everyday Business examines what information enters the system, and what happens to it before a decision is made. Scratching the Surface examines the reasoning used once a decision is reached and written down.

The Connection: A Form Without a Box

Everyday Business contains a finding that illustrates how the two reports connect. The C1A form — the form used to notify the family court of allegations of harm or domestic abuse — has no field for coercive or controlling behaviour. The identification of coercive control therefore depends entirely on whether it is picked up during Cafcass safeguarding enquiries.

The consequences of this gap are visible in the report's own data. Where domestic abuse was raised as an issue, allegations were noted in 81% of safeguarding letters — but validated, meaning accepted as relevant by the Family Court Adviser, in only 64% of those letters, with the rate ranging from 52% to 78% between the three court sites. In more than one in five cases where abuse was reported to Cafcass at the safeguarding interview stage, it was disregarded or not carried into the safeguarding letter's recommendations at all.

This is, in the terms of the SAFECHAIN™ Foundational Architecture Index™, a Disclosure Integrity™ issue (Paper 9) compounded by a Coordination Deficit™ issue (Paper 25). Information about coercive control either never enters the system in a structured way, or enters it and is then filtered out before it reaches the judge.

Scratching the Surface then shows what can happen to a case once that filtering has occurred. Its analysis found that coercive control allegations, where they survive into a judgment at all, were among the categories most often subject to the patterns it identified — judges accepting accounts of isolated incidents while declining to find a pattern of controlling behaviour proven, an approach the Court of Appeal had already cautioned against in Re H-N (2021).

Put plainly: a form with no box for coercive control feeds a safeguarding process that validates only 64% of the abuse allegations it receives, which feeds a court process in which findings on coercive and controlling behaviour are made in only a small minority of cases — and where, in the cases that are decided, judgments analysed by Right to Equality showed patterns of language that minimised or discredited the accounts that did reach the judge.

This is one illustrative chain, drawn from the reports' own findings. It is not put forward as the only chain, or as a complete explanation of either report's findings. But it demonstrates, with reference to a single concrete mechanism — a form, a validation rate, a judicial approach to patterns of behaviour — how a gap identified in one report can be connected to a gap identified in the other.

The C1A example is not unique. Everyday Business identifies three further structural barriers — a pro-contact culture, adversarialism, and resource limitations across courts and Cafcass — each of which raises similar questions about how information is captured, weighed, and carried through the system before a judgment is written. The C1A example is offered here as the clearest single illustration of the connection between the two reports, not as the only point at which it arises.

What This May Indicate

Read together, the two reports may indicate a governance challenge that extends beyond either report's stated findings. Everyday Business diagnoses structural barriers within the pre-court and safeguarding process. Scratching the Surface diagnoses patterns within judicial reasoning. Where the two might connect — and the C1A example above is one instance of this — is in the conditions under which decisions are made: what information a decision-maker has in front of them, how complete and reliable that information is, and how much of it has already been filtered, validated, or set aside before it arrives.

Both reports' own recommendations point toward training, transparency, and accountability — judicial training on domestic abuse and victim-blaming (Scratching the Surface, Recommendation 7), reform of the Judicial Complaints Investigations Office (Recommendation 8), and improved data collection and inter-agency coordination (Everyday Business, Part B). These recommendations are necessary. They address what professionals know and how their conduct is reviewed.

What they may not, on their own, address is the condition identified by the C1A example: a structural gap in how information is captured and carried through the system, independent of the training or attentiveness of any individual professional. A well-trained Cafcass officer working from a form with no coercive control field, under the resource pressures Everyday Business documents in detail (Section 4.3), may still produce a safeguarding letter that does not flag coercive control — not through error, but because the structure of the form and the process does not require or enable it.

This is the distinction between training and governance. Training improves individual capability. Governance improves systemic reliability. A governance approach asks not only whether professionals understood coercive control, but whether the systems they operate within — forms, validation processes, information flows between agencies and courts — were designed to carry that understanding through to the point of decision.

Where SAFECHAIN™ Fits

SAFECHAIN™ proposes one possible governance framework through which findings of this kind might be examined and addressed. It does not duplicate the work of Everyday Business or Scratching the Surface, and does not propose to determine which report's findings should take precedence. Its frameworks are designed to sit alongside such findings as a way of examining the structural conditions — disclosure, coordination, continuity, and accountability — that connect what happens before a decision to what happens within it.

In relation to the C1A example specifically, three papers from the SAFECHAIN™ Foundational Architecture Index™ are directly relevant:

•       Paper 9 — Disclosure Integrity™, which examines whether the information reaching a decision-maker can be relied upon, and where in a process information is lost, filtered, or never captured in the first place

•       Paper 25 — The Coordination Deficit™, which examines why institutions connected by policy — here, the family court, Cafcass, and the C1A form's design — often remain disconnected in practice

•       Paper 26 — The Continuity Deficit™, which examines why information about a person's circumstances, including safeguarding concerns, frequently does not survive the move between one part of a system and another

These are offered as a way of framing the structural dimension of what both reports describe — not as a finding additional to theirs, and not as a claim that either report's analysis is incomplete on its own terms.

What Might Follow

If the connection drawn above has merit, several lines of further work suggest themselves. These are offered as starting points for discussion, not as a programme SAFECHAIN™ proposes to deliver unilaterally.

1.     A structured review of the C1A form and its successors, examining what categories of abuse the form does and does not capture, and how that maps onto the categories Everyday Business found were most often minimised or treated as historic

2.     Tracking, alongside the existing Family Justice Board publication targets recommended by Scratching the Surface (Recommendation 1–3), the rate at which safeguarding concerns raised at the Cafcass stage are carried into the judgments Right to Equality and others analyse — closing the loop between the two reports' respective data

3.     A small-scale comparative review of cases in which coercive control was raised at the safeguarding stage, asking whether and how that information appeared, or did not appear, in the resulting judgment

4.     Further consideration of whether a governance framework — addressing the structural conditions under which information moves through the system — could complement the training and accountability measures both reports recommend

None of these proposals require acceptance of any SAFECHAIN™ framework as a precondition. They follow directly from the two reports' own data and recommendations, and from the connection between them set out above.

Reading This Alongside the Architecture

This article forms part of The Interlligence Hub Applied Analysis Series and should be read alongside Paper 9 (Disclosure Integrity™), Paper 25 (The Coordination Deficit™), and Paper 26 (The Continuity Deficit™) of the SAFECHAIN™ Foundational Architecture Index™.

SAFECHAIN™ welcomes discussion with researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and institutions interested in exploring governance approaches that may complement the recommendations already advanced by both reports.

References: Burton, M. & Hunter, R. (2025). Everyday Business: Addressing domestic abuse and continuing harm through a family court review and reporting mechanism. Domestic Abuse Commissioner's Office. Hayton, L., Quinlan, A., & Sayer, H. (2026). Scratching the Surface: Victim-Blaming and Bias in Family Court Judgments. Right to Equality.

© 2026 Samantha Avril-Andreassen. All rights reserved. SAFECHAINN Ltd (Company No. 12038453).