When Safeguarding Stops at the Courtroom Door

There is a word that appears in almost every piece of legislation designed to protect survivors of domestic abuse. It appears in the Children Act, the Care Act, the Domestic Abuse Act, and the procedural rules that govern family court hearings. Institutions display it in their mission statements. Agencies cite it in their policies. Judges are trained in it.

The word is safeguarding.

And yet, in courtrooms across England and Wales, domestic abuse survivors are being re-traumatised by the very proceedings that statute requires to be built around it.

This is not a fringe observation. The Ministry of Justice's own Harm Panel Report in 2020 found that the family court system was being used as a mechanism by which abusers could continue to perpetuate control over their victims. It called for wholesale reform. Years on, many of the structures it identified remain in place.

SAFECHAIN™ has now published a formal legal position paper setting out exactly how this happens, why it is unlawful, and what must change. This article draws on that paper to explain it in plain terms.

What Safeguarding Actually Means — And What It Doesn't

Safeguarding is not a value. It is not an aspiration. It is a legal duty.

The Children Act 2004 requires a wide range of statutory agencies to ensure their functions are carried out with regard to the need to safeguard and promote welfare. The Care Act 2014 extends equivalent duties to adults at risk. PD12J of the Family Procedure Rules — the specific procedural code for family proceedings involving domestic abuse — requires courts to take active steps to ensure that the proceedings themselves do not compound harm.

None of this is optional. None of it is subject to the discretion of individual practitioners.

What safeguarding does not mean is a box ticked at the first point of contact and then abandoned as the survivor moves through the system. It does not mean a referral made to one agency and forgotten by the next. And it does not mean a duty that evaporates the moment a survivor walks into a courtroom.

Safeguarding is continuous, or it is nothing.

The Fragmentation Problem

A survivor of domestic abuse navigating legal proceedings does not engage with one institution. They engage with many: police, the Crown Prosecution Service, CAFCASS, social services, healthcare providers, housing authorities, legal aid agencies, and the court itself. Each holds a safeguarding obligation. Each, in isolation, may believe it is fulfilling that obligation.

But what the survivor experiences is not a chain of protection. It is a chain of repetition — being required, at each new stage, to re-establish from scratch the history of harm that the previous institution already knew, already assessed, and already documented.

Every time that happens, it is not a neutral administrative inconvenience. The neuroscience is unambiguous: being required to retell a history of trauma activates the same neurological pathways as the original harm. Secondary victimisation — the re-traumatisation of survivors through institutional processes — is not a theoretical risk. It is what happens when institutions treat their safeguarding duty as individual and self-contained rather than collective and continuous.

The SAFECHAIN™ framework was built precisely to address this. Its foundational principle is evidential continuity: the obligation of each institution in the chain to carry forward what has already been established, rather than requiring the survivor to prove it again.

Shutdown Is Not Dishonesty

This is where it gets clinical — and urgent.

When a person has experienced sustained trauma, their nervous system does not recover simply because they are now in a safe environment. Trauma rewires the body's threat detection system. The autonomic nervous system remains on alert. And when that alert system is activated — by an environment that resembles the conditions of the original harm — the body responds.

In a courtroom, that response can look like silence. Flatness. Inability to answer questions directly. Fragmentation of memory. Apparent inconsistency. Emotional withdrawal. In the clinical literature, this is well understood: it is the freeze or shutdown response, documented across decades of research on complex PTSD, Polyvagal Theory, and trauma neuroscience.

In a courtroom, it is often interpreted as something else entirely: evasion, unreliability, dishonesty, or a lack of credibility.

This misinterpretation is not accidental. It is, in some proceedings, a strategy.

Barristers and solicitors acting for opposing parties have learned — explicitly or through practice — that sustained adversarial cross-examination can drive a trauma survivor into a state of visible dysregulation. The more dysregulated the survivor becomes, the less coherent their testimony appears. The less coherent their testimony appears, the easier it is to argue that they should not be believed.

That is the weaponisation of injury. It is not a legitimate forensic technique. And it is happening in proceedings that statute requires to be conducted with safeguarding at their centre.

A Survivor Should Never Have to Justify Their Own Shutdown

SAFECHAIN™'s legal position paper takes an unequivocal stand on this: a victim of domestic abuse should never be required — in court proceedings or any associated safeguarding process — to justify, explain, or prove that they are in a state of trauma-induced shutdown before protections are applied.

The legal basis for this position is straightforward. Where a court already has credible evidence of domestic abuse — police disclosure, MARAC referral, medical records, a CAFCASS Section 7 report, or prior judicial findings — that evidence constitutes a safeguarding finding the court is required to act upon. The obligation under PD12J is engaged when risk is reasonably apprehended, not when every element has already been proven.

To require a survivor to articulate and justify their own trauma state before protections apply is to make protection conditional on the capacity that the harm has already compromised. It inverts the statutory logic entirely. It is, in legal terms, a failure. And in human terms, it is a continuation of the abuse by another name.

The onus of adaptation lies with the institution. Not with the survivor.

What Court Should Actually Be

The family court exists to provide legal protection, to assess evidence justly, and to reach equitable resolutions for people navigating some of the most painful circumstances of their lives. It is not a theatre for adversarial performance. It is a safeguarding institution.

That means proceedings must be evidence-centred — built on the totality of what the court has before it, not on the ability of the most harmed party to hold up under cross-examination. It means that when a survivor's testimony is fragmented or inconsistent, that fragmentation must be read through a trauma lens before any credibility assessment is made. It means judges must actively manage proceedings to prevent compounding harm — not as a discretionary gesture, but as a procedural obligation they cannot set aside.

The Judicial College's own Equal Treatment Bench Book recognises the neuroscience. The statutory framework already requires the practice. The gap between knowledge and implementation is not a theoretical problem. It is a human cost being paid, daily, by survivors who came to court seeking protection and found a process that used their injuries against them.

What Must Change

SAFECHAIN™'s position paper calls on specific institutions to act:

The Ministry of Justice must implement the outstanding recommendations of the 2020 Harm Panel Report and introduce mandatory trauma-informed standards across all family proceedings where domestic abuse is a live issue.

The Judicial College must make trauma-informed adjudication — including the correct interpretation of shutdown, dissociation, and inconsistency — mandatory training for all Family Division judges.

The Bar Standards Board and the Solicitors Regulation Authority must issue binding guidance making clear that exploiting a survivor's trauma responses as a forensic instrument is a violation of their obligations as officers of the court.

CAFCASS and social services departments must implement evidential continuity protocols that prevent survivors from having to re-establish their history at every new institutional contact point.

The Domestic Abuse Commissioner and the Victims' Commissioner must treat family court reform as a domestic abuse policy priority — and engage with the SAFECHAIN™ framework as a model for cross-institutional safeguarding continuity.

The Principle

Safeguarding should be safeguarding.

That statement should not need defending in 2026. But it does — because institutions across the legal system are applying safeguarding language while delivering safeguarding failure.

A court that re-traumatises the person it is obliged to protect is not a safeguarding court. An adversarial process that uses a survivor's neurological shutdown against them is not a fair process. And a system that requires a victim to justify their own injury before protection applies has confused its function with its form.

The SAFECHAIN™ framework exists because this must change — not through further consultation, but through structural reform grounded in law, evidence, and the irreducible dignity of people who survived the harm and came to the system for help.

The full legal position paper, Safeguarding, Participation and Trauma: A Legal Position Paper on the Primacy of Safeguarding in Family Court Proceedings, is available from SAFECHAIN™.

By Samantha Avril-Andreassen FRSA | Founder & CEO, SAFECHAIN™ | May 2026

Part of the Silent Screams, Loud Strength: Unmasking Justice Masterclass Series.

Topics include:
family court trauma, coercive control, domestic abuse litigation, Article 6 rights, trauma-informed justice, litigation abuse, meaningful participation, vulnerable witnesses, procedural fairness, narcissistic abuse in court, safeguarding failures, family court reform, PD3AA, equality of arms, participation directions.

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© 2026 Samantha Avril-Andreassen. All rights reserved.
SAFECHAIN™ is a conceptual safeguarding infrastructure and policy framework authored by Samantha Avril-Andreassen. Reproduction or implementation of this framework without permission is prohibited.