Domestic violence survivors say family courts are failing them 

A couple of years into what at first seemed like a fairytale romance, Anna says, she started to feel like things weren't right.

Her partner's behaviour was becoming erratic. There was drug abuse, emotional manipulation and infidelity, the B.C. woman said, along with increasing violence directed at her and her two young sons. Her partner would lose his temper, break down doors. 

She'd left twice and returned to try to make it work, but the third time, she made it clear the relationship was over. He was out of town and she told him not to come home.

But he did, arriving at the family home, putting the younger child in a truck and speeding off. Anna didn't know where their son was for almost two weeks.

(CBC is not using the real names of the women in this story because some have active child custody cases, are concerned for their personal safety or risk losing access to their children if they are identified.) 

When the case hit the courts, Anna says, things only got worse. The abduction marked the beginning of a legal fight lasting more than a decade that saw Anna lose her home and primary custody of one of her children. It cost tens of thousands of dollars and left her reputation in the community in tatters. She was largely left to navigate the system alone. 

"He probably spent about $370,000 just trying to bury me … because he could. God forbid anybody ever, ever believed a word that came out of my mouth about how he treated me and what my boys went through."

In a court ruling awarding him primary custody of the younger child, the judge found the only objective evidence in the case came from a court-appointed psychologist's report, which stated there was a risk of alienating the child from the father should the child remain in Anna's primary care and that the father was likely to make more responsible decisions on the child's behalf.

The father was given primary custody despite the fact he had been charged with criminally harassing Anna and granted a discharge on the condition that he not come near her. 

Anna's story is not unique. Over the past several months, CBC News has spoken with a dozen survivors of intimate partner violence with children in three provinces, all of whom say their former partners used the family court system to continue the patterns of abuse and control that they left the relationships to escape. 

The court system does not give enough weight to the impact of domestic violence on parents in custody cases, Anna says. 

"It's not supportive of the trauma that you're going through when you leave that relationship, and then, you're in the worst place and you're fighting."

The women all say they wish judges would give more consideration to the history of abuse and the safety of survivors and children when making child-custody decisions. 

Nicholas Bala, a family law professor at Queen's University, says courts often struggle with establishing the credibility of the respective parties in high-conflict separations.