The degendering of male perpetrated intimate partner violence against female partners in Ontario family law courts

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we conducted a critical community-engaged Ontario family law case review of 46 cases from 2019 where intimate partner violence was identified. We explored the extent to which judges identified and addressed intimate partner violence and whether the gender of judges impacted on trial outcomes and judges’ parental assessments. We found that judges de-gendered the language of violence, which impacted trial outcomes (e.g., more rulings of unsupervised access for fathers despite them having been violent) and a mutualisation of responsibility by referring to the violence as ‘conflict.’ We also found that male judges were more likely to negatively assess the mothers as both parents and witnesses. We call for more research that explores whether the changes to the Canadian federal Divorce Act (which includes ‘family violence’) will have an impact on the manner in which intimate partner violence is identified and/or referred to by family law judges, and if and how this influences the weighting of salient outcomes in Ontario family court cases.

KEYWORDS:

• Family law
• violence against women
• intimate partner violence
• degendering
• critical community-engaged scholarship

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Jeji Varghese, Ph.D., from the Department of Sociology & Anthropology, as well as Lindsey Thomson and Caroline Duvieusart-Dery from the Community Engaged Scholarship Institute at the University of Guelph.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Although we searched for cases where there were heterosexual or same sex couples, we only found cases where there were heterosexual, presumably cisgender couples given the use of ‘he’ or fathers and ‘she’ for mothers by the judges.

2. In Canada, best interests of the child (Children’s Law Reform Act 1990) is a consideration of the emotional bond between the child(ren) and each parent, the child(ren)’s preferences, and other factors like the willingness and ability of each parent to care for the child(ren).

Additional information

Funding

The authors received no funding for this research.