Sex abuse claims not vindictive

NEARLY two-thirds of children spend more time with a parent alleged to have sexually abused them after going through a battle in the Family Court, new analysis shows.

Children are also ordered to live with the allegedly unsafe parent in 17 per cent of contested cases, analysis of more than 500 Family Court of Australia judgments has found.

In 23 per cent of contested cases the alleged abuser is given sole parental responsibility for the child.

Nola Webb, a barrister who led the research team, said there was a common belief that “vindictive mothers” make up such claims. But judges often found the allegations of sexual abuse by one parent against the other to be “genuine but mistaken”.

If the claims aren’t contested, the parent alleging the abuse ends up with more time with the children in nine out of 10 cases.

The data comes from 521 court judgments made between 2012 and 2019 in which at least one child was alleged to be at risk of sexual harm while in the care of the other parent.

Of these cases, 71 were uncontested, 70 were contested but the allegations were abandoned by the end of the trial and 380 were fully contested.

Judges only found risk of sexual harm to be present in 12 per cent of contested cases compared with 65 per cent of uncontested cases.

Ms Webb published the findings in the Australian Journal of Social Issues.

“There is a persistent perception in some quarters that a substantial number of allegations of child sexual abuse are made by vindictive mothers determined to remove fathers from the day-to-day lives of their children,” she said.

“When no risk of sexual harm was found and a judicial view could be determined, judges were more than twice as likely to regard the allegations as genuine but mistaken rather than to have been deliberately misleading,” she said.