Family Court System

The family court system is one of the most consequential institutions in the lives of survivors of coercive control and narcissistic abuse — and one of the most consistently documented as failing them. Research published in October 2025 by the Bureau of Investigates found that domestic abuse features in nine out of ten family court cases in England and Wales, and that coercive and controlling behavior — a criminal offense since 2015 — is routinely dismissed or misunderstood by courts despite its prevalence and severity. A 2025 Family Court Review paper confirmed that family violence and coercive control require fundamentally different approaches to parenting arrangements than those applied in standard custody proceedings, and that assessments must account for the specific harm that perpetrators present to both children and the protective parent (Jaffe, 2025).

The family court system was designed for conflict — for situations in which two parents with competing interests require a neutral framework for resolution. It was not designed for coercion. When one parent is using the court process as an extension of post-separation coercive control — filing repeated motions, making allegations, prolonging proceedings, distorting information to make the protective parent appear unfit — the system’s neutrality becomes a liability. This is what researchers now call legal abuse or litigation abuse: the deliberate use of court processes as a coercive control tactic. In 2022, Lisa Goodman and Ellen Gutowski developed the Legal Abuse Scale — the first validated psychometric measure of this specific form of post-separation abuse — confirming in a sample of 222 survivor-mothers that legal abuse functions as a distinct and measurable extension of coercive control.

The pro-contact culture that persists in many family courts — the presumption that contact with both parents is always in the child’s best interests, regardless of the safety context — has been identified as a systemic risk factor for survivors and children in coercive control cases. Joan Meier’s research at the George Washington University National Family Violence Law Center has documented the specific harms produced when courts fail to distinguish between conflict and coercion, and when protective parents’ allegations are dismissed or reversed through DARVO-informed perpetrator counter-claims.

Narcissistic Abuse Rehab addresses the intersection of coercive control and family court proceedings across multiple resources — including the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index, the lawfare guide, and the post-separation abuse hub — because the legal system is not a neutral space for survivors. Understanding it, navigating it, and documenting abuse within it are core dimensions of specialist recovery support.