When the violence against women movement became increasingly organized in Canada and shelters for abused women and rape crisis centres began to open, most of the work was focused on helping women get away from their abusers. There was an inherent belief that this was what was best for women. While shelter work has always been rooted in a commitment to providing non-judgemental support to women,
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A common legal bullying tactic of abusive men is to slow down family court proceedings by failing to file documents in a timely manner or by filing incomplete documents. Nowhere is this more common than with the filing of Financial Statements, which are required whenever there is a claim for support (child or spousal) or a division of property.
The number of litigants in family court who do not have lawyers has reached a critical point, with between 50 and 80% of cases now involving at least one party who is unrepresented. While not having a lawyer is of concern to any litigant, the impact on a woman who has left an abusive partner is significantly greater.
Supervised access and supervised access exchanges can offer some protection to women who are concerned about the safety of their children during access or their own safety as they exchange the children with their partner.
For example, if the access parent has a serious and unstable mental health issue, a drug or alcohol problem,
The presence of violence in the family is an important consideration in custody and access cases. It is, as we discuss below, one of the factors in the best interests of the child test.
However, this does not mean that all judges understand how important this issue is or that all lawyers know how to present evidence about it effectively.
From time to time, the court will impute income in a child support case. This means the judge finds that the amount of income the parent who is paying support is claiming is not a fair reflection of what they could be earning and, to address this, assigns an income to the payer,
Mandatory charging is a policy in place across Canada that requires police to lay charges in domestic violence cases where the officer involved believes there is a reasonable likelihood of getting a conviction, whether or not the victim wants a charge to be laid.
In order to understand the challenges this has created,
In Canada, marriage is ended by way of a civil divorce, pursuant to the terms of the Divorce Act, which set outs such requirements as:
At least one of the parties has to have been resident in the province where the divorce application is being made for at least one year
The parties have to have lived separate and apart for at least one year OR the party seeking the divorce must be able to establish either adultery or unconscionable cruelty by the other party
As well as terminating the marriage,
