Today marks the launch of Right to Equality’s Breaking Bias, Building Justice campaign. We are launching our report, documenting victim-blaming in the family courts, later today in parliament.
Our report reveals gender bias and victim-blaming language is found in nearly three-quarters of analysed family court judgments containing domestic and sexual abuse- primarily from judges.
You can read the report here.
Factfile:
- 72.5% (66) of all judgments contained at least one instance of judicial victim‐blaming. Source: “Scratching the Surface” Report 2026
- The most prevalent form of victim-blaming was discrediting (233 instances), followed by behavioural blame (173) and trivialisation (99)
- The majority of victim-blaming identified was subtle (62.5%), meaning it is easily embedded within judicial reasoning and difficult to challenge
- Mothers’ behaviour was scrutinised and criticised, while fathers’ conduct was contextualised or minimised
- Women were far more likely to be described as “emotional” by judges — a well-documented gender stereotype
Kirith Entwistle MP for Bolton North East, says:
“Too many women have told me that the family courts felt like an extension of the abuse that they were trying to escape. The persistent and routine undermining of victim-survivors found in published judgments demonstrates why victims of abuse have such low confidence in being treated fairly in our family justice system. Bias distracts judges from properly assessing risk, their obligation to safeguard, and putting the needs of the children first. It is essential that this is tackled head on with transparency, strong accountability, and training.”
Dr Charlotte Proudman, Founder and Director of Right to Equality, says:
“As a barrister, I have stood in family courts and watched judges normalise abuse, trivialise trauma and silence survivors. This report gives voice to what victims have been telling us for decades: bias is real, it is embedded in the family justice system, and it is shaping decisions that affect children’s safety, resulting in irreparable harm.
Our findings in this report – analysing over 90 family court judgments documenting persistent gender bias, the misuse of rape myths, and systemic injustices – are not abstract statistics. They are lives. They represent real trauma mishandled under the guise of neutrality in the family courts.”
Dr Adrienne Barnett, Co-Director of Right to Equality, says:
“Every day, victims and survivors of abuse experience appalling treatment in our family courts. Yet these scandals rarely reach the public because victims are silenced by outdated laws, closed hearings and ineffective complaints systems. This report had to rely on published judgments, yet still found subtle and pervasive victim-blaming and biased language. We are calling for stronger transparency and accountability so that victim-survivors are supported, not punished, for safeguarding their children.”
Angie Herrera, Director of Latin American Women’s Aid, says:
“It is imperative that the Family Courts system incorporate not only a gender and trauma informed approach, but also an intersectional one. A judicial system and truly seeks to safeguard children and victims, should also understand the role and impact of migration status, race, age, or ability in a context of a child arrangement cases where there has been domestic violence.”
The report raises concerns about the continued barriers to transparency and accountability for victim-survivors of abuse who are subjected to bias and victim-blaming in our family justice system. The report is part of Right to Equality’s Breaking Bias, Building Justice campaign, which is calling for urgent action to deliver a fairer, more trauma informed family court system that victims can trust. The campaign aims to increase transparency and drive family court reporting. We call for more judgements to be published by the Family Justice Boards. We are specifically calling for training on rape myths and stereotypes for the family court judiciary, as this is already mandatory for judges in criminal court.
Key recommendations include:
- Government resourcing of a drastic increase in the number of published family court judgments.
- Mandatory judicial training on gender bias and victim-blaming, designed in consultation with specialist organisations
- The Family Justice Board publishing transparency data annually at a local level
- The Government prioritising family courts in their rollout of AI tools for transcription and judgment publication
The project also explored the potential of artificial intelligence to support large-scale research into bias. The ViDA model, developed by herEthical AI, was trained alongside the manual annotation process and the report concludes bespoke AI tools offer significant opportunities for identifying victim-blaming at scale, as part of efforts to eradicate this insidious form of harm.
Despite significant legislative reforms in recent years, including the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, the report concludes that attitudinal change within the judiciary in family courts has not kept pace. Domestic abuse is now the “everyday business” of the family court, yet this report suggests survivors continue to face a culture of disbelief.
Although a limited and selective sample of published cases, the data suggests that harmful attitudes could influence decision‐making, including reliance on rape myths, stereotyping, or overt scepticism toward mothers. The findings show that victim‐blaming and gender bias can be found in family courts, even in published judgments that may already have been carefully worded. Given that only a small fraction of cases are publicly available, the report concludes that current analysis likely underestimates the scale of the problem. Unlike in criminal courts, there are no practice directions against victim blaming, so the culture of victim-blaming has so far gone unaddressed. This report is only “scratching the surface” of the issue of judicial bias in the family courts, where the fates of hundreds of families and children nationwide are being decided daily.
Published 9 June 2026.