Violence Against Women and the B.C. Family Law Act: Early Jurisprudence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
British Columbia’s new Family Law Act (FLA) – in force since March 18, 2013 – holds significant promise in the sense that it deals explicitly with family violence. Under the previous family law statute, judges were able to take family violence into account, but were erratic in doing so and lacking in legislative guidance regarding how to do so. In contrast, the FLA requires judges to consider family violence as a factor under the best interests of the child (BIC) analysis. It offers a broad definition of family violence and specifies factors that judges must consider in assessing the impact of family violence. Children’s physical, psychological and emotional safety, security and well-being are prioritized in the best interests of the child test. The focus of this article is to review case law up to December 2015 and to highlight some concerns. We ask to what extent judges are taking account of the realities of women’s lives in their assessments of family violence, and to what extent courts are still relying on faulty assumptions about the nature and impact of spousal violence. In particular, we focus on the impact that family violence has on parenting arrangements and orders. We first examine the interpretation of the new definition of “family violence” and then proceed to some evidentiary issues. We then consider how guardianship orders have been influenced by family violence and how family violence is dealt with in these judgements. We suggest that normative assumptions about the value of shared parenting can detract from the significance accorded to determinations of family violence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".