Domestic Violence and Custody Proceedings: An Analysis of Judicial Decisions in Portugal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Purpose To understand court decisions in custody cases involving allegations of domestic violence, a qualitative study was conducted among Portuguese family court magistrates. Methods A nonprobabilistic snowball sampling process, which involved six judges from Portuguese family courts who were authorized by the Superior Magistrate’s Court to participate in an interview, was used to construct the sample. Results When the data were analyzed, three main themes emerged, namely, the characteristics of the processes, the factors considered in the judicial decisions, and the impact of shared custody. The results also revealed several legal and extralegal aspects that influence judicial decisions, such as the characteristics of the violence, the mediation process, and the status attributed to victims, suggesting that there are objective and subjective factors in the perpetuation of violence. Conclusions Allegations of domestic violence in custody proceedings are not uncommon, and these allegations can complicate the process and delay a decision. Efforts by one parent to restrict contact with the other parent raise suspicions of attempted alienation that tend to undermine the risk assessment. There can also be overreliance on shared custody, potentially undermining children’s safety. The negative impacts of exposure to domestic violence and the instrumentalization of children are recognized, but it is questionable whether they are being prevented to the extent advocated by the Istanbul Convention. The effectiveness of communication between criminal and family courts is also debatable, despite its importance for protecting victims.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".