The Intersection of Child Protection and Family Law Systems in Cases of Domestic Violence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Both the child protection and the family law systems are intended to promote the best interests of children, and both can profoundly affect the relationships between children and their parents or caregivers. Over the past two decades, both systems have also accorded more weight in the assessment of best interests to how exposure to domestic violence can harm or place children at risk. However, these systems have evolved differently, are governed by different statutes, and are administered in different ways. Child protection proceedings purport to have primarily a protective function and invariably involve a public agency, while family law proceedings, under the Divorce Act and similar provincial and territorial statutes, typically involve disputes between private litigants. In this article, I compare the impact of the two systems in cases involving allegations of domestic violence, highlighting the challenges within each, the differences between them in their identification and response to domestic violence, as well as the problematic ways in which the systems interact and generate contradictory pressures for survivors, most often mothers. While I reference research findings in other jurisdictions, my inquiry is focused on Saskatchewan, a jurisdiction with relatively high rates of children in state care and the highest rate of domestic violence of all provinces. I draw on multiple sources that include extensive in-person interviews with legal professionals, government employees and service providers. I argue that the tensions and contradictions experienced by those affected by domestic violence could be mitigated by the provision of adequate and appropriate preventative and legal supports in both systems along with information and procedural protocols, more uniform understandings of domestic violence and adequate training for all court and Ministry personnel in the dynamics of domestic violence, the impact of systemic inequalities and the specific issues arising at the intersection of both systems.
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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 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".