Beyond Marriage: Evaluating Legal Protection Against Intimate Partner Violence In De Facto And Casual Relationships In Aotearoa New Zealand
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT This article examines the legal effectiveness of protection orders under New Zealand’s Family Violence Act 2018 in the context of de facto, casual, and non-cohabiting intimate partner relationships. While the Act purports to move beyond the confines of marriage and cohabitation by recognising “close personal relationships,” the practical application of this provision has proved inconsistent and, at times, exclusionary. Victims in informal or contested relationships often encounter significant evidentiary and procedural hurdles when seeking protection orders—obstacles compounded by judicial discretion, vague statutory guidance, and social assumptions about relationship legitimacy. Drawing on statutory analysis, case law, and comparative approaches from Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, this article argues that New Zealand’s current legal framework continues to privilege conventional relationship forms, thereby limiting equitable access to protection. It critically assesses the threshold requirements for obtaining protection orders, the burden of proving relationship status, and the intersection with parenting disputes under the Care of Children Act 2004. The analysis reveals that the law’s relational prerequisites can obscure the core issue of risk and harm, particularly for victims of coercive control, digital abuse, or psychological violence. The article concludes by proposing legislative and policy reforms, including clearer statutory definitions of intimate relationships, judicial training, evidentiary presumptions based on credible risk, and enhanced support for victims outside legally recognised partnerships. These reforms are necessary to align New Zealand’s legal response to intimate partner violence with contemporary relational realities and ensure that protection is guided by the presence of harm, not the form of a relationship.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".