Changing the culture of family justice: barriers to be overcome

Abstract

This chapter considers a number of underlying problematic issues that make it difficult to change the culture of the family justice system so as to put the needs of children centre stage and see the system as part of a matrix of public services to promote children's wellbeing and strengthen their emotional resilience. The discussions cover the way the Coalition government set about cutting legal aid from most private family law proceedings; the repeated and longstanding failures to invest in information technology; the ‘normalisation’ of divorce and the problem of scale; the problem of labelling interparental disputes as ‘private law’ cases; the problem of ‘churn’ in civil service staffing policy; and attempts to overcome obstacles to interprofessional understanding and collaboration.