The Family Court can be a toxic environment that entraps parents in a web of entanglement.
In most businesses, you want to harvest the low hanging fruit, as it is cost effective, requires minimal output, and generates good income. Lawyers know this, its their bread and butter.
Family Court lawyers have mastered the Art of gaslighting the parties once in the Family Court. They then create a legal entanglement, and milk the parents in a web that will often drag proceedings out for 2-5+ years. By the end of it one if not both parents will have lost most of their accumulated wealth, and at least one is likely to have lost a home. The lawyers will have moved the wealth to them via streams of Court filings, and applications. Often the concerned parent will be targeted with accusations of malicious notifications, and "emotional" abuse. Lawyers will even run "Potential emotional abuse", they don't even have to prove it in the Family Court. It's enough that they raise it as a possible risk. Not probable, nor likely, but "possible". These lawyers, and the parent not being targeted can even accuse the other parent of mental illness, and the Court will act on that concern. Then Specialist report writers will come in and often back up that concern and rubber stamp it for the majority group targeting the sole parent.
Why do they do this?
If you target a genuine concerned parent, and disbelieve their concern for a child's safety that will cause the concerned parent to try harder to prove the concerns are valid and real.
The lawyers, OT, Specialist report writers and Judges then often push back harder on the sole parent defending the safety of their child. Eventually they push the parent into supervised contact, or no contact at all. That causes the parent to fight even harder for the child, and meanwhile the cash registers keep ringing.
Its an evil system that is abused by those on the gravy train. They hold children for ransom over the heads of parents that will spend every last dollar they have attempting to save their children.
Many of these parents run out of finances in the first 1-3 years, and then if lucky they secure Legal Aid, but either end up with a junior lawyer, or if they are lucky to have a senior lawyer, that lawyer often wont put the necessary hours in that the web of entanglement requires. Your legal aid becomes depleted before you get to the substantive Hearing. Your lawyer becomes difficult and you are pushed until you remove your file from the firm and look for another lawyer. Because your legal aid is now gone, you have to prove further legal aid is warranted and justified. It is at this stage you will struggle to get a lawyer, because you had one, they didn't do the work they should have, and a new lawyer will be reluctant to pick up the file left over from a previous lawyer. These lawyers prefer fresh picking$...
So, you self represent. At this point the lawyers and Judge's whom were previously senior Family Court lawyers playing the game, see you as a hopeless case that hasn't come to accept you have lost. You are now bumped around in the court with numerous judicial conferences and round table meetings, reports undertaken, and pressure put on you. You either break, and then they gleefully say "see, we called it right early on, they have mental issues...", or you give up and walk away from your child, or at worst, take your life. If you survive, they will beat you down with an award against you for Legal costs, which they will throw on you now you aren’t protected by legal aid.
That is the sad reality of the destruction caused by OT and the Family Court gravy train Rort where children are the currency.
Please click on this link and sign the petition, and share it with family, friends, and across social media.