CCChat_The-Jess-Hill-Interview

A conversation with Jess Hill
The fact that lawyers here
(Australia) have openly said they
know which report writers to go
to, if they have a perpetrator as a
client, that’s how that report
writer continues to get work.
The fact is that, when we have
report writers who are real
experts in child abuse, child
sexual abuse, domestic violence,
it’s quite unusual- certainly less
usual than the other way roundfor
that court writer to be taken
seriously within the family law
system.
They seem biased because so
many of the expert report writers
are writing this completely
unscientific nonsense and so the
judges get used to reading that
and they’re not psychologists and
they don’t have their own
expertise in domestic abuse,
apart from the expertise they
think they’ve developed from
working with it and it can be that
you just reinforce and reinforce
the wrong assumptions, the
wrong stereotypes and all that
leads us exactly in the wrong
direction.
I’ve been pretty harsh on the
Family Law system, partly so the
public actually wakes up to how
bad it can be but, at the same
time, whenever someone has
said, would you mind coming to
talk to us, speak at our
conference, I am over the moon
as I do believe, like you, that this
can be reformed, I just think that
there’s a lot of education and a
total change in accountability
that needs to be instituted in
order for that to happen and I
don’t know if that’s possible.
I don’t know if the system would
allow that because the family law
judges are pretty resistant,
uniquely resistant, compared to
magistrates, from what I’ve
experienced, to being educated,
because they feel that they’ve got
the experts to do that for them.
They don’t need to be experts,
because they get these report
writers. So this nexus, the expert
report writers, for me, have
always been the fundamental
problem because enough are
providing incredibly bad advice
and they are operating within
this weird bubble like where
parental alienation is being
misused and this kind of stuff.
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