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When preparing for our second blog post, Family Relief became distracted by responding to Facebook interactions from our first post (Brindley 2024a). It had been our intention to invite public thought from consumers of the Parental Conflict Industry (PCI).   Overwhelming responders to the post intensely advocated for themselves by highlighting the vulnerability of men to suicide and blamed this on the legal profession.  As can be seen from the post Family Relief allowed the majority of these posts to remain and while challenging to read Family Relief chose to respond with the same respect that would be practiced with Parenting Coordination clients.

As is congruent with Family Relief’s approach this became an opportune time to reflect.  What was the underlying driver at play here? Why was it that only men responded, and their approach from a gendered framework against one institution? Was it wholly because the picture I used only had three women in it – including Family Relief? A response to exposure of a prior trauma?  Had there been occasions in which all these men saw three women talking that resulted in harm coming to them?

In planning for this post many months ago I had intended the second post to introduce and share a resource with potential referrers and clients.  A sneak peek into the style of semi structured robust work that Family Relief intends to scaffold clients needs with as they navigate the murky waters of implementing new Orders.  These resources are designed for Parenting Coordination clients however may be of us for anyone struggling with the demands of separated parenting.

The first resource needed to be something that introduced safety between clients and Family Relief, and parallel this with the review of boundaries that clients would also be challenged with in working with each other.  A space in which a common language with clear meanings is established so later boundaries and negotiation could be sought and valued.  As a social worker this starting point is pretty much standard practice – a very different approach to standard practice in the PCI.

Family Relief’s resource Safeguarding the Sanctuary invites the audience to acknowledge the complexities of relational safety, the obviousness of feeling anger, hurt and mistrust. It recognises that we all have a role in protecting ourselves and others.  This resource is not for the faint hearted. Our client base needs resources that are relevant and the PCI is not an industry a person accesses when their lives are easy and smooth sailing. It is written for all parents irrespective of gender without labels of perpetrator or victim/survivor purposefully.  The reason being is that rarely does someone causing harm focus on them being the perpetrator – they see themselves as protecting themselves from harm done to them – even if it is that they have been ‘disrespected’.  Further Parenting Coordination has the potential to redirect the dialogue to motivate parents to act like parents rebalancing the protect/nurture dual roles for their children.

So in thinking about what are the experiences of PCI consumers, as part of a broader review Family Relief accessed and reviewed publicly accessible submissions to the Inquiry of Family Law of 2020.  Family Relief conducted a keyword search for the term “suicide”. More than 1000 submissions were sent into the Inquiry, 261 are publicly available.  This review then does not represent a robust sample to draw conclusions of the population of submissions nor the population of consumers of the PCI.  However Family Relief found this to still be an interesting resource that is better than simply assuming based on my own experience as a consumer or a professional.

Of the 261 submissions accessed, 39 submissions stated the term “suicide” as identified by Adobe pdf folder search.  It is noted that not all documents could be interpreted by Adobe so some files were not adequately scanned.  Of the 39 submissions identified to include the term “suicide”  it appeared 237 times.

Of notable mention the Law Council of Australia (Law Council of Australia, 2019) reported on statistics of suicide, homicide and filicide and acknowledged that parental separation is a process where increased risk is present, with men more likely to be active in their intentions to harm both themselves and others. Sub 1129 (Withheld, n.d.) quoted the Domestic and Family Violence Death Review and Advisory Board “120 people died from DV related suicided compared to 71 DV related homicides. And more than half of these deaths occurred after parties were separated. Qld DFVDR & A Board studies found of the 120 deaths by suicide, 97 of the 120 suicides were men.” p.3. Submissions 05, 1129, 1132, 1134 acknowledged stressors men were specifically vulnerable to that contributed to suicide (L. Anlezark, personal communication, n.d.; The Divorce Tango Pty Ltd, personal communication, n.d.; Unknown, personal communication, n.d.-c; Withheld, personal communication, n.d.)and Sub1062, Sub1130, Sub1134 argued bias existed against men (L. Anlezark, personal communication, n.d.; S. Loomes, personal communication, 2020; Unknown, personal communication, n.d.-b).

Indeed Family Relief back in 2002 as a volunteer telephone counsellor worked alongside front line workers as Mensline was being established.  The trends of men’s suicide rates being higher than women is not a new thing, and nor is the rate of physical violence leading to more women than men being murdered. To reinforce this message consider the graph below published by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (Domestic homicide, 2024).  As can be seen there is a defining of intimate partner violence abuser separate from the perpetrator of homicide. Men identified as the primary abuser tended to be more often than not killing the female. Women who had perpetrated the homicide were more likely to have killed their abuser.

In the next graph as indicated above, the homicide rate of women was substantial around 2002 and decreased over the 20 years since for both sexes.  This indicates to me that the improvement may not actually be due to a bias towards services for women but rather that a more global protection against threats of loss of life with the family has been effective.

Still as can be seen in following graph, the persons who lose their life are not always women, male children are also vulnerable to homicide by men.  Thereby while there is a trend of multiple others being vulnerable, including children, parents and partners. Family Relief seeks to employ a focus of enabling wellbeing with an expansion from inter parental distress to others including children and those who have interests in the family wellbeing.  Family Relief is intrigued by the learnings from Family Group Conferences as an intervention strategy of the future.

Finally a particular statement from Sub13 resonated with Family Relief:

“After all, studies show that the vast majority of parents do indeed wish to spend more time with their children, if only the system allowed them to. Indeed, many parents are falling victim to depression and suicide (which are obviously health and safety related matters) as a result of the current system which unfairly denies them the ability to actively love their children indeed.” (Unknown, n.d.-a, p.3).

So in response to the posts by men seeking for there to be change, Family Relief agrees.  The rate of suicide may be an indication that indeed the PCI is not responding to men’s needs.  This is further supported by data that men tend to be more likely to take not only their own lives but also the lives of family members.  Men are in distress, as are other family members who seek to protect themselves and each other.  There has been improvements however as indicated by the submissions – psychological distress is enduring as our PCI industry is not yet equipped to acknowledge the drivers of distress such as use of Child Support Agency to disperse financial resources, legal argumentation to determine parenting capacity and the multiple losses embedded within the parental separation transition. Family Relief agrees so much so that we had developed Safeguarding the Sanctuary eBook (Brindley, 2024) and Safeguarding the Sanctuary Plan.

In order to provide an alternative, within our current system Family Relief has produced an eBook for consumers of the PCI to delve into this distress. This book will be accessible for the PCI to review and for potential consumers to use for free for a short time though will be protected behind a paywall in the future.  After readers of Safeguarding the Sanctuary eBook has completed the activities and identified their needs they have access to the Safeguarding the Sanctuary Plan (SSP) which provides a ‘container’ to consolidate needs identified and start actions or maintenance work that can be shared within each persons trusted network.

As always Family Relief welcomes feedback from the PCI regarding tools and resources developed by Family Relief and looks forward to clients benefiting from these tools.

The Safeguarding the Sanctuary eBook can be accessed by going to https://simplebooklet.com/familyreliefsafeguarding

 

References:

Anlezark, L. (n.d.). sub1134 [Letter to Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Family Law System].

Brindley, M. (2024). Safeguarding the Sanctuary (1st ed.). https://simplebooklet.com/familyreliefsafeguarding

Domestic homicide. (2024). Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. https://www.aihw.gov.au/family-domestic-and-sexual-violence/responses-and-outcomes/domestic-homicide

Law Council of Australia. (2019). Sub02 [Letter to Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Family Law System].

Loomes, S. (2020). Submission 1130 [Letter to Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Family Law System].

The Divorce Tango Pty Ltd. (n.d.). Sub05 – The Divorce Tango Pty Ltd [Letter to Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Family Law System].

Unknown. (n.d.-a). Sub13 – Name Withheld [Letter to Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Family Law System].

Unknown. (n.d.-b). sub1062 [Letter to Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Family Law System].

Unknown. (n.d.-c). sub1132 name withheld [Letter to Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Family Law System].

Withheld. (n.d.). sub1129 [Letter to Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Family Law System].

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