How Recent Court Decisions Are Changing Family Violence Law

Real change in family violence law doesn’t come through dramatic announcements. It happens through court decisions that demand clear evidence, careful reasoning, and well-justified orders. Recent cases show that judges have been quietly reshaping the way the law works—not by changing the legislation, but by making sure the legal system reflects the real ways control, coercion, and harm occur in relationships.

Start with how evidence is handled. In IMM v The Queen, the High Court required trial judges to assess probative value by assuming the evidence is credible and reliable at the outset. In plain terms, if you present text messages or bank records showing cut-offs, surveillance, coercive financial demands, they should not be discarded immediately as “unreliable.” Judges must give them full consideration in determining what actually happened. When combined with habitual misconduct, that’s a powerful base for showing coercive control.

Hughes v The Queen went further. The High Court said that tendency evidence doesn’t have to be near-identical to be relevant. A pattern of varied threats or financial manipulation can now be treated as significant. This is a major shift for family-violence contexts, where control is often psychological and cumulative, not physically identical each time.

Together, these principles form a legal foundation in which patterns, even subtle ones, can be significant and must be assessed fairly. Those principles are already shaping family law. In Pickford & Pickford, the Full Court dealt directly with whether parental conflict can be re-branded as coercive control. The Court said no – conflict isn’t violence unless there’s clear evidence of one party coercing, isolating or manipulating the other. The judgment required judges to describe the conduct, its effect, and the connection to safety. That helps prevent “control” from becoming a label for every angry text.

Risk assessments have also grown more disciplined. In Isles & Nelissen, the Full Court restated that “unacceptable risk” is about predicting future harm, not punishing past mistakes. It’s a forward-looking exercise, requiring evidence that links past conduct, risk, and the right protective orders. In Western Australia, that means judges must balance the best interests test with clear articulation of what could happen to children and why.

Wells & Wells shows how this looks in practice. The court parsed allegations of violence, assessed parenting capacities and made decisions about decision-making authority—breaking down risk in careful terms, not broad generalisations.

Property settlements are catching up too. Since Kennon v Kennon, parties have sought adjustments due to violence disrupting contributions. Now, amendments to the Family Law Act require courts to consider the economic effects of family violence—and explicitly include economic abuse. Courts must look at how unequal control over income, debt manipulation, or lost opportunities changed the property pool. That gives tangible weight to economic coercion.

Alongside developments in case law, there has also been a change to the legislative framework. The presumption of equal shared parental responsibility has been removed, with the law now framed in terms of an emphasis on safety. In practice, safety has always been the first consideration, but it was previously weighed alongside the ESPR presumption. Without that balancing step, it is unclear whether the change will lead to better outcomes for children. The court will still face the same challenges when one parent alleges risk and the other denies it, requiring judges to assess credibility and weigh competing evidence. Ultimately, the court must still balance the importance of maintaining strong relationships with both parents against the nature and extent of any risks alleged, making this change appear more like a simplification in wording than a fundamental shift in how decisions are reached.

For legal practice in Western Australia, these developments mean that work on a family violence matter must focus on building evidence around patterns rather than isolated incidents, using detailed timelines, messages, financial records and witness accounts. The reasoning in IMM and Hughes requires that such evidence be treated as credible for the purpose of assessing its probative value, with its significance lying in the demonstration of a recurring course of conduct. Isles & Nelissen provides a useful framework by linking each act to an identifiable risk and then matching that risk with specific protective orders. In property proceedings, Kennon and the new statutory provisions support arguments that violence diminished a party’s contributions or increased their future needs. Judges are now more likely to expect a precise articulation of the nature and extent of risk, and following Pickford, they will not accept vague references to “conflict” without a clear explanation of how it amounted to coercion or danger.

The law isn’t being rewritten in one headline case. Instead, it is developing through decisions that demand context, clarity, and protection. As these principles evolve, the hope is that the legal system can offer stronger safeguards for genuine victims of family violence while keeping evidentiary standards high enough to prevent false allegations from destroying reputations, relationships, and lives.