Background material for Battered by the System, 3 June, 2000.

For all its faults The Australian remains the only paper in Australia to have ever tackled this subject, the only paper prepared to fly in the face of fashionable shibboleths and to invest the time and energy to investigate this complex story..

The Family and Children's Courts are protected by rafts of legislation making them almost impossible to report.

The legislation purports to protect children.

It does nothing of the kind. It protects lawyers and an utterly dysfunctional judicial system.

The behaviour of these jurisdictions would shock any lay person, if only they were encouraged to understand them.

These are the original stories that preceded Battered by the System.