The essay is so angry as to be almost hysterical. There is frequent use of italics, exclamation marks and emotive language. The Family Court is ‘a monstrosity’, a gross abuser of human rights. ‘A caring court! It has not cared for the thousands of non-custodial parents (fathers) who have wasted their spirits and resources, not in attempting to overturn a decision of the Court, but in a futile attempt to get the Court to enforce its own orders so they might see their children.’

Hirst uses the stories of three men to illustrate his case. There is Graham, who has spent $53,000 in a failed attempt to get custody of his son, and who, Hirst tells us, is ‘a tradesman, bronzed, well-knit and still handsome in middle age’. Why do we need to know this? There is Julian (he has ‘an expressive, mobile face’), who has spent nine years going through the courts trying to see his daughter. He pushes around a double-decker trolley packed with his own files, and is ‘somewhat histrionic’. But, Hirst asks, ‘who can say what is the best way to preserve your mental health when you are accused of getting your four-year-old daughter to suck your cock?’ Quite.

And there is Paul, who has a bipolar disorder. Paul and his wife had worked out an agreement for sharing custody of their two daughters, but three days into the first time with her father, the thirteen-year-old telephoned her mother and asked to be taken home. His wife then insisted she would have to be present when he saw the girls in future. Now his daughters no longer want to see him at all. Paul does not expect to see them again: ‘They’re gone. They have been stolen. The court could not help me,’ he told Hirst. Yes, it’s extremely sad for Paul. But what happened to cause the girl to demand to go home? If Hirst asked, he does not tell us. And Hirst’s compassion for the men is commendable, but does not seem to extend to mothers, or even children.

The sins of the Family Court lie in its ‘no fault’ approach, when fault is exactly what most of the parties involved with the court want to prove; in the fact that it can’t enforce its own orders, due to its reluctance to put a custodial mother in jail because of the harm this will do to the children (though many women in jail are mothers, Hirst points out); and in its adversarial approach. The best interests of the child are served if separated parents can cooperate, whereas an adversarial system promotes conflict between them, Hirst says. Yes. An inquisitorial system should be and has been considered.

This is what happens: most separations are sought by women; the vast majority of separating couples decide custody arrangements either by agreement or through mediation (only five per cent go to trial); after separation, many non-custodial parents, mainly men, lose contact with their children; in disputed cases, sometimes false allegations of the sexual abuse of children are made. The most common accusation is made by the mother against the father; the second most common is by the father against the mother’s new partner. People who knowingly make false accusations should be charged with perjury, says Hirst. Yes, they should. And all of this is indeed tragic, for all concerned.

This also happens: ‘Michael took the children on ... and drove them to the place where he and Narelle used to park as lovers. Here he gave the children whisky in soft drink, to make them sleep, and then gassed them by connecting a hose to the exhaust pipe and placing it into the car. It appears that, as he lost consciousness, he had second thoughts about his actions and opened the door to let some air in. He managed to save himself but the children died.’ And: ‘Peter abducted his own two children, aged five years and one year, and his stepson aged seven years ... Police located the vehicle too late to save the children or their father. It appeared from scuff marks on the ground outside the car, and bruises and scratches on the bodies of the two older children, that they had struggled to escape, but that their father had used force to restrain them. All three children had been sedated prior to the offence.’

The stories told by Carolyn Harris Johnson in Come with Daddy: Child murder–suicide after family breakdown are the more shocking for the unemotional, academic language in which they are told. Johnson, who has worked in the criminal justice, Family Court and child protection systems for twenty-five years, was prompted to conduct this study of ‘familicide’ (child murder–suicide) after she counselled a man who was in jail for having killed his two young children. ‘An infrequent but regular variety of homicide is that in which a man destroys his wife and children. A corresponding act of familicide by the wife is almost unheard of,’ Johnson quotes. She tracks seven such cases, involving the deaths of fifteen children. In all except one case, the children were gassed in their fathers’ cars. Her study contradicts the common perception that such murders are carried out by men driven to madness by the Family Court, or who have been denied access to their children. ‘Some people apparently believe that fathers are treated unfairly in the Family Court,’ says Johnson, with remarkable understatement. Yet only one couple in the study had a current dispute in the court. In all but one of the cases, the man had contact with his children. ‘In the case where the man did not kill his children during access but shot them while they slept, he had consistently refused to exercise access although encouraged and supported to do so by his ex-wife,’ writes Johnson.

The men who committed these murders frequently ‘exhibited a proprietary attitude’ towards their wives and children. ‘There are often reports of the male’s rage, proprietary attitude or obsessive jealousy.’ Far from giving too much power to women, the courts need to pay more attention when mothers express fears for the safety of their children, she says. There is also a serious shortage of programmes to help men deal with marital separation and anger management. There is nothing very surprising in Johnson’s study. It is a sober text, one that provides previously lacking research into this terrible phenomenon. It is devoid of the rage and bitterness that characterises Hirst’s essay. Unlike Hirst, Johnson does display sympathy for the ‘other side’ in this sad equation. But what strikes this reviewer is that Johnson’s main concern is for the safety of children, while Hirst’s overriding sympathy is for their fathers.

Despite Hirst’s criticism, the Family Court’s principle of basing its judgments on what is in the best interests of the child is as it should be. To overturn the ‘no fault’ principle, as Hirst also wants to do, would be to go back to a time of punitive social attitudes, when those trapped in unhappy marriages were expected to remain in them. Parents – mothers and fathers – do sometimes behave maliciously, do tell lies, do use children to wound their former partners. The Family Court is only a court, and does not have the power to make people behave reasonably or responsibly. To consider how it might do its job better is a useful undertaking. Unfortunately, while John Hirst’s essay might give comfort to some men’s groups, it does not add much of value to the debate.