The final presentation on the first day of our conference was a shocking reminder of just how much work is still needed to keep women and children who are separating from their abusers safe.

Professor Shazia Choudhry’s presentation ‘The Role of Human Rights in the Family Courts’ was based on her research across several countries. That research in turn was based upon her in-depth discussions individually, or in focus groups, with those who have sad experience of the work of the Family Courts and the judgements they hand down relating to the access that abusive partners have to their children.

In the UK there has recently been a welcome change in the law removing the presumption that continuing contact with both parents is in the interests of the child, and is a human right of father (usually father) and child. This research also took place in France, Italy, Brazil and Latvia where the presumption continues, leading tragically to further harms up to and including the murder of mothers and children. All of us will have read about such tragedies in the UK news. This culture of contact at all costs continues in many countries.

Professor Choudhry emphasised that the most dangerous time in the journey of abused women and their children away from an abusive relationship is at the time of separation. During this time women described trying to live on three separate planets: those of social care, the divorce court and the family court, planets between which there is no communication. One of the most pernicious examples of the way in which these conflict is ‘parental alienation’. The idea that a child whose concern, often fear, about their father is taken not as an understandable sign of the violence they have witnessed, but as a sign that the child has been turned against their father by those seeking to separate them. This leaves the mother in an impossible double bind – protecting her children is also alienating them. This concept has now been dismissed in the UK but persists in the other countries where the research took place.

 There were many other examples of the ways in which gender bias works against mothers: the questions they are asked about how they reconcile their work and family commitments – which are not asked of fathers, the absence of support to obtain appropriate legal representation, the long ‘queues’ to get cases to court with all the risks to personal safety and financial security that entails.

 The sad experience of one mother, a complete loss of faith in the justice system, was a thread that we heard throughout the presentation.

 The question Soroptimists put to Professor Choudry was, of course, ‘what can we do?’ Her response – support the availability of refuges and support women in refuges to access the advice and support they need. Perhaps we feel that we are well engaged in this way in the UK. In one of the countries researched the only support available to women leaving domestic violence was peer support around their kitchen tables.

 This is a presentation that needs to be heard and considered across all our federations?