Judges in the family courts are using victim-blaming and gender-biased language towards domestic abuse survivors, AI analysis of judgments and appeals in England and Wales reveals.
The findings are the result of a project called herEthical AI, which trains computers to identify attitudes among judges that it warns is resulting in the retraumatisation of domestic abuse survivors in the family courts.
Examples found through the research include characterising a woman as a “deeply troubled mother with mental health difficulties unrelated to the father’s behaviour”; referring to an attempted strangling as a possible “prank”; or concluding that it was improbable that an “educated professional” would not speak to anyone else while “inappropriate and wrong” sexual relations were happening.
The idea for the project originated with a campaign called Breaking Bias run by Right to Equality. Charlotte Proudman, its founder and a barrister, said the AI model could “look through the nitty gritty to find patterns of behaviour in the language used” and reveal “stereotypical assumptions” about victims of domestic abuse, as well as a lack of understanding around coercive and controlling behaviour and how trauma impacts memory.
She said the findings underscored the need for greater training on domestic abuse in family court proceedings to help rebuild low levels of public trust in the fairness of the judicial process.
“There’s an attitude of disbelief – victims have reported feeling gaslit, victim-blamed, dismissed in the courtroom setting, some have described being cross examined as equivalent to being raped all over again – which is one of the most harrowing things I have heard. That’s horrendous. The courts are there to protect victims not to make it worse,” she said.
One problem she identified was the “adversarial” system, which can retraumatise survivors of domestic abuse and has a “deterrent effect” on others thinking of coming forward.
HerEthical AI, a startup that brings together academic experts in psychology and machine learning, along with a retired police inspector, plans to publish a journal article with its findings, as well as helping survivors make the case to be tried by a different judge or file complaints against them.
So far, it has used freely available judgments and appeals, but the project is crowdfunding to buy transcripts to better understand what is going on in courts. The cost of a court transcript comes per folio, which consists of 72 words – the cheapest being 80p a folio and going up to £1.91 a folio. This is often out of reach for domestic abuse survivors, who may have taken a financial hit to leave their abuser.
Hazel Sayer, a member of HerEthical AI and a research fellow specialising in gender-based violence at Bournemouth University, said this meant that family courts could be a “secretive environment, lacking accountability and transparency”.
The result, according to Roda Hassan, founder of Riverlight, a nonprofit that provides advocacy services for domestic abuse survivors and is collaborating on the project, was that “at the moment there’s no real way to hold judges and magistrates accountable” for what goes on inside courtrooms, other than through “very expensive and difficult” appeals processes, requiring specialist legal knowledge which many survivors cannot afford.
Riverlight has worked with survivors whose transcripts have included phrases such as “you’re a silly girl” and “you could not have been raped because you were married to him”.
One woman Riverlight is working with is Sarah (not her real name), who was shocked by the attitude of her judge when she tried to claim full custody of her children after leaving an abusive relationship. She had been pushed while pregnant, and had testimony from a GP who saw the bruises as well as recordings of her partner being verbally abusive.
She felt that the judge’s priority was ensuring the children would still have access to their father, even though she was frightened to leave them alone with him. “I was accused of not being child-focused by bringing up the abuse that me and the children suffered,” she recalled, adding that the judge’s attitude was “you need to put it in the past and move on”.
As a result, she said, “my mental health was horrendous, I was having nightmares, I started CBT through the NHS to help me cope”. She added: “I actually doubted myself about whether I should have left because now I have to hand over my children and not be there.”