When I first argued for a domestic abuse assessor role in the courts in part one of this concept, the pushback I heard most often was some version of: judges are already trained in this. The Judicial College’s own 2026 to 2027 prospectus on domestic abuse training is a useful document to test that argument against, because it is the most detailed public account of what that training actually involves that the College has ever published. Reading it closely does not weaken the case for an assessor. It strengthens it.
What the training actually is
The prospectus is explicit that this is the first time the College has published this level of detail about domestic abuse training. New magistrates complete one day of focused domestic abuse training within their first eighteen months. Existing judges complete two days of continuation training a year, chosen from a range of seminars they select based on their own learning needs, not all of which will be domestic abuse specific in a given year. Judges authorised for public family law or serious sexual offence cases must complete an induction, then a continuation seminar every three years.
This is real training. It is not nothing. But it is general, it is periodic, and in the case of continuation training for most judges, it is partly optional in what gets prioritised year to year. It teaches judges to recognise patterns of coercive control, trauma responses, and non-fatal strangulation in the abstract, through case studies, training films, and dramatised scenarios. What it does not do, and cannot do, is tell a judge what is actually happening in the specific case in front of them, based on the specific facts of that case.
The document undermines the case against an assessor, not for it
The prospectus states plainly that the training curriculum itself is informed and enhanced by external input from survivors, psychologists, clinicians, and academics. In other words, the Judicial College already accepts that understanding domestic abuse properly requires expertise beyond what a judge is expected to hold unaided. That expertise is doing real work. It is just only being used to build the training years in advance, not to inform the individual decisions judges make in live cases.
That is precisely the gap an assessor model would close.
A precedent that already exists, and a clearer one than family court alone
The Judicial College’s document points to one case-specific precedent, in the Financial Remedies Court, but it’s worth being precise about what that precedent actually shows. There, a qualified legal representative can be appointed so a victim isn’t forced to cross-examine, or be cross-examined by, their abuser directly. That protects the victim from a specific harm during a specific process. It says nothing about how the judge interprets what they see. In fact the qualified legal representative is expressly barred from advising on interpretation at all; their role is confined to asking the questions.
A more precise precedent for what an assessor would actually do already exists elsewhere in the system, and it is a stronger one. In Mental Health Tribunals, which decide whether someone continues to be detained under the Mental Health Act, a decision with real consequences for a person’s liberty, the panel is not a judge alone. It is three people: a legal member who chairs, a medical member, almost always a consultant psychiatrist, and a specialist lay member. All three sit through the same hearing, observe the same evidence and the same person, then adjourn together to deliberate before a decision is reached. The medical member’s clinical reading of what they observed becomes part of the panel’s shared reasoning, not a report filed separately and read afterwards.
This is close to the model I am proposing for domestic abuse cases: a specialist present throughout the hearing, watching what the judge is watching, contributing their informed reading of what that behaviour means once the hearing adjourns for a decision. The principle that a legal decision-maker benefits from a specialist’s real-time reading of a person’s presentation, not just their own trained instincts and not just a written report filed in advance, is not new or radical. It already operates in a jurisdiction dealing with equally serious stakes.
One difference is worth being explicit about. In a Mental Health Tribunal, the decision belongs to the panel as a whole, and if members disagree, the majority decides. What I am proposing is more conservative than that: the judge retains sole decision-making authority. The assessor’s role is advisory, informing the judge’s reasoning, not sharing it. That is a deliberate design choice, not a limitation, because it avoids the more serious objection that an assessor model hands judicial power to someone who has not been through judicial appointment.
Fairness has to be built in, not assumed
Any model like this has to answer a fair question: what happens to the assessor’s private read of the victim’s reactions if it never gets said aloud in the hearing? Mental Health Tribunal practice already has an answer, and it is the right one to import. Where a specialist member’s own view differs materially from the evidence given, that has to be disclosed to the parties, because a decision-maker acting on information neither party has heard or had a chance to respond to breaches a basic principle of natural justice. Any domestic abuse assessor model would need the same rule built in from the start: interpretation shared with the judge is interpretation the parties get to hear and, where relevant, challenge. That is not a weakness in the proposal. It is what makes it defensible.
Embedded is not the same as specialist
The prospectus states that domestic abuse training is deliberately not delivered as a standalone module, but embedded throughout the wider curriculum, specifically so that all judges receive regular training in which domestic abuse is a central and continuous theme. That is a real design choice, and a reasonable one. But embedding a topic ensures exposure to it, not equal depth of engagement with it every year. A judge who selects a seminar built around domestic abuse content encounters it very differently to a judge who selects a seminar where it appears as one thread among several. Continuous exposure to a theme across a curriculum is not the same claim as case-specific expertise applied to a specific set of contested facts, and the document does not claim otherwise. It describes a foundation, not a substitute for one.
What this means
None of this is a criticism of the training that exists. It is well designed, and the College’s own description of it, drawing on survivors, psychologists, and clinicians, shows a genuine effort to get this right. But training and case specific assessment are not substitutes for each other, and the Judicial College’s own document makes that distinction clearly, whether or not it intends to.
The question was never whether judges are trained. It is whether training alone is enough to meet the specific, contested facts of a specific case. Based on the Judicial College’s own account of what that training involves, and its own use of specialist decision-making elsewhere in the justice system, the answer is no.
