Domestic abuse court reform is long overdue. When a judge sits to decide a case involving domestic abuse, they bring legal expertise. What they do not always bring is a deep, specialist understanding of coercive control, of how abuse operates over time, of why a woman stays, why she returns, why her behaviour in the courtroom may look nothing like what people expect a victim to look like.
That gap matters. And it is a gap the current system has not adequately addressed.
How courts currently draw on expertise
Where a judge lacks the technical knowledge to decide a particular fact, the courts rely on expert witnesses. An expert is called to give opinion evidence on a specific issue, the judge weighs that opinion alongside the other evidence, and a decision is reached.
This works reasonably well for technical matters. Forensic analysis. Medical causation. Footprint matching. These are discrete questions with discrete answers that a qualified expert can address in the witness box.
Domestic abuse is different. Understanding it is not a discrete question. It is a lens through which the entire case needs to be read.
Why did she not leave immediately? Why did she go back? Why does her account of events change? Why does she minimise what happened? Why did she stay for years before reporting anything? These are not questions that can be answered by calling a single expert on a single technical point. They require an understanding of coercive control, trauma bonding, and the psychology of abuse that is contextual, not technical. And yet without that understanding, a judge is left to assess a woman’s credibility and behaviour against an implicit standard of how a victim is supposed to act, a standard that is frequently wrong.
What other areas of law already do
English and Welsh law has already recognised that some cases require more than an outside expert giving opinion evidence. In certain discrimination cases, including those involving disability, sex, race, religion and belief, and sexual orientation, County Court judges can appoint an assessor. An assessor is a qualified expert in the relevant area who sits with the judge and participates in the decision-making process, bringing specialist contextual knowledge into the room rather than presenting it from the witness box.
Employment tribunals have gone further. In some cases the panel deciding the case includes non-legal members with direct industry experience, reducing the need to rely on external expertise entirely.
The principle behind both approaches is the same. There are cases where the context is so central to the outcome that embedding expertise within the decision-making process produces better results than calling expert witnesses. The expertise is not a supplement to the judge’s understanding. It is part of the foundation on which the decision is made.
The argument for domestic abuse cases
Domestic abuse cases are precisely the kind of cases where this principle should apply.
Understanding coercive control is not peripheral to a domestic abuse case. It is the case. A judge who does not understand why a woman might continue to have contact with her abuser after leaving, why her accounts of events may be inconsistent, why she did not report for years, why she appears to defend him even in proceedings, is a judge who is not fully equipped to assess the evidence in front of them. That is not a criticism of individual judges. It is an observation about the structural limits of a system that treats coercive control as a technical matter to be explained by a witness rather than a contextual reality to be understood by the decision-maker.
A domestic abuse assessor, a specialist in coercive control and trauma-informed practice, appointed to sit with the judge in appropriate cases, would change that. It would mean that the credibility of a survivor’s account was assessed not against a lay expectation of how victims behave, but against an informed understanding of how abuse actually operates. It would reduce the burden on survivors to explain and justify their own responses to abuse. And it would produce decisions that more accurately reflect the reality of what happened.
The objections and why they are not fatal
The obvious objection is practicality. Courts are busy. Assessors cost money. Not every domestic abuse case is complex enough to warrant one.
These are real considerations but they are not fatal to the argument. The assessor model does not need to apply to every domestic abuse case to be valuable. A framework that allows judges to appoint an assessor in cases where the dynamics of coercive control are central to the outcome, where a survivor’s credibility is in issue, or where the defence relies on challenging her behaviour or her account, would be a meaningful reform without requiring a wholesale restructuring of the courts.
The question is not whether we can afford to do this. It is whether we can afford not to. Every case in which a survivor is disbelieved because a judge could not make sense of her behaviour is a failure of the justice system. Every conviction that does not happen because the context was not understood is a perpetrator who remains free.
A reform whose time has come
The Law Commission, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner, and survivor advocacy organisations have all identified the courts as a place where the system fails women experiencing abuse. The assessor model is not a radical proposal. It is an extension of a principle that already exists in English and Welsh law, applied to a context where it is urgently needed.
The Women’s Railroad exists because women experiencing abuse need practical information before they are ready to engage with the legal system. Part of what makes that engagement so daunting is the knowledge that the system may not understand them when they get there. An assessor model would not solve everything. But it would be a meaningful step toward a court system that is equipped to hear what survivors are actually telling it.
Jade Burrowes is the founder of The Women’s Railroad, the original practical guide for women in England and Wales experiencing domestic abuse. thewomensrailroad.org.uk
