The Bar at the European Conference on Domestic Violence

Photo caption: Dr Madalena Duarte, University of Coimbra, Professor Heather Douglas, University of Queensland, Dr Marianna Muraveya, University of Helsinki, Claire Edgar, Francis Hanna & Co Solicitors and Grainne Murphy BL, The Bar of Northern Ireland.

This week Bar Council member Gráinne Murphy BL attended the third European Conference on Domestic Violence in Oslo, Norway.

As a barrister who specialises in family law and former Chair of the Family Bar Association, Gráinne jointly presented a paper with Claire Edgar, partner at Francis Hanna & Co Solicitors in Belfast, exploring how the Matrimonial Causes (NI) Order 1978 and the practice which governs the law in Northern Ireland operates in the context of financial abuse on marriage breakdown.

The practitioner’s paper highlights that a perpetrator of abuse in this context will typically be more financially dominant than their spouse and may, for example, refuse to pay spousal maintenance, effectively pushing the more financially vulnerable spouse into accepting a lesser amount than they are entitled to, provide incomplete disclosure of any assets or fail to attend court causing delay. There are some legal protections against this, for example a spouse can obtain an injunction to freeze the assets where there is risk of them being dissipated and the court can award a larger share of assets and order costs against the perpetrator to penalise financial misconduct.

However, their work also considers how the courts in Northern Ireland tackles abuse by a financially dominant spouse and questions whether it may be an unwitting facilitator of abuse by the perpetrator against the victim. For example, in practice the court can be unwilling to provide timely maintenance hearings and can refuse to order the perpetrator to pay the legal costs of maintenance proceedings, making the application prohibitive for the financially vulnerable spouse who often endures ongoing financial hardship. Consequently, there can therefore be little disincentive for a perpetrator not to use the court system as a means to continue to assert financial control over a spouse.

Gráinne Murphy remarked: “This conference has been as valuable opportunity for us to learn from professionals, policy makers, researchers and academics working with victims of domestic violence across Europe and beyond. I was delighted to be given a platform to speak about the experiences of practitioners working in the Northern Ireland court system around the linkages between financial abuse and marriage breakdown. Our paper makes it clear that there are both protections and failings within the legal system for victims of financial abuse in this jurisdiction. However, the potential for abuse requires further scrutiny by the courts to ensure that the legal system does not act as a forum for continued domestic abuse and control. It is also clear that there is a need for judicial training on coercive control and training for lawyers to help in recognising coercive control in all family courts as well as the criminal courts”.