Over the past year I have taken what I initially thought was a side-step from my usual work in foreign affairs to research the behaviour — and failings — of family courts. Yet what I have discovered is that instead of venturing outside of my field I’ve actually come to…

What would the world be like if the state took men’s violence against women seriously? For the past three years the Law Commission for England and Wales has been pondering this idea in its review of Hate Crime legislation. At present the state is ambivalent about the safety of women…

Earlier this month I made a presentation at a conference, organised by the University of California, Irvine’s Initiative To End Family Violence, in conjunction with California Protective Parents. In my presentation I made some brief points about what can be called the “Facilitating System” in and around family courts that…

Canadian deputy PM Chrystia Freeland’s pro-democracy activities in Soviet-era Ukraine could rescue the Liberal Party from Justin Trudeau’s declining popularity — An intriguing article on Canada’s deputy prime minister and minister for finance, Chrystia Freeland recently appeared in Canada’s paper of record, the Globe and Mail. The article presented details from the KGB’s archived files on Freeland from her time as an exchange student in Ukraine in the late-1980s. Explaining how…

This article was written with Sigrún Sif Jóelsdóttir and was originally published in Icelandic in Kjarninn. In late-May the Supreme Court (Hæstiréttur) took the rare initiative to hear a child custody case. In doing so it presented an opportunity for the court to gain an understanding of the problems that…

I wrote a song for America, they told me it was clever There is a unique Canadian symbiosis with America. …

In the early hours of 1 February 1995, Richey Edwards, lyricist and guitarist with Manic Street Preachers, left London’s Embassy Hotel and vanished. Two weeks later his car was found next to the Severn Bridge, the major crossing between England and Edwards’ native south Wales. Edwards and the band’s singer…

Last week I published an article titled How The Family Court’s Purpose To Protect Children Became Inverted. The article sought to explain what has occurred in family courts throughout the West over the past three decades, and the ideas that are driving it to make consistently irrational and dangerous decisions. …

An updated version of this essay was published in the journal Family & Intimate Partner Violence Quarterly, Spring 2021. In the early 1980s in Sydney, Australia, the family court suffered a series of brutal and ideologically driven attacks. A judge was shot dead on his doorstep, and bombs were exploded…