This paper contributes to international feminist debates on shared parenting and family violence via reforms to Canada’s Divorce Act, in force since 2021. Looking backwards, it reviews parliamentary debates and early judicial discussions. The documentary review reads the reforms as an unstable compromise between calls from feminist voices and experts on family violence and from groups representing fathers. Family violence is now defined broadly and declared relevant to children’s welfare. But language in the statute may undermine its seriousness. Exposing the (...) tensions underlying these reforms is useful for Canadian participants in family justice and for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers elsewhere, exemplifying the promise and perils of reform in this area. Looking ahead, the paper offers recommendations to higher courts. Appellate judges should read rules on contact with both parents and parental cooperation in the light of the new recognition of family violence, taking the latter as an overarching objective of the statute. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has critiqued the tendency for separated mothers in custody disputes to be defined as hostile and alienating. Through the presentation of three case studies, drawn from an interview-based study with 21 women, we show how such pejorative constructions only arise when the conflicting gendered moral accountabilities of contemporary motherhood are overlooked. We found that mothers tend to believe that contact with non-resident fathers is generally in a child’s best interests. However, as a result of balancing complex moral obligations (...) for the care of their children, they may raise questions about particular kinds of arrangements for contact with particular fathers. We argue, therefore, that family law practice will lead to better outcomes for children when professionals listen to the history of, and reasons for, mothers’ positions. To enable family law professionals to undertake this task, we offer an alternative interpretive framework for making sense of women’s stories. Should family law professionals make use of this framework, it is likely that they will understand that the positions mothers adopt are often the outcome of the difficult moral dilemmas they encounter in caring for their children, and that the reductive rubric of the ‘hostile mother’ needs to be treated with scepticism. (shrink)