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When the government amended the  earlier this year, it included the  (BIC). These long-awaited updates require domestic violence to be presumed when determining the best interests of the child and parenting plans, one step towards keeping women and children safe.

Family violence  as any conduct that is violent, threatening or a pattern of coercive and controlling behaviour, or that causes a family member to fear for their safety.

• Co-author of this article with  is , University of Windsor

Prior to the amendments, the BIC standard was guided by provincial not federal legislation, whereby only four provinces (, ,  and ) named domestic violence as a factor in the BIC. What this means is that when parents separate or divorce, decisions that are made about children must now take into account whether family violence is a component of the family dynamics regardless of where one lives in Canada.

Professionals working with and making decisions or recommendations to families about co-parenting need to better understand coercive control as an important component of domestic violence.

Family violence includes coercive control

Domestic violence is defined in research literature  and .

The amended Divorce Act outlines that coercive and controlling behaviours are .

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Coercive control . This is important for those making decisions about parenting arrangements .

How does new legislation change practices?

Prior to the amendments, women who experienced domestic violence were silenced by their lawyers as a result of the law itself.

One challenge inherent in Canadian family law is  that can prevent lawyers from disclosing admissions of violent or abusive behaviour from their clients.

This means that lawyers may be well aware that coercive control defines a relationship and still argue on behalf of their perpetrating client for shared parenting. .

The future harm exception does allow lawyers to disclose knowledge of threats or acts of harm, but this is held to a high standard of “.”

What’s still unknown is how the new amendments will change legal practices specific to domestic violence and shared parenting.

A correlation between domestic violence and co-parenting

We recruited mothers to participate in our study through community stakeholders, such as domestic violence shelters and pediatricians, as well as a paid Facebook strategy. Through our search efforts, we were able to recruit 84 women across Alberta, Manitoba and Ontario. Our  with young children in shared parenting arrangements . This research will be published later this year and is yet to be peer-reviewed.

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We used a 56-item Co-parenting Across Family Structures tool, or , that is intended to measure effective co-parenting as well the  scale, that measures domestic violence in our study.

Our research found a correlation between domestic violence (the higher the score, the more severe the violence) and Co-PAFS scores (the higher the score the more conducive to healthy co-parenting). We found that the lower the domestic violence scores, the higher the co-parenting scores.

Using the Co-PAFS scale can help the courts make shared parenting orders.

Impacts on women and young children

Our study found that women who share parenting at least 40 per cent of the time had similar scores on measures of domestic violence, anxiety, depression and child development to women who shared parenting less than 30 per cent of the time.

This suggests that domestic violence and coercive controlling behaviours are occurring in shared parenting arrangements more than was previously thought; the assumption has been that parents who share parenting 40 per cent of the time or greater are able to do so because they have a healthy relationship and are able to put the needs of the children first.

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These findings are critical and require further exploration because family court orders for shared parenting (40 per cent or more time with each parent) occur routinely in Canada in situations of domestic violence and have negative impacts on women and young children.

The amendments to the Divorce Act in Canada will require us to better understand the day-to-day practices of those supporting families through the separation/divorce process and parenting arrangements for children. That will help ensure parenting plans reflect considerations of safety for survivors of domestic violence and their young children.