Navigating family law matters involving coercive control, financial abuse, and parental disputes is challenging and emotionally demanding. This case study highlights how Michael Seton and Seton Family Lawyers provided stability and safety for a mother and her children in a complex, emotionally charged situation.
The case
In this matter, Michael acted for the wife, a mother of four children—the youngest with special needs—who had endured years of coercive control and financial abuse from her husband. After the wife engaged legal representation, the husband sought to continue exerting control. He initiated proceedings in the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia, seeking the immediate sale of the family home, a restraint on the wife’s choice of legal representation, and, later, parenting orders that disregarded the best interests of the youngest child.
The husband’s actions were a clear attempt to use the court process to continue the cycle of family violence.
Throughout the case, we supported our client and helped her access community-based services to navigate financial uncertainty and allow her to focus on caring for her children. Remaining involved in the matter was essential to ensure the wife had trusted and consistent legal guidance during a challenging time and to remedy the financial power imbalance. We worked on an alternate fee arrangement, enabling her to access high-quality legal representation.
The courtroom
We initially succeeded at the initial financial interim hearing in:
(a) defeating the husband’s claim of conflict of interest
(b) defeating the husband’s application to have the home sold on an interim basis
(c) achieving orders for exclusive occupation of the home for the wife and her children
(d) achieving spousal maintenance orders for the husband to pay the mortgage repayments and both lump sum and periodic spousal maintenance to the wife to ensure her financial security pending resolution of the proceedings.
After this, the husband added an interim parenting application to the proceedings with respect to the youngest child, seeking care arrangements that were not child-focused and primarily to control the wife’s movement and relocation, attempting to isolate her from her support network.
The outcome
Following a subsequent parenting interim hearing, we succeeded in achieving a series of important outcomes that ensured stability, safety and certainty for the wife and her children. These included opposing the husband’s parenting orders, obtaining relocation orders for the wife without requiring her return, arranging supervised visitation at a nearby contact centre with travel costs borne by the husband, and transferring proceedings to a more convenient Queensland registry for the family.
Do you need help protecting your family from coercive control?
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