Australia Reformed Family Law Act: Family Dispute Resolution

Family Dispute Resolution
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Institutional Affiliate
Family Dispute Resolution Failure to maintain the government's control in the institution of the family unit may expose all its stakeholders to undesired outcomes in the aftermath of a conflict leading to family separation. For instance, the breakdown of family relationships may expose its stakeholders, parents and children alike, to emotional and legal aspects with an overall negative outcome on their quality of life. It was towards this end of mitigating the adverse outcomes of family conflicts that the Australian government established the Family Court in the 70s to enact the needed reforms to the Family Law Act (Cth) 1975. The reforms sought to develop an integrated approach to resolving family conflicts characterized by the intersection of legal and social sciences for the achievement of desired outcomes for all the parties involved. The integration of legal and social ideologies in resolving family conflicts gave birth to the concept of family dispute resolution (FDR) in the context of family law. Family dispute resolution is an integral element of the Australia reformed Family Law Act (Cth) 1975 that emphasizes maintaining a crucial balance between the children's safety and their need for parental relationships. Like any other conflict across the social, political, and economic domains, family disputes emanate from the operation of power or rights and beliefs of the involved parties stemming from their personal, cultural, or structural perceptions of the identified and existing differences. The personal, cultural, and structural perspectives constitute the anti-oppressive approach to understanding conflict and thus offer an effective framework for conflict family dispute resolution. The personal perspective offers that all conflicts are personal, unique, simple, local, and accidental while equally being systemic, generic, complex, global, and chronic. The anti-oppressive approach to culture posits that cultural beliefs, attitudes, and ways of doing things and thinking also create systems that perpetuate conflicts across different settings, including friendships, marriages, and communities. The structural approach further thrives on the premise that all conflicts occur within larger systems, contexts, cultures, and environments that directly or indirectly affect their potential for resolution (Cloke, 2015). It is, however, important to note that all conflicts are experienced personally and acted out by individuals outside the confines of the systems, contexts, cultures, and environments that may have contributed to the dispute. Mediation makes for one of the strategic interventions for conflict resolution that fosters the commitment and engagement of the involved parties towards resolving the dispute issues or accepting the long-term presence of the said issues for peaceful coexistence going forward. However, the process of conflict resolution through mediation may be characteristic of unfair invocation of individual advantages shared by either of the parties involved. For instance, one party has an unfair advantage of the legal knowledge surrounding the disputed issue and uses it or invokes the same in the mediation process towards their se...