This article provides general information and commentary and is not legal advice. People experiencing domestic or family violence or dealing with legal proceedings should seek advice appropriate to their individual circumstances.
Leaving an abusive relationship is often spoken about as though it marks the end of the abuse.
For some survivors, it does not.
The relationship may be over. The survivor may have moved out and started rebuilding a life. Yet the control can continue through another channel: the legal system.
A recent conversation brought this into sharp focus for me. A survivor described spending ten years dealing with legal abuse after divorcing her husband.
Ten years.
Not ten years in the relationship.
Ten years after it ended.
That distinction matters, because we still speak about separation as if it automatically creates freedom. For some survivors, separation simply changes the arena in which coercive control is exercised.
This is often described as legal abuse, legal systems abuse or, more broadly, systems abuse.
It deserves far more public attention.
What is legal abuse?
Legal abuse is not simply “going to court too often”, having a difficult separation or disagreeing strongly about children, property or money.
People have a right to seek legal remedies. They have a right to challenge decisions, defend themselves, pursue parenting arrangements, raise genuine concerns and access the courts.
The problem is not the existence of legal action.
The problem is when legal processes are deliberately or repeatedly used as a way to continue power and control over another person.
The Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia recognises systems abuse as behaviour in which legal processes or multiple complaint systems may be used to gain an advantage or to harass, intimidate, discredit or otherwise control another party.
In practice, the abusive relationship may end while the survivor remains tied to the perpetrator through applications, hearings, allegations, legal costs, complaints and repeated demands to respond.
When coercive control survives separation
Coercive control is a pattern of behaviour used to create and maintain power over another person.
It may include intimidation, monitoring, isolation, financial abuse, threats, humiliation, stalking, technology-facilitated abuse and the manipulation of children or institutions. Australian policy frameworks recognise coercive control as a pattern of abusive behaviours used over time to establish and maintain dominance.
Separation can disrupt some of those methods of control.
A perpetrator may no longer have the same access to the survivor’s home, money, movements or everyday life.
But that does not necessarily mean the desire for control disappears.
Legal systems can provide another route.
A survivor may find that every attempt to move forward is followed by another application, allegation or process they must navigate. Even without direct contact, the perpetrator can remain psychologically present through the next lawyer’s letter or court document.
That is why post-separation abuse needs to be understood as more than what happens between two people after a relationship ends.
Sometimes the system itself becomes the means through which contact continues.
What legal abuse can look like
Legal abuse does not have one fixed form, and no single behaviour automatically proves abuse.
It is the pattern, context, purpose and cumulative effect that matter.
It may involve repeated or unnecessary applications that keep disputes alive without meaningfully moving them towards resolution.
It may involve using contravention proceedings, complaints or procedural disputes to force continued engagement.
It can include making repeated allegations designed to discredit a former partner, overwhelm them or portray them as unstable, obstructive or dishonest.
Some perpetrators may make complaints across multiple systems — family law, child protection, police, child support or other agencies — creating several simultaneous processes for the survivor to answer. The Federal Circuit and Family Court specifically recognises that systems abuse may involve multiple applications and complaints across different systems.
Legal correspondence can become a vehicle for intimidation, while repeated proceedings can create mounting legal and practical costs.
Where children are involved, parenting arrangements can also provide a continuing point of access long after the intimate relationship has ended.
None of these processes are inherently abusive.
But when they form part of an ongoing pattern of domination, punishment or forced engagement, we need to be willing to see more than a collection of separate legal events.
We need to see the pattern.
The exhaustion becomes part of the control
One of the most damaging features of legal abuse is that the process itself can become the punishment.
Court proceedings demand attention: documents, deadlines, evidence, legal advice and hearings.
For a survivor, that burden may sit alongside trauma, parenting, employment, housing insecurity, financial pressure and the work of rebuilding a life after abuse — repeatedly, for years.
Research by Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety into family law parenting-order matters found that litigation in a substantial proportion of the cases examined extended beyond three years.
Nearly one-third lasted between five and nine years.
A smaller but significant proportion continued for 12 years or more.
Duration alone does not mean those cases involved legal abuse.
That distinction is important.
But the same research also identified concerns about systems abuse, coercive behaviour and repeated litigation, including accounts of legal processes being used to maintain control.
That should make us uncomfortable.
A person can technically be separated while still being required to organise parts of their life around the person they escaped.
There is another dimension we do not talk about enough:
Money.
Legal proceedings can be expensive.
Even with legal assistance, there may be indirect costs such as missed work, childcare and travel. For someone paying privately, repeated proceedings can erode savings, create debt and affect long-term financial security.
That matters because financial abuse is already recognised as part of domestic and family violence.
If someone knows that every new proceeding will cost their former partner money, consume their time and destabilise their life, repeated legal action can become another form of pressure.
Australian family law now expressly recognises that harmful proceedings may cause financial harm, psychological harm or oppression, major mental distress, and even affect someone's capacity to care for a child.
That recognition matters.
Legal processes are not emotionally or financially neutral simply because they occur inside legitimate institutions.
Children can remain caught inside the pattern
Where children are involved, legal abuse can have an additional layer.
Children may become the reason repeated contact remains possible.
Disagreements about parenting arrangements can be genuine and complex. Courts must remain accessible when children need protection or parenting arrangements need to change.
But children can also become caught within continuing patterns of coercive control.
A survivor may face an impossible balancing act: complying with orders, responding to safety concerns, protecting children, avoiding being labelled uncooperative and managing the possibility of further legal action.
ANROWS research has raised concerns that fear of further litigation, violence or penalties can influence how parents respond when they believe parenting arrangements may be unsafe.
If our systems look only at the application sitting in front of them without understanding the history surrounding it, we risk missing the behaviour those systems are supposed to address.
Why legal abuse can be difficult to identify
Part of the difficulty is that each individual action may look legitimate when viewed in isolation.
A court application may be legitimate.
So can a complaint, a request for information, a parenting dispute or an allegation requiring investigation.
That is precisely why pattern recognition matters.
Domestic and family violence is not always a collection of obviously criminal incidents.
Coercive control often operates through behaviours that may appear ordinary until their context and cumulative effect are understood.
Legal abuse can exploit that same gap.
One application may appear unremarkable.
Ten years of applications, threats, complaints and forced engagement may tell a very different story.
Systems therefore need the capacity to ask not only:
“What is happening in this matter today?”
They also need to ask:
“What has been happening between these people over time?”
The law is beginning to recognise harmful proceedings
Australia has taken steps to address this problem.
Changes to the Family Law Act introduced harmful proceedings orders.
A court may prohibit a party from starting further proceedings under the Act against another party without permission where there are reasonable grounds to believe further proceedings would cause harm.
The legislation expressly recognises psychological harm or oppression, major mental distress, financial harm and detrimental effects on a person’s capacity to care for a child.
Courts may also consider the history and frequency of proceedings and their cumulative effect.
That last point is particularly important.
Legal abuse is fundamentally cumulative.
The harm may not sit neatly inside one application.
It builds.
It accumulates across years of responding, defending, paying, preparing and waiting.
A legal system capable of recognising that cumulative pattern is better placed to distinguish legitimate access to justice from the misuse of that access as a tool of control.
This is not about denying anyone access to justice
Any discussion of legal abuse needs to be careful.
People must remain able to raise genuine concerns, seek protection, enforce lawful rights and challenge decisions.
A survivor raising repeated safety concerns should not be dismissed as vexatious simply because a case has been before the courts many times.
Likewise, conflict between separated partners does not automatically mean one person is perpetrating abuse.
The answer is not to make courts harder to access.
It is to become better at recognising behaviour, history, context and patterns of power.
We should be able to protect access to justice while also recognising when access to legal systems is itself being strategically weaponised.
Those principles are not contradictory.
They are both necessary.
We need to talk about what happens after leaving
Public conversations about domestic and family violence still place enormous emphasis on leaving.
We ask why survivors stay.
We encourage them to get out.
We sometimes speak as if the moment a person walks through the door is the moment the danger and control end.
But post-separation abuse challenges that assumption.
A perpetrator may continue stalking.
They may continue financial abuse.
They may misuse technology.
They may use children.
And they may use systems.
Legal abuse is one more reason we must stop measuring a survivor’s freedom by whether the relationship has formally ended.
Someone can be divorced, living elsewhere and seeking no contact, yet still have a former partner occupying enormous space in their finances, schedule and emotional life because another legal action may arrive at any time.
Leaving matters.
But what happens after leaving matters too.
Ten years is not “just a difficult divorce”
When I heard a survivor describe ten years of legal abuse after divorce, one thought stayed with me.
How much life can be consumed in ten years?
Ten birthdays.
Ten Christmases.
Ten years of children growing.
Ten years of work, relationships, plans, healing and ordinary days repeatedly interrupted by a person you had already left.
We should not dismiss experiences like this as simply “high conflict” without examining what is actually happening.
Conflict suggests two parties locked in mutual disagreement.
Abuse is about power, control and behaviour.
Those are not the same thing.
Sometimes a legal dispute is simply a legal dispute.
Sometimes it is the continuation of domestic and family violence by another means.
Our systems need to be capable of telling the difference.
And our public conversations need to give survivors the language to recognise it.
Because separation should not mean exchanging one form of control for another.
And nobody should have to spend a decade proving that leaving did not make the abuse stop.
