Writing reports for the family courts … Private consultants and their advice in custody disputes … Parenting plans and abused children … Contentious recommendations which sway courts with limited resources … Lack of alternative “independent” advice … Harrowing submission to parliamentary inquiry alleging misplaced professional advice about child abuse … Janek Drevikovsky reports 

The quality of their evidence has been questioned, and a parliamentary inquiry called for their abolition. Yet their evidence continues to have sway, especially in fraught custody cases.

Now, in its major family law review, the ALRC is recommending that private report writers be kept in place – so long as they’re given proper accreditation and training. 

Private report writers are governed by Chapter 15 of the Family Court Rules, which is why they are sometimes called “chapter 15 experts”. They are commissioned either to give evidence on agreement between the parties or the court can, on application or its own motion, appoint them to a case. 

Usually, chapter 15 experts are social workers, psychologists or psychiatrists and their evidence normally takes the form of a report. According to one survey, a single report can cost anywhere between $6,000 and $34,000. 

A report can recommend what, in the expert’s opinion, would best serve a child’s needs. For example, they often suggest parenting plans, with how much time should be spend with each parent.     

Often, such recommendations effectively determine the outcome. That’s no wonder, given the court’s resources which means judges give favourable consideration to expert reports.

It can be difficult to convince the court to disregard a report. Only one expert is appointed in a given case, meaning there is no other authoritative voice to challenge their conclusions. 

Some parents have said opposing an expert can be “the fight of your life”. Another described them as “the gods of the court”. 

Chapter 15 experts are not the only report writers used by the court. Family consultants, who are professionals working full-time for the court, also play this role. 

But there are important differences. 

One is that, as employees, consultants are subject to the court’s “rigorous recruitment and assessment processes”, while private report writers are not under the court’s oversight. 

Instead, they are simply “encouraged” to comply with the Australian Standards of Practice for Family Assessment and Reporting. 

There is also no accreditation scheme for private report writers and fees can differ widely from one private expert to another. With family consultants, on the other hand, there is no separate cost. 

Another significant difference is with the quality of evidence. Family law stakeholders have repeatedly claimed that private report writers perform worse, on average, than employed consultants. 

There were submissions to this effect to the 2017 parliamentary inquiry and again to the 2019 ALRC review. Several parties said private experts were often not specialists on the questions they had to consider, or had unorthodox views. 

That brings us to Dr B. 

The 2017 parliamentary inquiry received over 120 public submissions, including one from a group called “The Victims of Dr B”. 

The group’s submission is a critical account of expert reports and their role in the family courts. They claim that the same expert has been involved in their various cases. 

Under the court rules, report writers are anonymous, so the submission refers to this expert as “Dr B”. 

Dr B’s speciality is child abuse and incest. He approaches cases on the basis that children often make false reports of incest and abuse; that one parent often coaches the child to dislike the other; that reports of abuse are often exaggerated; and that the best outcome for the child is usually contact with both parents. 

Other experts have similar views, though only when it comes to a small subset of cases before the court. Dr Rikard-Bell, for example, a Chapter 15 expert who has written over 2,000 reports in the last 25 years, thinks that in a “narrow, very small group that are highly conflicted”, around 90 per cent of child abuse complaints are unfounded.

According to the submission from his “victims”, Dr B often suggests children should stay, at least partially, in the custody of the alleged abuser. He has described abuse allegations as “spurious” and recommends the child should be removed from the care of the complaining parent if the allegations do not stop. 

One of Dr B’s matters concerned a schizophrenic father, who had forced his former partner to watch while he threatened to kill their child with a samurai sword. Nonetheless, Dr B recommended full custody be given to the father. The judge was convinced by the report, and the child was removed from his mother. 

Dr B’s “victims” called for an end to experts’ anonymity and the introduction of tighter professional standards. They also suggested a Royal Commission into the family law system. 

Faced with other similar submissions, the inquiry recommended banning the use of private experts (recommendation 22). Instead, all report writing would be done by the court’s in-house family consultants. 

The government did not adopt the recommendation, though it did acknowledge the need for “high quality” reporting. 

The alleged conduct of experts like Dr B remains an ongoing issue for many family court litigants. In 2018, a group of aggrieved parents together referred one expert report writer, a psychologist, to the NSW medical board. 

It is unclear what action, if any, the medical board took against the expert, though it could have suspended his practising licence if it found he posed an “immediate risk to the public”. 

In its recent review, the ALRC considered the question of Chapter 15 experts. Unlike the 2017 parliamentary inquiry, the ALRC wasn’t convinced that family consultants out-performed private report writers. There were at least three submissions with a contrary point of view. 

Rather, the commission supported a submission from a group of researchers who had analysed family reports since 2015. That group submitted that there was no qualitative difference between in-house and private reports. It also thought it was “healthy to have a pool of [family report writers] who do not work at the courts, in addition to those at the courts”. 

Relying on this research, the ALRC recommended introducing an accreditation scheme for private report writers (recommendation 53). It also approved of ongoing attempts by the Attorney General’s Department to develop a training programme for expert report writers.