Current Legal Problems Lecture Series – The ‘Ideal Mother’: Family Law and Domestic Abuse
Thursday 30 January 2025, 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm GMT, London, UK
Speaker: Professor Shazia Choudhry (University of Oxford)
Chair: Professor Rosemary Hunter (University of Kent)
About the lecture:
Feminist theory has long established the links between patriarchal values and violence against which is rooted in hierarchical gendered structures, gendered stereotypes and inequalities. Taken together it is unsurprising that the mother-child relationship is often a key aim for perpetrators who intentionally try to undermine, distort and disrupt it in order to achieve power and control within the family. Understanding the construction of motherhood and fatherhood within the family justice system is therefore crucial in terms of combatting the damaging effects of gender stereotyping within the context of allegations of domestic abuse. With reference to a major empirical study of five European jurisdictions, this lecture will demonstrate how, when domestic abuse takes place, it is mothers who are often the focus of the State in terms of their ability to protect the children from the father perpetrator and at the same time, to sustain the father-parent relationship. Moreover, mothers experiencing domestic abuse are often negatively judged through normative paradigms of ‘good motherhood’, even when evidence shows they are acting to protect their child and enhance their safety in very difficult circumstances. As a result, the study demonstrates how damaging discourses of the ‘good mother’ as fully responsible for their children animate persistent discourses of mother-blame and should be understood as a gendered driver of domestic and family violence.
About the speaker:
Shazia Choudhry is Professor of Law and the Jeffrey Hackney Tutorial Fellow in Law at Wadham College, Oxford. She is also an Associate Academic Fellow and Academic Bencher of the Inner Temple. Her research interests lie in the fields of European and UK human rights law and the interface of those fields with criminal law, family law and human rights law. Particular areas of interest include the impact of the HRA and the European Convention on Human Rights on the law and policy with regard to violence against women.
In addition to her academic publications in these areas, Shazia also engages in advisory work at the domestic and international level. This has included her appointment as Specialist Adviser to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights Inquiry into Violence against Women (2014-15), Specialist Adviser to the Joint Committee on the Draft Domestic Abuse Bill (2019 and Specialist Adviser to the Women and Equalities Committee (2022)), as an expert evaluator for the European Commission, as an expert for the Council of Europe (including participating in the GREVIO monitoring mission to Serbia) and as an expert consultant for the UNFPA. Shazia was put forward, in 2024, as the UK Government first ever nomination for the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).
Find more information and book your free place here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/clp-the-ideal-mother-family-law-and-domestic-abuse-tickets-1104431988809
This event will be held at University College London, UCL Faculty of Laws, Endsleigh Gardens, London, UK.