Dr. Clíona Saidléar:

The prosecution rate found by the Garda Inspectorate was 4%, with a conviction rate of 2%. That leaves everything else and accepting that some of them will simply not be true at a figure of between 2% and 8%. Not every one of those cases will end up in the family law system, but many of them will in some way, shape or form. As Mr. Walsh said, the family law system is broken. Sexual violence cases disappear into a broken system in which we lose sight of them. That is why it is critical that we figure out how to count them to keep track of them. That is a matter for the Courts Service. We are asking the servants of the courts to log cases going through them and to say, for example, if there is an allegation of sexual violence in a case, they make no judgment on whether it is true but simply that it is present. We would then have an indication of the percentage of child sexual violence allegations present in the family law court, in public and private cases. In public cases it will be straightforward; the blind spot is in private cases. In a footnote to our submission we mention that some of these cases are interminable, something with which the practitioners will be familiar. In the area of the criminal law there are cases that are sub judice, but there are others that are finished and we can talk about them.

When we venture into this space these cases seem interminable but the system does not track them as one case, so they pop up again and again. The system does not know how long the same people remain in the system coming back over and over again. Consequently, we could really fix that part as well in order that the system understands just how long and interminable some of these cases are because one continues to be brought back in, if one likes. That is especially likely where there are situations of coercive control and domestic violence where the courts are essentially being used in that way. This type of visibility where the Courts Service can begin to track these data would give us a handle on it and allow us to begin to have a conversation whereby we ask how we manage it in terms of the case management and the practices and specialisations we need.