There is a piece of advice that thousands of women have been given by their own legal representatives in family court proceedings.

Do not raise the domestic abuse. It will be used against you.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is documented. Paragraph 65 of the UN Special Rapporteur's 2023 report — A/HRC/53/36 — states that women have been advised by their legal representatives not to raise allegations of domestic violence, as it would work against them. Submissions from the United Kingdom were among those that documented this pattern.

The Ministry of Justice Harm Report in 2020 documented the same thing from the other direction: that counter-allegations of parental alienation functioned to punish protective parents for raising concerns. The rational response to a system that punishes you for speaking becomes silence. Not because the concern was wrong. Because the institution made speaking dangerous.

Women's Aid documented in 2016 that nineteen children died in circumstances where courts had granted contact to fathers whose violence had been raised as a concern and dismissed. The mothers had raised the concerns. The system had reframed them. The children paid the cost.

Now consider who is giving that advice.

The people making the judgements are in worse mental health than those being judged

The WHO-5 mental wellbeing index is the international standard measure for mental health. It consists of five questions. Each is scored from zero to five. The total raw score ranges from zero to 25 — zero representing the worst possible mental wellbeing, 25 representing the best. To produce a percentage, the raw score is multiplied by four, giving a final score between zero and 100.

For the general European population, average WHO-5 percentage scores range from 53.7% in the Republic of Serbia to 70.1% in Denmark, based on the European Quality of Life Survey (2012), administered across 34 countries and reported in Topp et al. (2015). The same paper establishes that a WHO-5 percentage score of 50 or below is the validated clinical cut-off at which a health professional should screen for depression, meaning a formal diagnostic assessment is warranted.

The IBA's 2021 global study of lawyer mental wellbeing — the largest ever conducted, covering 3,256 respondents across 124 jurisdictions — found that the average WHO-5 percentage score for lawyers was 51%.

One point above the depression screening cut-off. Below the lowest general population average recorded in any European country. By the profession's own published clinical standards, the average lawyer sits at the threshold at which a formal mental health assessment is warranted.

This is not a polemic. It is the profession's own data, from its own global study, using the international standard measure. The people sitting in judgement of whether a mother is emotionally fit are, as a profession, in demonstrably worse mental health than the general population those mothers come from.

How it got this bad

This is not a snapshot anomaly. The profession has been tracking its own deterioration for years and the data has moved in one direction.

LawCare's Life in the Law 2025 report found that nearly 60% of legal professionals had poor mental wellbeing. Half reported experiencing anxiety often, very often or all of the time. Over three quarters were working beyond their contracted hours. The average burnout score was 37.8, above the high risk threshold. Psychological safety fell in the lower half of the scale. A majority said they could see themselves leaving their current workplace within five years. Nearly a third could see themselves leaving the profession entirely. One junior barrister wrote simply: "It is unsustainable. My work is slowly killing me."

The LawCare 2021 study found that 69% of legal professionals had experienced mental ill health in the previous twelve months. The most common reason for not disclosing it: fear of stigma, career implications, financial and reputational consequences.

This is the profession's own literature. It is not disputed. It is published, surveyed, and reported annually. The profession knows what is happening to it. It has known for years.

A peer-reviewed study published in 2024, Mason "From psychotherapy to legal practice" examined what happens to family lawyers specifically. Family lawyers described absorbing their clients' distress, internalising and ignoring their own emotional responses, and having no structured outlet for the trauma they encountered. One participant described the only coping mechanism available without formal supervision: "down the pub." The study documented vicarious trauma in family lawyers at levels comparable to, and in some cases exceeding, those found in mental health professionals. It found that lawyers operating under burnout, emotional distancing, and unprocessed trauma were at risk of advising clients in ways that harmed them. The study was explicit: it is hard to see how lawyers experiencing burnout, emotional distancing, anger, rage, guilt and over-identification can be fulfilling their duty to act in their client's best interest.

The gender dimension nobody is naming

The lawyers most likely to advise women not to raise domestic abuse concerns are also, statistically, the lawyers most likely to be women themselves. carrying the highest burnout, the lowest psychological safety, the least autonomy at work, and the greatest caring responsibilities outside it.

LawCare's 2021 study found that female legal professionals averaged higher burnout than their male counterparts, lower autonomy, and lower psychological safety. The 2023 ALM and Law.com Compass survey found that 46% of female lawyers said they felt stress all or most of the time, compared to 28% of male lawyers. Forty-one per cent had personally encountered gender discrimination on the job.

The Mind the Caring Gap report (2024) found that 89% of carers in the legal sector identified as women. Seventy-seven per cent said their mental health had been negatively impacted by their caring responsibilities. Sixty-six per cent had either unpaid or no support at all.

This means that the female lawyer advising a protective mother to stay silent is herself operating inside the same institutional logic, the logic that says raising the thing that is harming you will be used against you. She has learned it in her own career. It lives in her professional calculus. She is not a free agent offering neutral advice. She is a person who has absorbed, through years of practice, the lesson that the institution punishes those who speak.

The institution that silences protective mothers is staffed, in significant part, by women who could not afford to speak either.

Do not raise the thing that is harming you. It will be used against you.

What this does to the person receiving the advice

Judith Herman's landmark work Trauma and Recovery documents precisely what happens to a person required to remain silent about harm they are experiencing, the fragmentation of the self that occurs when their account of their own experience is systematically disbelieved, reframed, or punished.

The symptom profile that results, hypervigilance, intrusive thoughts, emotional dysregulation, difficulty concentrating, is indistinguishable from the symptom profile that a family court might cite as evidence of emotional instability in a parent.

This is the closed loop. The lawyer, burned out and operating under vicarious trauma, advises silence. The client falls silent. The silence produces the psychological distress the system then uses as evidence against them. The institution is protected. The child is not.

The legal advice not to raise abuse is not neutral professional guidance. It is the institution's self-protective logic, transmitted through the person's own legal representative, into the person's body.

What this means for children

The Dalgarno et al. (2024) study from the University of Manchester surveyed women who had been through family court proceedings involving domestic abuse. It found that 93% reported that the proceedings had negatively impacted their mental health. The majority described symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder. The research is unambiguous: the mental health consequences for protective parents are not a pre-existing vulnerability that the proceedings exposed. They are, in significant part, a consequence of the proceedings themselves.

Children whose protective parent was advised not to speak do not thereby avoid the adverse experience. They live through it without the system acknowledging it. The ACE is recorded nowhere in the official record. The impact is carried in the child's nervous system regardless.

Parental separation under conflict and witnessing domestic violence are both in the original ten ACE categories documented by Felitti et al. (1998). The silence the legal system required of the parent did not protect the child from those experiences. It protected the institution from scrutiny.

The question the evidence demands

The legal profession is in documented psychological crisis. The advice it gives in family court proceedings has documented lethal consequences for children. The mechanism connecting the two, a burned-out, traumatised profession advising silence to avoid institutional punishment, is described in its own literature, measured by its own surveys, and published in its own journals.

LawCare's 2025 report calls explicitly for psychological safety to be embedded into every legal workplace. That call cannot stop at the firm door. It must extend to the families sitting across the desk from lawyers who have not yet been given permission to speak the truth either.

And it must extend to the children who are still waiting for someone in that room to say what they know.

References

From psychotherapy to legal practice: the use of clinical supervision by lawyers in England and Wales (2024). Mason.  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13218719.2024.2362138#references-Section1

IMPACT REPORT 2024 https://heyzine.com/flip-book/78a253a6ee.html

Life in the Law https://lawcare.org.uk/life-in-the-law/

Life in the Law | 2025 https://lawcare.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Life-in-the-Law-2025.pdf

Life in the Law 2020/21 https://lawcare.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/lawcare-lifeinthelaw-v6-final-1.pdf

Mental Wellbeing in the Legal Profession: A Global Study https://www.ibanet.org/document?id=IBA-report-Mental-Wellbeing-in-the-Legal-Profession-A-Global-Study

Mind the caring gap Exploring the impact of caring responsibilities in the legal sector https://www.rpclegal.com/-/media/rpc/files/reports/301619_a4pb_mind_the_caring_gap_caring_responsibilities_report_d9.pdf