VIOLENT and controlling abusers must be stopped from using the family courts to prolong the pain and suffering of their victims without delay, an MP has said.

Peter Kyle, who has been campaigning on the issue since his election, said drastically needed reform must not be “kicked in the long grass” after the Government announced a review.

Justice Secretary Liz Truss has established an emergency review to find a swift end to domestic abusers directly cross-examining their ex-partners in family courts.

One domestic violence survivor who has suffered in the courts for years told The Argus that judges needed more training to stop other partners of abusive from suffering the same fate.

She also called for the notoriously secretive family courts to be opened up to public scrutiny to reveal bad practice.

A research paper into legislation to stop the practice and bring the family courts into line with the criminal justice system is due to be completed next week.

Research by The Guardian has revealed men with criminal convictions for abuse are able to directly question their former partners and repeatedly petition for contact with children and their mothers.

Mr Kyle said the ending of cross- examination must be immediate but needed to be backed up with wider reform lifting the secrecy of the family court while still protecting vulnerable victims.

The Hove MP said the very first person who turned to him for help after he was elected in May 2015 was a women who had just fled an abusive relationship.

Since then, Mr Kyle has been in contact with “countless” women talking about their experiences in the family courts including women who had to turn to medication to cope with the trauma and a family cross-examined by the murderer of their sister and daughter.

Last year he co-sponsored a House of Commons debate raising the issue with the Justice Secretary and to “give voice” to the women he had met.

He said: “I have been contacted by lawyers who say this happens very rarely but if this happens just once, if a victim is abused under the noses of judges and police, it brings shame on our justice system.

“It is unbelievably distressing to hear these stories. To know it is happening right across this country is unspeakable and nobody knows it’s happening.

“If this was happening in Russia, there would be a massive Amnesty International campaign about it – but it’s happening in our country.”

One of several campaigners and abusive survivors who have been allowed the use of Mr Kyle’s office in Church Road is Tina (not her real name).

She escaped 30 years of abuse from her partner only to be embroiled in a harrowing family court procedure over 25 hearings and three-and-half years which has resulted in her not being able to see her daughter for more than two years.

She said: “It is really good news that it’s finally being recognised as an issue; what victims have to go through is just barbaric.

“I can never get back what I have lost but if I can make it better for other women in my situation, that is what keeps me going.

“I have asked for my next hearing to be held in public because a lot of the issues in my circumstances are of public interest.

“Lawyers and other professional services are strongly opposed to this because it is in their interest to keep it all confidential and private because any bad practice or failures on their part don’t come to light.”

Tina said while new legislation was welcome, it was just as important that attitudes within the judiciary and professional services were changed as many powers to protect domestic abuse survivors were already available but not used.

Research by Women’s Aid shows that a quarter of women questioned have been cross-examined by their violent or abusive ex-partner despite current guidance designed to prevent it happening.

Tina said: “They have the powers already to deal with this.

“I have had to fight for that but at my last hearing they did put a screen up, they had us sit in different waiting rooms and the judge insisted he had to leave the court premises first.

“The problem is the judges and other professionals are not trained to deal with this kind of coercive controlling behaviour, they don’t know what they are doing and they are making it worse.”

IT WAS TERRIFYING, WORSE THAN BEING ALONE WITH MY PARTNER

WHEN mother-of-three “Tina” was finally able to break away from her domineering and violent partner, she hoped the nightmare was over after decades of abuse.

But the following three-and-a-half years battling her ex-partner through the family courts and losing custody of her youngest daughter were even more traumatic.

In her own words, she describes how the process opened up more pain and humiliation.

“It’s absolutely terrifying, I cannot describe it.

“Being in family court actually feels worse than when I was alone with my partner.

“It is like being lynched in public – every detail of your life is put up to be scrutinised “Three months after our first hearing I was so traumatised I was on anti-depressants.

“It is the worst experiences and it has taken me three-and-a-half years for me to now go into court and not actually just want to vomit.

“I have had about 25 hearings in different cases where I have had to sit in the same place, where I have had to look across at him while I am being cross-examined.

“It has taken me three years to realise what has happened to me and in that time I have met other women who have had exactly the same thing happen to them.

“What I thought was particular to my case, what we have found is that this is a pattern that we have all suffered at the hands of the perpetrator.

“You are on your own, and the perpetrator has all these professionals and he is so powerful, plausible and persuasive.

“It gets to the point where he is treated as the victim.

“It is increasingly isolating experience and one where the women are so traumatised and then re- traumatised in the family court next to the man who has raped them, who has violated them in one hundred different ways and dominated every aspect of their life. It compounds the utter sense of isolation and impotence to protect your children.

“I met him at university in London.

“I came from a tiny village and I had a lot of adverse experiences as a child growing up. My mother had a series of abusive relationships but I had managed to get away.

“We got into a relationship very quickly and he was so charming I just thought he was perfect.

“For the first few months we were like soulmates but when we moved into a squat together, his behaviour started to change and he began to talk very cruelly about women.

“After nine months he said he was sick of me.

“I went to move out, we had an argument and I threw orange juice over him.

“He grabbed me by the throat, up against a wall and said don’t ever do that again.

“A bit later he pushed me down on to the bed, he raped me but then afterwards he told me he had honey running through his veins and the he loved me.

“It was the first time he had been violent. I had never seen that side of him before.

“Two weeks later he brought a pregnancy test and it was positive.

“I did want a relationship because he was the father of my child but I was really scared.

“I wanted my child to have everything I didn’t have and that included a father because my father had left when I was six.

“Two weeks before my child was due to be born, he turned up drunk at 2am.

“He had no sense of ‘no means no’. If he wanted sex, he had it.

“Later on in the night, I went into labour. I went into hospital and I had a massive haemorrhage. I was rushed into theatre – it was life or death.

“After giving birth to my daughter, I was supposed to be in hospital for ten days but after six I discharged myself because he couldn’t handle me in the hospital as I had to be available to him.

“I hadn’t even had my sutures removed. I was literally just out of hospital from major surgery but he insisted on having sex.

“I didn’t associate what he was doing to me as violence, I thought domestic violence was drunk men coming home from the pub and hitting their wives, not forcing you to have sex or telling you when you sing in church I can smell the evil coming out of you.

“The sexual violation continued to happen even though I had a baby, I just lived in a survivor bubble and focussed on my daughter.

“I wouldn’t be raising my children with another man, because of my experience with stepfathers, so it was a green card for him to come and go as he pleased.

“It was when I was completely broken, that is when he would be kind and say it won’t be like that anymore. And I believed him.

“Some of the times when I was bereaved and distraught those were times when I was raped. That is a violation of your right to grief.

“In the end I had really stark choice to make, either I suffer or my children don’t have a father.

“If I had known then that even if children don’t see it directly, and often they didn’t, they still know, it might have been different.

“But I thought I was a firewall protecting them from whatever he was doing to me, that I was still giving them a normal family life.

“In your own head you compartmentalise the suffering. I loved my children more than I hated how he treated me. I always put them first.

“That was the tragedy of going through the family court process and losing contact with my youngest daughter after all the sacrifices and punishment.

“I loved him but I hated his behaviour. I’m not sure if people can understand this but I have spoken to a lot of women who felt the same about their partners.

“It is so deeply confusing. Just as you are thinking ‘oh my God I can’t live like this’, they become the complete opposite and you begin confiding in them again and then they have more to use against you.

“His final act of sexual violence years later left me with spinal injury. I had to have spinal surgery and after 14 months I was still in pain.

“It was at that time I saw a poster in the children’s hospital after my daughter had broken her ankle. It was a poster from RISE which said emotional, psychological, financial, sexual abuse and I thought ‘that’s me’. It was a real epiphany. What was more important, it said I was not alone and it gave a helpline number.

“We had agreed by then we were going to split up. I didn’t want to rock the boat, whatever he wanted was fine by me, even shared care.

“I found a house to move into for my daughter and I had a mortgage. I was so close to freedom but he was determined I was not going to get away and that’s when all the family court proceedings began.”