Jess Hill: Hello, this is Background Briefing, I'm Jess Hill. For decades, the Family Court has been one of the most controversial institutions in Australia. It's also one of the least scrutinised; strict privacy laws make it extremely difficult to report on.

Today, we look at some of the most vexed cases that come before the Family Court; those alleging child sexual abuse. Background Briefing has been contacted by numerous mothers who claim that the Court is biased against parents who raise abuse allegations, and disbelieving of the children who make them. It's a claim the Family Court rejects.

At the centre of this dispute is the perceived influence of some child psychiatrists and psychologists, whose assessments can play a vital role decisions regarding custody. This is not an easy story to tell. We can't reveal the identities of the family members or the experts involved in these cases, and we've even had to alter some voices.

The first case involves a girl we'll call Lucy, and a mother we'll call Tina. Lucy was eight years old when she told her school counsellor that she was being sexually abused by her father. Her disclosure came after a personal development class. Now in her late teens, Lucy recalls it clearly.

Lucy: And when they started talking about sexual abuse and where are your no-no zones, it suddenly clicked with me, eight years old, that the things that were happening in my household shouldn't be happening.

Jess Hill: Lucy says she hadn't thought to say anything before then because even though she didn't like it, she didn't know what her father was doing was wrong.

Lucy: I grew up being told that the things that were happening were part of a special bond between father and daughter, and I wasn't supposed to speak about it to anybody else because it would ruin the secret.

Jess Hill: Lucy's mother Tina had separated from her husband John when Lucy was two, after John had become physically and psychologically abusive towards Tina. Lucy had spent regular time with her father for many years after the separation. When the school told Tina about Lucy's disclosure, she went to the Family Court to try to stop John's access to Lucy.

To help it assess the allegations, the Family Court asked a child psychiatrist to write a single expert report. This is common in cases involving allegations of child sexual abuse. A single expert report writer, usually a psychologist or a child psychiatrist, will be asked to write a report assessing the family, and may assess the abuse allegations and make suggestions regarding custody. These reports can play a vital role in deciding how a child's care is allocated.

Tina felt sure the expert report writer would convey her daughter's concerns to the court.

Tina: This report writer shook our hands, looked my daughter and myself in the eyes, and he said, 'We will help you.'

Jess Hill: But when Tina received the report, she could barely believe what she was reading.

Tina: They painted him as gold, and made me look like a crazy, psychotic…and ludicrous, that's the words they used.

Jess Hill: There was no mention of domestic violence in the expert's analysis, just reference to an unstable relationship that was convoluted and strained. Tina was depicted as anxious, suggestible and over-protective, and possibly suffering from psychosis.

The report said Lucy became tearful when, interviewed alone, she talked about her father touching her private parts. When the expert report writer interviewed Lucy alongside her father, he asked her twice if she was worried about her dad touching her in a bad way. Lucy avoided the questions.

Lucy: It's unnerving…like, when Dad's sitting in the room, you don't want to tell, because he's the one that's doing it! And he's sitting there staring at you the whole time, monitoring what you're saying.

Jess Hill: Lucy was said to appear very guarded with her father, but in the expert report writer's opinion, that was because she felt pressured by her mother to reject him. The expert report writer concluded this pressure to reject her father was also what led Lucy to make allegations against him.

In his recommendations to the judge, the report writer said Lucy should continue to spend regular weekends and half school holidays with her father, and that the mother should get counselling to help her support the father-daughter relationship. The final recommendation in the expert report also served as a warning.

Tina: Because in the report, if we ever mentioned that she was sexually abused ever again and brought it up to the courts, then she would be removed from my care, and handed to him permanently. And I would have to seek supervised access, and close psychiatric help.

Jess Hill: Tina's lawyer told her that with such a strong recommendation against her in the expert report, the Family Court would likely find in favour of the father. She was advised to just consent to unsupervised access, or risk losing custody of Lucy altogether. Tina took her lawyer's advice. It would be years before Lucy mentioned the abuse again.

Lucy: I didn't really talk about it after that, because I didn't want anybody to worry. I shut down and pretended nothing was happening.

Patrick Parkinson: Now, these are the sort of cases where we ought to have very serious concerns about the safety of the child and where if any expert says confidently no abuse has occurred, then I question the expertise of the expert.

Jess Hill: That's Professor Patrick Parkinson, he's an expert in child protection, and former chairperson of the Family Law Council, which advises the government on family law. He says expert report writers can have enormous influence in the Family Court.

Patrick Parkinson: In the last few years I've noticed more and more cases where the court has being persuaded, usually by an expert report writer, that the abuse hasn't happened, they've switched the care from the mother to the father, and I'm seriously worried about this trend in the cases. It's not what we used to do. We used to put child protection first. And I think it is based upon a certainty about what has occurred which is not justified by a serious examination of the facts in some of these cases. It may have been in a few cases, but I think it has become all too common, and what some lawyers now tell their clients is if you make these allegations, you risk losing the care of your child, and that may mean the allegation is not made at all and children remain at risk of serious harm.

Jess Hill: Background Briefing has been approached by parents who lost custody of their children after reporting allegations of child sexual abuse in the Family Court. We'll be looking at one of these cases later in the program.

It's not the Family Court's job to decide whether abuse allegations are true or false. It's a civil court, not a criminal court. Instead, it has to decide whether a parent poses an unacceptable risk to their child.

Patrick Parkinson: The unacceptable risk test is derived from a decision of the High Court in 1988 called M and M. What happened in that case was there was alleged abuse of a very young child, I think the child was four years old at the time, and it was very unclear as to what exactly had happened. There was certainly grounds for serious concern about whether the child had been abused.

The trial judge couldn't say on the balance of probabilities that there had been abuse, but couldn't say that there hadn't been and had lingering doubts, and, on the basis of that, denied contact with the father. It went up finally to the High Court, and High Court upheld the decision of the trial judge and said that the test is whether in all the circumstances it would be an unacceptable risk for the child to have access or spend time with the father in the circumstances of that case.

Jess Hill: Assessing unacceptable risk is a complex, onerous task. In most cases, child sexual abuse does not leave any physical evidence. In the absence of physical evidence, expert report writers can play a pivotal role in the court's decision-making process.

Patrick Parkinson: It's important to understand the position of the judge. The judge has usually no training in child development, no expertise in child development, no expertise in child protection and may have no expertise in family law. Sometimes judges are appointed without any background in family law. The reality is they are highly dependent upon the expert evidence.

Jess Hill: In addition to interviewing family members, expert report writers look at evidence provided by others including doctors, Child Protection and police. Even if they believe the child to be at risk of sexual harm, an expert report writer may disagree. When views differ, Patrick Parkinson says the court is likely to preference the view of the expert report writer, especially if they're a child psychiatrist.

Patrick Parkinson: There is in courts a bit of a hierarchy. At the bottom of the hierarchy there are social workers. I think police officers maybe have slightly more credibility, but are there along with social workers. Psychologists, more credibility. But the gods of the Family Court are psychiatrists.

Now, let me say that the court is indebted to the psychiatrists who give evidence in these cases. It relies heavily on them and many, maybe most, are extremely capable professionals, but actually psychiatry does not provide necessarily very good training for identifying whether a six-year-old child has been sexually abused.

Jess Hill: The notion that expert report writers are always given more due by the court is not accepted by the Family Court's Deputy Chief Justice John Faulks.

John Faulks: It's not the case that judges always accepts those opinions. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. It's not up to them to make that decision, they can say these things are consistent with something having happened. Typically, for example, if there's an accusation a child has been abused, a report writer might say, 'There was nothing in my observations of the child with the alleged abusing parent which would suggest that this may have occurred, there was no fear,' a whole range of things. Now, in some cases it will be influential, in some cases it won't, in other cases it might have a medium influence. It isn't a situation where you can have a one-size-fits-all, I'm sorry, that's just not reality.

Jess Hill: We'll hear more from the Deputy Chief Justice later in the program.

Concerns about Family Court procedures are also held by Hetty Johnston, CEO of the child advocacy group, Bravehearts.

Hetty Johnston: We've seen over the years some horrendous…what we believe to be horrendous decisions, just horrendous in the worst possible way, and this has been ongoing.

Jess Hill: Bravehearts has just closed submissions on Abbey's Project, a privately funded inquiry into the experiences of families who've brought allegations of child sexual abuse to the Family Court.

How many cases have you received in reviewing this?

Hetty Johnston: Hundreds. We have been absolutely bombarded. We have matters that are years old, and we have matters that are live now in the courts.

Jess Hill: Abbey's Project is named after a 17-year-old girl who took her own life in 2013 after disclosing that her father had sexually abused her. He'd been jailed for sexually assaulting her best friend when she was eight. After he was released, parenting orders made by the Family Court of Western Australia, with consent of both parents and Child Protection, allowed Abbey to stay overnight with her father.

In a letter to the Australian newspaper, Abbey's mother says she felt pressured to consent after a psychologist's expert report recommended contact with the father. She says she had neither the money nor the strength to convince the court that she was right and the expert report writer was wrong. Hetty Johnston says this is far from an isolated case.

Hetty Johnston: We've got clients who've spent in excess of $1 million trying to defend their children and grandchildren, and they're up against a system that refuses to believe them, that puts them in a box that says they're being vindictive, or they're putting these thoughts in their child's mind.

One in five children will be sexually assaulted before they turn 18 in Australia, and those one in five, a percentage of those are going to finish up in front of the Family Law Courts. When we have a system that doesn't want to believe children, that degrade the mothers or the fathers who are trying to protect their children, then we've got a real problem.

Jess Hill: In Lucy's case, the single expert report was enough to scare her into silence for the next three years.

Lucy: It definitely made me feel very betrayed. The abuse obviously got worse, it went from being daddy's little secret, to just full-on, just awful abuse. It became very violent, and if I wouldn't comply, it was brought up that I wasn't allowed to speak about it, so maybe I should just shut up and let it happen, and no-one would believe me anyway is what he kept telling me.

Jess Hill: As Lucy got older, the abuse became more explicit.

Lucy: It did come to the stage where he was in fact having sex with me, and I got my period quite young, so it was scary to the point where I didn't even know if I'd come home pregnant.

Jess Hill: Lucy suffered her father's abuse for three more years. Then when she was 13, her mother received a letter, saying her father was relinquishing custody.

Lucy: I was just told that I wouldn't have to go back, and at first I was very cautious, I didn't believe it, I just looked at her and I went, 'Are you sure this time?'

Tina: We couldn't believe it either. We don't understand...with all the fighting, and what lengths he had gone to to get her, why would he suddenly just give it up?

Jess Hill: Tina and Lucy both believe it may have been because Lucy was old enough to speak out. Lucy now feels betrayed by the whole process.

Lucy: The fact that I had to be sent back and abused, that was something that they could have stopped. It felt really betraying, and now I've been asked now that I'm 18, if I want to go back and finish the report with the police, and I'm like, well, 'What's the point? Are they going to believe me, are they going to listen?' I still don't have any more evidence than I did back then.

Jess Hill: The Family Court has the difficult task of deciding what's best for children. Sometimes one or both parents will go to any lengths to make life difficult for their ex. In this context, false abuse allegations do occur.

Child psychiatrist Carolyn Quadrio is an expert report writer for the Family Court who has decades of clinical experience in child sexual abuse, domestic violence and forensic interviewing. She says that assessing abuse allegations is a demanding task.

Carolyn Quadrio: It's very serious because the implications are so profound. I mean, the implications are that if the child has been abused it's very important to protect the child and they mustn't be exposed to someone who's likely to abuse them again.

On the other hand, if the abuse didn't happen it's equally critical that a child not have the relationship with the other parent destroyed on the basis of a misunderstanding, so the stakes are extremely high either way. The other thing is allowing them to stay in the custody of a parent who's so overanxious that they're contaminating the child's mind when it shouldn't be contaminated. So there are lots of issues and it's difficult work.

Jess Hill: Two years ago, a retiring Family Court judge, David Collier, told Fairfax that allegations of child sexual abuse were being increasingly invented by mothers to stop fathers from seeing their children. He declined Background Briefing's request for an interview.

Carolyn Quadrio says that the research on false sexual abuse allegations made in custody cases shows that on average, they comprise around 10% of the total.

Carolyn Quadrio: By no means would anyone say that it's common. There are a variety of studies, and statistics are always rubbery. You can get estimates of anything between 4% to 20%, but around 10%, around that area is a common reporting in a lot of different studies. I think we could say safely something like 80% to 90% seem to have a reasonable foundation to them when they're investigated.

Jess Hill: Background Briefing spoke to another expert report writer who holds virtually the opposite view to Carolyn Quadrio. Child psychiatrist Chris Rikard-Bell says he's often called on by the Court to assess allegations of physical and sexual abuse. He says in his experience, the vast majority of allegations of child sexual abuse, which only make up a small minority of the court's total caseload, turn out to be unfounded, meaning they have no basis in fact.

Chris Rikard-Bell: I think in the Family Court there are a lot of false allegations.

Jess Hill: What do you think…what share of the cases that you look at that involve child sexual abuse do turn out to be unfounded?

Chris Rikard-Bell: So, in my experience, about 90% are unfounded in this very narrow, small group that are highly conflicted. So, there is still sexual abuse and physical abuse that comes through, but a lot of the people who end up in the Family Court are highly motivated people and highly competent people, so they're a different group from, say, the lower courts, or the Children's Court.

Jess Hill: And how long have you been doing this?

Chris Rikard-Bell: 25 years, yeah.

Jess Hill: And how many evaluations roughly?

Chris Rikard-Bell: Oh a couple of thousand probably I've done, yes.

Jess Hill: When Background Briefing raised the figure of 90% of abuse allegations being unfounded with Professor Patrick Parkinson, he was visibly taken aback.

Patrick Parkinson: I would be very seriously concerned about figures of that kind. They're not borne out by research. The research does suggest that there's a greater proportion of unsubstantiated allegations in the Family Court system and there are very good reasons for that, not least that we're often dealing with such young children that it's hard to substantiate. There are some cases where you can conclude on the balance of probabilities and on all the evidence that it probably didn't happen. There's a vast group in between, where all you can say is 'I cannot be certain it has happened, I cannot be certain it hasn't happened, and I have to say the allegations are unsubstantiated'.

Jess Hill: Given his view on the frequency of false allegations, Background Briefing wanted to get a better understanding of how Chris Rikard-Bell, a prolific expert report writer for the Family Court, assesses the families that come before him.

Chris Rikard-Bell: One cannot just depend on what the child's statements are. So often this is seen as the gold standard for trying to decide whether abuse has occurred, whereas in the Family Court, one has to be cautious about just accepting at face value a child's statements, because often what happens is children are interrogated by the anxious parent over and over, and as children develop, at certain ages they will try to be attempting to please their parent, and not so aware of what is in fact fact, but they're more worried about producing what they think the parent wants to hear. And so they might be making statements that one parent will want to hear.

Jess Hill: So can a child be led to believe they have been abused when they haven't? Carolyn Quadrio says it is possible, but it's not easy.

Carolyn Quadrio: You can persuade them that something's happened that hasn't happened. However, they're sort of laboratory conditions too. For example there's a classic one that was done when someone is told that when they were a child they got lost in a shopping mall and were very distressed and crying for mum. Compare that with persuading a child that when you were in the bath last Saturday daddy put his finger inside your vagina. I don't think they're comparable memories to think about…you know, if you're going to implant a false memory, I don't think that they're equally easy to implant.

Jess Hill: One way of assessing whether a child has been abused, according to Chris Rikard-Bell, is to talk openly about the abuse allegations with both the child and the alleged abuser present, to see how they both react.

Chris Rikard-Bell: If abuse has occurred, generally there's an awkwardness, and some representation of that difficulty that will be discussed between the child and the parent. If there is no substantial sign of abuse that might have occurred, then generally one can tell if a child and a parent has a good rapport, and the child's relaxed or if the child's frightened, it gives you strong information.

Jess Hill: This is not an interviewing style Carolyn Quadrio agrees with.

Carolyn Quadrio: No, I don't think that's appropriate. I think that has to be done by forensic interviewers. That has to be properly recorded. It would be hopeless for me to ask those questions and then write the report saying this, that and the other happened. I'd have to have a video of it, preferably have somebody else around. That has to be done under forensic conditions.

Jess Hill: I asked Chris Rikard-Bell if this style of interviewing could be traumatic for a child, especially if the abuse allegations were true.

Chris Rikard-Bell: That's always a concern, and in other jurisdictions it's probably not always wise to interview a perpetrator and a victim. However, allegations of abuse is a big problem in the Family Court, but the actual rate of abuse is far different from the Children's Court, so one cannot presume that abuse has occurred.

Jess Hill: In some Family Court cases, allegations of child sexual abuse have been explained as being the result of brainwashing or what's known as 'parentification'. I asked Chris Rikard-Bell where these theories came from, and which child sexual abuse experts he referred to when he was forming an opinion on a case.

Chris Rikard-Bell: It's a very difficult area to get objective information and to carry out controlled trials, so the scientific literature is really a combination of looking at very experienced, well-regarded people in the field, and looking at their opinions and their experience. And so, often it's really looking at eminent people.

Jess Hill: Is there anyone in particular?

Chris Rikard-Bell: Well, there are various people who've looked at various syndromes, so Gardner, for example, looked at Parental Alienation Syndrome, and there's been a lot of debate about the use and misuse of Parental Alienation Syndrome. But clinically often we see children who have become distanced from the other parent under influence, and so develop a degree of alienation. I think that's a useful concept in some circumstances, but it's sometimes overused and misused.

Jess Hill: Parental Alienation Syndrome was the brainchild of American psychiatrist Richard Gardner in the 1980s. He testified in hundreds of American Family Court cases, claiming that during custody battles, women often programmed their children to manufacture allegations of sexual abuse. Parental Alienation Syndrome has since been widely discredited, and is not recognised as having any scientific basis. The concept of alienation, by which a parent consciously undermines the child's relationship with the other parent, is still a valid concept.

There's long been concern that Parental Alienation Syndrome is influencing decisions made in the Australian Family Court. This was the subject of a 2007 Background Briefing, in which American attorney Richard Ducote, a critic of Richard Gardner, explained the syndrome.

Richard Ducote: So what he did is he took the evidence that has been well documented to exist in cases where kids actually have been physically and sexually abused by a parent, and simply redefined the evidence of abuse into evidence of what he called Parental Alienation Syndrome, which meant that the child was not being abused, but simply was being coached or encouraged by the other parent, generally the mother, into disliking the other parent for no good reason.

And then he proposed a very draconian cure, as it were, for this non-existent disorder, and that was to take the child away from the protecting parent and give the child to the parent who the child had reported to have abused the child, and then suggested that the mother be either jailed or all of her contact with the child be terminated.

Jess Hill: In that 2007 Background Briefing, the Chief Justice of the Australian Family Court, Diana Bryant, said that Parental Alienation Syndrome was not accepted by the court.

Diana Bryant: It isn't something that the Family Court accepts. All of the internal counsellors that are in the Court subscribe to the view that there is no valid condition as Parental Alienation Syndrome.

Jess Hill: Based solely on his clinical observations, Richard Gardner, the psychiatrist who defined the Syndrome, said that around 90% of the child sexual abuse allegations he assessed were false. As we've heard, Chris Rikard-Bell quotes the same sort of statistics, based on his experience. I asked him if he thought that Richard Gardner had been unfairly maligned.

Chris Rikard-Bell: I think he's very relevant, but I think that one needs to specifically not just throw that term 'parental alienation syndrome', one needs to actually describe what one is seeing clinically, and then talk about the degrees of alienation which Richard Gardner talked about, and I think that that's useful, where there's mild, moderate or severe, and that may lead to an appropriate response from the court.

Jess Hill: In a subsequent email exchange with Background Briefing, Chris Rikard-Bell clarified his position. He wrote: 'I refer to alienation if it specifically occurs and describe it but I avoid using the Parental Alienation Syndrome label, even though it is often useful, as it has now come under such scrutiny that it often creates more debate than is helpful.'

He says he doesn't use Parental Alienation Syndrome as a diagnosis.

The Deputy Chief Justice of the Family Court is Justice John Faulks:

John Faulks: So far as the syndrome is concerned, I wouldn't have thought anyone was relevantly suggesting that that was still a psychologically valid concept, but that does not in any way suggest that there aren't situations in which parents do engage in a process of trying the alienate the children from the other parent. That's not a syndrome of the child, that's a feature of the evidence of the parent.

Jess Hill: Deputy Chief Justice Faulks says that in most cases, the expert report writer is chosen by agreement between the judges and the parties involved, based on their expertise.

John Faulks: All experts are under the same provision: first they've got to demonstrate that they have the relevant expertise to give an opinion; second they've got to demonstrate that their experience and knowledge is such in the particular area in which they're giving an opinion, which qualifies them to give the evidence; third, that in giving the evidence, they have followed a reasoned pathway, and they have to disclose what factors they're taking into account in reaching that conclusion.

Jess Hill: The level and type of expertise does vary. Expert report writer Carolyn Quadrio says she has decades of clinical experience in treating victims of child sexual abuse. Background Briefing asked Chris Rikard-Bell whether he had specialised expertise in child sexual abuse.

Chris Rikard-Bell: As part of training as a child psychiatrist, one is exposed to all forms of potential adversity that could influence a child's development, and sexual abuse is one of those. And so, I guess the training that I would have had is exposure to the various ranges of trauma that children can experience, not specifically sexual abuse, but sexual abuse is one of those areas of abuse.

Jess Hill: In cases like this next one, in which there are conflicting views about whether a child is at risk, the strong influence of a single expert report writer is clearly evident.

Last year, a mother who we'll call Sandra, had her children removed from her care and handed to their father as a result of orders made in a private, ex-parte hearing.

Sandra: Ex-parte means without all the parties present. Ex-parte hearings are used as a legitimate technique to protect a child if there is evidence of an immediate risk to their life, or there's evidence of an immediate risk of flight. There were neither of those things.

Jess Hill: And you were not informed of this hearing?

Sandra: We were not informed, and the department of child safety were also not informed either.

Jess Hill: There were two people present at the ex-parte hearing; the judge, and an independent lawyer for the children.

Sandra: So they met, and they had this secret meeting in the judge's private chambers. It was not even recorded. They made orders on the basis of a report by this report writer.

Jess Hill: The following day, Sandra's two young children were removed from their school.

Sandra: The day that the children were taken, I had gone to the school, and I had talked very briefly to the school principal to say, just as a heads up, we now have a final trial date, and this is the gist of what the department has said. Within an hour and a half I got home, I had another phone call from the principal to say the most shocking thing has happened, almost as soon as you left, two officers of the court came to the school and presented court orders that the children were to be immediately removed to go and live with the father.

Jess Hill: The court orders also stated that Sandra could not see her children for two weeks, and after that, only at supervised visits. In the reasons for judgment, the judge said the decision to hold an urgent ex-parte hearing was made based on recommendations from a single expert report writer. The written judgement quotes the expert's report:

Reading: I don't believe the sexual abuse on balance is likely to have occurred, and that this has been more the anxiety of the mother which has been projected onto the children. I believe the only alternative now is for the children to be placed with the father. I recommend this happen immediately and without notice.

Jess Hill: In the single expert's report, the major concern was that she would not be able to support a relationship between the children and the father. The judge concluded this risk was profoundly serious and potentially irreparable. In the written judgment, the judge also quoted the report writer's justification for removing the children immediately, and without warning:

Reading: There is an extremely high likelihood that the great emotional responses in the mother and the maternal grandparents would lead to further police and child protection involvement, making any decision of change of residence impossible. The pressure on the children would be so intense that they would, I believe, refuse to leave the mother, and the likelihood of lasting damage to future contact with the father would be high.

Sandra: So the kids were removed without Child Safety being involved. Why didn't they at least involve the department, who had just entered proceedings, making a very strong statement that there's risk of sexual harm?

Jess Hill: Three weeks before the children were removed, Child Protection had submitted a notice to intervene in proceedings.

Sandra: Saying that risk of sexual harm was substantiated for one or both children, and the father was the person associated with causing that risk.

Jess Hill: The affidavit also criticises Sandra for questioning her daughter too frequently, and said that her young daughter had made contradictory statements about her father. But Child Protection clearly states that the risk of sexual harm to one or both of the children was substantiated. There's no mention of this document in the judgment ordering the change of custody.

The children had spent most of their lives in the care of their mother. 18 months before the Family Court removed the children from her care, the Court had changed the father's access to his children from being supervised to unsupervised. That order was made on conditions that applied to both parents.

Sandra: Don't give the kids alcohol, don't show them porn, don't show them your genitals, and don't masturbate with the kids. Now, every one of those restraints had a specific background and was based on external evidence, like counselling notes.

Jess Hill: Shortly after the children began spending unsupervised time with their father, Sandra says her young daughter made disclosures to her and the girl's maternal grandfather.

Grandfather: We were actually sitting on our veranda, and our little granddaughter came across to her grandma and me, and said to me, 'Grandpa, (and I won't use his name) has asked me to rub in his privates.' I was taken aback and said to her, 'And what did you do?' And she said, 'I said no', upon which I said words along the lines of, 'That's good, because that's not nice.'

Jess Hill: Did she bring it up ever again, or was that the only time?

Grandfather: Look, that was the only time that I recall her talking about being asked to rub in his privates, but some months later we were sitting in our lounge room just watching a kiddies TV show, and out of the blue she said to me, 'Grandpa, do I have to go to Dad's place before my tooth grows?' At that stage I realised what she was getting at, because she'd just lost one of her front teeth. So I said to her, 'Do you want to go to your dad's?' And she said, 'No.' And I said, 'Why not?' And she said, 'You know, he made me look in his private parts.' And I just said to her, 'Darling, we're trying to sort something out.'

Jess Hill: After her daughter's disclosures, Sandra stopped sending the children to their father, and had her daughter interviewed by Child Protection and police. When the father took the matter back to Family Court, the independent children's lawyer chosen by the court appointed a child psychiatrist to write a single expert report. This was the report that came to the conclusion that the children should be removed immediately from their mother and handed to their father.

In the reasons for judgment, the judge conceded this drastic step was not consistent with usual procedural fairness. But the judge was persuaded it was the right action to take.

This has been a long and protracted case before the Family Court, and it continues. There have been several court orders made over several years, and we're unable to report all the detail.

Background Briefing acknowledges this is only one side of the story. We didn't interview the father, on advice it may not be in the best interests of the children who are currently living with him. We have verified this story through court documents.

Family Court said it was not appropriate for them to comment on individual cases.

Expert report writer Carolyn Quadrio says in cases like these it's a huge call to remove a child from their primary bond with the mother.

Carolyn Quadrio: Even if you were absolutely convinced that you've got a mother who's contaminating the child's mind in that way, it's still a very traumatic thing to take a child away from the person who's their primary attachment figure and put them with someone who they believe is a risk to them. It's a very big step. It has to be done very carefully and only when you're absolutely sure of what you're doing.

Jess Hill: It's cases like these that worry family law expert Patrick Parkinson.

Patrick Parkinson: I'm quite concerned about some of the decisions of the Family Court in this area. In situations where they make very, very firm findings there's been no abuse and switch care from the mother to the father. In situations where some humility is called for. And it is usually because the expert report writer has made very strong recommendations. There are cases where undoubtedly that has been justified, but I think it may be happening too often.

Jess Hill: Background Briefing's coordinating producer is Linda McGinness, research by Lawrence Bull, technical production by Leila Shunnar, the executive producer is Chris Bullock, and I'm Jess Hill.

This program and its transcript have been edited for legal reasons.