CLP - The 'ideal mother,' Family Law and Domestic Abuse

This lecture will be delivered by Professor Shazia Choudhry, as part of the Current Legal Problems Lecture Series 2025-26

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CLP - The 'ideal mother,' Family Law and Domestic Abuse

20 Nov 2025, 18:00 – 19:00

UCL Faculty of Laws
4-8 Endsleigh Gardens
London
WC1H 0EG
United Kingdom

The 'Ideal Mother', Constructions of Motherhood and Fatherhood within the Family Justice Response to Domestic Abuse

Speaker: Professor Shazia Choudhry (University of Oxford)

Chair: Professor Rosemary Hunter KC (hon) (Loughborough University)

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.

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)

The Current Legal Problems (CLP) lecture series and annual volume was established over fifty five years ago at the Faculty of Laws, University College London and is recognised as a major reference point for legal scholarship.

You can attend this event in-person at UCL Faculty of Laws (Bentham House, 4-8 Endsleigh Gardens, London WC1H 0EG) or alternatively you can join via a live stream.

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