After a successful pilot project in Grande Prairie, officials at the Reforming Family Justice Initiative are looking to remove divorce and separation from the list of adverse childhood experiences by addressing the standards of the legal process at their core.
Justice Rod Jerke of the Court of King’s Bench in Alberta explains the need stems from the “societal paradigm” surrounding divorce and separation, saying the most strenuous issue placed on families is the feeling of needing to “lawyer up” immediately, rather than addressing the challenges of family life through cooperation and composure for the sake of the children.
“When I say the family justice system, I’m not limiting that to the formal part of the system, which is all about judges and lawyers, I’m talking about the family justice system, which is very broad fundamentally, it’s the whole community,” he says. “We’re talking about who cares about children, and who is providing support and skill building to parents and children, who is therefore interested in family justice.”
The initiative came to Grande Prairie in 2020, partly due to Justice Jerke’s sitting in the city often, but also the city’s willingness to collaborate with the initiative at a local level. Jerke explains he and his colleagues were surprised to see so many community-based organizations who were willing and excited to be a part of the project.
“We set about to identify what individuals and organizations existed in Grande Prairie in this community, and the first thing we noticed was- oh my goodness, there are a lot more folks that are really interested in providing services in exactly this kind of way than we ever dreamed possible,” he says. “We shouldn’t have been surprised, think about it, that’s the heart of our society, isn’t it, the best interest of children.”
The Justice explains the first step his team took was identifying the groups who were willing to discuss strategies to better serve families experiencing divorce, and what he says most importantly- the children affected by separation. He says the identification process is an “open book,” that will continue as the RFJS Initiative expands.
“The vision of the community is not about families having disputes and then resolving those disputes in some format, the focus is on how families deal with the challenges that they experience and what they need by way of skill-building and support to deal with those challenges,” he says.
Jerke adds that oftentimes, in his experience as a Justice, what many families immediately think of as legal problems are really “not just legal problems.” He says families often face more dominant problems, outside of the legal system, namely, social concerns, relationship issues, financial challenges, or health needs.
“All of that, of course, means that the court will still be involved, there still will be a court and that’s where the community and the court have intersected,” he says. “The community really wanted us to align our efforts, align the efforts that we can make as a court in such a way that it would support the work of the community-based family justice, reforming family justice system initiative that was going on.”
Jerke and his colleagues at RFJS cite “toxic stress” as a significant driver for kids to encounter adverse childhood experiences. He says the family justice system as of late has been quite hard on children, particularly when it comes to divorce and separation.
“All of this is informed by, and in many ways is driven by very clear brain science, which shows us that we need to reduce the risk of toxic stress that’s experienced by families, particularly children,” he says. “Toxic stress can be increased by involvement in adversarial legal processes, which is how our legal, formal legal system is fundamentally designed so that led us into a process whereby we did a broad-based community collaboration over four and a half years of work.”
Jerke uses the example of what, unfortunately, many adults and their friends end up advising one another to do when it comes to divorce being the instruction to “get the best lawyer you can,” and proceed with the “best legal advice” possible throughout the divorce process. He says Canadian society currently has a “paradigm” or “vision” of what divorce is supposed to look like, largely involving lawyers and judges, which results in a “winner” or a “loser.”
“That’s what we’re fundamentally trying to shift,” he says. “You can think of it as a paradigm shift, you can think of it as a new story, or you can think of it as this, simple as this- we are working to remove separation and divorce from the list of adverse childhood experiences, if we can do that, there will be wonderful outcomes to follow.”
Ultimately, Jerke and his colleagues say they are pleased with how the pilot project was received in Grande Prairie, and the hope is to eventually “fundamentally shift” family justice across Canada, and beyond.
