- Anonymous Contributor
Namibia’s legal frameworks affirm that the best interests of the child are paramount. Namibia is a country governed by progressive laws and international human rights instruments that recognise children as rights-bearing individuals entitled to safety, dignity, protection and participation. I have witnessed first-hand how these provisions translate into real-time outcomes for children when they are applied by competent children’s advocates when interpreted without prejudice and bias.
But in practice, many family court processes can reflect a pro-contact culture that prioritises parental access over child protection. This reality is lived, often painfully, in courtrooms and therapy rooms with untrained experts and – somewhat ironically – child protection officers projecting their unexplored biases onto children’s experiences and invalidating their experiences. This reality shows up in procedures that continue to ignore and underestimate coercive control and post-separation abuse, and minimise the psychological realities facing women and children after separation.
Post-separation abuse
Post-separation abuse is just that. Abuse that begins (but usually continues) and often escalates when a relationship ends. Controlling people will often use divorce to tighten the noose of abuse when they lose access to and control of their victim once a relationship ends.
This attempt to maintain control can reappear through legal processes, false allegations, withholding of joint resources, attempts to ruin the victim’s reputation, harassment, stalking, repeated court applications, unnecessary counter-applications, accusations framed as concern, strategic delays, and even the use of children as evidence or leverage. All these tactics are aimed at destroying the survivor’s credibility, reputation, well-being, security and stability.
In these contexts, parents who assert boundaries or advocate for their children’s well-being are frequently recast as obstructive, hostile, abusive or alienating. The original dynamics of control are not disrupted by the legal system; they are sometimes fuelled and even rewarded. Rather than protection, what emerges is a procedural environment in which power, privilege, resources and persistence matter more than truth or safety.
Law as process vs law as protection
In my own experience, the most destabilising harm does not arise from a single incident, but from the cumulative effect of legal processes that are slow to respond, ill-equipped to recognise and integrate coercive control, and more concerned with maintaining procedural balance than ensuring safety.
This is further compounded by the adversarial nature of litigation itself, where fault-based systems can interact with high-conflict personality dynamics, enabling the legal process to be used strategically and destructively in pursuit of winning rather than protection.
As a result, the law becomes a process to be navigated rather than a safeguard to be trusted. Survivors are expected to perform credibility, resilience and cooperation under conditions that are themselves destabilising. Meanwhile, the burden of proof quietly shifts onto those already harmed, while systemic delays and procedural complexity exhaust those with the least power to endure them.
Affirming children as rights-bearing persons
Children are too often treated as extensions of adult conflict rather than as individuals with independent rights. Their resistance, fear or distress is sometimes reframed as parental manipulation. Their voices are sometimes postponed, filtered, minimised, misconstrued, weaponised or dismissed altogether.
Yet international and domestic law both recognise children’s rights to participate in decisions affecting them, to psychological and emotional safety and to protection from harm. When contact is enforced without regard to context, history or the child’s expressed experience, the law ceases to protect and instead is used to compel.
We are so accustomed to assuming that parenthood itself confers an absolute entitlement to compel children’s compliance that this power is rarely questioned. Yet separation fundamentally alters the parenting context. In contested divorces, adults may be locked in adversarial struggle, or one parent may be defending against ongoing coercion.
At the same time, children can become caught in the middle and gradually disappear from view. Their fear, distress, hesitation or resistance is no longer taken at face value as a meaningful reflection of their lived experience. Instead it can be treated as something suspicious that must be re-framed, neutralised, discounted or weaponised so that adult motives and decisions can proceed unchanged. In this process, children’s responses are frequently weaponised within adult disputes. This raises a critical question: do children truly possess agency in the systems governing divorce and separation, or is their voice overridden whenever it complicates adult claims to authority?
Fortunately, I have also witnessed the opposite when children are genuinely given opportunities to be heard, supported to access their full rights under the Child Care and Protection Act (2015), and held by individuals who are skilled, neutral and compassionate. In those cases, the system can shift from emphasising enforcement toward protection, containment and meaningful regard for their agency, appropriately calibrated to their age and maturity.
In these circumstances, the role of the protective parent becomes one of understanding and careful interpretation of the technical aspects of the Act, parental clarity, advocacy and the steady exercise of authority in ways that centre the child’s safety, dignity and well-being.
The myth of neutrality and the cost of delay
The idea that the legal system is neutral collapses when delay itself becomes a weapon. Drawn-out processes advantage those with financial resources, legal sophistication and the capacity to outlast others.
In such conditions, calls for “balance” and “both sides” can obscure asymmetry and danger. Trauma-uninformed practice does not merely misunderstand survivors; it actively reproduces harm, while presenting itself as objective and fair.
Conclusion
The question we must ask is not whether contact is important, but at what cost and to whom. Additionally, we should not focus on who holds a formal entitlement to parent, nor who asserts the strongest claim to children, but how parenting is understood and evaluated within contexts shaped by abuse. Is parenting treated as an automatic right to be exercised, or as a responsibility that must be demonstrated through conduct that protects and nurtures children? At its core, the issue is whether children’s rights to safety, care, emotional security and developmental well-being are meaningfully upheld and which arrangements, in practice, best meet those rights.
If we are serious about children’s rights, gender justice and the dignity of families, we must move beyond inherited legal cultures that privilege access over safety. This requires trauma-informed practice, accountability and a willingness to listen; especially when what children and survivors are saying disrupts familiar narratives. Justice, after all, is measured by who it truly protects, not by process alone.
Editor’s Note: This article reflects one contributor’s lived experience of and perspective. It does not constitute legal or professional advice. Details have been anonymised to protect the contributor.
