An order that a child spend no time with a parent is the most drastic outcome an Australian parenting case can produce. Judges call it severing the relationship, and they only do it when every softer option has failed or would put someone at risk. This article explains what a no contact order actually is, why courts treat it as a last resort, and how judges have decided real cases involving family violence, abuse risk, and a primary carer who simply cannot cope.
Introduction
Q1: My ex was violent to me during the relationship. Can the court stop him from seeing the kids completely?
A: Yes. Where a parent has been seriously violent towards the other parent or the children, courts have ordered that the children spend no time with that parent and given the other parent sole parental responsibility. Reference: Bayer & Imhoff [2010] FamCA 532
Q2: The court accepted my ex is not actually dangerous, but I genuinely cannot cope if the child has to see him. Does that count for anything?
A: It can. If your fear is genuine, and forcing contact would damage your capacity to care for the child, the court can order no contact even where the other parent poses no objective risk. Lawyers call this the Re Andrew principle. Reference: Arendse & Pilkvist [2025] FedCFamC1A 153
Q3: Is supervised contact not the obvious middle ground? Why would a court refuse even that?
A: Supervision only works if a suitable supervisor exists and the arrangement can realistically last. Where no suitable supervisor is available, or supervised visits would wreck the primary carer's ability to function, courts have refused supervision and ordered no time at all. Reference: Tate & Ralph [2012] FMCAfam 279
What Is a No Contact Order in Australian Family Law?
A no contact order is a package of parenting orders that stops a child from spending time with, and usually from communicating with, one parent. The court typically orders that the child live with one parent, spend no time with the other, and that the residential parent have sole parental responsibility. In Bayer & Imhoff [2010] FamCA 532 the court made exactly that package after finding the father had been severely violent towards the mother, that the children had witnessed the violence, and that he had also been violent towards the children themselves.
The starting point is section 60CC of the Family Law Act 1975, which lists what the court must consider when deciding a child's best interests. Two of those factors do most of the work in no contact cases. The first is safety:
"what arrangements would promote the safety (including safety from being subjected to, or exposed to, family violence, abuse, neglect, or other harm) of: (i) the child; and (ii) each person who has care of the child"
The second is the relationship factor, which asks the court to consider "the benefit to the child of being able to have a relationship with the child's parents, and other people who are significant to the child, where it is safe to do so".
Read those together and the logic of every no contact case becomes clear. The child's relationship with each parent is a benefit, not a right belonging to the parent, and the benefit only counts where the relationship is safe. Safety expressly includes the safety of the person caring for the child, which is why harm directed at a mother can end a father's contact even if he never touched the child.
The case law has built a consistent framework on top of the statute:
- Past violence is evidence of future risk. Courts do not need to predict exactly what a parent might do next. Proof of what the parent has already done is a sound basis for assessing the probability of it happening again: Hannigan [2025] FedCFamC1A 117.
- Risk is assessed in two stages. First the court makes findings about what actually happened, then it carries out a predictive exercise about what the evidence means for the future: Batas & Gaire (No 2) [2024] FedCFamC1F 672.
- The court balances benefit against risk, not fairness between parents. The question is never what a parent deserves. It is whether the benefit the child gets from the relationship outweighs the risk of keeping it alive: Saunders & Yorke [2022] FedCFamC1A 54.
- The primary carer's capacity is part of the child's welfare. If contact would so damage the carer that their parenting deteriorates, that damage lands on the child, and the court weighs it accordingly: Arendse & Pilkvist [2025] FedCFamC1A 153.
"It is obvious that past violence, especially if directed at a family member, is a sound basis for considering future violence to be a significant risk. The evidence of past violence in this case was a strong foundation for the primary judge's findings that the father presented an unacceptable risk to the children if he was to have time with them."
Core Point: A no contact order is not a punishment for bad behaviour. It is the court's conclusion that no arrangement involving that parent, not even supervised time, can keep the child and the child's carer safe.
Why Do Courts Treat No Contact as a Last Resort?
The law starts from the position that children benefit from a relationship with both parents, so cutting one parent out entirely needs strong evidence and careful justification. Misjudging how this area works is costly in both directions. Parents facing allegations often assume the worst cannot happen to them, and parents seeking protection often assume a violent history speaks for itself without proper evidence.
Getting it wrong has real consequences:
- For the parent facing the application: courts have severed relationships even where the children loved the parent and enjoyed their time together. A good relationship is not a defence if the risk cannot be managed.
- For the parent seeking the order: a genuine fear that cannot be supported by evidence of its impact on your parenting will not be enough. Appeal courts require a proper evidentiary basis before they let a carer's subjective fear curtail contact.
- For the child: an order sought for tactical reasons rather than safety can backfire badly. Courts examine whether fear is genuine or manufactured, and a parent found to have coached a child or fabricated risk can lose residence altogether.
The children, aged 10 and 6, lived with their mother. Everyone agreed they had a good relationship with their father. The problem was the father's paraphilia, the behaviours associated with it, and his public connections to a community of people with similar practices. The trial judge found the children were likely to face humiliation and ridicule if the father's links were exposed, and could be confronted with sexual ideas they could not understand.
The father offered restraints and undertakings, saying he would keep that part of his life away from the children. The expert was not satisfied. In her view the only real fix was for the father to stop the behaviour entirely and de-identify himself from his business and the community, and she had real concerns he could not contain it during time with the children.
Outcome: The trial judge found supervision was not workable long term and ordered that the children spend no time with their father, and the Full Court dismissed his appeal. The judge accepted the outcome was most unfortunate for the children, who would experience genuine loss. The risk still won.
Key Point: Saunders & Yorke shows the balancing exercise at its starkest. Even a warm, loving relationship can be severed when the risk cannot be managed by anything short of severance.
How Do Courts Decide in Different Situations?
The cases fall into recognisable patterns. Here are the three situations that come up again and again, and how courts have handled each one.
Scenario 1: Family violence and coercive control
Common Misconception: Only violence aimed directly at the child matters. What happened between the adults is history once the relationship ends.
Legal Truth: Violence and coercive control directed at the other parent can by itself justify no contact, because section 60CC makes the carer's safety part of the child's best interests, and because a parent who terrorises the other parent damages the child's home. In Lim & Zong [2022] FedCFamC1A 146 the appeal court upheld a no time order built on findings of a long term pattern of pervasive, coercive and controlling conduct, including years of offensive emails and litigation used as a weapon, which had left the mother with a mental illness.
"In all, the father impressed as a person incapable of taking responsibility for his actions and the impact his actions have had upon the mother."
The parties' daughter was born in 2011. The father had perpetrated serious family violence and coercive control against the mother throughout the relationship, and at one point carried out what the judge described as a retributive attempted suicide at the mother's workplace. The mother suffered PTSD, anxiety and depression, and her symptoms flared whenever she had to deal with the father in any form.
The father started the trial asking for equal shared parental responsibility and alternate weekends, then retreated to a proposal for two hour supervised visits. The judge found he used the trial itself to inflict further psychological harm, giving flippant denials and minimising conduct he had already been shown to have committed. The independent children's lawyer changed position mid trial and supported the mother.
Outcome: Sole parental responsibility to the mother, no time and no communication with the father, plus protective injunctions. The judge found the father devoid of the capacity for reflection, insight and remorse, and accepted the mother could not cope with any form of contact between father and child.
Two family violence cases show what the court is really weighing when it decides whether to leave any channel open:
| Comparison | Dunst [2014] | Perks & Doney [2014] |
|---|---|---|
| Child's existing relationship with father | Children knew their father; the youngest three had some positive memories | Child was 20 months old when the father went into custody and had little to no memory of him |
| Value of communication to the child | Letters showed the children their father had not abandoned them and kept a door open for later | None; the court found no benefit in writing to someone she did not know |
| Risk in the communication itself | Managed through court controlled correspondence arrangements | Father's letters from prison were undermining and likely to cause psychological harm |
| Outcome | ✅ No time, but periodic written communication allowed | ❌ No visits, no calls, no letters |
Key: The court cuts off exactly as much as the risk requires and no more. Residual communication survives only where the child gets a real benefit from it, which is why the Dunst children kept their letters and the Perks child did not.
If you are the parent raising family violence, the practical steps that matter:
- Report and record incidents when they happen. Police records, medical records and contemporaneous messages carried enormous weight in these cases.
- Keep the paper trail of the other parent's own words. In Lim & Zong, thirty pages of the father's emails did much of the work.
- Get treating practitioners on the record about the impact on you. The diagnosis evidence in Batas & Gaire and Lim & Zong connected the violence to parenting capacity.
Scenario 2: A parent poses an unacceptable risk of abuse
Common Misconception: If this particular child has never been harmed, there is nothing to protect the child from.
Legal Truth: The court does not wait for the child to become a victim. It asks whether the parent's history creates an unacceptable risk for this child in the future, and a criminal record involving other children can be enough on its own.
"I am satisfied that there is an unacceptable risk if orders were made for [X] to spend time with his father and that that risk outweighs any potential benefit to [X] of a relationship with his father. The father's history of alleged abuse of family members over many years, his denial of such abuse in the face of court conviction and disclosures by his own sister, his lack of insight into the impact of his behaviours on others and the poor role model he presents to [X] are such that the risk to [X] greatly outweighs any benefit to [X] of a relationship with the father."
The child was born in 2007 and was two months old when abuse allegations against the father first surfaced within his own family. In 2011 a jury convicted the father of six counts of indecent acts with a child under 16 and two counts of indecent assault. Every allegation involved children in his family, all around nine years old. Nobody alleged he had ever harmed this child.
The father denied everything despite the conviction and despite disclosures by his own sister. He asked for supervised time until the child turned 16 and proposed his mother as supervisor. The court found the grandmother did not believe the allegations against her son, so she could not be trusted to put the child's interests ahead of his.
Outcome: Sole parental responsibility to the mother, no time and no communication with the father. The court also accepted that forcing supervised visits would worsen the mother's anxiety and depression and damage her care of all three of her children.
What this scenario teaches about supervision proposals:
- A supervisor who does not believe the risk exists is not a supervisor. Courts test whether your proposed supervisor accepts the findings.
- Supervision must be sustainable for years, not months. Paid supervision services were rejected as a long term answer in Saunders & Yorke for exactly this reason.
- Denial is evidence. In Tate & Ralph the father's refusal to accept a jury verdict became one of the reasons contact was refused entirely.
Scenario 3: No proven danger, but forcing contact would break the primary carer
Common Misconception: If the court does not find me dangerous, it has no basis to stop my contact.
Legal Truth: Under the principle from Re Andrew, a court can order no contact where the primary carer genuinely and honestly fears the other parent, and forcing contact would so damage the carer's psychological health that their parenting would collapse. The fear does not have to be objectively justified. It does have to be genuine, and its impact has to be proved with real evidence, because the carer's fear is not a veto.
"Re Andrew and many other decisions of similar ilk ... establish that, even when a non-residential parent does not objectively pose an unacceptable risk of abuse to a child, the genuine fears of the residential parent about the existence of such a risk may impinge so profoundly upon that parent's capacity and cause such disturbance within the residential household that interaction between the child and the non-residential parent should be curtailed nonetheless, as the need to accommodate the child's best interests overrides any sense of injustice between the parties."
The parents separated in 2020 and agreed to consent orders in September 2022 for their two children to live with their mother and spend time with their father. Three months later the father crashed his car with the elder child in it. The child died, and the father was convicted of dangerous driving offences. The mother stopped the younger child's time with the father, and he applied in 2023 to restore it.
The trial judge found the father did not pose an unacceptable risk to the surviving child. But the mother genuinely and deeply believed he did, and the evidence of four separate experts established that she could not emotionally cope with the child spending any time with the father at all. Her symptoms worsened during supervised visits under the interim orders, to the point where she needed medication to comply.
Outcome: No time with the father and a 12 month pause on communication. The appeal court confirmed the orders, holding that the trial judge correctly applied the Re Andrew principle within the section 60CC framework. The child's best interests overrode the injustice the father understandably felt.
Be careful about how this principle interacts with parental alienation. Courts are alert to the difference between a carer whose genuine trauma makes contact unworkable and a carer who has manufactured fear in themselves or the child. In the first situation the court may curtail contact. In the second, courts have moved children away from the alienating parent entirely. The evidence, particularly expert psychiatric evidence, is what separates the two.
If your situation involves fear and contact:
- Get treatment and let your treating practitioners document the real impact on your functioning. In Arendse & Pilkvist, four experts pointed the same direction.
- Do not coach, involve or interrogate the child. That evidence flips the case from Re Andrew territory into alienation territory.
- If you are the parent on the other side, focus your evidence on capacity, not fairness. Arguments about injustice to you carry little weight against evidence about the child's household falling apart.
If the fear in your case flows from the other parent turning the child against you rather than anything you did, see Child Refuses Visitation for No Reason? The Other Parent May Be Behind It: How Australian Courts Respond. For the evidence courts require before they accept alienation is happening, see Proving Parental Alienation: Evidence Australian Courts Need. For how deliberately false allegations affect parenting outcomes, see Parental Alienation and False Abuse Claims in Australia. And if orders already exist and are being breached, see Legal Consequences of Contravening Parenting Orders in Australia.
What Should You Do If a No Contact Order Is on the Table?
Whether you are seeking one or facing one, the cases above reduce to a handful of hard lessons.
The court cuts off contact to manage risk, not to punish anyone. In Batas & Gaire (No 2) the order followed from findings about future risk to the mother and child, not from moral condemnation of the father's past.
A good relationship with your child will not save contact if the risk cannot be managed. The Saunders & Yorke children loved their father, and the court severed the relationship anyway because nothing short of severance dealt with the risk.
Supervision is not a fallback you are entitled to. In Tate & Ralph the only available supervisor did not believe the risk existed, and the proposal failed with her.
Genuine fear counts, but it is not a veto. Arendse & Pilkvist succeeded on the mother's side because four experts proved the impact on her parenting capacity, not because she asserted fear.
| ✅ Do this | ❌ Not this |
|---|---|
| Report violence when it happens and keep records | Rely on your own account years later with nothing contemporaneous |
| Put treating doctors and psychologists on the record about impact on your parenting | Assert fear or trauma without evidence of its effect |
| Propose supervision arrangements that can genuinely last for years | Offer a family member who does not accept the risk as supervisor |
| Keep the child out of the dispute completely | Coach, question or expose the child to your fear of the other parent |
| Address your own risk factors with real, documented work | Minimise, deny or explain away findings a court has already made |
A no contact application is the heaviest artillery in parenting litigation, and courts scrutinise it accordingly. Whichever side of it you are on, the evidence you build now decides the outcome far more than the arguments you make later.
