“Now You Must Cooperate, and Smile”

This article uses autoethnographic poetic inquiry to explore the experiences of domestic abuse survivors, as they navigate the family court system in the UK. The author’s lived experiences are explored and illuminated through a research poem, with this piece used as a pivot around which the academic literature spins. The analysis reveals a court system that systematically fails parents and children who have experienced domestic abuse, particularly those from marginalized and vulnerable communities. Not only does this system fail to protect adults and children from risk, it often retraumatizes them, and is easily used by perpetrators as a weapon through which to continue, intensify, or instigate their abuse. There is an urgent need to address these issues, and to challenge the domestic abuse stereotypes, pro-contact culture, adversarial system, underresourcing and reliance on the dubious concept of “parental alienation” that underpins them. Autoethnography and poetic inquiry offer powerful tools through which to raise these important issues and ignite a call for change.