Why are judges pinning the blame on victims in family courts?

Inside the story

Hannah Summers, who has been reporting from family courts for five years, writes in the piece that she’s occasionally seen this behaviour in person, but it more often takes place behind closed doors. As she points out, judges and other professionals in court are more likely to moderate their language when a reporter is in the room. That’s why it’s so important to get more journalists fully prepared to cover the family courts.

Family courts used to be entirely private, with journalists only allowed access in a handful of circumstances after specific applications. When a pilot first opened up courts to reporters several years ago, the Bureau helped to train journalists so we could finally see what was going on inside this opaque system. You can access all our advice on family court reporting here.

Finally, progress on lawsuits against free speech

Inside the story

Our newsroom has been passionate about SLAPPs for a long time – even before we had to fight off a case brought by Kazakh oligarchs. It is unbelievably frustrating to have a brilliant, necessary story that we can’t tell because a subsequent legal case could bankrupt the Bureau. That’s why we work so hard to get everything fact checked and take legal advice – and when even that’s not enough to keep us safe, we innovate.

For example, did you know that MPs can’t be sued for anything said in the Houses of Parliament? When we organised the Silenced Stories debate with MPs two years ago, it was a chance to get more than a dozen stories that might never otherwise see the light of day out into the public domain. It was also something of a world first – and if anyone in a jurisdiction with similar parliamentary privilege wants to find out how to do it, just reply and I’ll put you in touch with the geniuses who got it done.

Some newspapers push anti-trans agenda twice a day

Chatbot ban leaves loopholes for the industry

Inside the story

I’ll be honest – this is one of those stories that’s been the talk of the office, and it’s not been all on one side. Some of the parents on the team are all for the ban, suspicious of giant tech companies that seem all too eager to get their children to give over more data and more attention to their apps. I personally find it hard to imagine a world where social media is locked away like alcohol or cigarettes – and where I have to hand over a legal ID to log in.

But I think Effie Webb has identified a particularly nuanced point here: that an outright ban on social media that nevertheless leaves many chatbots available could push children towards AIs to maintain some kind of online social life – just one where there’s never a real friend on the other end of the conversation.

⚡ Impact this week

We can’t keep Effie out of parliament! This week she went to speak at a Foreign Policy Centre and Global Disorder Group event on “Rhetoric, Disorder, and the Crisis of Democracy”. There, she talked about some of our recent Hate Economy reporting, explaining how promoting extremism can become profitable.

Another win this week was learning that Josephine Mould’s work on banks funding oil drilling is being used to teach students – more than 2,500 of them, in fact – how to do investigative climate reporting. Another couple thousand Josephines looking into how our banks invest our money is just what the planet needs.