What does relational injustice look like?

Relational injustice happens when safe and meaningful family relationships are obstructed, erased, denigrated, delayed or made practically impossible without proper justification, evidence or repair.

It can happen inside families. It can happen through institutions. It can happen through delay, cost, disbelief, ideology, procedural drift or the failure to act when relational harm is occurring.

Relational injustice does not mean every relationship must be preserved at any cost. Relational justice means that safety and evidence matter.

But where a safe and meaningful relationship is needlessly destroyed, the harm is not merely private. It is public harm.

Relational injustice can occur when:

• Family law treats children’s relationships with parents and wider family as disposable, including when it removes relational continuity from the centre of decision-making;

• Safeguarding becomes so narrowly framed that family relationships are treated primarily as risks rather than as part of a child’s identity, continuity and belonging;

• Parental alienation is recognised only reluctantly, belatedly or selectively;

• Courts lose the discretion to repair ruptured parent-child relationships before the evidence has been properly tested.

These are some of the reasons why relational justice matters. Family relationships are social infrastructure.

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