18/09/2026
WELLINGTON R**E CRISIS
Advocacy & Commentary
September 2026
Believing Her: What the Phillips Inquiry Tells Us About Whose Word Our Systems Trust
A mother and her daughters raised the alarm for years. It took a public inquiry - and immeasurable harm to three children - for anyone in power to say they should have been heard.
In July 2026, a public inquiry into the disappearance of the Phillips children delivered a finding that will be painfully familiar to anyone who works alongside survivors of family and sexual violence: the people closest to the danger - the children's mother and older sisters - told the authorities exactly what was happening, and for years, almost no one who mattered acted as though they believed them.
The inquiry, led by former High Court Justice Simon Moore, found that Oranga Tamariki was “largely dismissive” of repeated concerns raised by the children's mother and her family about Tom Phillips's controlling behaviour and access to fi****ms. Those warnings were, in the inquiry's words, “often minimised as being part of a parenting dispute.” A 2021 affidavit setting out his conduct in detail was never properly read by the staff responsible for assessing risk to the children. Weeks later, Oranga Tamariki told the Family Court the children were “completely fine.” The Court was not told about the mother's concerns, nor about the police investigation running alongside it.
This is not a story about one family slipping through the cracks. It is a story about how a woman's account of the man who controlled her is treated as noise until an independent inquiry, years later, confirms it was signal all along.
“We did not listen in the way we should have”
To its credit, Oranga Tamariki has not tried to dress this up. Chief Executive Amanda Malu called the findings “difficult and at times harrowing,” and told the family directly:
“We did not listen in the way we should have, and this family deserved better from us.”
“Why was Cat not taken seriously?”
- Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson, responding to the inquiry
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer went further, pointing to something survivor advocates recognise immediately: agencies did not simply fail to act on the mother's concerns - they actively made “judgements” about whether her concerns were valid at all. That is the mechanism we see over and over in this sector. A woman's credibility is litigated by the system before her safety information is ever acted on.
Police, meanwhile, have been markedly less willing to accept the same conclusion. When the inquiry found that better coordination between Police and Oranga Tamariki could have prevented the second disappearance or shortened it, Acting Deputy Commissioner Jill Rogers pushed back, arguing that Phillips's determination and danger meant “we don't know that there would have been different outcomes.” Pressed on the cumulative weight of missed opportunities - including a May 2023 sighting, with a photo and location, that police failed to follow up because the responding unit was diverted - Rogers's own words were revealing: “I understand how that sounds when you add them all together.”
That gap between the two agencies' responses matters. One has accepted it failed a mother and her children. The other is still arguing about whether its failures counted.
The hero-dad story, and the woman written out of it:
While agencies were minimising the mother's concerns behind closed doors, a very public version of this same dynamic was playing out on social media. Commentators described Phillips - a man who took three children off-grid for nearly four years, exposed them to fi****ms, and was photographed committing armed robbery and burglary with a child present - as a “legend” who “lived and died for his kids.” Some of the imagery circulating to support that story was not even real: AI-generated pictures of an idyllic cabin and a happy family were used to romanticise what was, on the facts the inquiry itself now confirms, a story of isolation, control and risk.
University of Auckland law scholar Carrie Leonetti has named the mechanism plainly. She points to a “cult of masculinity” that holds an involved father is better for children than a safe mother - “no matter how violent or abusive that father might be” - and to a persistent, false belief that the Family Court is biased in favour of mothers, when UN reviews have found the opposite: systemic discrimination against women within it.
“We take men's suffering and men's hardship much more seriously than we take women's suffering.”
- Carrie Leonetti, University of Auckland
The children's mother, Cat Christey, has described facing online trolling from strangers who insisted Phillips was “protecting” his children - casting the man she says controlled her finances, her friendships, even her access to a car, and who she says strangled and slapped her, as a folk hero. She has called him, simply, “a dictator.” Her account received a fraction of the public sympathy his did, for years, while she was living the actual, verifiable loss of her children.
Not an isolated failure - a documented pattern
It would be more comfortable to treat the Phillips case as extraordinary. It is not. It sits inside a body of research and testimony, built up over years, showing New Zealand's family justice system routinely discounting the accounts of women and children:
• A 2022 government-commissioned review of children's participation in the family justice system, by lawyer Deborah Inder, documented troubling evidence about children's safety in the Family Court - and was withheld from the public for years, surfacing only after the Backbone Collective forced its release under the Official Information Act.
• A 2022 review by Dame Karen Poutasi into Oranga Tamariki's failure to prevent the death of five-year-old Malachi Subecz, whose family had tried to raise the alarm about the risk he was in, found the same institutional pattern operating agency-wide - children fall through the gaps not only when no one speaks up, but when someone does and is not listened to. The review named three categories of failure: people who tried to act but were not listened to, people who were uncertain and did not act, and people who knew and chose not to act.
• A 2025 University of Auckland study of 29 Family Court judgments, led by Leonetti, found judges, lawyers and court-appointed psychologists relying on “junk” research to justify decisions - including claims that almost all children's disclosures of sexual abuse after separation are false.
• Peer-reviewed research on children's own appeals of parenting orders has found a pattern of children's disclosures of abuse, and their stated fears, being disregarded - sometimes resulting in orders returning them to the care of the person they said they feared.
• The United Nations CEDAW Committee has formally criticised New Zealand's Family Court for how it awards shared custody to fathers with histories of domestic violence or child abuse, and in 2018 called for a commission of inquiry into the Family Court itself.
• New Zealand's Family Court proceedings remain unusually secretive by international standards - a secrecy that makes exactly this kind of pattern difficult to see, track, and challenge in real time.
The 2019 Te Korowai Ture ā-Whānau review made 70 recommendations for reform across exactly these areas - child-centred process, safety, cultural responsiveness, delay, and access. Its own “principal recommendation” (Recommendation 1) was to build a single, joined-up family justice service precisely to stop the kind of siloed, agency-by-agency failure this inquiry later found. Sitting alongside it were recommendations requiring judges to make timely findings of fact on disputed violence allegations and treat risk as ongoing rather than a one-off determination (Recommendation 17); a statutory safety checklist weighing a documented history of violence, coercive control, and a child's own stated fears (Recommendation 18); a direct legal pathway for the Family Court to request information on family harm and violence incidents from Police (Recommendation 20); a validated, evidence-based risk-assessment tool (Recommendation 21); and mandatory, ongoing family-violence training for every professional in the system (Recommendation 22). Seven years on, and after a case as extreme as this one, the honest assessment is that implementation has not kept pace with the diagnosis: the same gaps in information-sharing and training the panel flagged in 2019 are the same gaps Dame Karen Poutasi flagged again in 2022, and the same gaps this inquiry has now found again in 2026.
What we are asking for:
Wellington R**e Crisis works every week with women and children who are told, in ways large and small, that their account of danger is less credible than his account of normality. The Phillips case is what that pattern looks like when it runs uninterrupted for four years and is finally examined in public. We are asking for:
• Mandatory, resourced family-violence screening and training - built as ongoing capability-building, not a one-off module - for every person who makes risk assessments in the family justice system - judges, lawyers, court-appointed psychologists, and frontline Oranga Tamariki and Police staff.
• A binding standard barring reliance on discredited or misrepresented research (such as false-disclosure and shared-care claims) in Family Court decision-making, with independent review of expert evidence.
• Statutory, ongoing information-sharing between Police and Oranga Tamariki in cases involving children at risk - not the one-off, easily-dropped contact this inquiry found. That means a shared, interoperable case-management system agencies are actually required to use, not just a duty on paper, backed by mandatory compliance monitoring and real consequences when an agency fails to share what it knows.
• Full, timely public implementation reporting on the Te Korowai Ture ā-Whānau recommendations, and on this inquiry's nine recommendations, so “lessons learned” cannot substitute for measurable change.
• A cultural reckoning - in newsrooms, on social media platforms, and in the wider public - with why a controlling father is so readily mythologised as a hero, while the mother who told the truth the whole time is left to carry both the loss and the disbelief.
Cat Christey and her daughters said what was happening. They said it clearly, repeatedly, to the agencies whose job it was to listen. The system has now admitted, in an official inquiry, that it did not. The measure of what comes next is not another apology - it is whether the next mother who raises the alarm is believed the first time, not the last.
