Biography
Dr. Edward Kruk is Associate Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia, specialising in child and family policy and practice, who also practices as a family mediator in Vancouver. He is the author of five books and numerous research articles on the subjects of shared parenting responsibility, family violence, parental alienation, family mediation, and fathering after separation. In addition to thirty years on faculty at UBC, he has worked at the University of Calgary, Calgary Catholic Family Services, the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh, the Toronto District Catholic School Board School Board, and Metro and Catholic Childrens Aid Societies in Toronto. He is an active member of several local and international NGOs, including serving as current President of the International Council on Shared Parenting. He is the recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Award for his service to children and families, and is the father of two boys, Stephan and Liam.

Plenary title
Shared Parenting and the Prevention of Violence Against Women

Abstract
Intimate partner violence (IPV) and violence against women (VAW) are recognized as global public health emergencies in the Istanbul Convention, and by the World Health Organization. In recent years, a consensus has emerged among family violence scholars regarding the shortcomings of the dominant gender paradigm of IPV, as a gender-based understanding of IPV and interventions based on the gender paradigm have failed to stem the growth of VAW globally. Yet outdated practices remain in place, and gender-based IPV interventions in therapeutic and legal practice continue to proliferate. An alternative perspective, based on research findings of gender symmetry in IPV and partner abuse, emphasizes the importance of reconceptualizing IPV as a bilateral phenomenon, and addressing IPV generally in a bi-directional manner. In addition, there is now ample data regarding IPV in the context of parental conflict over children’s living arrangements after divorce, as fully half of first-time IPV occurs in the context of adversarial divorce. The establishment of a legal presumption of shared parental responsibility, rebuttable in cases of historical IPV, will reduce the rate of first-time situational IPV after divorce. This presentation will discuss the harms of VAW “crusaders” who deny the reality of gender symmetry in IPV, resist the establishment of shared parenting as the foundation of family law, and deny the reality of parental alienation as a form of IPV; and will present an alternative approach to addressing VAW based on a gender symmetrical understanding of IPV, and a framework for preventing first-time violence attendant to divorce by means of establishing shared parenting as the foundation of family law.