Forms of address in court

We received a complaint about an Officer’s conduct in a family violence intervention order proceeding. The Complainant alleged, among other things, that the Officer used incorrect pronouns when addressing the Complainant and their former partner, the respondent.

As part of our investigation, we inspected the court file and listened to the audio recording of the proceeding.

The pre-hearing court documents noted the complainant’s pronouns as they/them and that the respondent identified as a transwoman. The respondent’s pronouns were not specified.

During the proceeding, the Officer addressed the Complainant as ‘Ms’ twice and the respondent as ‘Mr’ once.

We sought further information from the complainant. The Complainant confirmed that neither they nor their legal representative advised the Officer of their correct pronouns or corrected the Officer’s use of incorrect pronouns during the proceeding.

We dismissed the complaint because we found that in the context of the Proceeding as a whole, the Officer’s conduct did not infringe the standards of conduct generally expected of judicial officers in circumstances where:

• Judicial conduct must be assessed in context, which requires an appreciation of the busy workload of magistrates and the challenges that this presents. Although the standards of conduct require that ‘everyone that comes to court [is] treated in a way that respects their dignity’ and using a person’s pronouns is important to promote public trust, impartiality, and confidence in the court system, in the context of a busy court list, it did not follow that the Officer was aware of this on court documents.
• The complainant was legally represented during the proceeding. Where a party is legally represented, legal representatives should ensure that the court has access to all the facts relevant to the parties, including forms of address. Some Victorian jurisdictions have provided practice notes concerning forms of address and provide that where a representative or party is concerned about the use of an inappropriate form of address in a proceeding, this may be brought to the attention of the presiding officer.