Gender-Based-Violence and so-called 'parental alienation'
A backlash against women’s rights is underway around the world. Anti-feminist movements are on the rise, attacks against women human rights defenders and activists are up, and the legal status of women’s rights is increasingly under threat in many countries (UN, 2022).
Gender-based-violence is increasing and the time to act is upon us.
A particularly harmful form of gender-based-violence is the use of 'Parental Alienation' allegations, a form of coercive control, and a legal strategy used mostly by abusive fathers and their legal teams to deny that abuse against a child has occurred. How do perpetrators do this?
Firstly, they Deny the abuse.
When a perpetrator has abused their ex-partner (and/or a child), they deny it, just as the prolific child sex offender Jimmy Savile did ‘it’s all lies’ they cry.
Then they Attack the mother (and/or child) with the allegation of ‘Parental Alienation’ (that the mother has ‘brainwashed’ the child to report abuse) and by doing this they Reverse the Victim(s) (Mother and child) into becoming the Offender(s) (the abusive father then claims the victim status by claiming the mother and child are lying about the abuse and stating the mother and/or child are the real offenders).
This is known as DARVO and is used widely by perpetrators across the globe to deny abuse they have perpetrated.
What we need to do is to thoroughly investigate allegations of child abuse and hold perpetrators accountable for choosing to abuse and to pivot to the perpetrator.
‘Parental Alienation’ allegations are the most damaging type of victim-blaming and gaslighting we have ever seen. It is also part of a lucrative ‘cottage industry’, with children across the globe speaking out about this ‘hoax’ and evidencing the extreme harm they are being exposed to in so-called ‘parental alienation reunification camps’, where children are often stolen from safe parents and forced against their will to attend these camps in the hopes they will be ‘reunified’ with the parent who has been abusing them.
‘Parental Alienation’ is an unscientific belief system. It is not a scientific theory or concept. It is the notion that a child has been brainwashed by one parent to report abuse from the other parent. It is rejected broadly by the scientific community, having no robust evidence, with many studies being methodologically weak and based on unreliable applications of the label (Doughty, 2018; Barnett, 2020; Meier et al., 2020; Milchman et al., 2020; Katz, 2022; Prigent and Sueur, 2021; Sheehy and Lapierre, 2022, and for a comprehensive overview of all studies see Mercer and Drew, 2022).
Parental Alienation allegations are evidenced as harmful to mothers and children who are victim-survivors of abuse.
In Brazil, we reported in our peer-reviewed findings, that mothers and children had reported child sexual abuse, child rape and domestic violence by fathers to the police and had criminal investigations underway prior to family court (FC) proceedings. The family courts then later accused mothers of being lying ‘alienators’, which was enough for the criminal courts to close down 5 out of 8 of these criminal investigations.
We must ask - why does the family court have the power to close down criminal court investigations? It should not have this power, which is harming women and children.
Mothers described a range of health impacts to us, created by the trauma of these violent family court proceedings, which we have coined Court and Perpetrator Induced Trauma. Worse still, when mothers show natural trauma responses, such as fear, anxiety and general poor-health due to the stress and trauma, this is then used against them, as more evidence that they are ‘unfit mothers’ or ‘alienators’. It is the worst trap imaginable. One mother told us:
“I think that what hurts me the most is the fact that, despite I knew I was a victim-survivor, just like my son was, I was feeling like a criminal…I never had criminal incidents, I had never been involved with drugs, I always had a straight life. On the other hand, the father already had criminal records, but they haven’t even taken that into consideration. Nothing, nothing, nothing … the more we report the more we are punished. That was my fear. I would say, by using an expression “Swim, swim and die at the beach”. Vania.
DARVO
‘Parental Alienation’ has been denounced by the United Nations Special Rapporteur, and many others as a 'regressive pseudo-scientific theory' and many others including but not limited to; The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), Women's Aid, Group of Experts on Action against Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (Council of Europe), The European Association for Psychotherapy, The American Psychological Society, The New Zealand Psychological Society and has received much negative media attention recently including comments from the Association of Clinical Psychologists UK Chair Professor Mike Wang who stated to the Guardian Newspaper on 12th June 2022:
"The organisation is aware of unregulated experts making findings of so-called parental alienation and doing tremendous harm. I’ve seen children taken away by the force of the state on the basis of PA. But what the public needs to know is that there is an international consensus that the evidence-base on parental alienation is not sufficiently robust to be making decisions about child-contact arrangements."
Nobody denies that a child can be used by one parent to exert control over another parent, but this should be explored within a framework of parent-child relationship sabotage or for mothers and children, via our CAMS framework, and understood by examining in depth the wider pattern of behaviour of the perpetrator parent, within the context of the parent-child and parent-parent relationships, the history of abuse/relationship, a coercive control framework and other contextual factors (Domestic Abuse Act statutory guidance, 2022). This should not be explored within the unscientific, narrow-minded belief system ‘Parental Alienation’, which statistically is likely to result in women and children victim-survivors being disbelieved, with claims of ‘Parental Alienation’ doubling the risk of mothers losing custody of their child to the perpetrator father.
It is also deeply problematic, that ‘Parental Alienation’ was developed by the disgraced late Dr Richard Gardner, who has been widely criticised for his pro-paedophilic statements and who arguably developed the belief system to protect abusive fathers. Here are some pro-paedophilic statements made my Gardner (with thanks to Dr Andrew Cicchetti for below images):
Gardner, R.A. (1992) True and False Accusations of Child Sex Abuse:
The below video includes a brief discussion from Dr Gardner, where he claims if a child raises sexual abuse by a father, a mother should say '"I don't believe you, I'm going to beat you for saying it..."
In addition, Gardner proposes that many different types of human sexual behaviour, including paedophilia, necrophilia (rape of corpses) and zoophilia (rape of animals), can be seen as having species survival value and thus do "not warrant being excluded from the list of the `so-called natural forms of human sexual behavior.'"
See, Gardner, R.A. (1992). True and False Accusations of Child Sex Abuse . Cresskill, NJ: Creative Therapeutics. (pp. 18-32)
The roots of so-called ‘parental alienation’ are dark. That cannot be disputed. I hope you will join me by denouncing ‘Parental Alienation’ allegations as a legal strategy of post-separation abuse and gender-based-violence.