Parental alienation as a legal trick to reward abusers
Abusive husbands and fathers gain time with their children as well as access to the abused mother by accusing her of parental alienation, according to the results of a study by the Law School of Brunel University (London, UK) that spanned 19 years (2000 - 2019) (Barnett 2019).
The results of the study show that:
☞ "parental alienation" is used in the adjudication of custody cases mainly as a strategy to undermine allegations by women and children of domestic violence, and
☞ when there is an allegation of "parental alienation" before the court, the child's refusal to have contact with the abusive parent is not taken seriously; instead, it is interpreted as the result of manipulative behavior by the parent who has custody and is not examined in depth.
As a result, in many cases the child is removed from the mother and forced to live with the abusive father (in the overwhelming majority of cases, it is fathers who make allegations of parental alienation).
Adrienne Barnett, who conducted the study, notes that since 2016 the number of cases in which "parental alienation" is used has increased dramatically, despite the fact that the legal and scientific community has pointed out for the last three decades that it has no scientific basis whatsoever. In fact, its use is discouraged by official bodies as particularly harmful to the mental health of children and women.
The reasons for this increasing trend are various. "Parental alienation" has become a particularly profitable field both for the various child psychologists who present themselves as experts and offer their services, as well as for lawyers who seek to represent parents wishing to make an allegation of parental alienation. Moreover, it has also acquired a political dimension, as a reaction to feminism and movements such as #metoo, with the common denominator being the attempt to undermine and discredit allegations of domestic violence and sexual abuse.
The study also puts forward the hypothesis that the increasing use of "parental alienation" in the courts - despite its scientific discreditation - is largely related to the effort made by various fathers' movements such as Fathers4Justice (in Greece we have the "Active Dads") to cultivate the image of the "bad, hostile, vindictive" mother.
In Greece, various reactionary organizations are exerting pressure, on the occasion of the upcoming reform of the Law on domestic violence, to include a reference to parental alienation, establishing it for the first time as a concept in a legislative text. In this way, the pressing demands of those groups eager to use the powerful card of parental alienation in their personal custody disputes will be satisfied.
Bibliography
Adrienne Barnett (2020): A genealogy of hostility: parental alienation in England and Wales, Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, DOI: 10.1080/09649069.2019.1701921 Link to the study