UN Recommendation: legally prohibit the use of "parental alienation"
The Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, submitted a report to the Human Rights Council on 13 April 2023, in which she condemns the use of the pseudoscientific concept of "parental alienation", and related concepts, in custody court cases, demonstrating the risks it poses to the protection of minor victims and their mothers, particularly in cases where there are allegations of domestic violence and sexual abuse.The Special Rapporteur, together with the other members of the Platform of Independent Expert Mechanisms on the Elimination of Discrimination and Violence against Women, expresses strong concern that judicial authorities systematically ignore the history and allegations of domestic violence and abuse when making decisions about child custody, even in cases where mothers and/or the children themselves have made credible claims of physical or sexual abuse. In several countries judicial authorities treat victims with distrust and judge children's claims of abuse as a product of coaching, that is, as a deliberate attempt by mothers to manipulate their children and separate them from their fathers. This alleged attempt by a parent to manipulate a child is often referred to as "parental alienation".In preparing the report, the Special Rapporteur requested the participation of Member States, international and regional organizations, non-governmental organizations, academic bodies and victims, and conducted a series of online consultations with stakeholders and experts. The Special Rapporteur received over a thousand submissions, a large number of which were duplicate individual submissions, mainly from fathers' rights organizations.
Below is an indicative excerpt from the report (link to the full text at the end of the article):Parental alienation and its relationship to domestic violence.
Domestic violence is one of the most serious and widespread violations of human rights, particularly with regard to women and girls. Although men can also be victims of domestic violence, women are at much greater risk, and the dynamics of abuse differ for men.
Given the frequency of domestic violence in intimate partner relationships, separation from the perpetrator can also be an extremely dangerous period for the victim. Allegations of domestic violence tend not to be adequately scrutinized by courts and give rise to problematic assumptions, for example that the violence causes little harm to the mother or child and that it ceases upon separation. Judges, too, who tend to prioritize and allow contact with fathers, have a mistaken understanding of the consequences of domestic violence and its effects on children, and they underestimate them. In this way, judges fail in their duty to protect children from violence, granting abusive fathers unsupervised access to their children, including in cases where judges have found that physical and/or sexual violence has occurred.
When judges recognize the existence of domestic violence, they may treat it as a past event, assuming it belongs to the past. Research and the submissions received show that perpetrators of domestic violence may also misuse family law proceedings to continue exercising violence against their victims, resulting in their secondary traumatization. In this context, parental alienation can be used as a useful tactic. An empirical analysis of parental alienation cases in Canada conducted in 2018 found that of 357 cases, 41.5% involved allegations of domestic violence or child abuse, of which 76.8% included alienation claims supported by the alleged perpetrator. In another study, parental alienation was reported in all 20 cases studied in the context of coercive control and child sexual abuse, and even when it was not explicitly used, the underlying notions were still present.
The use of parental alienation is particularly gendered and is often used against mothers. A study in Brazil found that women were accused of parental alienation in 66% of cases, compared to 17% of cases where a man was accused, and that men made more unfounded accusations than women. In Italy, this accusation was also used overwhelmingly against mothers.
A common element of the gendered use of parental alienation is the depiction of mothers by their partners, courts, and expert witnesses as vindictive and delusional. Mothers who object to or try to limit contact, or who raise concerns, are widely regarded by evaluators as obstructive or malicious, reflecting the widespread pattern of mother-blaming.
Claims that the mother is alienating the child are often used to show that granting custody to the mother is not in the child's interest, since she will not facilitate contact with the father. As noted in many submissions received, domestic violence and parental alienation are often conflated in family law systems, to the detriment of victims of violence. Protective mothers are placed in an adverse position, in which insisting on presenting evidence of domestic violence or child abuse may be regarded as an attempt to alienate the children from the other parent, which can lead to the loss of primary care or contact with their children.
The use of parental alienation tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once parents are judged to be "alienating", "intransigent", or "unable to listen", their actions or inaction may be approached with bias. This results in claims of family violence being dismissed as an isolated incident. This trivializes domestic violence into a minor conflict and stigmatizes and pathologizes women and children.
The consequences of biased custody decisions can be devastating, resulting, in specific incidents where contact was granted to fathers with a history of violence, in the deaths of children or women and children being threatened with weapons. In some cases, women have been imprisoned for violating custody rights, and protective restraining orders have been annulled.
Parental alienation can have a significant impact on custody decisions. In the United States of America, data show that the rates of loss of custody among mothers and fathers differ significantly, depending on which parent claims alienation. When a father claimed to be alienated by the mother, custody rights were removed from the mother in 44% of cases. When the situation was reversed, mothers won custody from fathers in only 28% of cases. Therefore, when there was an accusation of alienation, mothers were twice as likely to lose custody compared to fathers. This led to an annual estimate that 58,000 children in the United States are placed in dangerous family settings. In New Zealand, a survey showed that 55 to 62% of mothers reported being accused of parental alienation, often diverting the courts' attention from legitimate abuse complaints.According to the findings of the report:
"Parental alienation" is used in family law proceedings by abusers as a tool to continue their abuse and coercion and to undermine and discredit allegations of domestic violence made by mothers trying to keep their children safe.
The standard of the best interest of the child is violated by imposing contact between the child and one or both parents and by prioritizing it, even when there are indications of domestic violence.
Mainly due to lack of training and gender bias and lack of access to legal support, custody of children may be granted to perpetrators of violence, despite evidence of a history of domestic and/or sexual abuse.
Judges and evaluators must stop focusing on trying to identify behaviors that are contested within the field of psychology (such as the pseudoscientific concept of parental alienation) and start focusing on the specific facts and context of each case.
Bibliography | Sources
Link to the report of the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls (English)
Link to the report of the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls (Greek)
Link to the United Nations website referencing the report of the UN Special Rapporteur (English)