Introduction to the special issue

The suggestion that a special issue might be produced to present critical perspectives on parental alienation was first raised at the Law & Society Association Conference in Toronto in June 2018. In the session entitled ‘Comparative family court practices in cases involving domestic violence, child abuse, and parental alienation’, Joan Meier (George Washington University), Susan Boyd (University of British Columbia) and Elizabeth Sheehy, Simon Lapierre and Patrick Ladouceur (University of Ottawa) presented findings from quantitative and qualitative studies conducted in the US and Canada. These papers highlighted the need to interrogate parental alienation for its impact on claims of family and domestic violence, at both national and international levels.

This special issue brings together scholars whose work presents a critical perspective on parental alienation, with a particular focus on women and children who have experienced domestic and family violence. The contributors represent diverse countries and disciplines, and use the terminologies of their jurisdictions. For example, in England and Wales the term ‘residence’ is used; in the US ‘custody’ would indicate where the child lives; and in New Zealand the term ‘care arrangements’ refers to both child residence and parental access.

The literature on parental alienation stems from Gardner’s work on what is termed the parental alienation syndrome (Gardner 1985, 1987, 1992). In essence, parental alienation refers to a situation where a child demonstrates a strong affinity for one parent and rejection of the other parent, in a context where ‘the negative behaviours the child attributes to the alienated parent are trivial, highly exaggerated, or totally untrue’ (Faller 1998, p. 100). This situation was attributed by Gardner to the behavior of the alienating parent, which he thought involved false allegations of child sexual abuse. However, the term parental alienation is now used much more broadly, to designate any situation where a parent is perceived as engaging in strategies to exclude the other parent, particularly in the context of high-conflict separation, regardless of whether the child actually rejects the other parent (Hayez and Kinoo 2005, Farkas 2011). Moreover, Bruch (2001) argues that this term ‘has been extended dramatically to include cases of all types in which a child refuses to visit the non-custodial parent, whether or not the child’s objections entail abuse allegations’ (p. 528).

In this context, experts in the field of domestic and family violence have expressed serious concerns regarding the recourse to the concept of parental alienation by family court and child protection services (Lapierre and Côté 2016, Neilson et al. 2019). In the context of domestic and family violence, women may have well-grounded reasons to want to limit father-child contact due to their ex-partners’ violent behaviour and threats to their own and to their children’s safety. They may oppose father-child contact, express serious concerns for their children’s safety, or request safe and supervised contact arrangements (Johnson et al. 2005, Brownridge 2009). And children who have been exposed to domestic violence may refuse to visit their fathers (Mullender et al. 2002, Holt 2015, Lapierre et al. 2015, Lamb et al. 2018). However, with a ‘parental alienation’ lens, women’s and children’s concerns are likely to been seen as invalid and as a manifestation of the mother’s hostility and alienating behaviours.

Unfortunately, this perspective has been largely ignored in the mainstream literature on parental alienation, and this absence has facilitated its popularization in family court and child protection services. The objective of this special issue therefore is to fill this important gap in the literature. It does not intend to present different perspectives on parental alienation, but rather to describe how recourse to this concept affects the lives of women and children living with domestic and family violence.

The opening articles in this issue examine the history of ‘parental alienation’ (PA) as a construct in child custody law. Zoe Rathus focuses on the period 1989–2019 in Australian law and policy, demonstrating how the inherent conflict between the two custody law pillars–maintaining relationships between children and parents post-separation and protecting children from abuse – has opened the way to PA claims. Although legislation effective in 2012 provided a renewed focus on family violence as relevant to child custody, the contradiction between promoting both contact and child safety remains, allowing mothers who are disbelieved about their partner’s violence to be punished by reduced access to their children. In fact, according to Adrienne Barnett’s investigation of the development of family law in the period 2000–2019 in England and Wales, legal and policy initiatives recognizing family violence as relevant to custody have spurred on deployment of PA as a litigation strategy to counteract these initiatives. She finds that PA tends to overshadow other issues once raised, allowing complex dynamics to be presented as ‘stark binaries’ of good and bad, and limiting judges’ ability to understand and respect children’s behaviours and wishes.

In the province of Quebec, PA has been legitimated and ‘institutionalized’ not only in family law but also in child protection practice as a form of ‘psychological ill-treatment.’ Simon Lapierre and colleagues’ study of legislation, policy, training documents, academic research and key informant interviews reveals an underlying gender bias, where the alleged gender neutrality of PA is belied by the examples provided of ‘alienating’ mothers and the emphasis on the importance of the father-child bond, to the exclusion of the mother-child bond. In Quebec and in Spain, as described by Glòria Casas Vila, this push for recognition of PA has largely come from professionals, including psychologists and social workers, who supervise access visits, write reports and testify as experts. Spain’s strong record on domestic violence legislation and the clear opposition to PA from government committees and the judiciary have been circumvented by a shift in language away from ‘PA’ to ‘parental interference’ or ‘prevention of contact’, and by avoiding clinical diagnosis and instead focusing on mothers’ ‘alienating behaviours’. Social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists are also conveyors of PA theory in Italy, according to Mariachiara Feresin. She finds that professionals in the family court system are committed to protecting the relationship with the father as necessary to the child’s well-being, even when his abuse against the mother and/or the child is visible, and to adhering to the belief that mothers are apt to exaggerate and make false allegations of abuse.

Social workers are also key players in the family law system in England and Wales, but Julie Doughty, Nina Maxwell and Tom Slater’s review of international studies and case law from England and Wales cautions that the lack of agreement about defining parental alienation, combined with the many behaviours identified as potential indications thereof and the complexity of assessment, mean that ‘there is a dearth of robust empirical studies’ with generalizable findings. Their review has been endorsed by the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service of Wales as ‘crucial reading’ for social work practitioners (Doughty et al. 2018), and as part of practice guidance intended to avert the serious risk that professionals who deploy PA will distort practice and mislead the family court. This kind of dialogue between researchers who think critically about PA and justice system professionals is needed in Canada, where Susan Boyd and Elizabeth Sheehy report an exponential increase in PA claims in the family courts, with disproportionate negative impacts on mothers. They show that when PA is alleged, spousal violence is eclipsed by judges’ failure to make findings of fact in violence allegations, their characterization of spousal violence as unfounded, mutual or in the past, and by judges’ decisions on custody and access whereby even well founded spousal violence is not seen as relevant to the child’s best interests. Joan Meier’s US research goes further because she is able to demonstrate a causal relationship between fathers’ PA allegations and mothers’ diminishing chances of being believed when they allege spousal abuse, child abuse, and most starkly, child sexual abuse. PA allegations virtually double the risk that the mother – but not the father–will lose custody in the context of abuse, but seemingly have a gender-neutral impact on custody when abuse is not alleged.

The two final papers are focused on the impact of PA accusations on the lives of mothers. Deborah Mackenzie, Ruth Herbert, and Neville Robertson describe research undertaken by The Backbone Collective, whose 1600-plus members are New Zealand women who have experienced family violence. Their survey of 291 abused mothers who had experienced Family Court proceedings found that 87% stated that their children had either seen or heard their abuse, 68% stated that their children had been verbally abused, and 54% said that their children had been physically assaulted. Among these women, 40% had been accused of PA by a lawyer, social worker or psychologist, 37% reported being advised by their lawyer not to raise their abuse allegations, yet 93% stated that the court determined that their abuser was ‘safe’ for their children. Vivienne Elizabeth also reports on New Zealand mothers’ experiences, focusing on the emotional burdens they bear when they must hand their children to abusive fathers, provide a sounding board for their distressed children, and simultaneously attempt to assist the father-child relationship as required by the court. She draws on interviews with mothers to show how actual or anticipated accusations of PA require mothers to engage in a ‘dance of ambivalent support for fathers’, whereby women are forced to self-police their mothering behaviours to avoid any appearance of PA, to the detriment of their own and their children’s needs.

Together these articles make a contribution to the debates within specific countries and at the international level regarding the validity, extent, and impact of allegations of parental alienation. The articles in this collection suggest that when parental alienation is raised in family law and child protection services, professionals – whether social workers, psychologists, lawyers or judges – should exercise caution in the light of the evidence that suggests that PA has a questionable scientific base, can function to negate allegations of family violence, has negative and gendered impacts on mothers, and can distort analysis of the best interests of the child.