‘Parental alienation’: Child abuse or a tool to silence domestic violence victims?

• Published date: 05 November 2022
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

To those who believe in the concept, it is serious form of child abuse. To the sceptics, it is a pseudoscientific tool used to silence women and children experiencing domestic violence

Whatever one's view, parental alienation (PA) is gaining traction as a legal concept - being invoked mainly, but far from exclusively, by fathers accusing mothers, increasingly in custody disputes before the family law courts - here and across the globe.

Groups such as the Family Therapists Association of Ireland welcome increasing awareness of what they say is a treatable mental disorder, both for the mother and the child. Its chairman, Dublin-based family therapist Professor Jim Sheehan, describes it as a "unique form of family violence" that can cause as much long-term damage as child sex abuse and should be included in the State's domestic violence strategy.

'Extremely worrying

Others such as Sarah Benson, chief executive of Women's Aid, describe its increasing use in disputes involving domestic abuse and coercive control as "extremely worrying. The vista of what can happen with this is appalling."

Cliona Sadlier, executive director of the Rape Crisis Network, says mothers enduring ongoing abuse post-separation are being accused of PA when they seek to limit or stop contact between their abuser and their children.

Mary Louise Lynch, founder and co-ordinator of Survivors Informing Services and Institutions (Sisi) said: "You have children not being believed, the mother being branded as abusive and children removed, against their expressed wishes, from their preferred parent and into the custody of abusers."

Grevio, the Council of Europe body overseeing implementation of the Istanbul Convention, concluded in a report published in June: "It is now clear the minimisation of domestic violence within family court processes is closely linked to an increasing use of the concept of parental alienation to undermine the views of child victims of domestic violence."

Just in the past week the United Nations Office of the High Commission for Human Rights (OHCHR) described the use of PA in custody disputes where domestic violence is raised as a topic requiring "urgent attention". In a lengthy call-out for submissions on the issue, it said: "A very powerful bias, shared by many welfare and judicial systems, is that the right of a father to maintain contact with his children should override any other consideration . . . even if the father has been abusive towards the mother or the child".

Today Bernard Durkan TD, who is supporting a mother affected by this, will be among speakers at a protest outside Leinster House calling for a ban on the use of PA in family law cases, regulation of family court experts, oversight and monitoring, including data collection, of family law proceedings.

But what is PA? Prof Sheehan said it was crucial to distinguish "alienation", where a child has no good...