Parental alienation and the United Nations: is gender politics getting in the way of children’s wellbeing?
There isn’t a universally agreed definition, but according to Psychology Today, Parental Alienation is generally understood as “when a child refuses to have a relationship with a parent due to manipulation, such as the conveying of exaggerated or false information, by the other parent”. This most commonly occurs during family breakdown situations.
These alienating behaviours, which might be deliberate or unconscious, suppress the normal-range functioning of the child’s attachment system. This may compromise their psychological boundaries so the child becomes infused or enmeshed with the mindset of the alienating parent, or the child may experience cognitive dissonance regarding the target parent, which they overcome by justifying their rejection of the parent by seeing them as dangerous or unworthy of their love. A study of adults exposed to these behaviours in childhood found "the psychological consequences for children subjected to parental alienating behaviours are clear, with both negative immediate and long-term effects. These include self-esteem issues, anxiety, depression, substance use, increased suicidality, school-related difficulties … an uncertain identity, lack of self-esteem and deep insecurity”.
One common alienating behaviour is to communicate to the child that the targeted parent is dangerous, and that therefore the alienating parent (or family member) is ‘protective’. Therefore false or exaggerated allegations of domestic or child abuse commonly feature and this places the issue in conflict with efforts to support parents in Family Court who allege abuse. It is commonly suggested that the ability of Family Courts to protect children is frustrated by the conflict between a child’s expressed wishes, tainted by the alienation, and their authentic welfare needs.
“the Report […] presented the controversial narrative that Parental Alienation was merely a legal contrivance by men to counter women’s domestic abuse allegations”.
Concerns over false allegations of parental alienation in Family Courts has led to calls to for States to prevent any consideration of Parental Alienation in Family Court. This was recommended in the Report by the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls (UNSRVAW), titled “Custody, violence against women and violence against children”, which presented the controversial narrative that Parental Alienation was merely a legal contrivance by men to counter women’s domestic abuse allegations. Following a wave of objections by scientists and affected victims, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) did not adopt the Report’s recommended resolutions in its recent 53rd session.
“The affair highlights an epistemological competition in policy-making between legal scholars trained to persuade, and scientific scholars trained to investigate.”
The UNSRVAW report has been strongly critiqued on several grounds. . Our Complaint Letter to the United Nations was signed by over 5,000 people of both sexes from all over the world (See our co-signing platform hosted on Change.org).
The affair highlights an epistemological competition in policy-making between legal scholars (the UNSRVAW is a lawyer) trained to persuade, and scientific scholars trained to investigate.
The UNSRVAW’s Report arguably arises from a process to amass selected subjective anecdotes to bolster a pre-determined narrative, which was boldly explicit the “call for inputs”:
“The aim of this report is to examine … how [Parental Alienation] may lead to double victimisation of victims of domestic violence of abuse. It also aims to document the many ways in which family courts ignore the history and existence of domestic and family violence and abuse in the context of custody cases, as well as their grave consequences on mothers and their children.”
The call for inputs is most likely to only reinforce an existing narrative: aiming only to “document” and “examine how” the preconceived beliefs manifested. By contrast, an empirical, objective and impartial scientific investigation would aim to discover “whether” these alleged phenomena occur, to what degree, and then test theories about how they arise.
The Report “discredited the empirical research, despite a comprehensive review by Harman et al (2022) describing Parental Alienation research as having ‘a scientifically trustworthy knowledge base’.”
The flawed approach might have arisen from a skills deficiency. However, hundreds of submissions by parties such as the Parental Alienation Study Group and the Global Action for Research Integrity in Parental Alienation, as well as by individual victims, provided substantial evidence that undermined the preconceived narrative. Rather than give due regard to this information, the final report to the UN HRC suppressed the voices of victims and discredited the empirical research, despite a comprehensive review by Harman et al (2022) describing Parental Alienation research as having “a scientifically trustworthy knowledge base”.
An example is in paragraph 62 of the Report, in which unfounded innuendo of improper profiteering was applied to disregard the substance of psychologists’ articles published in scientific journals. The Report also relied on UNSRVAW’s undocumented “consultations” with unnamed “experts” to controversially claim, with neither examples or references, that “reputable academic journals in the field of psychology are publishing articles that promote the notion of “alienating behaviours” without applying the usual standards of scientific rigour in peer review or not allowing a right of response”. Ironically, no response was sought from the scientists or scientific journals in question.
The Report also excluded experiences and views of the victims that were contrary to the predetermined narrative. Tellingly, the commitment made in the ‘call for inputs’ to publish the received submissions remains unfulfilled.
The Report asserts that “credible allegations” of abuse are dismissed in favour of claims of Parental Alienation. Who determined these allegations to be “credible”, or how they did so, is not explained and the working assumption appears to be that a person accused of domestic abuse is guilty without, or even in spite of trial. On the basis of “testimonies” that were not calibrated against court records, the UNSRVAW described judicial decisions to maintain the children’s parental relationships as “colossal miscarriages of justice”.
Perhaps most egregious was the paucity of concern in the Report about the outcomes for the children involved. The Report seems to have been prepared under the misapprehension that Family Courts exist to deliver “justice” in the adult conflict. However, it is long-established that the welfare of the children should always be a family courts’ primary consideration.
The UNSRVAW Report is supposed to be prepared in accordance with a ‘Code of Conduct for Special Procedures Mandate-holders’, which sensibly includes provisions for impartiality, objectivity, transparency and completeness. Our Complaint Letter identified potential violations of most of the articles in the Code by the UNSRVAW in creating this report. However, despite being co-signed by five thousand people from around the world, the Complaint remains unacknowledged by either the UN HRC or the UN Coordination Committee of Special Procedures. A ‘Code of Conduct’ is meaningless if it is not robustly policed, and failure to investigate the complaint risks the institution wrongfully disenfranchising people of their human rights.
UN Secretary General António Guterres elsewhere noted that:
“In its resolution 76/227, adopted in 2021, the General Assembly emphasized that all forms of disinformation can negatively impact the enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms, as well as the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals. Similarly, in its resolution 49/21, adopted in 2022, the Human Rights Council affirmed that disinformation can negatively affect the enjoyment and realization of all human rights”
We alleged that the UNSRVAW’s recommended resolutions sought to disenfranchise
• children of their rights to their parents pursuant to Articles 7-9 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC),
• children and parents of their right to a fair trial, and
• children and parents to family life as the natural and fundamental group unit of society that is entitled to protection by society and the State pursuant to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;
and that the recommendations sought to exploit children’s relationships with their parents in order to exact punishment of their parent, in violation of Art 36 of the UNCRC.
“[The UNSRVAW said] ‘We have to find a different name other than the label of parental alienation to describe this kind of post separation abuse.’ However, the Report did not recommend any name change, in fact, it sought to outlaw ‘related’ concepts, so the name would not matter”.
Seemingly in defence of criticisms levelled at the report, the UNSRVAW later presented to the UN HRC the confusing proposition that parental alienation is both a reality but also a “pseudo concept” because it is coercive control:
“I understand very much that mothers and fathers feel therefore that because they go through this reality, parental alienation is not a pseudo-concept and that it is very real... we cannot put this reality under the label of parental alienation because that reality is part of a continuum of coercive control that is being levied within a particular context from one partner to another.”
Apparently, according to UNSRVAW, the real problem now is the terminology:
“We have to find a different name other than the label of parental alienation to describe this kind of post separation abuse.”
However, the Report did not recommend any name change, in fact, it sought to outlaw “related” concepts so the name would not matter, and did not at any time acknowledge “the reality” of the “post separation abuse” the term describes.
The Report instead recommends legislating to prevent Family Courts from even considering this abuse, whether the victims are male or female and regardless of the impact on children. Because the UNSRVAW later categorised “the reality” of these behaviours as coercive control, the Report effectively recommended to force Family Courts to allow coercive control.
The problematic Report still remains unchallenged on the UNHRC’s records and could be acted upon at any future session. We continue to push for the remaining items in our complaint letter, being for UN HRC to:
“Immediately release the submissions received by UNSRVAW into the public domain
Conduct a public inquiry into the probity of the UNSRVAW’s Report and the conduct of the UNSRVAW in this matter.”
This week the UK’s Domestic Abuse Commissioner (DAC), who seems to have no scientific or statistical qualifications, published her own advice on reforming the Family Court that leans heavily of the UNSRVAW’s Report, the similarly-flawed ‘Assessing risk of harm to children and parents in private law children cases’ report of 2020, authored by legal scholars and published by the UK Ministry of Justice, and the DAC’s own ‘practitioner survey’, which mirrored many of the design flaws of the UNSRVAW’s ‘call for inputs’. The practitioner survey was shut down early, and the DAC’s office refused a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to provide reasons for the shutdown nor to provide the survey questions, promising these will be published later.
Parental Alienation is likely the form of child abuse that is most commonly experienced by children, and the form of domestic abuse most commonly witnessed by children. Just as its child victims are caught in conflict between their parents, parental alienation itself is caught in conflict between scholars of psychology and of law, between aggrieved victims and mendacious accusers of abuse and of alienation, between prioritizing women’s sense of their safety or prioritizing children’s parental attachments, between artful persuasion and objective reasoning. Careful consideration of the individual circumstances put before the Family Courts is required, but crude proposals to simply prohibit or diminish the consideration of Parental Alienation risks exposing children and parents to this form of domestic and child abuse.
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Disclaimer: This article is for information purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy, legal advice, or other professional opinion. Never disregard such advice because of this article or anything else you have read from the Centre for Male Psychology. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of, or are endorsed by, The Centre for Male Psychology, and we cannot be held responsible for these views. Read our full disclaimer here.
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