Legislating to recognise parental alienation - where one parent is alleged to have turned their child or children against the other - would be “premature and ill-advised”, given its potential to silence children’s voices and endanger victims of domestic, sexual and gender-based violence (DSGBV), a Department of Justice report warns.
Published on Thursday, a policy paper on the issue neither accepts nor rejects parental alienation (PA) as a concept, describing it as “highly contested” with opinions divergent “on whether it exists at all”.
The recommendation is likely to disappoint those who believe in the concept and who have called for it to be recognised as a serious form of child abuse. However, it should please sceptics, particularly those working with victims of DSGBV.
The paper draws on an examination of PA literature internationally alongside findings from a public consultation, both of which were commissioned by the department in the context of wider reforms in the family justice system.
It notes the term was first coined in 1985 by US-based psychologist Richard Gardner to describe a damaged or severed relationship between a child and a targeted parent. While sceptics see it as tool for abusive parents to “further abuse and control the other parent”, others argue “it is a real and painful experience of estrangement from a child for no established reason or explanation”, says the report.
“Irish courts, similar to other courts internationally, appear to be encountering increasing claims of parental alienation ... in family law proceedings, particularly in custody and access disputes and child abduction cases,” it notes.
Among concerns are the “gendered nature of the debate ... since the concept first emerged” with the mothers most usually accused and that the “scientific basis for parental alienation does not meet the legal standards for evidence in court in the United States”.
‘Tactic’
A significant proportion of the 19 submissions from organisations were from those working in DSGBV. The report said they raised concerns that “perpetrators of domestic violence use parental alienation as a tactic to discredit reports of abuse by mothers and children”, and, by suggesting children have been manipulated by an ‘alienating’ parent, can impact “the weight that is attached to children’s views” in family-law proceedings.
A total of 352 submissions were received from individuals in Ireland. “The majority of the respondents were male. The submissions, regardless of gender, mostly discussed their personal experience of parental alienation and the majority of these identified themselves as the father in the situation,” the report said.
Professional assessors, writing expert reports for family courts, required regulation, both sides said. “For opponents of the parental alienation concept this concern was compounded with a seemingly rising amount of ‘parental alienation experts’ working in the area.”
Most of the concerns around the use of parental alienation in the courts are best addressed with improvements already under way “to the Irish family law system”, says the report.
It describes as “problematic” a description in 2019, by an Oireachtas committee on family law, of parental alienation as a “serious problem”, for reasons including “the lack of systematic data available from the courts system on the incidence of PA allegations”.
The report concludes: “Legislating for a concept that is so contested about whether it even exists, and bearing in mind its close proximity to issues like domestic abuse and coercive control, would be premature and ill-advised.
“It could have a number of consequences, including potentially create dangerous implications for victims of DSGBV as well negatively impacting on our legal obligations to consider the voice of the child and their best interests in legal proceedings that concern them.”
