More parents in Family Court disputes are claiming former partners have poisoned their children against them, a new study shows.
It reveals fathers are almost as likely as mothers to be guilty of deliberately alienating children from the other parent.
Nicholas Bala, a professor of law at Queens University, Canada, and an expert in parental alienation, will present his findings from Australian data at a seminar in Melbourne this month at the Australian Institute of Family Studies.
He said there were genuine cases of parental alienation, where children were brainwashed and manipulated into an unfounded fear and rejection of the other parent. ''But there are other cases where the child has legitimate reasons to be afraid of a parent, and it's important for the court to unpack the real reasons.''
The study found where a parent was considered to have alienated the child from the other parent, judges ordered the child live with the ''rejected'' parent in half of the cases.
''It's controversial and dramatic to order a change of residence but in more severe cases children will not respond to counselling if they continue to live with the alienating parent,'' Professor Bala said.
However, it was preferable for judges in appropriate cases to cajole, pressure and persuade parents to change their behaviour, and to recognise both were often at fault.
The controversial term ''parental alienation syndrome'' has been rejected by the Family Court, and discredited by feminist scholars after it achieved wide currency among men's groups in the 1980s with the publication of work by United States psychiatrist Richard Gardner.
Professor Bala says it is the word ''syndrome'' with its implication that a psychiatric disorder underlies an alienating parent's behaviour that is wrong.
''But parental alienation is real behaviour,'' he said. ''And it can cause long-term harm to children often extending into adulthood.''
.gif)
