Thankyou Dr Sue. I have read most of your studies on Academia and am glad to see you are posting here as it seems to be one of the last bastions of unfettered information.
''I have yet to see a balanced assessment of the risk to a child which includes ceasing and maintaining the relationship with each parent in the interim''
I think this is a point that seems negligible in the collective mind of the courts. There seems to be no consideration for the damage that is caused, and that is evidenced clearly in sound data and studies that children do much better with both parents in their lives.
Instead they make the mistake of, to use a sporting analogy, 'ball watching' where they become obsessed with the perceived safety of the children. This tends to play directly into the hands of parents who are from that cluster b personality set who, for which 'smearing' and 'revision of history' is part of their predisposition. Not only that, part of the cluster b profile means that they may well be extremely adept at using manipulation techniques to amplify the character assassination of what may well be a normal, safe loving parent. This enables them to triangulate the alienated parent, where Cafcass and other professionals, unwittingly or through incompetence, then become victims to confirmation bias.
There are also current societal trends that favour mothers. One only has to look at the distribution of funding where billions go towards gendered charities, the United Nations 'gender responsive law making' specifically lobbies for mothers, and mother only to receive free legal aid. Pressure from other groups, big tech, main stream media is also being exerted to the point where we are currently in the bizarre situation where government funding is now being spent on posters stating, 'straight white men pass the power'. Try and flip this poster any other way and imagine the justified outrage?
Of course PA is not gendered, I have friends gained through through the PA community who are fantastic mothers and good people who have lost their children to PA. The fact is if either parent has the requisite personality traits that might be predisposed to create what Hayley called the 'perverse triangle', a take on the victim triangle but with the added trauma of a cross generational coalition. This along with the enmeshment causes huge psychological pressure to be exerted on the child.
To an untrained 'professional' this enmeshment may well come across as a caring parent (rescuer) and a distraught child (victim) and they are drawn in by the 'smearing' and the the child will play along and display what Amy Baker calls, 'the independent thinker phenomenon''. They wont see the splitting or the lack of rationalisation in what are usually frivolous complaints to attack and demonise the alienated parent (persecutor).
Whilst I don't really put much weight on anecdotal evidence, my experience of the family court system was that I was demonised by Cafcass officers who, not only refused to listen to the psychological report, but actively assisted mother to alienate my daughters from me. I am an reasonably articulate dad with no safeguarding issues, I don't drink, have a good job and have a healthy lifestyle. The Court lost complete focus on that and became fixated on making me jump through hoops and write constant apology letters to my daughter. When I asked Cafcass what I was apologising for they would say I needed to appreciate my daughters 'lived experience' regardless of whether or not their mother was influencing them as evidenced by the psychologist. I tried to make the point that re-enforcing distortions in children was abusive in itself they just said that I lacked understanding and that I 'read too much'. In the end you are just gaslit out of the process. I was never even observed with my children. Cafcass now deem this to be 'too stressful' for the children. Videos of me with the children before I was alienated were discredited by Cafcass because the children said they were just pretending to be happy and really they hated me. This was their 'lived experience' and we should understand that, of course the psychologist disputed this but they were ignored.
Looking at the picture in your article is heart-breaking for me. It symbolises a lost childhood for my children. Something they can never get back. They will never experience the love of their father, holidays with their dad or see their dads side of the family and play with their once beloved Labradors. They will be conditioned to hate their father and men as a whole. Sadly, this seems to be something that society deems to be acceptable and in some realms, even commendable. In the mean time I have to stay healthy for my daughters, and be ready for a knock on the door should that day ever come.
I have lost three friends in this past year to the black dog, and I am really worried about where society as a whole is going. I hope that things turn around soon. We have lost ourselves and there is a storm looming. I will be there for my beloved daughters with a brolly, a flask of tea and a map when they need it.
Thank you for your comment. While some parents do meet the criteria for a diagnosable personality disorder, many do not. We need to understand where those behaviours and traits we observe come from. Often this relates back to childhood trauma and ways of coping, which become unhlepful in the long term and challenging, or harmful, for those around them.
Running On Empty - I feel your pain mate. I am in Australia and am in a similar position but without the involement of child protective services. Just a narcissistic mother who has alienated my now 13-year-old son and is trying her best to do the same to my other two younger boys. All the while the unfit for purpose court system drags its chain and ignores the fact that what is going on is child abuse. Her lawyer is happy to prey on her emotional rage and take every penny he can from our asset pool which in the end is being taken from our children's futures. Lawyers who do this are a disgrace to the profession and should be struck off. Courts who allow this should be sued for damages as they facilitate the destruction of innocent children's futures.
I hope and pray for you to stay strong and get that knock on the door one day. Keep the brolly handy and the tea hot my friend. You are not alone.
I hear you on the lawyer front. I spent 20k on lawyers and barristers only for mum to just totally ignore the every other weekend contact ordered and instead stopped contact completely. I decided to rep myself and put an application in to 'enforce the order'. I paid for a psychologist and of course mum was getting legal aid (she alleged I emotionally abused her in the relationship-when it was the other way around-Of course she couldn't and wasn't required to provide evidence of this alleged abuse she never paid a penny towards the court despite the fact she earns a good wage and I pay her double what she pays for her mortgage every month).
Her lawyer was pretty nasty and even worse, Cafcass employed a rad fem lawyer who just completely shafted me at every opportunity. She lied with impunity, ignored my emails then, in court said I wasn't co-operating and generally assisted mum in her bidding.
I would say I'm pretty resilient mentally. I've seen a lot of trauma in the work I've done, both in the military and armed police and I thought I was strong. It very nearly broke me although I don't like to admit it.
I got through with the support of my wife and my dogs, going on mega long runs with them in the middle of nowhere and you can sort of let it out a bit.
Reading helped lots. I recommend two books. Franz Kafka 'The trial' It was written in the 1920s. The novel is an evocative account of a mans helplessness in the face of a completely incomprehensible court system. The book opens, “Somebody must have slandered Joseph K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.”-Franz Kafka
Victor Frankl 'Mans search for meaning'. The story of psychologist Frankl who was sent to Auschwitz with his wife (they were separated in the line up and you might know what that means). Franz survived and held onto the hope his beloved wife was still alive. This hope helped him survive the horrors of Auschwitz . When he found the fate of his wife it shook him to the core and he had to to reinvent his thinking. “The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”
Wow Matey. You poor sod. I know exactly how you feel in relation to being broken by lies and the bias and the complete abrogation of responsibility of the courts and those charged with ensuring procedural fairness for the children. It has taken me to the edge more than once.
I know of Viktor Frankl book but not the other one. I will hunt that up, thank you.
I have been studying the effects of PA on the children and on the parents of those affected. I must say while interesting it is terrifying as well. The long-term damage to the kids is horrid and as we can attest it is none too flash for us either. Bottom line is no one wins. Even the favoured parent eventually loses when the kids are old enough to understand they were had over and manipulated. That is so sad. What's worse is that it can so easily be avoided.
Sadly, the system is unfit for purpose. What gets rewarded gets done ergo as long as courts allow people to ignore court orders, to lie and commit perjury with no consequences and the lawyers keep getting paid to enflame the emotional misery we will continue to get what we always got!
It is an adversarial system with winners and losers and as long as the legal (un)profession continues to think and act this way the kids who have no financial skin in the game but are the most affected will continue to be damaged.
Then we have damaged kids grow up to be damaged adults who get together with another damaged adult and then have kids and then fall apart and the cycle repeats. OMG when will society wake up?
Children are not possessions or spoils of war, and it is high time the judiciary took some of these parasite law firms to task and rub them out. The lawyers who puit winning above decency, profits before kids' welfare, who make sure that every case goes to a full trial as a negotiated outcome does not generate enough fees have no place in "FAMILY" law.
Anyway, stay strong buddy. You have your dogs and partner to support you through. Good luck.
We have formed the Family Court Reform Coalition (fcrc.uk) to look specifically at private-law Children Act proceedings, and to petition for reform to relieve children of the harms arising from the court processes. One of our key areas of interest is the constructive child alienation arising from withholding contact where domestic abuse is alleged. Would very much appreciate your input.
The key problem, as I see it, is that decision-makers are subject to an uneven professional risk-reward profile:
Allow contact and get it right, and no-one cares
Allow contact and get it wrong, career over.
Hence a need for legislative intervention, as the 'market' is perverse.
I will take a look at your proposals. I strongly advocate for maintaining relationships and direct contact, with appropriate measures, while allegations are explored. There is much case law, and more in judgements not made public, to indicate that as often as not - allegations are not substantiated. There is an ongoing, almost universal, failure to consider the risk of separating a child from a parent who has not caused them harm while they reside in the full care of a parent who may have made malicious allegations, or may be unable to separate their needs, experiences and opinions from their child's.
I’m so glad you’re doing this Sue. Can we link on the CFS website?
Of course - I won't always be venting about children's matters though! So much that I feel a need to speak out loud about ...
Thankyou Dr Sue. I have read most of your studies on Academia and am glad to see you are posting here as it seems to be one of the last bastions of unfettered information.
''I have yet to see a balanced assessment of the risk to a child which includes ceasing and maintaining the relationship with each parent in the interim''
I think this is a point that seems negligible in the collective mind of the courts. There seems to be no consideration for the damage that is caused, and that is evidenced clearly in sound data and studies that children do much better with both parents in their lives.
Instead they make the mistake of, to use a sporting analogy, 'ball watching' where they become obsessed with the perceived safety of the children. This tends to play directly into the hands of parents who are from that cluster b personality set who, for which 'smearing' and 'revision of history' is part of their predisposition. Not only that, part of the cluster b profile means that they may well be extremely adept at using manipulation techniques to amplify the character assassination of what may well be a normal, safe loving parent. This enables them to triangulate the alienated parent, where Cafcass and other professionals, unwittingly or through incompetence, then become victims to confirmation bias.
There are also current societal trends that favour mothers. One only has to look at the distribution of funding where billions go towards gendered charities, the United Nations 'gender responsive law making' specifically lobbies for mothers, and mother only to receive free legal aid. Pressure from other groups, big tech, main stream media is also being exerted to the point where we are currently in the bizarre situation where government funding is now being spent on posters stating, 'straight white men pass the power'. Try and flip this poster any other way and imagine the justified outrage?
Of course PA is not gendered, I have friends gained through through the PA community who are fantastic mothers and good people who have lost their children to PA. The fact is if either parent has the requisite personality traits that might be predisposed to create what Hayley called the 'perverse triangle', a take on the victim triangle but with the added trauma of a cross generational coalition. This along with the enmeshment causes huge psychological pressure to be exerted on the child.
To an untrained 'professional' this enmeshment may well come across as a caring parent (rescuer) and a distraught child (victim) and they are drawn in by the 'smearing' and the the child will play along and display what Amy Baker calls, 'the independent thinker phenomenon''. They wont see the splitting or the lack of rationalisation in what are usually frivolous complaints to attack and demonise the alienated parent (persecutor).
Whilst I don't really put much weight on anecdotal evidence, my experience of the family court system was that I was demonised by Cafcass officers who, not only refused to listen to the psychological report, but actively assisted mother to alienate my daughters from me. I am an reasonably articulate dad with no safeguarding issues, I don't drink, have a good job and have a healthy lifestyle. The Court lost complete focus on that and became fixated on making me jump through hoops and write constant apology letters to my daughter. When I asked Cafcass what I was apologising for they would say I needed to appreciate my daughters 'lived experience' regardless of whether or not their mother was influencing them as evidenced by the psychologist. I tried to make the point that re-enforcing distortions in children was abusive in itself they just said that I lacked understanding and that I 'read too much'. In the end you are just gaslit out of the process. I was never even observed with my children. Cafcass now deem this to be 'too stressful' for the children. Videos of me with the children before I was alienated were discredited by Cafcass because the children said they were just pretending to be happy and really they hated me. This was their 'lived experience' and we should understand that, of course the psychologist disputed this but they were ignored.
Looking at the picture in your article is heart-breaking for me. It symbolises a lost childhood for my children. Something they can never get back. They will never experience the love of their father, holidays with their dad or see their dads side of the family and play with their once beloved Labradors. They will be conditioned to hate their father and men as a whole. Sadly, this seems to be something that society deems to be acceptable and in some realms, even commendable. In the mean time I have to stay healthy for my daughters, and be ready for a knock on the door should that day ever come.
I have lost three friends in this past year to the black dog, and I am really worried about where society as a whole is going. I hope that things turn around soon. We have lost ourselves and there is a storm looming. I will be there for my beloved daughters with a brolly, a flask of tea and a map when they need it.
Runningonempty
Thank you for your comment. While some parents do meet the criteria for a diagnosable personality disorder, many do not. We need to understand where those behaviours and traits we observe come from. Often this relates back to childhood trauma and ways of coping, which become unhlepful in the long term and challenging, or harmful, for those around them.
I hope your daughters reach out soon ...
Running On Empty - I feel your pain mate. I am in Australia and am in a similar position but without the involement of child protective services. Just a narcissistic mother who has alienated my now 13-year-old son and is trying her best to do the same to my other two younger boys. All the while the unfit for purpose court system drags its chain and ignores the fact that what is going on is child abuse. Her lawyer is happy to prey on her emotional rage and take every penny he can from our asset pool which in the end is being taken from our children's futures. Lawyers who do this are a disgrace to the profession and should be struck off. Courts who allow this should be sued for damages as they facilitate the destruction of innocent children's futures.
I hope and pray for you to stay strong and get that knock on the door one day. Keep the brolly handy and the tea hot my friend. You are not alone.
I hear you on the lawyer front. I spent 20k on lawyers and barristers only for mum to just totally ignore the every other weekend contact ordered and instead stopped contact completely. I decided to rep myself and put an application in to 'enforce the order'. I paid for a psychologist and of course mum was getting legal aid (she alleged I emotionally abused her in the relationship-when it was the other way around-Of course she couldn't and wasn't required to provide evidence of this alleged abuse she never paid a penny towards the court despite the fact she earns a good wage and I pay her double what she pays for her mortgage every month).
Her lawyer was pretty nasty and even worse, Cafcass employed a rad fem lawyer who just completely shafted me at every opportunity. She lied with impunity, ignored my emails then, in court said I wasn't co-operating and generally assisted mum in her bidding.
I would say I'm pretty resilient mentally. I've seen a lot of trauma in the work I've done, both in the military and armed police and I thought I was strong. It very nearly broke me although I don't like to admit it.
I got through with the support of my wife and my dogs, going on mega long runs with them in the middle of nowhere and you can sort of let it out a bit.
Reading helped lots. I recommend two books. Franz Kafka 'The trial' It was written in the 1920s. The novel is an evocative account of a mans helplessness in the face of a completely incomprehensible court system. The book opens, “Somebody must have slandered Joseph K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.”-Franz Kafka
Victor Frankl 'Mans search for meaning'. The story of psychologist Frankl who was sent to Auschwitz with his wife (they were separated in the line up and you might know what that means). Franz survived and held onto the hope his beloved wife was still alive. This hope helped him survive the horrors of Auschwitz . When he found the fate of his wife it shook him to the core and he had to to reinvent his thinking. “The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”
― Viktor E. Frankl
Wow Matey. You poor sod. I know exactly how you feel in relation to being broken by lies and the bias and the complete abrogation of responsibility of the courts and those charged with ensuring procedural fairness for the children. It has taken me to the edge more than once.
I know of Viktor Frankl book but not the other one. I will hunt that up, thank you.
I have been studying the effects of PA on the children and on the parents of those affected. I must say while interesting it is terrifying as well. The long-term damage to the kids is horrid and as we can attest it is none too flash for us either. Bottom line is no one wins. Even the favoured parent eventually loses when the kids are old enough to understand they were had over and manipulated. That is so sad. What's worse is that it can so easily be avoided.
Sadly, the system is unfit for purpose. What gets rewarded gets done ergo as long as courts allow people to ignore court orders, to lie and commit perjury with no consequences and the lawyers keep getting paid to enflame the emotional misery we will continue to get what we always got!
It is an adversarial system with winners and losers and as long as the legal (un)profession continues to think and act this way the kids who have no financial skin in the game but are the most affected will continue to be damaged.
Then we have damaged kids grow up to be damaged adults who get together with another damaged adult and then have kids and then fall apart and the cycle repeats. OMG when will society wake up?
Children are not possessions or spoils of war, and it is high time the judiciary took some of these parasite law firms to task and rub them out. The lawyers who puit winning above decency, profits before kids' welfare, who make sure that every case goes to a full trial as a negotiated outcome does not generate enough fees have no place in "FAMILY" law.
Anyway, stay strong buddy. You have your dogs and partner to support you through. Good luck.
Hi Dr Whitcombe
We have formed the Family Court Reform Coalition (fcrc.uk) to look specifically at private-law Children Act proceedings, and to petition for reform to relieve children of the harms arising from the court processes. One of our key areas of interest is the constructive child alienation arising from withholding contact where domestic abuse is alleged. Would very much appreciate your input.
The key problem, as I see it, is that decision-makers are subject to an uneven professional risk-reward profile:
Allow contact and get it right, and no-one cares
Allow contact and get it wrong, career over.
Hence a need for legislative intervention, as the 'market' is perverse.
I will take a look at your proposals. I strongly advocate for maintaining relationships and direct contact, with appropriate measures, while allegations are explored. There is much case law, and more in judgements not made public, to indicate that as often as not - allegations are not substantiated. There is an ongoing, almost universal, failure to consider the risk of separating a child from a parent who has not caused them harm while they reside in the full care of a parent who may have made malicious allegations, or may be unable to separate their needs, experiences and opinions from their child's.