Thank you for exposing what’s been happening for decades. I’ve been screaming this from the rooftops for 5 years. The problem is that government uses the “separation of powers” to fob us off and say they can’t do anything about the family court. There are very powerful players covering up this DARVO tactic to ensure predators win their reputations back. If this has happened to you in Australia please contact Family Court Accountability Network (FCAN) https://www.fcanetwork.org/contact
I’m in Australia and experienced this a few years ago. I’ll look at the contact information you shared - it was the worst time my life. Thinking you may be separated from your children through manipulation is just devastating and the only time I’ve ever contemplated suicide. I’m so happy they are with me now when the only reason he and his partner did it was for money and to hurt me - it’s truly disgusting.
🎯, I've been saying this for years. PA is a DARVO litigation tactic of abusers. And it works in our patriarchal and misogynistic society. In addition, Grant Wyeth wrote a spot on article of how many court players know the father is the abuser but society wants to keep that responsibility of containing him on the woman to handle and keep it in the home so it doesn't spill out into the streets and then it becomes society's responsibility.
Exactly! I am living proof and couldn't have articulated it more clearly. Spot on! Thank you for being of those with insight, you are supporting my healing ❤️
This is the kind of writing that makes people pause and sit with what they already know in their bodies but have been taught to doubt. The way you show how control can look calm while harm looks emotional is something so many women recognize instantly. It speaks to how easily systems confuse safety with obedience and composure with care. Reading this brings a strong sense of solidarity with every parent who has tried to protect their child and been treated as the problem. It also leaves a quiet but firm sense that the story being told in courts is long overdue for serious scrutiny.
This is so true. I knew I was being seen as over emotional and he was smug and sanctimonious and calm. But when it’s your children how can you not be emotional.
Thank you for highlighting this problem. I wonder if you might extend the article, or produce another, which highlights how Fathers also use Parental Alienation in criminal defence arguments which leads to police closing child sex offences investigations? Often people consider Parental Alienation a family court problem but it's impact is much deeper and wider into the systems which should protect - police and social services.
This is exactly what happened to my sister. She reported her ex for coercive control. He turned the children against her, they said they wanted to live with him. The social worker recommended full custody for him. The judge awarded joint custody but it didn’t matter - by then the children knew they were not to have a relationship with my sister or any of her family so wouldn’t see her. He then coerced her daughter into reporting my sister to the police for abuse. Sickening. She hasn’t seen her son for over a year.
I don’t think we’ll ever get over the failures of the police, social services, the school or any other organisation that you naively think is going to help before you’ve experienced them.
The way family courts can flip protective instincts into accusations is something many clinicians see. When trauma responses get recast as pathology while control gets praised as stability, the system ends up amplifying the very dynamics it claims to prevent. In my own work, I’ve seen how easily a survivor’s fear for her child becomes the evidence used against her. Conversations like this matter because they push us to look at power, not just presentation. The children caught in the middle deserve that level of scrutiny from all of us.
This post makes me sick to my stomach. Why? You're ignoring the well-documented reality of parental alienation (PA), experienced by fathers and mothers alike.
As a self-proclaimed child protection reformist, what does that even mean in practice? Do you grasp how PA devastates children and loving parents? Courts see false claims exploited via loopholes, unchecked until evidence emerges, dragging families through hell.
PA inflicts lifelong trauma on kids: attachment disorders, depression, even suicide risk. In the US, over 100 men die by suicide weekly amid family court battles, many tied to alienation. UK studies (e.g., Warshak, 2020) affirm PA's existence, with 11-15% of divorces involving it, not a myth abusers "invent."
I'm living this nightmare right now. Claims like yours fuel denialism, worsening outcomes for genuine victims. I'm not blind to abusers misusing PA as a shield; we must address that. But dismissing it wholesale is irrational, dangerous, and betrays the children you claim to protect.
Please listen to the mothers who have experienced genuine PA - it isn’t simply a gendered issue. Of course, I agree that there are instances where abusers falsely claim PA, but it also really happens to many women (and can happen to men, too). As a women alienated from my only daughter, I have felt like collateral in the arguments as to whether PA exists - my experience denied (mainly by women), in order to protect those who do experience false claims of PA against them. Surely, acknowledging PA (or whatever term you want to label alienating behaviours) exists, and discerning the difference between false and genuine claims, would mean that all (or at least, more) of us could be afforded protection. The mums of RoK, and many who are supported by Matchmothers would tell their stories of being genuinely alienated, if given the chance.
For context, I have spoken publicly about my experience, but I was alienated from my 15 yo, overnight in 2016. She had lived with me her entire life, and I alone held PR for her and was her only LG (her dad left when she was a toddler). In my case, the person who alienated me was my own mother, in collusion with a Clin Psych in retaliation for me raising concerns re her very serious misconduct. She was later exposed as lying re her actions in a FTP case with the HCPC, but still practises without sanctions. Ironically, I was a practising Speech & Language Tx at the time, regulated by HCPC, with no FTP concerns about me, ever. I gave up my career due to the trauma and am now dx c-ptsd.
Despite there being no court orders or involvement, my contact details were removed without my knowledge or consent at both school & hospital, and replaced with my mother’s (not a LG, no PR). I was left to discover this by guesswork in the absence of expected communication. Both school & hospital then refused to reinstate me as contact, and I was told that in the event of a medical emergency, or worse, no one would - or could - have contacted me. It took nearly £40k fighting on my own to get school & hospital policies changed so this can never happen again. Both were forced to admit serious safeguarding failings and breaching PR. Bham Children’s Hospital, then failed to amend a dangerous policy, as they had promised to do, which was exposed only bc I knew they wouldn’t have acted, and I requested CQC investigate. I was right, and the hosp was also given warnings by ICO for failing to comply with SARs/FOIs repeatedly for years. The hosp was forced to admit that it had a policy that anyone -ANYONE - cd instruct any administrator to remove any parent’s contact details from the hosp system, & replace them with anyone else’s (no checks as to whether they held PR/were LG - it could be a random stranger). This of course also meant all confidential correspondence cd be sent to anyone. In a Childen’s Hospital.
I raised concerns that no one had checked my abusive parent who had threatened to kill me in front of my child - the Clin Psych then wrote that I had made up the abuse (bc she knew she was ‘in trouble’). The false accusations then escalated to reports that I had abused my child (I refused her a can of coke at midnight and offered her water/squash as an alternative - and this was twisted and reported that I had neglected her by denying her a drink when she was thirsty). I was then accused of more things than I can list here. I suspect my mother has mental health concerns/trauma that result from losing my only sister to meningitis on Christmas Day, as a result of med negligence when she was just 18 (I was 22).
I speak bc I am a woman who has not been through court, yet has still experienced the most severe alienation. I have been denied all contact with her for nearly a decade, despite there never being any orders for this. School and hospital were entirely complicit. Unless we acknowledge that alienating behaviours/PA really does happen - and that women can (and do) alienate as well as men - women like me are failed and prevented from accessing support. This in no way negates that there are people who use false claims of PA when abuse is investigated; more than one thing can be true at once. I am happy to speak openly.
I have very similar concerns Cheryl but Dr Taylor is acknowledging that alienation does exist. I speak as a mum that hasnt seen or spoken to her child for 6.5 years. I warned the court he was using ccb/alienation on my child, they said I was emotionally harming my child for naming his DA.
Abuse is not limited to just physical or sexual violence. Abandoning a child is also abuse. There are fathers who abandon and ghost their children, then suddenly reappear — if at all — only when the mother files for divorce. They don’t return out of remorse or longing to see their children; they show up to fight child support and punish the mother for taking them to court. Instead of seeing through the lies, theatrics, and manipulation, family court judges hand them exactly what they seek: access to the very children they abandoned, giving them a new channel to continue post-separation abuse.
Another critical reality I’ve seen from living abroad and observing family court cases is this: in countries where mothers are respected and socially valued, PA isn’t even a talking point. In those cultures, custody defaults to the mother and the father is held firmly responsible for the financial support of the children he brought into this world. This structure shuts down the very loophole abusive fathers exploit to keep control through the legal system by turning their own children into pawns on their chessboard.
The underlying problem, therefore, runs far deeper than identifying abusive men. When a society has been slowly conditioned for generations to espouse misogyny, scapegoat mothers, and shift blame onto them, no amount of judicial reform alone will fix it — the bias is cultural, systemic, and entrenched, and there can be no accountability in such a society. The Epstein case stands as undeniable, real-world proof — evidence not of a broken system, but of one functioning exactly as it was conditioned.
I could not agree more. Fantastic comment. It's cultural misogyny and patriarchy keeping women & kids in their place. Systematically punished for daring to leave.
Happened to me - parental alienation of my kids but they didn’t go with it no matter how hard he tried and then he kidnapped them for three months launching an action in court to try to take them full time and calling me crazy but he just wanted child support. Good job it came out in court that it was his new partner who kept on getting sectioned and had a lot of mental health issues - when this came out two days later he said I could have them full time as long as I agreed to no child support! And courts wouldn’t award me legal fees for his nonsense! At least I have my beautiful children with me - safe. ❤️ afterwards it really impacted my mental health for a while but I was too afraid to get any kind of help in case he tried it again and it would be in my records. I got through it but it was a continuation of the abuse.
It is very difficult, you can believe that courts will support whichever parent based on how much stability they can provide will be upheld. The courts can seem to advise adversariality, which I know doesn't obtain the whole truth, if the apparently most stable seeming parent can back up their position, with no evidence of any abuse apart from what is said, what can they do? If the parents provided evidence of abuse, which is against the law, how can a child who has been abused be given into the care and responsibility of the abuser, the courts cannot act in a way which is against the law. Parental alienation would be easy to prove under these circumstances, but I would understand that the courts would add on these descriptions to make their judgement easier in conditions where the truth is difficult to gather because of the closeness of the people involved, it reads like they can be seen as doing what's best for the child, Family Courts are supposed to do that above all. So the term "parental alienation" should come from a history of cases where this behaviour substantiates a volume of evidence, where what people will find is that the ascertainment of the correct evidence for each case to provide full facts for everybody involved would seem to be the only correct course of action, otherwise something wrong will be perceived. What should go with this description of parental alienation is the difficulty which the court finds in its' history to reach the correct judgement. The other things may be time, and court staff(judges and lawyers), who would appear to not have the experience to focus on the correct descriptive values involved in each case, which is difficult, an independent evaluation of evidence is thought to be valuable to remove bias of judgement, but a lack of intimacy with these situations can lead to the safety of the child and other elements of judgement coming to the fore when the courts may have to deal with unascertainable evidence. I don't know this as fact, but I have recently thought about what tends to be middle-class lawyers involved in the courts in Britain, a biased viewpoint can say that they don't have the depth to do what they do, a closer look at the way things are and how they're done can then show that they are the best people for the job, when I wrote about not knowing this as fact at the beginning of this paragraph, that meant everything written above this paragraph.
Thank you for exposing what’s been happening for decades. I’ve been screaming this from the rooftops for 5 years. The problem is that government uses the “separation of powers” to fob us off and say they can’t do anything about the family court. There are very powerful players covering up this DARVO tactic to ensure predators win their reputations back. If this has happened to you in Australia please contact Family Court Accountability Network (FCAN) https://www.fcanetwork.org/contact
I’m in Australia and experienced this a few years ago. I’ll look at the contact information you shared - it was the worst time my life. Thinking you may be separated from your children through manipulation is just devastating and the only time I’ve ever contemplated suicide. I’m so happy they are with me now when the only reason he and his partner did it was for money and to hurt me - it’s truly disgusting.
🎯, I've been saying this for years. PA is a DARVO litigation tactic of abusers. And it works in our patriarchal and misogynistic society. In addition, Grant Wyeth wrote a spot on article of how many court players know the father is the abuser but society wants to keep that responsibility of containing him on the woman to handle and keep it in the home so it doesn't spill out into the streets and then it becomes society's responsibility.
Exactly! I am living proof and couldn't have articulated it more clearly. Spot on! Thank you for being of those with insight, you are supporting my healing ❤️
This is the kind of writing that makes people pause and sit with what they already know in their bodies but have been taught to doubt. The way you show how control can look calm while harm looks emotional is something so many women recognize instantly. It speaks to how easily systems confuse safety with obedience and composure with care. Reading this brings a strong sense of solidarity with every parent who has tried to protect their child and been treated as the problem. It also leaves a quiet but firm sense that the story being told in courts is long overdue for serious scrutiny.
This is so true. I knew I was being seen as over emotional and he was smug and sanctimonious and calm. But when it’s your children how can you not be emotional.
Thank you for highlighting this problem. I wonder if you might extend the article, or produce another, which highlights how Fathers also use Parental Alienation in criminal defence arguments which leads to police closing child sex offences investigations? Often people consider Parental Alienation a family court problem but it's impact is much deeper and wider into the systems which should protect - police and social services.
I would agree this is a great question
This is exactly what happened to my sister. She reported her ex for coercive control. He turned the children against her, they said they wanted to live with him. The social worker recommended full custody for him. The judge awarded joint custody but it didn’t matter - by then the children knew they were not to have a relationship with my sister or any of her family so wouldn’t see her. He then coerced her daughter into reporting my sister to the police for abuse. Sickening. She hasn’t seen her son for over a year.
I don’t think we’ll ever get over the failures of the police, social services, the school or any other organisation that you naively think is going to help before you’ve experienced them.
The way family courts can flip protective instincts into accusations is something many clinicians see. When trauma responses get recast as pathology while control gets praised as stability, the system ends up amplifying the very dynamics it claims to prevent. In my own work, I’ve seen how easily a survivor’s fear for her child becomes the evidence used against her. Conversations like this matter because they push us to look at power, not just presentation. The children caught in the middle deserve that level of scrutiny from all of us.
This post makes me sick to my stomach. Why? You're ignoring the well-documented reality of parental alienation (PA), experienced by fathers and mothers alike.
As a self-proclaimed child protection reformist, what does that even mean in practice? Do you grasp how PA devastates children and loving parents? Courts see false claims exploited via loopholes, unchecked until evidence emerges, dragging families through hell.
PA inflicts lifelong trauma on kids: attachment disorders, depression, even suicide risk. In the US, over 100 men die by suicide weekly amid family court battles, many tied to alienation. UK studies (e.g., Warshak, 2020) affirm PA's existence, with 11-15% of divorces involving it, not a myth abusers "invent."
I'm living this nightmare right now. Claims like yours fuel denialism, worsening outcomes for genuine victims. I'm not blind to abusers misusing PA as a shield; we must address that. But dismissing it wholesale is irrational, dangerous, and betrays the children you claim to protect.
You should be ashamed. Prioritize all kids, not ideology. Learn more: PAPA (https://www.papaorg.co.uk) and Hope for the Fatherless (https://hopeindarkness.me).
#ParentalAlienation #FamilyCourts #ChildProtection
Please listen to the mothers who have experienced genuine PA - it isn’t simply a gendered issue. Of course, I agree that there are instances where abusers falsely claim PA, but it also really happens to many women (and can happen to men, too). As a women alienated from my only daughter, I have felt like collateral in the arguments as to whether PA exists - my experience denied (mainly by women), in order to protect those who do experience false claims of PA against them. Surely, acknowledging PA (or whatever term you want to label alienating behaviours) exists, and discerning the difference between false and genuine claims, would mean that all (or at least, more) of us could be afforded protection. The mums of RoK, and many who are supported by Matchmothers would tell their stories of being genuinely alienated, if given the chance.
For context, I have spoken publicly about my experience, but I was alienated from my 15 yo, overnight in 2016. She had lived with me her entire life, and I alone held PR for her and was her only LG (her dad left when she was a toddler). In my case, the person who alienated me was my own mother, in collusion with a Clin Psych in retaliation for me raising concerns re her very serious misconduct. She was later exposed as lying re her actions in a FTP case with the HCPC, but still practises without sanctions. Ironically, I was a practising Speech & Language Tx at the time, regulated by HCPC, with no FTP concerns about me, ever. I gave up my career due to the trauma and am now dx c-ptsd.
Despite there being no court orders or involvement, my contact details were removed without my knowledge or consent at both school & hospital, and replaced with my mother’s (not a LG, no PR). I was left to discover this by guesswork in the absence of expected communication. Both school & hospital then refused to reinstate me as contact, and I was told that in the event of a medical emergency, or worse, no one would - or could - have contacted me. It took nearly £40k fighting on my own to get school & hospital policies changed so this can never happen again. Both were forced to admit serious safeguarding failings and breaching PR. Bham Children’s Hospital, then failed to amend a dangerous policy, as they had promised to do, which was exposed only bc I knew they wouldn’t have acted, and I requested CQC investigate. I was right, and the hosp was also given warnings by ICO for failing to comply with SARs/FOIs repeatedly for years. The hosp was forced to admit that it had a policy that anyone -ANYONE - cd instruct any administrator to remove any parent’s contact details from the hosp system, & replace them with anyone else’s (no checks as to whether they held PR/were LG - it could be a random stranger). This of course also meant all confidential correspondence cd be sent to anyone. In a Childen’s Hospital.
I raised concerns that no one had checked my abusive parent who had threatened to kill me in front of my child - the Clin Psych then wrote that I had made up the abuse (bc she knew she was ‘in trouble’). The false accusations then escalated to reports that I had abused my child (I refused her a can of coke at midnight and offered her water/squash as an alternative - and this was twisted and reported that I had neglected her by denying her a drink when she was thirsty). I was then accused of more things than I can list here. I suspect my mother has mental health concerns/trauma that result from losing my only sister to meningitis on Christmas Day, as a result of med negligence when she was just 18 (I was 22).
I speak bc I am a woman who has not been through court, yet has still experienced the most severe alienation. I have been denied all contact with her for nearly a decade, despite there never being any orders for this. School and hospital were entirely complicit. Unless we acknowledge that alienating behaviours/PA really does happen - and that women can (and do) alienate as well as men - women like me are failed and prevented from accessing support. This in no way negates that there are people who use false claims of PA when abuse is investigated; more than one thing can be true at once. I am happy to speak openly.
I have very similar concerns Cheryl but Dr Taylor is acknowledging that alienation does exist. I speak as a mum that hasnt seen or spoken to her child for 6.5 years. I warned the court he was using ccb/alienation on my child, they said I was emotionally harming my child for naming his DA.
Abuse is not limited to just physical or sexual violence. Abandoning a child is also abuse. There are fathers who abandon and ghost their children, then suddenly reappear — if at all — only when the mother files for divorce. They don’t return out of remorse or longing to see their children; they show up to fight child support and punish the mother for taking them to court. Instead of seeing through the lies, theatrics, and manipulation, family court judges hand them exactly what they seek: access to the very children they abandoned, giving them a new channel to continue post-separation abuse.
Another critical reality I’ve seen from living abroad and observing family court cases is this: in countries where mothers are respected and socially valued, PA isn’t even a talking point. In those cultures, custody defaults to the mother and the father is held firmly responsible for the financial support of the children he brought into this world. This structure shuts down the very loophole abusive fathers exploit to keep control through the legal system by turning their own children into pawns on their chessboard.
The underlying problem, therefore, runs far deeper than identifying abusive men. When a society has been slowly conditioned for generations to espouse misogyny, scapegoat mothers, and shift blame onto them, no amount of judicial reform alone will fix it — the bias is cultural, systemic, and entrenched, and there can be no accountability in such a society. The Epstein case stands as undeniable, real-world proof — evidence not of a broken system, but of one functioning exactly as it was conditioned.
I could not agree more. Fantastic comment. It's cultural misogyny and patriarchy keeping women & kids in their place. Systematically punished for daring to leave.
Happened to me - parental alienation of my kids but they didn’t go with it no matter how hard he tried and then he kidnapped them for three months launching an action in court to try to take them full time and calling me crazy but he just wanted child support. Good job it came out in court that it was his new partner who kept on getting sectioned and had a lot of mental health issues - when this came out two days later he said I could have them full time as long as I agreed to no child support! And courts wouldn’t award me legal fees for his nonsense! At least I have my beautiful children with me - safe. ❤️ afterwards it really impacted my mental health for a while but I was too afraid to get any kind of help in case he tried it again and it would be in my records. I got through it but it was a continuation of the abuse.
It is very difficult, you can believe that courts will support whichever parent based on how much stability they can provide will be upheld. The courts can seem to advise adversariality, which I know doesn't obtain the whole truth, if the apparently most stable seeming parent can back up their position, with no evidence of any abuse apart from what is said, what can they do? If the parents provided evidence of abuse, which is against the law, how can a child who has been abused be given into the care and responsibility of the abuser, the courts cannot act in a way which is against the law. Parental alienation would be easy to prove under these circumstances, but I would understand that the courts would add on these descriptions to make their judgement easier in conditions where the truth is difficult to gather because of the closeness of the people involved, it reads like they can be seen as doing what's best for the child, Family Courts are supposed to do that above all. So the term "parental alienation" should come from a history of cases where this behaviour substantiates a volume of evidence, where what people will find is that the ascertainment of the correct evidence for each case to provide full facts for everybody involved would seem to be the only correct course of action, otherwise something wrong will be perceived. What should go with this description of parental alienation is the difficulty which the court finds in its' history to reach the correct judgement. The other things may be time, and court staff(judges and lawyers), who would appear to not have the experience to focus on the correct descriptive values involved in each case, which is difficult, an independent evaluation of evidence is thought to be valuable to remove bias of judgement, but a lack of intimacy with these situations can lead to the safety of the child and other elements of judgement coming to the fore when the courts may have to deal with unascertainable evidence. I don't know this as fact, but I have recently thought about what tends to be middle-class lawyers involved in the courts in Britain, a biased viewpoint can say that they don't have the depth to do what they do, a closer look at the way things are and how they're done can then show that they are the best people for the job, when I wrote about not knowing this as fact at the beginning of this paragraph, that meant everything written above this paragraph.
Yes. 35ys of coercive and darvo here, my poor lad.