Mother-blame by design: Patriarchy, epistemic practices and parental alienation in family courts

1. Introduction and framework

Family law does not simply adjudicate private disputes; it helps to produce a gendered social order. Feminist socio-legal scholarship has long shown that family law does not simply mirror private life but helps to produce it, by codifying a normative ideal of motherhood: selfless, ever-protective and reliably facilitative of the father–child relationship. When mothers depart from this ideal, most visibly in the context of domestic abuse, legal and expert discourse tends to treat the deviation as a problem to be managed. This article develops these insights for contemporary family court practice by advancing and applying a four-part framework that traces how such ideals lead to real outcomes. First, it shows how doctrine and routine professional practice construct motherhood and fatherhood asymmetrically: mothers are cast as intensive, facilitative carers who must shoulder risk-management after separation, while fathers are positioned as symbolically central, such that their involvement is presumed to be welfare-enhancing. Second, it explains how everyday techniques of case management and expertise entrench this construction of motherhood and fatherhood with mother-blame. This also explains why ‘parental alienation’ (PA) has re-emerged in reformulated behavioural frames that police maternal conduct, even where the PA label is discouraged or prohibited. Third, it identifies the credibility economy that structures decision-making, in which abused mothers encounter testimonial deficits (disbelief and raised corroboration thresholds) and hermeneutic gaps (limited conceptual resources to render coercive control intelligible within welfare analysis). Finally, it argues that when courts prioritise the maintenance of contact, rely on weakly regulated expertise and sideline children’s voices, survivors experience secondary victimisation and institutional betrayal, with predictable consequences for safety.

As a result, the article reconceives PA discourse as an epistemic technology that translates protective mothering and children’s fear into evidence against them, and it integrates the literature on epistemic injustice and institutional betrayal to clarify how the contact-at-all-costs culture produces systematic misreadings of abuse. Empirically, it applies and evidences the framework against multi-country evidence, against the context of international and regional human-rights norms, to demonstrate how norms that exist on paper are routinely under-implemented in adjudication.

This article proceeds in three stages. Section 2 sets out the research design, methodological approach and empirical scope of the study, situating the project within existing socio-legal and human-rights research on domestic abuse and post-separation contact. Section 3 provides a comparative account of the legal and policy frameworks governing private family law and domestic abuse across Bosnia & Herzegovina, England & Wales, France, Italy and Spain, highlighting how shared welfare commitments diverge in implementation. Section 4 develops the article’s core analytic contribution, applying a four-part patriarchal framework to explain how normative ideals of motherhood and fatherhood, institutional logics of contact and settlement, epistemic practices and PA repertoires interact to produce patterned outcomes in domestic-abuse cases. The conclusion draws out the implications for doctrine, procedure, expert evidence, children’s participation and the role of human rights in everyday adjudication.

2. Research design, methods and empirical scope

Domestic abuse is one of the most serious and pervasive forms of violence against women and girls and constitutes a violation of their human rights. Given the prevalence of domestic abuse in relationships,^[1] and that separation from a perpetrator can be the most dangerous period for the victim, a focus of increasing concern for women’s organisations and academics across Europe has been the dangers posed by post-separation contact to both adult and child victims (either as direct victims or as witnesses and including sexual abuse). The phenomenon of domestic-abuse perpetrators using family law proceedings as a tool to continue the abuse and coercion has been demonstrated by a substantial body of research.^[2] This not only facilitates the secondary traumatisation of victims of abuse but also implicates state institutions in its perpetuation, most particularly when access to children is mandated and custody of children is awarded to perpetrators, despite evidence of a history of domestic and/or sexual abuse. In recent years, it is apparent that the concept of PA in its many forms and iterations has played a significant role in providing justifications for such outcomes, which is causing widespread alarm and distress amongst survivors of domestic abuse.^[3]

These issues are particularly concerning given that a number of international and regional mechanisms recognise the need to ensure that post-separation access and custody, particularly where domestic violence is present, is subject to thorough risk assessment and that the wishes and feelings of children are heard when decisions are made by family courts as to what outcome represents the best interests of the child. As a result, post-separation access and custody within the context of domestic abuse has been the subject of attention from GREVIO, the monitoring body of the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (the Istanbul Convention),^[4] and, more recently, the UN Rapporteur on Violence against Women and Girls.^[5] Both note the disproportionate and gendered impact of family law systems and procedures on victims of domestic abuse and their children.

Although some efforts have been made to advocate for legal and policy changes at the individual State level, achieving these changes has been difficult without an evidence base. Moreover, producing such evidence is particularly challenging for NGOs that often struggle to provide basic services to victims of domestic abuse and may not have the necessary skills or resources. In addition, academic research in this area has been sporadic against the context of a challenging funding environment across Europe. Where it has taken place, it has focused on specific aspects of the family justice system, particularly the experiences of survivors of violence, with most of this research undertaken in the USA, Canada and the UK.^[6]

While gaps exist in some jurisdictions, this research has reached a level of sufficient range and depth to demonstrate common areas of concern and patterns in how family law systems across the globe have dealt with such cases.^[7] These include: a culture of scepticism/disbelief towards those raising abuse; an inappropriate use of mediation in cases involving domestic abuse; a culture of contact at all costs and a presumption of shared custody even where evidence of abuse towards mothers and children exists; a lack of recognition of the link between domestic abuse and sexual abuse of children; and a failure to provide adequate risk assessments. Of most concern has been the widespread adoption and operationalisation of the concept of PA as a means of dismissing safety concerns, particularly towards mothers^[8] who are often characterised as vengeful and/or delusional by courts and expert witnesses in this field.

The data from this project echo many of these concerns and raise additional questions, both specific to each jurisdiction and generic. The project differs from previous research in this area in terms of undertaking empirical research across four key stakeholder groups within the family justice system – survivors, lawyers, judges and court professionals who provide information on the child/family to the court – to provide a comprehensive overview of the experiences of survivors and the attitudes of key actors that work within the family law system within six European countries. The countries were selected based on a series of factors: ratification of the Istanbul Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), geographical location, monitoring by GREVIO, the relative availability of data, academic and civil society engagement with the issue and the likelihood of success in terms of accessing the identified stakeholder groups based on established connections.

The study employed a multi-site qualitative design to examine how family justice institutions respond to domestic abuse across five European jurisdictions: Bosnia & Herzegovina, England & Wales, France, Italy and Spain. It combined focus groups with survivors and semi-structured interviews with professional stakeholders (judges, lawyers and court-appointed experts), producing jurisdiction-specific datasets analysed in a common framework. The research aimed to understand survivors’ experiences of the family justice system; the roles, knowledge and practices of key stakeholders; the structural and cultural conditions shaping access to justice; and the salience of human-rights norms in this field.

Qualitative methods were selected to support depth, flexibility and reflexivity, allowing participants to frame their experiences and reasoning in their own terms. Two modalities were used. First, focus groups with survivors, conducted in person and online, provided a supportive setting in which peer testimony could lower barriers to disclosure around sensitive topics. Second, semi-structured online interviews with judges, lawyers and court-appointed experts elicited detailed accounts of role-specific practices and decision-making logics.

Fieldwork (early 2022 to June 2023) combined survivor focus groups and stakeholder interviews across five jurisdictions, conducted in local languages by native speakers and translated for cross-country analysis; a common core protocol was used with jurisdiction-specific adaptations.^[9] Sampling was purposive: survivors who had experienced domestic abuse and completed family law proceedings; stakeholders were judges, lawyers and court-appointed experts; and recruitment relied on NGOs, professional associations and snowballing, yielding depth rather than statistical generalisability. To maximise regional coverage, some survivor groups met in person (Banja Luka, Cardiff, London, Madrid, Nottingham, Paris, Sarajevo, Tuzla) with the remainder, and all stakeholder interviews, online; participant codes (e.g. UKFG = England & Wales survivor; FRIL = France lawyer; SPIJ = Spain judge; ITIO = Italy court-appointed expert) identify jurisdiction and role. Ethical approval^[10] and WHO-informed safeguards governed all sites.^[11]

Recruitment proved uneven. Outside England & Wales, particularly in France, some professional groups (judiciary, psychologists, social workers) were difficult to access, partly due to concerns about anonymity and a limited tradition of participation in socio-legal research. Given the snowballing strategy, the samples likely over-represent survivors who had accessed specialist services and stakeholders with expertise in domestic abuse; accordingly, the study is designed for depth of insight, not population inference.

The project aimed to recruit at least 12 participants in each stakeholder category; the final numbers are set out in Table 1.

Table 1. Project participants by category

3. Family law, domestic abuse and contact: a comparative legal landscape

Across the five sites – Bosnia & Herzegovina, England & Wales, France, Italy and Spain – the formal legal architecture signals a shared ambition: child welfare is the organising principle, domestic abuse is recognised as a serious harm, and international human-rights instruments provide an important backdrop. However, once we move from statutes and policy statements into the everyday business of private law disputes, each jurisdiction’s legal design and professional culture shape how risk is perceived and what, in practice, is done about it.

In England & Wales, private law children’s cases are structured by the Children Act 1989, with a rebuttable presumption that the involvement of each parent furthers the child’s welfare,^[12] and a set of practice directions intended to route abuse allegations through a protective pathway. Alongside these sit procedural rules on expert evidence. The research record, however, describes a system that frequently ‘manages’ risk so contact can continue (supervision, indirect contact etc), rather than asking whether contact is compatible with safety. Non-physical abuse is often historicised or reframed as conflict, and tools once linked to PA have been rebadged as guidance on children’s ‘resistance and refusal’, sustaining the same inferences through a behavioural vocabulary. Concerns about the variable quality and regulation of psychological expertise recur; this matters because expert recommendations are typically decisive.^[13]

France presents a distinct pattern.^[14] Criminal law remains incident-focused, making cumulative coercive control harder to prove, even as family courts retain broad discretion over parental authority. Policy has moved to discourage mediation and to signal that inter-parental violence should be taken into consideration, and official guidance has warned against parental alienation syndrome (PAS). In practice, however, joint parental authority often persists after abuse; measures enabling suspension or withdrawal of parental authority are rarely applied; communication between criminal and civil proceedings is weak; and euphemistic reformulations of PA are often reported. In addition, children’s participation remains uneven and largely at judicial discretion, contributing to a tendency to normalise domestic abuse as routine within family law solutions.

In Italy, the legal response disperses across offence-based criminal provisions and family-procedure reforms.^[15] The recent ‘Cartabia’ reforms systematise duties to hear children and to record reasons for departing from their views; however, implementation is mediated by the long-standing reliance on court-appointed technical consultants (CTUs). The literature and fieldwork converge on two main issues of concern: that professional preparedness on gender-based violence is uneven, and PA-type reasoning persists despite the Supreme Court’s clarification that parental alienation lacks scientific standing.^[16] Furthermore, children who resist paternal contact after abuse are sometimes recast as ‘influenced’, with transfers of residence or ‘reunification’ therapies often suggested as the remedy; outcomes that sit awkwardly with the statutory rhetoric of protection.

Spain is distinctive in creating specialist gender-violence courts within the criminal law response, while leaving contact and custody to the civil courts.^[17] Policy reforms have strengthened the child’s right to be heard and expanded judicial powers to restrict contact in violence cases. However, the research picture points to a strong contact-preserving reflex: meeting points, safeguarded visits, and third party-managed contact are used to keep paternal involvement going while ‘working on’ risk. Although national law and judicial guidance prohibit the use of PAS/PA, allied vocabularies such as ‘interference’, ‘instrumentalisation’ and ‘gatekeeping’ re-enter via psychosocial assessments, and a tools-based approach to ‘alienating behaviours’ has been in evidence. Although children’s voices are taken into account more regularly than before, practice remains inconsistent and their stated fears are frequently discounted.

In Bosnia & Herzegovina, the federation’s layered structure produces a patchwork of domestic abuse and family law provisions across entities and cantons, with variable coverage and eligibility for civil protection and legal aid.^[18] Family laws acknowledge the child’s right to be heard and require decisions to explain whether and how this occurred, but the practical implementation depends heavily on social work expertise and NGOs with limited capacity. Reconciliation or mediation remains embedded at the gateway to private law disputes, including in cases involving violence, and information-sharing between criminal and civil fora is uneven. While PA-type language appears less frequently than in the EU jurisdictions studied, the familiar risks of minimisation and contact maintenance often follow from the institutional set-up itself.

Taken together, the jurisdictional portraits demonstrate a good level of convergence at the level of principles and divergence in terms of implementation. Despite shared commitments to children’s welfare and to addressing domestic abuse, day-to-day adjudication is steered by incident-focused proof cultures, contact-maintenance heuristics, uneven routes for hearing children and heavy reliance on lightly regulated expertise. These common pressures help to explain why abuse is so often historicised or reframed as ‘conflict’, why protective action is recoded as non-cooperation and why managerial solutions (supervision, meeting points etc) are preferred over testing the compatibility of contact with safety.

Section 4 develops an analytic account of how these patterns arise and persist. It connects the normative ideals that organise expectations of mothers and fathers to the institutional logics of family courts, and then to the epistemic practices that determine what counts as knowledge in this forum, culminating in the technologies (notably PA repertoires) that stabilise those judgements in reports and orders. Read in sequence, the four elements demonstrate how ideals travel into outcomes, and why reforms that change labels without altering these underlying patriarchal logics struggle to improve the situation.

4. From ideals to outcomes: patriarchy, knowledge and family court decision-making

This article thus starts from the claim that the contemporary family justice response to domestic abuse is organised by a gendered normative order that moves from ideals to outcomes through four linked mechanisms. First, adjudication presupposes an ideal of intensive, facilitative motherhood alongside a thin, symbolically central fatherhood, loading post-separation care and risk-management onto mothers while treating paternal involvement as presumptively beneficial.

Second, those ideals are inscribed institutionally within a field oriented to settlement and the preservation of contact, generating a default to managing rather than refusing unsafe contact. Third, decisions are mediated by epistemic practices: credibility economies and conceptual blind spots that discount survivors’ testimony and render coercive control hard to recognise within welfare analysis. Finally, PA functions as an epistemic technology that reinterprets children’s fear and mothers’ protection as manipulation, sustaining contact-first outcomes even when the label is avoided.

Unlike accounts that treat maternal ideology, contact-first institutional dynamics and critiques of PA as discrete literatures,^[19] this article argues that they are different expressions of the same patriarchal logic. It traces a single causal pathway from idealised, facilitative motherhood (and a thin, valorised fatherhood), through to a family justice field oriented to settlement and contact, into the epistemic practices that determine what counts as knowledge (credibility allocations; blind spots around coercive control), and finally into the technologies that stabilise those practices in casework (PA-style behavioural frames). The theoretical contribution is therefore integrative and mechanistic: it shows how norms shape institutional incentives, which condition credibility and interpretation, and how feedback loops, via expert pipelines and statutory presumptions, return the system to contact-first results. By reclassifying PA as an epistemic technology (rather than a diagnostic thesis) and centring epistemic injustice in the explanation, the framework connects parallel conversations into a single account of how patriarchy is reproduced in family court decision-making. The next four sections unpack each component in turn.

A. The juridical ideal of motherhood and the symbolic centrality of fatherhood

Within family law’s imaginary, the ‘good mother’ is figured as selfless, endlessly resilient, ever-available and, above all, in post-separation disputes, unceasingly facilitative of the father–child relationship. In its negative form, the ‘bad mother’ is constructed as obstructive, overly anxious and thus blameworthy when contact is contested.^[20] However, this is not simply a cultural backdrop but an adjudicative logic. It displaces post-separation care and risk-management onto mothers while simultaneously treating paternal involvement as presumptively welfare-enhancing even where domestic abuse is alleged or proved, thereby pre-structuring maternal responsibility and maternal blame when contact proves unsafe or unworkable.^[21]

The genealogy of this norm is extensively traced in feminist socio-legal and sociological scholarship, which has built the argument along several interlocking lines. First, classic feminist accounts insist on separating motherhood as a lived relationship from motherhood as an institution: while many women experience mothering as meaningful, the ‘institution’ of motherhood operates as a social arrangement that channels women into primary responsibility for reproduction and care, naturalises that responsibility as feminine duty, and makes women’s unpaid (and often invisible) labour available to patriarchal family forms and labour markets.^[22] Second, scholars of late-modern parenting culture identify ‘intensive mothering’ as the dominant yardstick against which mothers are judged: this model frames good mothering as child-centred and future-oriented, requires constant emotional attunement, treats expert knowledge (psychology, medicine, education) as authoritative, and expects sustained time, vigilance and consumption of resources so that ‘good’ motherhood becomes an all-encompassing project and mothers who cannot meet these classed and gendered expectations are cast as deficient.^[23] Third, feminist socio-legal work shows how law functions as a technology of moral regulation in precisely this terrain: legal processes do not merely apply rules but actively produce normative maternal identities, rewarding the mother who appears ‘responsible’, ‘reasonable’ and ‘co-operative’, and penalising mothers who are read as angry, obstructive or insufficiently accommodating, so that courtroom credibility often turns on comportment, affect and displays of compliance as much as on the substantive realities of care and risk.^[24] Finally, domestic-abuse research, especially Hester’s ‘three planet model’, maps how mothers are positioned within a structurally disjointed system: criminal justice tends to focus on discrete incidents and evidential thresholds, child protection prioritises managerial risk and parental capacity, and family courts elevate continuing parental involvement and the settlement of disputes; when these logics collide, mothers face contradictory demands to simultaneously prevent harm and facilitate paternal contact, with institutional pressure to agree contact frequently recasting safety concerns as interpersonal conflict or ‘lack of co-operation’.^[25] Taken together, these strands help explain why decision-makers so often responsibilise mothers both for preventing children’s exposure to abuse and for sustaining paternal involvement, while continuing to treat fathers’ presence as presumptively beneficial even in contexts where it may generate ongoing risk.

A key aspect of patriarchal thought is the authority of the father as the symbolic origin of male privilege. Here, parenting is conceptualised as a significant dimension of male experience, which can be illustrated in the burgeoning fathers’ rights movement, which valorises the role of the father and ‘fathers’ rights’.^[26] However, these claims stand in direct contrast to the overwhelming and enduring reality that even where children are parented jointly, it is women who take on the vast majority of parenting tasks^[27] and are held to a higher standard of responsibility when doing so, often to impossible levels.^[28] Moreover, feminist theory has long established the link between patriarchal values and violence against women, which is rooted in hierarchical gendered structures, gendered stereotypes and inequalities.^[29] Taken together, it is unsurprising that the mother–child relationship is often a key target for perpetrators, who intentionally try to undermine, distort and disrupt it to achieve power and control within the family.^[30] When domestic abuse takes place, it is mothers who are often the focus of the State in terms of their ability to protect the children from the father perpetrator, and, at the same time, to sustain the father-parent relationship.^[31] Moreover, mothers experiencing domestic abuse are often negatively judged through normative paradigms of ‘good motherhood’, even when evidence shows they are acting to protect their child and enhance their safety in very difficult circumstances.^[32] It has been argued, therefore, that damaging discourses of the ‘good mother’ as fully responsible for their children animate persistent discourses of mother-blame and should be understood as a gendered driver of domestic and family violence.^[33]

These points were echoed in the data. Across jurisdictions, the research evidences persistent double standards in evaluating maternal versus paternal conduct. Survivors describe what they observed as an admiration for the paternal ‘heroic minimum’ alongside minute auditing of maternal care: ‘the father, no matter how little he does, is fantastic. And the mother is so disregarded, because that’s what she has to do’ (SPFG2D); a judge in England asked a mother, ‘“Why didn’t you tell him that he had to apply for schools?” And I said, “because he’s their dad [laughs], he should know that they’re going to start school,” like, and he said, “well, you know, don’t you think you had a responsibility to let him know?”’ (UKFG4D). A French stakeholder observed that ‘the mother has to prove that she’s been to all the parent–teacher meetings … On the other hand, the father, we don’t ask him anything’ (FRIL6). These are not isolated impressions. An Italian lawyer distilled the prejudice with precision: ‘We applaud if a father accompanies his children to school … it is taken for granted that the mother has to take care of the children’s schooling,’ adding, ‘There’s no magnifying glass on fathers’ (ITIL10).

The ideal also mandates facilitation of paternal contact despite abuse. Mothers reported being pressed to suppress trauma so that the children ‘are guaranteed a father figure, regardless of whether or not the father is adequate’ ( ITIL5). As one survivor put it, the maternal duty extended even to ensuring the father knew how to parent: ‘Because I was a woman, it was my duty to make sure he knew how to raise his children’ (UKFG4D). Unsurprisingly, this placed additional burdens on mothers, who were expected to put aside their experiences of trauma emanating from the abuse and perform an extraordinary level of labour to meet these norms: ‘We have to make a superhuman effort … because we are not fit to look after our children … they come to search us’; ‘I have done everything not to lose my children … to work, to behave well and do [my] job’ (ITFG1D).

When the ideal cannot be performed, because contact is unsafe or coercive, mother-blame often follows. A practitioner acknowledged a ‘prejudice against the mother’ (ITIL10) in protection assessments, and survivors describe threats of removal: ‘It was constantly, I will take your children’ (BFG1D). In one Italian case, the ideology surfaced as overt judicial disdain: ‘your son … will become … a faggot and a junkie, because you took a father away from him’ (ITFG1B). These patterns resonate with Smart’s account of law as a technology of moral regulation: family law does not merely adjudicate disputes but actively produces normative maternal identities.^[34] They also reflect Fineman’s critique of the ‘autonomy myth’ and the privatisation of dependency, through which responsibility for care and its associated risks is individualised and, in practice, disproportionately borne by mothers as default carers.^[35] Later socio-legal work on fatherhood politics has traced how ‘father involvement’ becomes a powerful organising principle in family justice, shaping both legal argument and institutional expectations about contact and co-parenting.^[36]

In contrast, the data reveal a complementary ideal of fatherhood: rights-bearing, symbolically central, lightly scrutinised. Minimal involvement attracts praise (‘we applaud if a father accompanies his children to school’) (ITIL10), and institutional actors often treat the father’s presence as a welfare good, irrespective of abuse histories. Several stakeholders attribute this to entrenched patriarchy and machismo; in Italy, one interviewee described an ongoing pull ‘to take us back to the fireplace’ (ITIL7). The effect is to centre paternal claims even where they conflict with safety: survivors were told that past violence was ‘historical’ (UKIL2) or reframed as mere ‘conflict’,^[37] while paternal contact proceeded. Stark’s^[38] account of coercive control helps explain why this interpretive gap is systemic rather than incidental. According to Stark’s analysis, abuse is often an ongoing pattern of domination, achieved through tactics such as isolation, intimidation, surveillance, degradation and financial restriction, rather than a series of discrete violent incidents. Read through an incident-based lens, this patterned control is easily reframed as ‘conflict’ or treated as ‘historical’ once physical violence is not recent, even where coercion continues post-separation via contact, handovers and legal processes. In turn, the paternal contact script remains intact because the central harm, ongoing control, fails to register as sufficient to disturb the presumption of beneficial involvement.

Recognising coercive control would legitimate maternal protection over paternal contact; as a result, the system often silences or reframes abuse. Research participants cited several instances where judges and experts explicitly shut down disclosures: ‘I do not want to hear about abuse. I am not interested. Do you understand how many people say that in my courtroom?’ (UKFG1A); ‘the criminal cases do not concern me’ (ITFG1B) or reinterpreting violence. ITFG3B shared how the psychologist in her case (referred to as a CTU) tried to convince her she was mistaken about what had happened to her:

I told the episode in which he at night wanted at all costs have sexual intercourse with me (but I did not) and he punched me on the head, all night like that … and the CTU told me ‘Ah, punches? That was not punching with meanness, it was to wake you up’. I was shocked, ‘Punching the head was not done with meanness? Definitely not with love!’ [The CTU replied] ‘Well, of course not even with love, but they weren’t punches’ … from here the CTU went on like that.

Mothers were pressed to ‘back down’ so contact could progress (UKFG4A). These are not merely credibility deficits (testimonial injustice) but part of a broader hermeneutic failure, where the shared interpretive resources of the forum do not permit experiences of coercive control to count as abuse within the best-interests analysis.^[39]

The paired ideals – intensive, facilitative motherhood and thin, valorised fatherhood – are thus mutually constitutive. They explain why courts (i) over-responsibilise mothers for both safety and contact, (ii) under-scrutinise fathers’ care, and (iii) gravitate toward managing rather than refusing unsafe contact. The quotes above demonstrate how this pairing is enacted in routine reasoning: admiration of the paternal heroic minimum, surveillance of maternal minutiae, pressure to guarantee a ‘father figure’ and overt moral rebuke where mothers resist. In short, the ‘ideal mother’ is juridically produced in tandem with a rights-inflected image of fatherhood, reproducing gender hierarchy in outcomes.

B. Contact, settlement and the institutional field of family law

Hester’s ‘three planets’ model, as outlined above, illuminates why family courts so often orbit a logic distinct from criminal justice and child protection: while the latter fora (at least in principle) centre safety and accountability, family courts prioritise settlement and the preservation of contact. That gravitational pull is amplified in England & Wales by the statutory presumption of parental involvement,^[40] which, though rebuttable, structurally places the burden of proof on protective mothers. Across the jurisdictions studied, the net effect is a reflex to manage risk so that contact can proceed, rather than to ask whether contact is compatible with safety.

A first manifestation is the downgrading and reframing of abuse once it enters the family law orbit. Participants describe a systematic translation of patterns into incidents, and then into irrelevancies: an English judge emphasised recency over pattern, ‘you haven’t actually got a long relationship with domestic violence in it’ (UKIJ1) and another professional queried the relevance of earlier episodes, ‘I do then wonder, to what extent, those earlier matters are relevant’ (UKIL2). Abuse is recast as a couple’s turbulence, ‘a couple in crisis’ (ITFG1), the ‘mishandl[ing]’ of a break-up (SPIO1), with a presumption of mutual responsibility: ‘it takes two to argue, doesn’t it?’ (UKIL7). These interpretive mechanisms become testimonial silencing: survivors recall being told by decision-makers, ‘I do not want to hear about abuse. I am not interested’ (UKFG1A) or, more bluntly, ‘the criminal cases do not concern me’ (ITFG1B). UKIJ5 acknowledged that survivors probably experience most of the process as ‘unfair’ as they are being ‘challenged’ for what ‘they know happened to them’. As one described it, ‘They don’t see coercive control. They do not see it’ (UKFG1A). What is probative of danger in criminal or child-protection fora is recategorised as non-probative ‘history’ in private law, the very cross-planet drift Hester predicts.

A second manifestation is the preference to manage risk in order to keep contact moving. The pressure is explicit. One survivor was told: ‘We can’t progress with contact until you back down … we’ll adjourn the non-molestation so we can proceed with [the] section 7’ (UKFG4A). In Italy, even with parallel criminal proceedings, courts and experts re-describe violence as ‘conflict’ and pursue arrangements that maintain paternal involvement; a national inquiry reported that in 96 per cent of separations involving violence, courts did not treat violence as relevant to custody, and juvenile courts allowed unsupervised contact in 54 per cent of cases.^[41] The Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s Everyday Business report^[42] evidences a similar dynamic in England & Wales: domestic abuse is frequently present in private law proceedings but is often not treated as determinative in decision-making about contact. The review found evidence of domestic abuse in 87 per cent of case files, yet in observed hearings abuse was treated as a ‘live issue’ in only 42 per cent of cases, despite being raised far more often. In outcomes, the report records substantial levels of unsupervised paternal contact notwithstanding abuse concerns, including 44 per cent of cases ending with unsupervised overnight contact (with a further 16 per cent providing for progression, most commonly toward unsupervised overnight contact), and it reports that section 7 recommendations frequently supported unsupervised arrangements even where abuse was raised.

These patterns exemplify an institutional preference to manage around risk via supervision orders or staged increases, rather than to refuse unsafe contact.

A third, infrastructural feature is planetary siloing and the resultant information deficit.^[43] Participants reported that ‘the police won’t just send us information because we request it. It has to be done formally, through the court; procedures are very strict and … rigid, so unless one asks, exactly the right sort of thing at the right time, crucial data never arrives’ (UKIO8). Family courts are ‘not being kept up to date with relevant criminal proceedings’ (UKIO9), with delays cascading into expert reporting and hearings. In practice, this keeps the family court on a contact-maintenance track while material about patterns, breaches or escalation sits elsewhere.

Finally, doctrinal backstops entrench these issues. The presumption of involvement in section 1(2A) of the Children Act 1989 in England & Wales frames participation as beneficial unless the contrary is shown, shaping professional heuristics about risk and structuring the burden of proof. Rights-based talk is also mobilised accordingly: Article 8 was the most encountered in the data, but largely in reference to men’s rights or fathers’ rights, while more specific and relevant human-rights arguments, such as those on Articles 2 and 3 of the ECHR, are pushed to the background as inapposite to private disputes. There was also evidence of a distinct lack of knowledge around the applicability of human rights: ‘there’s no duty on the state to protect individual mothers or fathers from domestic, from domestic abuse’ (UKIL2) or an appreciation that some of the relevant articles were absolute, and did not require a proportionality assessment.

Taken together and set alongside the feminist socio-legal literature on law’s moral regulation, maternal ideology and cross-system contradiction, the participants’ accounts depict a field effect. Abuse is downgraded or reframed when it enters the family law planet; courts manage rather than refuse unsafe contact; and statutory/procedural frameworks (such as the presumption of involvement) fragment inter-system coordination, burdening mothers’ cases by requiring them to rebut the risk.

C. Credibility economies: testimonial and hermeneutic injustice

Within the family law field, abused mothers routinely encounter two interlocking epistemic harms: testimonial deficits, in which their accounts are met with disbelief or subjected to heightened corroboration demands; and hermeneutic gaps, in which there are few, if any, legal concepts available to render coercive control intelligible to decision-makers. Under Fricker’s framework, these are not incidental errors at the margins of adjudication but patterned ways of wronging people as knowers, with predictable consequences for fact-finding, risk assessment and welfare analysis.

On Fricker’s account,^[44] testimonial injustice arises when a hearer assigns a speaker an unwarranted credibility deficit because of identity prejudice. The wrong is specifically epistemic: the speaker is unfairly thwarted in contributing knowledge to a shared inquiry; the downstream harms are practical and moral missed protections, legal mistakes and the erosion of self-trust. Fricker distinguishes incidental, one-off bias from systematic testimonial injustice, where credibility downgrades ‘track’ a stigmatised identity across contexts. The corresponding virtue, testimonial justice, involves a cultivated reflexivity about one’s prejudicial heuristics and corrective adjustment of credibility judgements. However, Fricker also recognises the need for institutional conditions (procedures, training, representation) that make virtuous hearing possible.

Fricker’s second category, hermeneutic injustice, is structurally prior and collective. It occurs where gaps in shared interpretive resources, the concepts and frameworks through which a society makes sense of experience, leave some people unable to render their experiences intelligible to themselves or to others. Such lacunae arise from unequal participation in the production of social meanings; those with less power contribute less to the ‘collective hermeneutical pool’.^[45] The primary harm is a form of cognitive disablement: without the requisite concepts, subjects cannot adequately understand, communicate or seek redress for what is happening to them (Fricker’s illustration is the period before ‘sexual harassment’ entered public vocabulary).

Within the family law field, abused mothers face two interlocking epistemic harms. On the testimonial side, their accounts are routinely met with disbelief, suspicion and heightened evidential thresholds. Participants describe being explicitly shut down by judges and experts, and practitioners corroborate a culture that reads disclosures as a strategy to win the case or to obtain legal aid,^[46] coupled with an overemphasis on false allegations despite their evidenced rarity. UKIJ1, together with UKIJ2, UKIL1 and UKIL7, highlighted the need to be wary of false allegations. SPIL8 held the view that there should be a general presumption of mistrust towards survivors’ reports of violence because false allegations were underreported: ‘The data on false reports are minimal, but it is also true that the data on false reports are those that end up in a house in which a situation of false reporting is reported and the person who filed the false report is convicted.’ The bar for belief is repeatedly raised: survivors’ testimony was often insufficient, with corroboration demanded, usually a criminal conviction for domestic abuse. One survivor was told by police that ‘there had to be a corpse or a forensic medical report … it was my word against his … better not to report’ (SPFG3B).

These practices instantiate what I term a credibility economy: a patterned discounting of survivors’ ex ante and an outsourcing of ‘truth’ to criminal law proxies, which is precisely the wrong direction to take when the abuse is non-physical and patterned rather than incident-based. The same deficits surface in relation to courtroom demeanour and routine interactions, with women describing being ignored or addressed in the third person, ‘as if I were … an empty chair’ (SPFG2C). UKFG3B related how the Cafcass officer in her case ‘gave me no eye contact, nothing, even when I’m trying to show her my scars, she, like, didn’t care’. Unsurprisingly, participants report secondary victimisation, being pushed towards reconciliation and blamed for the violence; when the ex-partner of UKFG2B became aggressive in court: ‘The judge obviously told him off, to calm down, and then looked at me, and said, you’ve created this circus.’

Others described being mistreated and bullied by experts. Aggressive stakeholders were a particular problem reported in Spain, which included one participant being called a ‘parasite’ in her hearing by the judge (SPFG2C), and there was also evidence of straightforward cruelty: ‘they always told me that I was no longer a mother, that I should get used to the idea that I was no longer a mother, that I should tell myself that my children never loved me, and they said very, very strong things to me’ (SPFG3D).

On the hermeneutic side, the family justice forum frequently lacks (or suppresses) the interpretive resources to register coercive control as a legally salient harm. As set out above, pre-separation abuse is often reclassified as ‘historical’ and thus irrelevant to present risk; violence is minimised as mere conflict or a couple’s mishandling of the break-up. Survivors often referred to the fact that family law professionals do not see coercive control and expert evaluators actively retrofit experience to available schemas. ‘Maybe your daughters watched a porn film at their dad’s place’ (FRFG3C) was one example of displacing sexual and physical violence into alternative narratives that the system already knows how to hear. The comparative picture is consistent: even where legislation recognises coercive control in principle, courts and experts continue to privilege discrete, incident-style evidence; cumulative patterns thus fall through the evidential net. In England & Wales, for example, recent appellate guidance recognises that private law adjudication has often struggled to register coercive and controlling behaviour as a legally salient harm, with abuse fragmented into discrete ‘incidents’ or downplayed as relationship ‘conflict’, and earlier (pre-separation) abuse treated as ‘historic’ and therefore of limited present relevance. The Court of Appeal has therefore stressed the need to evaluate patterns of coercion and control over time (and not allow schedules or incident-counting to distort the enquiry), because welfare and risk cannot reliably be assessed if cumulative harms fall outside the court’s interpretive frame.^[47]

Crucially, these testimonial and hermeneutic failures do not arise in a vacuum. They are reinforced by stock stereotypes, such as the idea that ‘women weaponise allegations’ or that ‘it takes two to argue’, and by institutional knowledge practices that narrow what counts as abuse. The data demonstrate that, in practice, decision-makers often give determinative weight to criminal convictions as the clearest proof of ‘real’ harm, treat an expert’s claimed neutrality as a proxy for reliability despite well-known methodological concerns^[48] and treat non-physical tactics (surveillance, intimidation, isolation, financial control) as non-events.

The result is a pipeline from stereotype to procedure. Testimonial discounting makes women’s accounts easier to disregard; hermeneutic capture then frames what remains as mere ‘conflict’ or ‘historical issues’. That interpretation, in turn, rationalises contact-first approaches and intensifies the monitoring of mothers, evaluating their ‘cooperation’ and holding them responsible for managing risk.

The result is also a level of institutional betrayal. Participants describe being coerced by process to disavow abuse so that contact could progress and being threatened with the removal of children if they resisted (‘If I was not cooperating, she would put him in a group home’ (ITFG2B)). The cumulative effect is that expectations of protection are systematically disappointed; many felt their solid evidence was disregarded (‘everything was proven, but nobody cares’ (BFG1A)). In this way, the court replicates core features of abuse, silencing, gaslighting, coercion under the guise of neutrality and converting epistemic injustice into material risk for women and children.

D. Parental alienation as epistemic technology

The research data also maps a clear line of descent from Gardner’s now-discredited PAS^[49] to a more diffuse but practice-ready repertoire centred on ‘parental alienation’ and, increasingly, on behavioural proxies such as ‘alienating behaviours’, ‘gatekeeping’, ‘instrumentalisation’ and ‘parental interference’. This shift is not simply a matter of updated language. It largely preserves the same inferential logic: a child’s fear, avoidance or distress – responses that may be intelligible in light of violence or coercive control – can be reinterpreted as the effect of maternal influence. Within that frame, mothers’ protective actions are readily recast as obstruction, and the very act of raising safety concerns becomes evidence of the harm said to be inflicted on the child.

The research participants described this process succinctly: as a Spanish judge put it, ‘they don’t use the term … but they use parental interference, gatekeeping … a morbid disorder’ (SPIJ5). In England & Wales, the functional pivot is similarly explicit: ‘the tag is what we get lost in … it’s the behaviour that’s the thing we need to keep focused on’ (UKIJ3). Put differently, the underlying logic persists even when the label is set aside.

Furthermore, the institutional machinery sustains this logic: on the supply side, expert evidence in family proceedings is lightly regulated and its methodological foundations have repeatedly been questioned. In England & Wales, Family Procedure Rules 2010 Part 25 and Practice Directions 25A/B lay down procedural duties for experts but do not mandate statutory regulation or stand-alone methodological standards beyond compliance with general duties and permission requirements. Further, in Re C (Parental Alienation; Instruction of Expert),^[50] the President of the Family Division highlighted the need for due rigour in expert instruction and noted the systemic issue of unregulated psychologists presenting contested opinions. Moreover, recent Family Procedure Rule Committee consultation material also records long-standing concerns about unregulated experts and variable standards of reliability.^[51] One study^[52] analysing 126 expert psychological reports from family law proceedings found that the quality of the reports was extremely variable, with two thirds rated ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’. There was also evidence of unqualified experts being instructed to provide ‘expert’ psychological opinion. Practitioners in England & Wales describe PA as ‘rife’ (UKIJ10), increasingly deployed, often tactically: ‘one party will allege domestic abuse, and the other party will allege parental alienation … lock horns’ (UKIL4). Cafcass officers reported using a PA instrument^[53] ‘you use it with a guide, “Children’s resistance and refusal to spending time with a parent”’ (UKIO6), subsequently reformulated as guidance on ‘alienating behaviours’; one judge praised Cafcass as ‘very good on it … we have one … leading academic … now a Cafcass officer’ (UKIJ10). Comparable dynamics were evident outside England & Wales: there was a particular problem in Spain, where Spanish psychosocial teams were asked to ‘explain the child’s rejection of the paternal figure’ (SPIO6), and survivors reported the use of a tool called Balora to assess it (SPFG2E). This demonstrates that even where family law professionals avoid the PAS/PA label to reduce appeal risk, family judges can request the same assessment but under a different heading.

The deployment of PA is also gendered. Across jurisdictions, the imagined alienator is the mother, with widespread belief that it is mothers who engage in PA. According to BIL12, PA is ‘mothers urging them [children] to behave like that, and it’s the mothers’ fault that the children don’t want to see their fathers’, whereas to UKIJ7 it is the result of ‘the mother trying to make herself more heroic, I suppose. I’m looking after you, I’m your carer, I’m this, he does nothing, he might turn up every now and again, he doesn’t do this, and he, you know, think back, he hit me, he did this, he did that’. Spain was the only site in which PA was explicitly described by professional stakeholders as being mobilised to keep children apart from the mother. Elsewhere, where the label itself is treated as taboo, a proliferation of reformulations performs similar work and is disproportionately directed at mothers. In England & Wales, for example, UKFG1D was accused of ‘parentification’ and UKFG3C of ‘parental annihilation’, while UKFG3A was told ‘it’s the mother’s fault, subconsciously, even though she’s maybe not saying anything, subconsciously’.

In France, two survivors were accused of ‘instrumentalisation’ (FRFG1A and FRFG3A), and in Italy, ITFG2B had ‘mother’s bubble’ used to express how she ‘didn’t cooperate and was obstructive’. ITFG3A was referred to as a ‘distancing mother’ who was ‘alienating’ and ‘manipulative’, while ITFG3C was told was she ‘does not legitimate the father’. In Spain, survivors reported the following terms used in their cases to imply PA: ‘the hindrance of the filial paternal bond’ (SPFG1F), ‘instrumentalization’ and ‘parentification’ (SPFG1A, SPFG2B, SPFG3C), ‘gatekeeping’ (SPFG3A and SPFG3C) and ‘manipulation’ (SPFG3C). Professional stakeholders also used similar terms, as set out above, when defining PA; however, Italy provided the greatest number and variety of reformulations, such as ‘malevolent mother’ (ITIJ2) and ‘the behaviours assumed by a parent that can condition or influence the children’s reaction’ (ITIJ4). Other terms used are ‘obstructing behaviour’ (ITIJ7), ‘belittling’ the other parent (ITIL1), ‘mother’s hostile behaviour’ as hindering the father–child relationship (ITIL10), ‘symbiotic mother’ (ITIL2) and ‘manipulation’ (ITIO2). Judges also describe a recurrent counter-allegation dynamic, in which PA is frequently invoked ‘as a corollary, as a counterargument to abuse’.^[54]

Against this background, official criticism has mounted. International human-rights mechanisms have condemned reliance on PA to negate abuse claims, characterising it as pseudoscience embedded in evaluative practice.^[55] Nationally, the French Ministry of Justice has issued guidance that discourages the use of PAS, warning that it ‘leads to the discredit of the voice of the mother … by inversing the responsibilities’.^[56] Spain has prohibited the concept in law and issued judicial guidance against its use,^[57] but the underlying ideology permeates reports and judgments through euphemisms (condicionamiento, instrumentalización, interferencia, manipulación, preocupación mórbida) and stigmatising maternal descriptors (celosa, vengativa, sobreprotectora, manipuladora). In Italy, despite the Supreme Court’s stance that PA lacks scientific status,^[58] the data shows that CTUs continue to deploy both the language and the logic of PA, routinely discounting children’s accounts as being ‘influenced by the mother’, with tangible consequences in individual cases. Awareness of the term’s contested status has therefore not translated into the abandonment of the concept. Rather, PA persists largely in substance if not in name. Legal actors repeatedly emphasised that, even if the label is avoided, the underlying ‘behaviours’ are said to remain. At the same time, the concept retains a public and professional afterlife: even a cursory online search reveals numerous legal chambers and psychologists openly advertising expertise in diagnosing PA, lending the framework an ongoing veneer of legitimacy despite sustained critique.^[59]

In sum, PA functions as an epistemic technology. It recodes protective actions and trauma-related child responses as evidence of manipulation, shifts the burden of recognising abuse onto criminal law thresholds that incident-based frameworks rarely satisfy, and legitimates expert-driven ‘solutions’, such as transfers of residence or so-called reunification therapies, that heighten scrutiny of mothers while normalising paternal contact. Formal denunciations of PAS at the jurisdictional level may have led to changes in terminology, but they leave the underlying inferences largely intact.

5. Conclusion

This article has argued that contemporary family‐court responses to domestic abuse are organised by a patriarchal logic that travels from ideals to institutions to knowledge practices, and into outcomes. The application of the four-part framework has shown how adjudication encodes an ideal of intensive, facilitative motherhood alongside a thin yet symbolically central fatherhood; those ideals are then embedded in a field oriented to settlement and the preservation of contact; decisions are filtered through credibility economies and hermeneutic gaps that disadvantage disclosures of coercive control; and PA persists as an epistemic technology that translates children’s fear and mothers’ protection into ‘manipulation’, even where the label itself is avoided. Viewed comparatively across Bosnia & Herzegovina, England & Wales, France, Italy and Spain, the same pattern appears in different doctrinal accents: contact-first managerialism, the historicising or minimising of abuse, heavy reliance on lightly regulated expertise, and low or delayed child participation. Together, these dynamics explain how a normative ideal of motherhood becomes adjudicative common sense with material consequences for women and children.

The contribution is both conceptual and empirical. Conceptually, reclassifying PA as a circulating set of inferences and tools, rather than a diagnostic thesis, clarifies why efforts confined to policing terminology rarely shift practice and why the inferences survive the labels. Bringing testimonial and hermeneutic injustice into view links courtroom credibility judgements to structural conditions of meaning-making and helps to name the institutional betrayal many participants describe when process reproduces core features of abuse, silencing, gaslighting and coercion under the guise of neutrality. Empirically, the study adds multi-site, multi-actor qualitative evidence that these mechanisms travel across systems notwithstanding different statutes and policy programmes, and it demonstrates how child-welfare rhetoric coexists with routines that treat resistance by mothers or children as a problem to be corrected rather than a signal of risk.

The implications for reform are clear. If the injustice is interpretive, reform must target logics as well as labels. A safety-first welfare analysis should require explicit reasoning with coercive control and child-focused perspectives; any presumption in favour of ongoing parental involvement must not override situations in which risk remains unresolved. Procedurally, this requires early and robust safeguarding triage, effective information-sharing across criminal, child-protection and family justice systems, and the avoidance of settlement pressures in cases involving allegations of violence, so as to prevent abuse being prematurely framed as ‘historical’ before the facts are established. Expert evidence must be subject to transparent methodological standards and independent regulation; PA-style constructs and so-called ‘reunification’ therapies should not be treated as default explanations or remedies but approached as contested claims requiring rigorous proof. Children’s participation must be meaningful, timely and properly supported, with clear reasons provided where their views are discounted. Finally, courts should engage with human-rights standards not as abstract background principles but as reason-giving law that actively shapes everyday adjudication.

A reformed family justice system would therefore look very different in practice. Disclosures of patterned abuse would trigger a safety-first analysis rather than a search for managerial mechanisms to facilitate contact at all costs; children’s voices would be heard early and without penalty; expert evidence would be regulated and transparent; and PA-style repertoires would no longer function as default lenses through which protection is recoded as obstruction. Most importantly, the juridical ideal of the ‘good mother’ would cease to operate as a yardstick for blame.

1. Globally, 81,000 women and girls were killed in 2020. Around 47,000 of them (58 per cent) died at the hands of an intimate partner or a family member, which equals to a woman or girl being killed every 11 minutes in their home. In 58 per cent of all killings perpetrated by intimate partners or other family members, the victim was a woman or girl. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, ‘Killings of Women and Girls by Their Intimate Partner or Other Family Members: Global Estimates 2020’ (November 2021) <https://www.hhri.org/publication/killings-of-women-and-girls-by-their-intimate-partner-or-other-family-members/> accessed 21 March 2026. ↑

2. Erin Reeves and others, ‘Incredible Women: Legal Systems Abuse, Coercive Control, and the Credibility of Victim-Survivors’ (2025) 31 Violence Against Women 767; Nicola Gavey and Julia Tolmie, ‘“… He’s just swapped his fists for the system.” The Governance of Gender through Custody Law’ (2012) 26 Gender & Society 239. Ministry of Justice, ‘Assessing Risk of Harm to Children and Parents in Private Law Children Cases: Final Report’ (June 2020) <https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/assessing-risk-of-harm-to-children-and-parents-in-private-law-children-cases> accessed 21 March 2026. ↑

3. See, detailing a good deal of this research, UN Rapporteur on Violence against Women and Girls, its Causes and Consequences, ‘Custody, Violence Against Women and Violence Against Children’ (2023) <https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-violence-against-women> accessed 21 March 2026. The author was the expert consultant on this report and assisted in its preparation. ↑

4. GREVIO, ‘Third Annual General Activity Report: Focus Section’ (2022) <https://rm.coe.int/prems-055022-gbr-2574-rapportmultiannuelgrevio-texte-web-16×24/1680a6e183> accessed 21 March 2026. This section was drafted by the author as a consultant for the Council of Europe. ↑

5. ibid. ↑

6. See n 4. See also Rosemary Hunter and others (eds), Domestic Abuse and Child Contact: International Experience (Routledge 2020). ↑

7. Hunter and others (n 6). ↑

8. See, among others, MS Milchman, ‘Misogynistic Cultural Argument in Parental Alienation Versus Child Sexual Abuse Cases’ (2017) 14(4) Journal of Child Custody 211; JB Kelly and JR Johnston, ‘The Alienated Child: A Reformulation of Parental Alienation Syndrome’ (2001) 39(3) Family Court Review 249; JS Meier and S Dickson, ‘Mapping Gender: Shedding Empirical Light on Family Courts’ Treatment of Cases Involving Abuse and Alienation’ (2017) 34(2) Law and Inequality 311; M Clemente and D Padilla-Racero, ‘When Courts Accept What Science Rejects: Custody Issues Concerning the Alleged “Parental Alienation Syndrome”’ (2016) 13(2-3) Journal of Child Custody 126. ↑

9. Pandemic constraints shifted interviews online; Bosnia & Herzegovina fieldwork was delivered by an experienced local partner; approvals were required in England & Wales to interview judges and Cafcass; analysis and cross-site coding were performed by the Oxford team on English translations and organised around five themes. ↑

10. Ethical approval was obtained from the University of Oxford (Social Sciences & Humanities Interdivisional Research Ethics Committee). The protocol was informed by WHO guidance on research on domestic violence. Safeguarding measures included: having a trained specialist from a domestic-abuse organisation present for survivor groups (in person and online); booking safe rooms via the support organisation; minimising direct questioning about violent incidents. ↑

11. Female interviewers; specialist support present; safe rooms; minimal probing; referrals; expenses only; strict confidentiality and secure data handling. ↑

12. Following a review of the operation of the presumption, the Government has recently announced that it will be repealing it as soon as parliamentary time allows: Ministry of Justice, ‘Government Action to Protect Children from Abusive Parents’ (22 October 2025) <https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-action-to-protect-children-from-abusive-parents> accessed 21 March 2026. ↑

13. For a comprehensive overview of this research see Ministry of Justice, ‘Assessing Risk of Harm’ (n 2); Jenny Birchall, ‘Two Years, Too Long: Mapping Action on the Harm Panel’s Findings’ (Women’s Aid 2022) <https://womensaid.org.uk/what-we-do/research/research-and-reports/> accessed 21 March 2026; Domestic Abuse Commissioner, ‘The Family Court and Domestic Abuse: Achieving Cultural Change’ (2023) <https://www.domesticabusecommissioner.uk/reports/> accessed 21 March 2026; Cordis Bright, ‘Research into Safeguarding Processes in Child Contact Centres in England: Final Report’ (Ministry of Justice 2023) <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/research-into-safeguarding-processes-in-child-contact-centres-in-england> accessed 21 March 2026; C Hargreaves and others, ‘Uncovering Private Family Law: How Often Do We Hear the Voice of the Child?’ (Nuffield Family Justice Observatory 2024); Ministry of Justice, ‘Review of the Presumption of Parental Involvement: Final Report’ (October 2025) <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/presumption-of-parental-involvement-review> accessed 21 March 2026. ↑

14. For an overview of the law and policy in each jurisdiction, see Part 3 of Shazia Choudhry and Daniela Rodriguez Gutierrez, ‘The Family Justice Response to Domestic Abuse: A Six Country Empirical Study’ <https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/the-family-justice-response-to-domestic-abuse> accessed 21 March 2026. ↑

15. ibid. ↑

16. See Supreme Court of Italy, 24 March 2022, Case No 9691. ↑

17. See Choudhry and Rodriguez Gutierrez (n 14). ↑

18. ibid. ↑

19. On maternal ideology, see, for example, Tricia Williamson and others, ‘Mothering Ideology: A Qualitative Exploration of Mothers’ Perceptions of Navigating Motherhood Pressures and Partner Relationships’ (2023) 88 Sex Roles 101; Catherine Verniers, Virginie Bonnot and Yvette Assilaméhou-Kunz, ‘Intensive Mothering and the Perpetuation of Gender Inequality: Evidence from Mixed Methods Research’ (2022) 228 Acta Psychologica 103614. On contact-first dynamics, see Adrienne Barnett, ‘Contact at All Costs? Domestic Violence and Children’s Welfare’ (2014) 26 Child and Family Law Quarterly 439. For critiques of parental alienation, see Joan S Meier and others, ‘Child Custody Outcomes in Cases Involving Parental Alienation and Abuse Allegations’ (2019) GWU Legal Studies Research Paper No 2019-56; Carrie Leonetti, ‘The Pseudoscience of “Parental Alienation Syndrome”’ (University of Auckland, 15 November 2023). ↑

20. Vivienne Elizabeth, Nicola Gavey and Julia Tolmie, ‘Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Resident Mothers and the Moral Dilemmas they Face During Custody Disputes’ (2010) 18(3) Feminist Legal Studies 253; Julie Wallbank, ‘Castigating Mothers: The Judicial Response to “Wilful” Women in Disputes over Paternal Contact in English Law’ (1998) 20(4) Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law 357; Felicity Kaganas and Shelley Day Sclater, ‘Contact Disputes: Narrative Constructions of “Good” Parents’ (2004) 12(1) Feminist Legal Studies 1. ↑

21. The presumption in section 1(2A) of the Children Act 1989 (inserted by Children and Families Act 2014, s 11) that parental involvement will further the child’s welfare, unless the contrary is shown, is an example of this. See also, Ministry of Justice, ‘Assessing Risk of Harm’ (n 2). ↑

22. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (WW Norton 1976). ↑

23. Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (Yale University Press 1996). ↑

24. Carol Smart, ‘The Woman of Legal Discourse’ (1992) 1 Social & Legal Studies 29; Carol Smart, ‘Deconstructing Motherhood’ in Elizabeth B Silva (ed), Good Enough Mothering? Feminist Perspectives on Lone Motherhood (Routledge 1996) 21; Carol Smart and others, ‘Residence and Contact Disputes in Court, vol 1’ (2003) Department for Constitutional Affairs Research Series 6/03; Carol Smart and others, ‘Residence and Contact Disputes in Court, vol 2’ (2005) Department for Constitutional Affairs Research Series 4/05. ↑

25. Marianne Hester, ‘The Three Planet Model: Towards an Understanding of Contradictions in Approaches to Women’s and Children’s Safety in Contexts of Domestic Violence’ (2011) 41(5) British Journal of Social Work 837. ↑

26. Richard Collier and Sally Sheldon (eds), Fathers’ Rights Activism and Law Reform in Comparative Perspective (Hart Publishing 2006). ↑

27. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD Factbook 2014: Economic, Environmental and Social Statistics (OECD 2014) DOI: 10.1787/factbook-2014-en. ↑

28. Vivienne Elizabeth, Nicola Gavey and Julia Tolmie, ‘Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Resident Mothers and the Moral Dilemmas They Face During Custody Disputes’ (2010) 18 Feminist Legal Studies 253; Shazia Choudhry, ‘When Women’s Rights are Not Human Rights: The Non-Performativity of the Human Rights of Victims of Domestic Abuse within English Family Law’ (2019) 82 Modern Law Review 1072; Jenny Birchall and Shazia Choudhry, ‘“I was punished for telling the truth”: How Allegations of Parental Alienation are Used to Silence, Sideline and Disempower Survivors of Domestic Abuse in Family Law Proceedings’ (2022) 6 Journal of Gender-Based Violence 115. ↑

29. Sylvia Walby, Theorizing Patriarchy (Basil Blackwell 1990); R Emerson Dobash and Russell Dobash, Violence against Wives: A Case against the Patriarchy (Free Press 1979) for two classical accounts of this. ↑

30. See Marion Coy and others, Picking Up the Pieces: Domestic Violence and Child Contact (Rights of Women 2012); Emma Katz, ‘Beyond the Physical Incident Model: How Children Living with Domestic Violence are Harmed by and Resist Regimes of Coercive Control’ (2016) 25 Child Abuse Review 46; David McLeod, Coercive Control: Impacts on Children and Young People in the Family Environment (Research in Practice 2018); Ravi K Thiara and Cathy Humphreys, ‘Absent Presence: The Ongoing Impact of Men’s Violence on the Mother–Child Relationship’ (2017) 22 Child & Family Social Work 137. ↑

31. Marianne Hester (n 25); Liza Thompson, ‘Impossible Expectations? Abused Mothers’ Experiences of the Child Protection and Family Court Systems’ (2020) 32 Child and Family Law Quarterly 31. ↑

32. Christine A Ateah and others, ‘Mothering, Guiding, and Responding to Children: A Comparison of Women Abused and Not Abused by Intimate Partners’ (2019) 34 Journal of Interpersonal Violence 3107. ↑

33. Jane Maree Maher and others, ‘Mothering through and in Violence: Discourses of the “Good Mother”’ (2021) 55 Sociology 659. ↑

34. Smart, ‘Deconstructing Motherhood’ (n 24). ↑

35. Martha Albertson Fineman, The Autonomy Myth: A Theory of Dependency (New Press 2004). ↑

36. Richard Collier and Sally Sheldon, Fragmenting Fatherhood: A Socio-Legal Study (Hart 2008). ↑

37. BIL7, UKIL7, FRIL8 SPIL6, SPIL8, SPIO1, SPIO5. ↑

38. Evan Stark, Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life (OUP 2007). ↑

39. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (OUP 2007). ↑

40. Children Act 1989, s 1(2A). See also Ministry of Justice, ‘Government Action’ (n 12). The Government has recently announced that this provision will be removed from the Children Act 1989. ↑

41. Commissione parlamentare di inchiesta sul femminicidio, nonche su ogni forma di violenza di genere, Relazione (June 2021) <https://www.invalsi.it/cug/documenti/> accessed 21 March 2026. ↑

42. Domestic Abuse Commissioner, ‘Everyday Business: Addressing Domestic Abuse and Continuing Harm through a Family Court Review and Reporting Mechanism’ (October 2025). ↑

43. This was also a major theme in Ministry of Justice, ‘Assessing Risk of Harm’ (n 2). ↑

44. Fricker (n 39). ↑

45. ibid. ↑

46. BIL7, BIO7, BIO9, UKIJ1, UKIJ8, UKIJ9, UKIL2, UKIL3, UKIL5, FRIJ1, FRIL1, FRIL2, FRIL3, FRIL4, FRIL6, FRIL7, FRIL8, FRIL9. FRIO2, ITIL9, ITIO2, SPIJ2, SPIL2, SPIL7, SPIL8, SPIL9, SPIL10, SPIO4, SPIO5, SPIO7. ↑

47. Re H-N and Others (Children) (Domestic Abuse: Finding of Fact Hearings) [2021] EWCA Civ 448; K v K [2022] EWCA Civ 468; A v B and C [2023] EWCA Civ 360. ↑

48. Family Procedure Rule Committee, ‘Consultation on the Standards Required for Expert Witnesses in Family Law Children Proceedings’ (2025) <https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/family-procedure-rules-new-draft-255a-changes-to-252-and-practice-directions-25b-and-25c/consultation-on-the-standards-required-for-expert-witnesses-proposed-practice-direction-changes> accessed 21 March 2026; Re C (Parental Alienation; Instruction of Expert) [2023] EWHC 345 (Fam). ↑

49. Richard A Gardner, ‘Recent Trends in Divorce and Custody Litigation’ (1985) 29(2) Academy Forum 3; Richard A Gardner, The Parental Alienation Syndrome: A Guide for Mental Health and Legal Professionals (2nd edn, Creative Therapeutics 1998); Richard A Gardner, ‘Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS): Sixteen Years Later’ (2001) 45(1) Academy Forum 10. ↑

50. See n 48. ↑

51. ibid. Under PD 25B there is no general requirement of external regulation. See also Rachael Grey, ‘“Catastrophic”: A Qualitative Exploration of Survivors’ Experiences of Expert Instruction in Private Law Child Arrangements Proceedings’ (2023) 45(4) Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law 344. ↑

52. Jane L Ireland, Evaluating Expert Witness Psychological Reports: Exploring Quality (University of Central Lancashire 2012). ↑

53. Presumably a reference to Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, ‘Alienating Behaviours / Parental Alienation’ (Child Impact Assessment Framework guidance) <https://www.cafcass.gov.uk/parent-carer-or-family-member/applications-child-arrangements-order/how-your-family-court-adviser-makes-their-assessment-your-childs-welfare-and-best-interests/alienating-behaviours> accessed 21 March 2026; CAFCASS Cymru, ‘Domestic Abuse and “Parental Alienation” Guidance’ (4 June 2025) <https://www.gov.wales/domestic-abuse-practice-guidance-cafcass-cymru> accessed 21 March 2026. ↑

54. UKIJ6, UKIO6 and UKIO8. ↑

55. Joint statement of the Committee of Experts of the Follow-up Mechanism of the Belém do Pará Convention and the Special Rapporteur (12 August 2022) <https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/issues/women/sr/2022-08-15/Communique-Parental-Alienation-EN.pdf> accessed 7 April 2026. ↑

56. Ministère de la Justice, Réponse ministérielle sur le syndrome d’aliénation parentale (12 December 2024) <https://www.village-justice.com/articles/syndrome-alienation-parentale-reponse-ministerielle-decembre-2024,51771.html> accessed 7 April 2026 (France, rejecting the scientific validity of SAP and its use in family proceedings). ↑

57. Council of Europe, Baseline Evaluation Report on Spain (GREVIO 2020) <https://rm.coe.int/grevio-s-report-on-spain/1680a08a9f> accessed 21 March 2026 (report noting introduction of a legal ban on the use of parental alienation syndrome in Spanish law). ↑

58. The Supreme Court of Italy stated that the exclusive custody of a minor cannot be based only on the diagnosis of parental alienation syndrome or ‘malicious mother’ syndrome, and that judges must verify the foundation, at the scientific level, of any advice that deviates from official medical science. See Supreme Court of Italy, 24 March 2022, Case No 9691. ↑

59. See, for example, Centre for Assessment and Family Therapy, ‘PA1 CPD’ (online course) <https://www.caftt.co.uk/courses/pa1-cpd> accessed 21 March 2026; Child Attachment and Family Trauma Training, ‘Attachment-led Theory and Practice in Parental Alienation (PA1)’ (CPD UK, online course) <https://www.cpduk.co.uk/courses/attachment-and-forensic-services-attachment-led-theory-and-practice-in-parental-alienation-pa1> accessed 21 March 2026; Family Separation Clinic <https://www.familyseparationclinic.com> accessed 21 March 2026. ↑