On 28th April Parliament debated the second reading of the Domestic Abuse Bill.
Philip Davies MP spoke what many of you will have been thinking, saying:
"Another amendment I will be tabling would extend the definition of domestic abuse to include parental alienation. This is where one parent deliberately alienates the other parent from a child. I have heard horrific stories affecting parents and children..." adding "I also want to amend the Bill so that false allegations of domestic abuse would be classed as domestic abuse in their own right. Some parents have their reputations and lives trashed by malicious, vexatious accusations, particularly in relation to domestic abuse. By including false allegations of domestic abuse in the definition of domestic abuse, we can hopefully reduce the instances of this occurring."
We have already written to thank him for his valuable contribution to the debate and raising the issues of parental alienation and false allegations. You can watch him speaking here.
Denial of contact is a dangerous, pernicious and very widespread form of abuse. There are domestic abuse courts these days, but they are concerned with female victims and certainly show no interest in dealing with contact denial. There is a need for urgent hearings to deal with these situations. Family courts already rarely exercise their powers to enforce their own orders (less than 1% of enforcements result in an order) and Covid-19 makes the matter far worse. In fact, with many parents at home, it would send a powerful message if judges made temporary change of residence orders when contact is maliciously denied.
The issue needs to be recognised and addressed. Please contact your MPs to urge them to back these amendments providing them with your own examples. If you want to find out who your MP is, please click here.
Here's the full transcript of the second reading.
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