Press Releases

Sign a Petition to Make Parental Alienation a Criminal Offence

25th April is Internationl Parental Alienation Awareness Day

Each year thousands of children, who love both their parents, find themselves orphaned from one parent due to the poisonous behaviour of the other. Children are put under so much pressure to hate a parent that it becomes 'the real love that dare not speak its name' as Bob Geldof once said. It is devastating to target parents whose loving relationships end up slowly but surely being destroyed . It is simply child abuse and a form of coercive control, the effect of which is every bit as harmful as other forms of criminal abuse. This petition addresses this very comomn scourge and deserves everyone's support. Please SIGN THIS PETITION and share it.

Smash the 10,000 Signatures Target

10,000 signatures are needed for the government to have to take notice or at least acknowledge the petition. So please SIGN IT AND SHARE IT. If everyone who receives this email signs and then forwards it to other family members, friends and colleagues who then do so too, we will smash the 10,000 limit and make some progress.

To achieve our objective of ending this abuse we'll also need to keep up our future campaigns, so please encourage family and friends to REGISTER WITH US AT FNF AS WELL, FOR FREE.  They'll be able to receive our Newsletters, progress reports and other updates.

Further Action

Please ask to meet your MP or write to them. Tell them of your experience of parental alienation, tell them how many people have signed the petition to outlaw it and how ineffective family courts currently are at dealing with it. Tell them that the World Health Organisation (WHO) is considering formal recognition of PA and that the recent research by Colorado State University identifies it as both child abuse and a form of intimate partner violence. Suggest that your MP contacts the relevant ministers at the Ministries of Justice and Health to get their response. Please feel free to share any responses you get with us at admin@fnf.org.uk (we will not publish identifying details without your permission).

Thank you!

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Recent Parental Alienation Articles of Interest 

A case of parental alienation that started in 2012 finally led to the child living with his dad last year when professionals and the court accepted that the mainpulation and hate would not end otherwise. The court report is published after the mother lost her attempt last month to appeal the judgement of the court in yet another attempt to exclude the father from their son's life. The mother had a QC to represent her while the father was a litigant in person. A ray of hope! The Guardian covered the story under the somewhat alarmist headline Boy must leave mother with 'hateful feelings' for father, judge rules.

Allegations of domestic violence form part of the weaponary of parental alienation, leaving family courts having to distinguish the difference between genuine abuse and false or unfounded allegations that are themselves a form of abuse. We hear from dads who have been the subjects of violence, only to find this turned around to suggest that they were the aggressor - attack as a form of defence. New research being published in Canade concludes that the "gender lens" is counter-productive to families and domestic violence is "largely gender symmetric". Authorities such as the police and other organisations dealing with allegations of abuse often demonstrate "gender asummetry" in ignoring men who make complaints or suffer abuse more than when women do. The article on this was published by the Toronto Sun. We have obtained a copy of the research and have requested permission to share it with you.

There was also an article on BBC online (and The Times) about an abduction to Ukraine of daughters being alinenated from their millionaire father. "She is instilling hate in one of the few people who will always love them unconditionally, who is always going to hug them" the father told The Times. "Pappa is bad" said the daughter. Abduction is a feature of alienation, as is moving hundreds of miles to frustrate relationships. Such chocking alienation can affect parents regardless of whether they are poor or multi-millionaires as in this case reported a week ago after the judge gave permission for the mother to be named as the children were suffering significant harm.

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World Health Organisation (WHO) Considers Formal Recognition of Parental Alienation

The World Health Organisation is to decide in May whether Parental Alienation is to be added to its International Classification of Diseases. If it does, it will be a boost to raising awareness of this pernicious abuse of children and of one of their parents whom the child feels pressured to reject. Last month we heard from a dad who raised the possibility in court only to be told by the Cafcass Family Court Advisor and the judge that PA does not exist. Read the full article on this for more information.

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Respond to Government Consultation on Social Security and Separated Parents
Dealine for submissions is Tuesday 16th April 2019

The Social Security Advisory Committee (SSAC). is a statutory government agency that advises on complex social security regulations. They are asking organisations and individuals to submit evicence that help them to understand how living standards and well-being are affected by:

• child maintenance
• child benefit
• the legacy benefit system (for example Child Tax Credit, Housing Benefit and Working Tax Credit)
• Universal Credit

This is a rare opportunity to help the government to understand what works and what does not with a focus particularly on parents who pay Child Maintenance.- most such investigation tend to look at the 'single parent'.

Whist the work will focus on the issues around benefits, including Universal Credit, it will consider other matters that affect paying parents.

Examples of issues that you may be able to assist with:

• Unaffordable assessments for Child Maintenance
• 20% ‘collect’ system surcharge
• Issues with variations of pay e.g. if self-employed
• Work that does not pay
• Shared parenting not taken into account fairly
• Housing cost issues
• Second family costs
• Travel cost issues
• Assessments that don’t reflect court orders or promote breaking them
• Overturned court agreed maintenance
• etc

Responses should be emailed by 16th April 2019 to ssac.consultation@ssac.gov.uk. See specific questions being asked and further details of the consultation. 

Focus Groups - Thank you to everyone who responded to our call for participants in focus groups on 22nd April 2019.. We will confirm details of those to take part shortly.

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4.5 Million Parents Suffer Intimate Terrorism

Their Children Abused by Parental Alienation

Researchers at Colorado State University (CSU) have published a report identifying Parental Alienation as a form or child abuse and intimate terrorism.

Associate Professor of Psychology at CSU, Jennifer Harman estimates that this affects 22 million American parents. Projecting the US figures suggests 4.5 million UK parents with alienated children!

Harman, an expert in power dynamics, says the following:

“You have to treat an alienated parent like an abused person.
You have to treat the child like an abused child.
You take the child out of that abusive environment.
You get treatment for the abusive parent, and you put the child in a safe environment – the healthier parent.”

We are drawing this to the attention of Cafcass who, having moved forward in accepting that alienation, or as they prefer to call it 'unjustified rejection' by a child of a parent, they still sorely lack plans for appropriate interventions. What are they waiting for?

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