Karen Woodall – Psychotherapist, Writer, Researcher, Trainer

There is a crisis unfolding in the family courts around the world — one that is hidden in plain sight. It is a crisis born not of ignorance, but of ideology and at its centre are children, suffering silently, as the adults around them fail to see the truth of the harm they are enduring.

The family court system in England and Wales is increasingly being pulled into the orbit of a shared delusion — a sweeping narrative, largely driven by vocal women’s rights campaigners, that aims to convince the world that abusive fathers are using claims of “parental alienation” to gain custody of children, at the expense of protective mothers. This shared delusion, which has one repeated narrative, that the family courts are a hotbed of misogynistic control of women and children, has taken root once again, fed by the narratives of mothers who have been found to have harmed their children, supported by academics who take every word these women say as truth.

But what this narrative conceals — indeed, what it actively denies — is the complex and often inverted reality of abuse in the families where children align and reject, the abuse of children who are made to believe that a parent is going to harm them, the abuse of children who are abducted to places such as northern Cyprus, the abuse of children who are fed drugs and then bound into a conspiracy theory which attempts to hide the mother’s abuse.

Those of you who read regularly will know the BBC Documentary ‘Mums on the Run’ which was based upon the self reports of mothers found to have abused their children in the Court process, who then fled to northern Cyprus to evade the child protection process which was underway. Recently, one of those mothers was found and brought back to the UK, where she is now in prison awaiting sentence for abuse and abduction. Championed by women’s rights campaigners, she, along with other mothers who have been found to have abused their children, are all part of the widespread belief, promoted by campaigners in the US and UK, which says that mothers in such circumstances never abuse and fathers are always dangerous and findings made by the Court do not count because they are made by old white men. It is a binary splitting narrative which has no basis in reality and does not allow for safeguarding procedures to be properly implemented in the family courts.

Unfortunately, some legal people in the UK, are now showing their lack of understanding of serious attachment trauma, perhaps unconsciously displaying their own internal biases and ideological allegiances, which presumably suit their own personal agenda more than thinking about this issue from a depth psychological perspective. Others, who should centre the needs of children at the heart of all of their work, appear to be more fascinated with coercive control of women than they are by coercive control of children and so we are therefore back in dangerous territory for any child of divorce and separation who lives with a mother or father who has a personality or psychiatric trait of concern or who is captured in the psychological net of coercive control.

I work with these children every day. And I see a different story to that which is told by the campaigners who believe that women do not abuse their children. I see children who are being seriously emotionally and psychologically harmed by the parent they were aligned with prior to intervention. Sometimes those children are physically abused and sexually abused too. In a signficant number of these cases, it is mothers who are exerting controlling, coercive, and psychologically abusive behaviours — behaviours that the courts are being encouraged, by women’s rights campaigners, to ignore.

When the Narrative Becomes the Law

In recent years, a growing cohort of campaigners has been extraordinarily effective at embedding a distorted framework into both public discourse and judicial reasoning. The argument goes something like this: If a mother is rejected by a child, it is always because she is doing something to cause it and the father is protective. If a father is rejected, it is because he is abusive and the child is bravely resisting and the mother is protective.

This thinking has become so entrenched that any decision to place a child with their father — even when that decision is backed by clear findings of harm caused by the mother — is automatically cast as suspect. Instead of examining the facts, professionals are increasingly trained to look for confirmation of a pre-decided script. The result? A catastrophic inversion of reality, where abusive behaviours are excused, minimised, or outright denied if they come from the ‘right’ parent — and where the child’s suffering is rendered invisible.

What is worse in this scenario, is that mothers who are rejected are being blamed and shamed for this, or, alternatively, they are told that they must reframe their experience and call it CAMS (Child and Mother Sabotage), a term invented by academics who made it up on the basis of the self reports of abusive mothers. There is no such thing as CAMS, it is as unscientific as the label parental alienation and the theory upon which it is built. It is simply another attempt to create a litigation tool to ensure that someone wins in Court. But whoever wins in the current battle of the labels which is going on, it certainly isn’t children.

The Invisibility of Harm

The psychological abuse of children in the context of family separation is often covert and insidious. It does not leave bruises. It leaves fractured identities, false beliefs, and enduring attachment trauma. When a parent uses the child as a weapon in their war against the other, it is the child who becomes the battleground — their developmental integrity sacrificed for adult needs.

These children are taught to split the world into good and bad. They become enmeshed in a delusional loyalty to the abusive parent, often parroting beliefs that are not their own. Their trust in themselves, in others, and in the safety of emotional intimacy is profoundly compromised. And yet, because they say they feel “safe” with the aligned parent, professionals too often take that statement at face value.

This is where the family court fails them. By mistaking fear for preference, and coercive attachment for genuine bond, the court becomes complicit in sustaining the very harm it ought to protect against.

Differentiation

Too many, in legal systems around the world, remain unable — or unwilling — to discern the psychological dynamics at play in these cases. Despite the growing body of clinical literature on psychological splitting, attachment disruption, and trauma bonding, too many legal people continue to rely on a surface-level reading of the child’s behaviour and stated wishes.

Worse still, it is clear that the legal systems which should be protecting children, are influenced by external pressure — from campaigners, academics, and even within the legal community — to discount the concept of alienation entirely. The result is a legal culture that is increasingly ideologically aligned and professionally ill-equipped to recognise relational abuse.

It is currently, just not politically convenient to say that some mothers and some fathers abuse their children — emotionally, psychologically, and through coercive control. It does not fit the narrative. But we must say it. We must say it because it is true, and because children’s lives are being devastated by the drive to draw everyone into a shared delusion which has no basis in reality.

Defending the Child, Not the Adult

The central duty of the family court is to the child, not the parent — not the campaigner, not the professional interest group. And yet, in the face of increasingly polarised narratives, the child’s voice has become distorted — a ventriloquised echo of the more powerful adult’s needs and the more powerful lobby groups who support them.

In my work I have learned that if we allow the shared delusion to drive those of us who understand what is happening to children away, abused children in divorce and separation will be silenced once more. I therefore long ago stopped deferring to political movements and started attending to clinical realities and I remind myself every day that this abuse is not a binary narrative and protection of children, can never be achieved by ideological means.

Will our legal systems reclaim impartiality and courage, or will they sink, as they did last time, into an inability to work with the complex and often nuanced dynamics which occur in families where children align and reject. Will the Courts find the strength to listen to the depth and breadth of the problem facing silenced children of divorce or will it look away, relying on the claims of those with the biggest voices or the most control over the media? Who knows but what we do know, is that the stories being told in the media, such as the ‘mums on the run’ documentary, hide a serious and dark truth, alienated children are abused children, their childhoods are being stolen by parents who take the law into their own hands and by campaign groups who justify this by using ideological argument.

It is a dangerous world to work in but it is a far more dangerous world for children to grow up in. We can only hope that in the coming months, as the reality of what we are fed by the ideologically driven media, unfolds, the sharing of this particularly harmful delusion, will begin to fall away.