“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, 1986
There is a particular kind of harm which occurs when children become caught in family relationships in which loving one parent appears to require rejecting the other. It is a harm which can be difficult to recognise, because the child’s behaviour may appear to be voluntary, deliberate and entirely consistent with their expressed wishes.
The behaviour alone cannot tell us which explanation is correct but what it can tell us is that something important is happening in the child’s relational world which requires our attention. And this is where I believe the professional commitment to neutrality needs to be challenged. Because when children have been forced to take sides, neutrality is not necessarily a protective position, and, in fact, when harmful relational dynamics are established, neutrality may become part of the mechanism through which that harm is maintained.
Neutrality is therefore not always the absence of intervention. Sometimes neutrality is an intervention which preserves the conditions under which the child has become psychologically constrained and in the case where children are being coerced into alignment with an abusive caregiver, neutrality is the very last thing we should be maintaining when we work with families.
When the child’s rejection becomes the explanation
In my clinical work with children who have become strongly aligned with one parent and rejecting of the other, I have frequently encountered situations in which the child’s expressed wishes have become the central organising principle of professional decision-making. The child says they do not want to see a parent and is adamant and fixed in their views. The child becomes distressed when contact is discussed and so many professionals conclude that the child’s wishes must be respected. Especially when, from the outside, such a close alignment looks like a loving relationship.
Of course children’s wishes must be heard and taken seriously. Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child establishes their right to express their views freely and to have those views given due weight according to age and maturity. But there is an important distinction between listening to a child and assuming that their expressed wishes provide a complete explanation of their circumstances. And this is that The capacity to express a wish is not necessarily the same as the freedom to form it.
Children such as Sara Sharif, killed by the father she said she wanted to live with, whilst rejecting the mother she said she was afraid of, are clear examples of the dangers facing coerced children in family separation. Look closer at Sara’s plight and it becomes clear that her abusive father was able to hide behind her alignment to him precisely because the professionals did not look or listen any further than the words she said and the way she behaved. If those same professionals had looked even closer however, through a lens which allowed them to understand how coerced children behave, they would have heard the voice of her authentic self, the voice she could not speak in but the voice that through her behaviours, came across loud and clear.
Abused children do not wear t shirts with ‘I am being abused’ written on them, neither are they able to say, without an extraordinary amount of risk, ‘this person or that is abusing me.’ Sometimes children who align and reject are aware of their fear of a parent and sometimes they are not and whether they are or not, depends upon the attachment adaptations they make.
Understanding this becomes especially important when we understand children’s attachment relationships because children do not develop their sense of self independently of their caregivers. They develop within relationships of dependency, in which the availability, responsiveness and emotional stability of adults are central to their experience of safety.
Attachment theory has long recognised that children adapt their behaviour to preserve proximity to caregivers, particularly when those relationships are experienced as uncertain or frightening (Bowlby, 1969; Main & Hesse, 1990). A child who experiences a caregiver’s distress, withdrawal or hostility when expressing love for another parent may begin to organise their behaviour around avoiding those reactions. Over time, what begins as an adaptation to relational pressure may become an increasingly rigid way of thinking and feeling. The child may cease to speak positively about the parent in the rejected position, they may deny affectionate memories, interpret ordinary interactions negatively and eventually appear unable to hold positive and negative feelings about that parent simultaneously. This can be understood through the lens of defensive psychological splitting: a process in which conflicting emotional experiences become difficult to integrate.
The critical question is not simply what the child says but what has happened in the child’s relational world to make that position necessary, meaningful or psychologically protective. And in the almost two decades that I have done this work, children who were in a strong alignment with a parent and who rejected the other, especially when this is accompanied by disdain and contempt, were found to be suffering abuse behind closed doors.
This is why alignment with one parent and rejection of the other is such a red flag in divorce and separation and it has nothing to do with conflict, contact or complex divorce, those three words that so many professionals seem to think are at the heart of this issue. The problem we are dealing with is attachment trauma, which demands investigation, precisely because it is a red flag for hidden harm at home.
The problem with professional neutrality
Professional impartiality is essential and from the outset we must not assume that one parent is responsible for a child’s rejection because of their gender, their position in family proceedings or the intensity with which they present their concerns. We must investigate allegations of abuse from wherever they come from and we must consider the child’s experiences of both parents. We must distinguish between rejection arising from frightening or harmful parenting and rejection arising from coercive influence.
Kelly and Johnston (2001) argued for a child-centred, systemic understanding of severe parent-child relationship difficulties, recognising that a range of parental, familial and contextual factors can contribute to rejection.
The Association of Family and Conciliation Courts (2022) similarly identifies the need to consider multiple explanations for children’s resistance to parental contact, including maltreatment, family violence, compromised parenting and influencing behaviours.
But professional impartiality is not the same as therapeutic neutrality. Impartiality is about how we establish what is happening. whilst protective partiality is about what we do when harm is identified.
A professional who remains neutral between an adult who is coercing a child and a child who is adapting to that coercion is not necessarily protecting the child’s interests. They may instead be allowing the existing relational arrangement to continue unchallenged.
Neutrality is itself an intervention
This is the central argument I want to make. In therapeutic work, choosing not to act does not mean that nothing happens. Family relationships are dynamic systems and the behaviour of each person influences the behaviour of others, whilst the responses of professionals can become part of the system within which the child is living.
When a child has learned that maintaining the relationship with one caregiver requires rejecting another however, professional acceptance of that rejection without adequate investigation may reinforce the child’s existing adaptation. The child may experience the professional response as confirmation that the arrangement is permanent, that their rejection must be maintained, or that there is no safe space in which to explore conflicting feelings.
This is not an inevitable consequence of respecting a child’s wishes. It is a risk which arises when those wishes are treated as sufficient explanation without understanding the relational conditions in which they developed.
The professional is never entirely outside the relational system and interventions which claim to be neutral, in situations where children are being coerced, leave the oppressed further harmed and the perpetrator protected and decisions to be silent, to withdraw or to avoid challenging established patterns of behaviour have serious consequences.
Our decisions, including decisions to remain silent, to withdraw, to accept an explanation or to avoid challenging established behaviour, have consequences.
The child who cannot afford to feel differently
One of the most important questions we can ask when working with children who reject a parent is whether the child feels psychologically free to experience the relationship differently.
Can the child remember loving the rejected parent without becoming anxious?
Can they acknowledge positive experiences without feeling disloyal?
Can they express anger towards the parent with whom they are aligned?
Can they tolerate the possibility that both parents have strengths and weaknesses?
Can they explore uncertainty without fearing that an important attachment relationship will be threatened?
Attachment research has demonstrated the complexity of children’s responses to frightening or contradictory caregiving experiences. Main and Hesse (1990) explored how a caregiver who is simultaneously a source of comfort and fear may create an unresolved approach-avoidance dilemma for the child. Attachment theory offers an important developmental insight: children’s responses to relational threat may be organised around preserving safety and proximity rather than expressing unconstrained preferences.
Children’s rights require more than listening
Article 12 of the UNCRC is frequently invoked when professionals discuss children’s wishes and feelings. Less frequently discussed alongside it is Article 19, which establishes children’s right to protection from physical and mental violence, abuse and maltreatment.
These rights are complementary because the right to be heard does not remove the right to be protected..
In England and Wales, the Children Act 1989 similarly requires the court, when applying the welfare checklist, to consider children’s ascertainable wishes and feelings alongside their emotional needs, the harm they have suffered or may suffer, and other relevant welfare considerations.
The child’s voice is therefore a vital part of understanding their welfare, but it is not the entirety of that understanding because when children have become caught in coercive relational circumstances, the professional task is to create the conditions in which their experiences can be explored safely. Which may mean protecting a child from an abusive parent even when that child protests strongly, professes deep love for the parent they are being protected from and argues that their choices are entirely their own.
When harm has already been established
There is a further distinction which is especially important for therapists working with children involved in family court proceedings. Where a court has made findings that coercive or abusive behaviour has occurred, those findings provide the factual framework within which the professional is required to work. This does not mean that the child’s subjective experiences become irrelevant, or that every aspect of the child’s presentation has been explained. It means that the professional should not approach established findings as though they were merely competing parental allegations.
Therapeutic work must be grounded in the factual circumstances which have been determined, while remaining attentive to the child’s individual needs, experiences and safety. Where the findings establish that a child has been subjected to coercive pressure to reject a parent, the therapeutic task cannot simply be to validate the child’s rejection and leave the underlying coercion unaddressed.
Taking the child’s side
Elie Wiesel’s words were spoken in the context of profound human suffering and the moral responsibility to resist indifference. For me they are apt when considered in the light of the serious psychopathology which is seen in situations where children strongly align and reject in divorce and separation.
The ethical challenge they present is relevant to anyone entrusted with protecting vulnerable people, especially when abusive parents may be hiding behind a child’s alignment and proclamations of love and preference. Because when power is unequal, neutrality may preserve the circumstances in which harm is occurring.
Children are inherently dependent upon adults. They cannot simply leave harmful relational environments, negotiate independently with caregivers or reliably identify the psychological adaptations they have developed in response to fear. They need adults who are willing to understand what is happening and take responsibility for responding.
This does not require us to become advocates for one parent against another, leaving our neutrality behind requires something more demanding than that. It requires us to distinguish the child’s stated position from the circumstances which may have shaped it. It requires us to recognise that respecting children’s wishes does not mean abandoning them to decisions they may have been pressured into making. And it requires us to understand that professional silence and inaction are not always harmless.
Protective partiality towards the child is not a departure from ethical practice, it is, instead an essential part of it. We take the child’s side when we investigate rather than assume, when we recognise abuse, wherever it originates, when we challenge coercion rather than accommodate it.
We take the child’s side when we protect their right to experience relationships without fear, pressure or the threat of losing someone they love. And we take the child’s side when we are willing to act, even when acting is difficult.
We must be impartial in our assessment of adults, rigorous in our examination of evidence and humble about what we do not know.
But we must never be neutral about a child’s right to be safe from harm.
References
Association of Family and Conciliation Courts (2022). Guidelines for Parenting Plan Evaluations in Family Law Cases. AFCC Guidelines.
Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss: Volume 1. Attachment. Basic Books.
Children Act 1989, section 1. UK legislation.
Johnston, J. R., Walters, M. G., & Friedlander, S. (2001). Therapeutic work with alienated children and their families. Family Court Review, 39(3), 316–333. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.174-1617.2001.tb00613.x.
Kelly, J. B., & Johnston, J. R. (2001). The alienated child: A reformulation of parental alienation syndrome. Family Court Review, 39(3), 249–266. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.174-1617.2001.tb00609.x.
Main, M., & Hesse, E. (1990). Parents’ unresolved traumatic experiences are related to infant disorganized attachment status: Is frightened and/or frightening parental behavior the linking mechanism? In M. T. Greenberg, D. Cicchetti, & E. M. Cummings (Eds.), Attachment in the Preschool Years: Theory, Research, and Intervention (pp. 161–182). University of Chicago Press.
United Nations (1989). Convention on the Rights of the Child, Articles 12 and 19. UNICEF full text.
Wiesel, E. (1986). Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, Oslo, 10 December 1986. Nobel Prize official transcript.
As we are now heading towards the publication of the Journey of the Alienated Child, I will shortly announce the work that we will be doing to raise wider awareness of the needs of alienated children around the world. This publication marks the beginning of the worldwide delivery of a child focused, relational repair pathway which can be utilised by parents in the rejected position as well as the professionals who support them. Based upon the Coerced Alignment framework developed by the Family Separation Clinic, the Journey of the Alienated Child argues that the alignment and rejection behaviour is a red flag which must always lead to depth assessment and a clear framework of findings upon which intervention can be delivered. The Journey of the Alienated Child offers a detailed examination of this presentation in a child through an attachment and neuropsychological lens and offers a pathway through what is a highly contested issue when it is considered within the framework of parental rights. At the Family Separation Clinic we do not consider this to be a parental rights issue but a serious safeguarding issue which flags the high possibility of hidden harm at home.
The Journey of the Alienated Child is the first in a series of books which offer real hope for wider acceptance and recognition of this hidden trauma as well as a route to healing the harms that some children suffer when parents decide to separate.
