Cafcass and Parental Alienation

Cafcass already has long lists of potentially-abusive behaviour where parents can buttress their case, and queer the other parent’s pitch, by making allegations.

PA has recently been added to that list: in the form of a PA-abuse allegation by the one parent, and counter-allegations - of a false allegation - by the other.

Opportunities for inter-parental strife are augmented in the absence of Cafcass making actual provision for actual PA. Neither the Courts nor Cafcass are in a position to make useful inroads into the problem. The overlooked basics are:

1. PA is largely the result of our guidance free system making a rod for its own back

   - there is no guidance to say that a parent should make proper provision for access after separation; so proper provision is not made; so by the time the dispute reached court, the child-parent relationship has eroded:

   Parent A: little Timmy does not want to see you

   Parent B: that’s because you’ve alienated him

   Parent A: oh no I haven’t

   Parent B: oh yes you have

   The scene is set for interminable and irresolvable did/didn’t litigation.

2. The Courts and Cafcass cannot address the problem - because the horse has yet to be set before the cart. PA is is the wilful distortion of the child-parent relationship - and it subsists in a context where there is no concept of what should happen or what things look like if the relationship is undistorted. PA cannot be identified, but, if it could, there is no reason to do anything about it; continuance of the child-parent relationship is not a matter of import.

A well-informed speech by Andrew Bridgen MP at the 2018 International PA Conference (click here) focused on the central point: if the Courts are to have an informed approach to parental alienation, the Courts have to know what that approach is.

In other words, PA needs to be brought into the Courts’ framework of general knowledge. But there is no framework of general knowledge: ‘every case is different’. Here as everywhere else, out country is decades behind.

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