My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 2 and 4. I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Altmann and Lady Watkins of Tavistock, and the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, for their support.
I would like to start by telling you a story. In 1994 a mother—a British citizen—sent her two sons aged nine and seven to spend their holiday with their father in Germany as per their custody agreement. The children never returned. After four months of separation, in which the father blocked all contact between mother and sons, even on the telephone, they met again at a German family court. The older son greeted the mother by hitting and kicking her. The younger son turned his head away and refused to look at her. When they had set out for Germany, they had been normal loving sons.
This was the beginning of a long separation that lasted for nine years—until the day when the older son, having reached his majority, came to London with his younger brother to see the mother. During those nine years, the mother had a few snatched meetings with her children—a total of 24 hours and always in Germany in the presence of a third party. The children were not allowed to visit her, and the mother was never allowed to reach them on the telephone, even to wish them a happy birthday or a merry Christmas.
The mother went to the courts time and again to find justice—to no avail and to her financial ruin. She was repeatedly blocked by the argument that her sons did not want to see her any more. The argument was sustained by the children’s apparent hostility towards the mother, a hostility instilled by the father’s relentless denigration of the mother and her family.
That mother was me. This is the reality of parental abduction: my lived experience. Today, unlike many fathers and mothers who have suffered in the same way, I am happily reunited with my sons. But make no mistake—it has been a very difficult road. It took more than our years of separation to repair our relationship, and it has scarred me for life. It also led me to create a charity to fight the evil of missing and abducted children and the use of children as weapons of war by one parent against the other. These campaigns led me to be appointed to this noble House and compel me to address this issue today.
There is much debate about parental alienation. Cafcass, which has first-hand experience of dealing with children, defines it as a situation where
“a child’s resistance or hostility towards one parent is not justified and is the result of psychological manipulation by the other parent.”
It is precisely this type of psychological manipulation that should be explicit in the Bill. Parents in abusive relationships should not have to endure what I did, and neither should their children; that is the purpose of these amendments.
There is an argument that these matters fit better in legislation dealing with child abuse. I do not agree—we must distinguish means from ends. The Serious Crime Act 2015 condemns coercive, controlling behaviour in a relationship; what behaviour could be more coercive
and controlling than a parent using a child as a means to overwhelm the other parent? It is domestic abuse, fair and square. As his Honour Judge Stephen Wildblood QC put it:
“The problem with Parental Alienation is that it’s not about the child at all. It is about the adults. It is about adult issues. It is not child-focused ... It’s using children as an instrument of that parent’s skewed emotions; it is in every sense wrong”.
I am aware that some in this House are concerned that parental alienation is used by men as a tool to silence victims of domestic abuse, but that is why we have judges: to give careful consideration to all the evidence and distinguish truth from falsehood. Section 1 of the Children Act 1989 tells us to treat the child’s welfare as “paramount”. How can judges possibly do that if they cannot tell the difference between a genuine case of parental alienation, another concocted by an abuser-parent and yet another where a child is justified in accusing a parent of abuse?
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From my lived experience as a victim-parent and charity campaigner for 19 years, I can tell noble Lords how easy it is to spot a genuine case of parental alienation. Children who reject a parent because of the harm that the parent has done to them do not display signs of what psychologists call “psychological splitting”, which denotes a child who has been the subject of systematic indoctrination. The defining feature of a parentally alienated child is the intense hostility to, and outright rejection of, the targeted parent. The child’s bifurcation between hostility to the targeted parent and loyalty to the alienating parent is absolute. The process of indoctrination, usually before a court hearing, moves fast. It can take just four months, as it did in my case, and the longer the child is without contact with that parent, the deeper the damage. This is why the courts must intervene quickly to break the creation of this vicious circle; the alternative is to wreck lives and destroy whole families.
I am more than alarmed that the Ministry of Justice should turn to Dr Adrienne Barnett to create
“a literature review to support their inquiry into domestic abuse”.
The good doctor has described parental alienation as a cunning stratagem used by fathers against mothers. Of course, this can be the case, just as much as it can be used by mothers against victim-fathers. I came across plenty of them when I lived in the States, where I ran my charity.
However, that is not the point; there are two serious points here. First, if we allow this issue to become yet another arena for gender war, as Dr Barnett seems to want, it will get in the way of the main objective: to protect all victims of domestic abuse. Secondly, if the Ministry of Justice wants its inquiry to have any credibility, its review must embrace all sources of this contentious issue.
I remind the Minister of the sheer volume of peer-reviewed research by members of the academy, mental health practitioners and judicial officers around the world, which reaches similar conclusions: there is no statistically significant difference between women and men as perpetrators and victims; the effects of parental alienation on children are severe and last into adulthood, and the effects on the victim-parents are equally severe.
In summary, parental alienation is child psychological abuse, the collateral damage of domestic abuse. In other words, to quote the Honourable Lady Justice Parker of the High Court’s Family Division:
“Parents who obstruct a relationship with the other parent are inflicting untold damage on their children and it is, in my view, about time that professionals truly understood this.”
All this material appears to have been ignored by the Government—goodness knows why. Perhaps it is because the Ministry of Justice is daunted by the subject’s apparent complexity and is attracted to simplistic and one-sided analysis, such as that of Dr Barnett. What happened to me is the reality of parental abduction. It is not, as some would have it, an ideology or a concept; it is my lived experience and that of thousands and thousands like me, both men and women. It is an almost unbearable experience of grief, sorrow and pain. There is no place for gender politics here.
I beg your Lordships to support these amendments. If we are to put a stop to this evil of parental alienation—and surely we must—it cannot happen until the right legislative framework is in place. The casualties are too many; there are fathers, mothers and children who are damaged forever and those who kill themselves. I beg to move.