My Lords, before I had the pleasure of meeting my noble friend Lady Meyer, I had read about the unbelievably distressing time she went through following the alienation of her children by their father. Today she has told us that story in the most moving way. I apologise for the fact that, as she is sitting behind me, she is seeing only my back rather than my front as I make this speech.
I admire my noble friend for all she has done to raise awareness of parental alienation through the setting up of her charity and getting the academic and judicial profession to realise that parental alienation
needs to be recognised. Along with her, I want parental alienation recognised, but it must be tackled in law in the right way. Hasty law makes for bad law and will not elevate parental alienation to where we all want it. This important Bill must not become a Christmas tree on which we hang too much, which leads to minimising what it wants to achieve.
I cannot agree with the amendment to this Bill. Clause 1 sets out to define domestic abuse by listing different types of abusive behaviours, and not how they may be manifested. This is important, because to do this could be risky and give more weight to how a particular type of behaviour is displayed, and potentially ignore others. As many noble Lords have mentioned, the introduction of parental alienation into the Bill could have unintended consequences due to the absence of a common definition. Consequently, in a family court, cases of parental alienation could mean whatever the judge wants it to mean.
A child may form their own reasons for resisting contact, and there are cases where a parent, for no justified reason, restricts the other parent’s relationship with the child. These are two very different situations under the parental alienation label, which serves to validate the misuse of parental alienation and to obscure the tactics of perpetrators of domestic abuse.
Parental alienation needs to be looked into in its own right. This is now being done after too many years of misunderstanding, lack of clarity and muddle among the experts. My noble friend Lady Helic mentioned how the Ministry of Justice set up an expert panel and reported in June 2020. The panel made a series of recommendations, which I do not have time to go into here, to reform the child arrangement programme in family law. Leading on from this, the Government published an implementation plan for some of the recommendations. One recommendation said:
“A review of the presumption of parental involvement … is needed urgently in order to address its detrimental effects.”
In November, the Government announced an advisory group to begin this work. I welcome these initiatives and feel strongly that this is the way forward, to make sure that parental alienation gets the recognition it deserves.
I want my noble friend to get all she feels is necessary to have parental alienation recognised in law, but my fear is that adding her amendment to this Bill will have a detrimental effect on the work that is going on, and will minimise the importance of this appalling problem. We must make sure that parental alienation is put into legislation where it can be properly dealt with, and this Bill is not that legislation.