My Lords, I rise with some trepidation, but also with an open mind because I want some clarity on one or two of the amendments. In general, the group of amendments we are discussing seem eminently sensible in terms of safe- guarding, but I seek some clarification. Perhaps the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, can give me some help, because her explanation was very well made, detailed and useful, and explained the two different groups.
My concern is specifically with Amendment 82, which says, in effect, that anyone who is a victim of criminal conduct within Section 1
“cannot be considered by the family court as a potential perpetrator of parental alienation”.
It seems an extraordinary thing to put into law. To say that somebody can never be considered by the family court to be a potential perpetrator of anything would seem to go against the spirit of open inquiry; for example, the possibility that even if one is a victim, one might well indulge in something unsavoury.
In the previous group, we heard a huge amount about the damage that can be caused by false allegations. We must always consider the possibility that false allegations are used to alienate one parent against another; this has become known as “parental alienation”. I am rather sympathetic to the concern raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, about medicalisation —I particularly do not like quack medicalisation—and I am glad to hear that many noble Lords are worried about the fact that so many people who call themselves experts are not necessarily experts, which is something I have been arguing for quite some time across a range of issues, so all that is good.
None the less, Amendment 82 uses the term “parental alienation”, and I want to know how this amendment will help, because if anyone is using, for example, falsifications that are aimed at removing one parent from a child’s life, even if that parent was previously guilty of a crime, we have to be careful, do we not?
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We know that creating false narratives by telling a child distorted information about a parent is not going to be in the best interests of the parent. I might even understand why somebody who is a victim of domestic abuse in any context will feel incredibly bitter and hostile to the parent, but we have to let the court decide, rather than putting this into the law.
When I was reading the briefings related to this group of amendments, I was struck by how often the term “pro-contact culture” was used. I am, generally speaking, pro contact culture, because I want to be in a situation—which has been well laid out in the other amendments—where the presumption is that the best interest of the child is to have contact with both parents. I do not necessarily think this is gendered, although I appreciate that obviously, more women—