Family court proceedings linked to suicides

Published by Professional Social Work magazine, 05 September 2023

Use of 'parental alienation' or PA in family courts needs revision, damning research suggests after women died during ongoing proceedings.

A University of Manchester study reveals how children were forced into contact with abusive fathers. And three mothers accused of PA subsequently committed suicide, a BBC investigation found.

In all the cases looked into, the fathers had claimed 'parental alienation' - a legal concept used in response to allegations of abuse where the accused claims children have been turned against them.

The Manchester study examined the experiences of 45 mothers and found all had reported serious health problems they claim were linked to family court proceedings. Women experienced suicidal thoughts, heart attacks and miscarriages.

A BBC investigation found a convicted child rapist was granted residency of a child. Five women died, three committing suicide, and 75 children were forced into contact with fathers reported for abuse.

The use of PA is a "national scandal" according to lead researcher Dr Elizabeth Dalgarno.

Dr Dalgarno, lecturer in public health at The University of Manchester and founder of SHERA Research Group said: “This is the first study to link family court proceedings with suicidal ideation, suicide, and mental and physical health problems in women who have been subjected to domestic abuse perpetrator behaviours.

“The system is loaded against abused women. Courts are often unsympathetic to them.”

Of the 45 families studied:

• 43 fathers were given access to children - including those with convictions for child sexual abuse
• 39 of the women alleging abuse were counter accused of PA
• one child had no contact after the parent accused of violence abducted the child
• another child reached an age where they could make their own choice

Report authors note: "PA was used... as a way to deny the abuse and grant access or even residency of their children to the abusive parents.

"The remaining six women who were not accused said they were either threatened with PA or mischaracterised as medically or psychologically abnormal."

PA has been rejected as a concept by the World Health Organisation and governments globally. It flags up psychological manipulation of a child to turn them against their (often male) parent, sometimes involving accusations of false allegations of sexual abuse.

But research has shown false allegations of CSA are rare - it is extremely difficult to make a child make such allegations – and Dr Dalgarno believes the courts tend to side with male perpetrators by accepting PA.

"The women we spoke to in our study provide a graphic depiction of the psychological and physical health costs of parental alienation allegations – a pseudoscientific belief system designed to control women and deny abuse,” she said.

“We believe that these (health) conditions should be examined at scale in clinical research under the umbrella term that we have coined as Court and Perpetrator Induced Trauma (CPIT).”

“The women are already traumatised, so it’s not hard to imagine the impact of dealing with court proceedings which threaten to restore an abusive parent’s access to their children because the courts don’t believe them.

“Though we can’t generalise from this qualitative study the findings acknowledge the structural disadvantage and intrinsic societal misogyny faced by women, providing transferable insights into the wider population of mothers.”

Around 49 to 62 per cent of the 55,000 private family court cases each year involve domestic abuse.

Questions over the dysfunctional nature of family court proceedings were publicised in the 2020 Harm Report by the Ministry of Justice.

The courts have issued new guidance on use of PA in domestic abuse cases and the government is investigating whether further action is needed.

Nicole Jacobs, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner, said on X: "I hear from hundreds of victims and survivors about the devastation wrought by family court proceedings. We need urgent and wide-reaching reforms to restore public faith in the family court."

Case study

One woman told researchers of threats and a collapse in her health due to family court proceedings:

“There have been four times I’ve actually seriously considered killing myself, and three out of the four, I haven’t done it because of my daughter.  I was stood on the edge of the road, and I thought, the next lorry, that’s it, I’m gone, I’m just going to do it.”

“Health-wise I was super, super fit, always have been for years…my body’s just kind of fallen apart.”

“Apart from aging more quickly, last year I was diagnosed with breast cancer… I definitely think that’s [court proceedings] affected my health and I definitely would say that I'd had suicidal thoughts.”

“There were a few times that my dad had to pick me up off the floor, I literally collapsed in a heap, because I was just like, they’re going to take them [children] away”

“She [a Cafcass officer] told me actually, in the garden, that if I didn’t agree to contact, the judge would make a decision that I wouldn’t like, and that was her threat to me, on a Change of Residency…I was constantly accused of parental alienation, my hostilities towards father were highlighted, and I just felt like, at that point, people needed to understand the wider picture, and the reason for my hostilities towards father, weren’t based on parental alienation, they were based on domestic abuse.”