What Is Parental Alienation?

What is Parental Alienation?

Parental alienation occurs when a child refuses to have a relationship with a parent due to manipulation, such as the conveying of exaggerated or false information, by the other parent. Parental alienation is often used as a false allegation by an abusive parent in response to the healthy, protective parent disclosing intimate partner violence or child abuse. Ruth believes that it is highly unlikely that children would wrongly reject one parent because of a “hate campaign” by the other parent.

Parental alienation postulates that one parent systematically enlists the child in the abuser’s “campaign of denigration” and “vilification” of the other parent. How does the parent accomplish this objective? The abuser “brainwashes” or “programs” the child into believing untrue claims of abuse, neglect or general wrongdoing by the healthy, protective parent. The child then becomes fearful of that protective parent and aligns himself/ herself with the abuser in whose residential care the child is often placed by Court Order on a full-time, permanent basis. Ruth has seen firsthand how parental alienation is weaponized by perpetrators of domestic abuse against their victim, often resulting in irreversible trauma and harm to their children.