Jim Sheehan: Parental Alienation and Children's Protection Rights: New Horizons for Systemic Practice
Summary by Eivind Meland
Parts of the Norwegian academic community reject the phenomenon and the concept of parental alienation. One of the arguments used is that it is not compatible with family systemic treatment. They see systemic therapy and parental alienation theory as irreconcilable contradictions, and recommend that the term "should be scrapped." Shouldn't we rather view systemic therapy and parental alienation theory as complementary. Just as psychiatry relies primarily on patient autonomy and voluntarism, every psychiatrist will realize that in some situations coercion is necessary. Likewise, family therapists may realize that in some situations, legal actions with clear requirements and limitations is necessary to protect children from alienating emotional violence in the family. Jim Sheehan is a professor at VID in Oslo.
The title of this two-volume series points to newly emerging horizons within systemic practice. Within the practice domain under consideration in this chapter, new horizons are nowhere more evident than in that space where the most intense and prolonged postseparation parental disputes about children occur. These disputes usually involve some version of what specialists call the 'resist/refuse dynamic' (Walters & Friedlander, 2016)). This dynamic is seen in a group of children who show reluctance to go on court-ordered access/contact with their non-resident parent, resist meaningful engagement with this parent when they do go on court-prescribed visitation and sometimes refuse to have any contact whatsoever with that parent.
For many years family courts and systemic practitioners have tried to address these issues through a mixture of parent education, child therapies and family therapy. Sometimes this mixture of interventions proved helpful with the relatively mild forms of this dynamic but failed spectacularly with the moderate to severe end of the postseparation conflict continuum.
While the resist/refuse dynamic was descriptive of behavioural patterns displayed by a child, the family relational context in which the most severe expressions of the dynamic were usually embedded was better captured by the term 'parental alienation'. While the phenomenon has been recognized by child and family professionals for the last eighty years, it was not until the mid-1980's that Gardner (1985) coined the term parental alienation syndrome. Following a debate between clinicians over whether terminology should just be descriptive of a child's position/condition or whether it should reach towards more relational meanings, the field has now settled for the term parental alienation (Lorandos et al., 2013) which captures both individual and family relational dimensions.
Parental alienation should be understood as a type of diagnosis in the sense that Axberg and Pettit (see Chapter 9, this volume), drawing on earlier Greek meanings, give to that term, namely 'learning the phenomenon well, so that we can decide what kind it is'. For the DSM-5 of the American Psychiatric Association, the diagnostic label of 'Parent–Child Relational Problem' can be used whenever a child has been exposed to parental alienation strategies that are likely to cause 'unwarranted feelings of estrangement' in the child towards the targeted parent (American Psychiatric Association, 2013, p. 715). The alternative diagnostic label of 'Child Affected by Parental Relationship Distress' is offered by the ICD-10 when 'the negative effects of parental relationship discord (e.g., high levels of conflict, distress, or disparagement') are having a negative impact on the child.
In the interests of 'learning the phenomenon well', this section of the chapter will now outline in more detail what parental alienation is and is not and will describe how it functions simultaneously as a unique and complex form of emotional child abuse and family violence. As a form of emotional child abuse, parental alienation brings the issue of children's protection rights under the UN Convention sharply into focus. The failure to address the issue in the context of parental disputes within family court systems undermines these rights and places children at risk for a range of negative short-term and long-term consequences. The positive and hopeful news is that when adequately addressed in a timely manner the systemic practitioner can play a decisive role in honouring the protection rights of children in the face of the phenomenon.
Jim Sheehan is a contributor to a recently published book by Springer Publisher: