Romania passed an anti-alienation law

Romania with key changes that will be operated on the Child Protection Act (Law 272/2004 with all its subsequent changes):

1.     The term “parental estrangement” is defined inside the Child Protection Act. As per the initiators, they preferred this legal term rather than the term parental alienation because parental alienation is more in relation with psychology . We, the Romanian Association for Joint Custody, will add that sometimes the mild alienation does not become visible as “estrangement” .. so it makes sense for the state to react to more complicated alienation cases and not to the mild alienation cases which likely will fade away. As per the definition of the law, the parental estrangement is that form of psychological violence by which one of the parents [or other people] intentionally, trough pursued or assumed actions, generates, accepts or takes advantage of a situation in which the child ends up showing unjustified or disproportionate restraint or hostility towards any of the parents;

2.     The law makes explicit that the “parental estrangement” is important by listing it explicitly, immediately after “abuse”, “neglect”, “exploitation”. This appears in all places where abuse/neglect/exploitation enumeration happens. Such change was needed because the local Child Protection agencies used to ignore the parental alienation claims from the alienated parent, because the “alienation“ was not explicit in the law. The alienation was, of course, included in the very general term “other form of violence against children” but for the Child protection folks it was a nice pretext to ignore such requests from the alienated parents.

Romanian Association for Joint Custody