The International Council on Shared Parenting (ICSP) with strong critique of Alsalem

The International Council on Shared Parenting (ICSP) has responded to a letter published by the UN Human Rights Council's Special Reporteur, Reem Alsalem. Prior to preparing the report, Alsalem had been a known activist advocate of discrediting Parental Alienation (PA) with allegations that it threatened the credibility of women and children when they have been subjected to violence and abuse. In December 2022, she issued an invitation marked by her own ideological prejudices, asking actors internationally to report on how references to PA not only undermined women's legal status, but also represented a separate form of violence against women and children. In the report published in June 2023, Alsalem has only included input from those who support her own views on parental alienation.

Ideological activists in several countries are now trying to portray this as expressing the official views of the UN. The UN has not recognized Alsalem's report as an expression of the organization's position. In an email from the Human Rights Council to the World Parents' Organisation, they write: "Kindly note that the Special Rapporteurs serve in an individual capacity, independent of the United Nations and any other organization or government."

The response from the ICSP has several paragraphs, and we are now publishing the research correction of Alsalem's unsubstantiated claims and misuse of research findings:

II. Flaws of the Report of the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls in Regard to Intimate Partner Violence and Parental Alienation

The misleading statements, misinformation, errors, use of science denial techniques, and misrepresentations of the current state of peer-reviewed published research, scientific inquiry, and case law support in regard to intimate partner violence and parental alienation in the Report have been documented by a number of scientific associations, including the Parental Alienation Study Group, and we add our critique to the chorus of voices condemning the report in that regard. We draw attention to the following: 

1. The current state of scientific knowledge indicates that intimate partner violence is not a gendered phenomenon, and the gender paradigm adopted in the report is deeply flawed. Although we support the need to draw special attention to the victimization of women and girls in family violence situations, the assumption in the report that women are most often the victims of intimate partner violence, and men are most often the perpetrators of intimate partner violence, is false. Numerous meta-analyses, including the comprehensive Partner Abuse State of Knowledge report, clearly indicate that women and men are roughly equally both victims and perpetrators of intimate partner violence, that most intimate partner violence is reciprocal in nature, and that women’s use of intimate partner violence is not primarily defensive. Women suffer greater injury from intimate partner violence, but this should not negate the injuries suffered by men in these situations. 

2. The current state of scientific knowledge indicates that intimate partner violence takes many forms, including emotional and psychological abuse as well as physical and sexual abuse, with no less damaging consequences. There is a growing scientific consensus that as a form of coercive control, parental alienation is a serious form of both intimate partner violence and child abuse, which is often not recognized, and is far more common than most assume it to be. Parental alienation involves a set of abusive strategies on the part of a parent to foster the child’s rejection of the other parent, whereby children are manipulated by the alienating parent to hate the other, and its negative effects are serious and debilitating to children and target parents alike. For the child, parental alienation is a significant mental disturbance, based on a false belief that the alienated father or mother is a dangerous and unworthy parent. 

3. Failing to acknowledge the psychological abuse that alienated children are being subjected to in severe cases of parental alienation, and that they may also be subjected to other forms of abuse, leaves children vulnerable, unprotected, and at risk of severe harm. 

4. The Report also fails to acknowledge that parental alienation represents a serious form of victimization and abuse of parents, who live with anxiety, depression, and helplessness, as well as feelings of victimization by the other parent, the child, and myriad systems (legal, mental health, and school systems) that are not responsive to their needs. 

5. It is no longer tenable to dismiss the field of parental alienation is lacking in scientific status. To state that there is no scientific evidence of parental alienation is at best an outdated opinion, and at worst an attempt to deliberately falsify, mislead and misinform. Repeatedly referring to the “pseudo-concept of parental alienation” in a pejorative manner is clear evidence of the anti-scientific orientation of the Report. With over 1,000 articles and books on the subject, including over 200 peer-reviewed research studies containing empirical data using a wide variety of methods and samples in leading scientific journals, the scientific foundation for the field of parental alienation is strong and robust; as reported in the APA journal, Developmental Psychology, in 2022, “the current state of parental alienation scholarship meets the three criteria of a maturing field of scientific inquiry: an expanding literature, a shift toward quantitative studies, and a growing body of research that tests theory-generated hypotheses.” Nearly 40% of the research on parental alienation has been published since 2016, establishing that the field has moved beyond an early stage of scientific development and has produced a scientifically trustworthy knowledge base. 

6. There are no gender differences in who the alienating and alienated parent is; based on data from nationally representative samples, fathers and mothers are equally likely to be perpetrators and targets of parental alienation. 

7. The statement that it is the parent (fathers specifically) who alleges being a victim of parental alienation who is the abusive parent seeking to deflect attention away from his own perpetration of intimate partner violence is not borne out in the research. A recent study in the Journal of Family Violence (Sharples et al, 2023) found that parents who are found to have alienated their children had an 82% greater probability of having a substantiated claim of abuse against them than parents alienated from their children. It is significantly more likely to find a substantiated claim of abuse against alienating parents as opposed to alienated parents. Moreover, alienated parents had an 86% greater likelihood of having an unsubstantiated abuse claim made against them compared to alienating parents; such false allegations constitute form of legal and administrative aggression which is also a form of family violence. 

8. The charge that courts and legal and judicial bodies disregard and “dismiss” evidence of intimate partner violence when parental alienation is alleged in the context of child custody disputes is patently false.