Louise O'Neill: 'Why as a culture is it so much easier for us to blame women?'
Louise O'Neill: "let's keep children at the core of our family justice system." Picture: Miki Barlok
I first heard of the term ‘parental alienation’ while speaking to a number of domestic abuse survivors, primarily based in west Cork. Most had been accused of parental alienation by their estranged partners and it’s an accusation that is still taken very seriously within our court systems.
Parental Alienation is described as a child’s experience of being manipulated or coached by one parent to turn against their other parent. An article by Patricia Fersch in Forbes Magazine explained the term was first coined in 1985 by child psychiatrist, Richard A. Gardner, and lists eight symptoms of Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), from the “relentless denigration of the targeted parent”, “hostility toward and refusal of contact with the… targeted parent”, and “the child’s insistence that he or she is expressing his or her own opinions in denigrating the targeted parent.”
