04/19/2026
Believe in parental alienation? Then you better be ready to explain how you are ok with the founder’s other beliefs and things he pushed. Parental alienation was created as a way to punish safe parents, mostly mothers to cover up the horrible things fathers were doing. Parental alienation is not real, our courts and professionals need to stop using it to justify taking kids away from safe parents and we need to hold unsafe parents accountable. It is not enough to say every kid needs 2 parents in their life. Those parents need to be safe or they need to be restricted in access to ensure safety at all times or in some cases not allowed because there isn’t a way to make their contact safe. We need to ensure that the moment a court hears a party spewing parental alienation claims or claims that sound similar to that they recognize that’s the party they really need to be looking at. It’s time for major changes and to hold everyone accountable when bad things happen to kids that were preventable.
By Sonia Sodha
Opinion: The American psychologist who destroyed British families with sexist poison
Richard Gardner's unevidenced theory of 'parental alienation syndrome' has done untold harm
Richard Gardner, who died in 2003, was a psychiatrist with highly controversial and misogynistic views
What connects a crank psychiatrist from New York with a British mother wrongfully blocked in 2019 from having any contact with her children for five years? The link is parental alienation syndrome, a psychological theory developed by Richard Gardner which, despite being widely discredited, was latched onto by fathers’ rights groups and unregulated “experts” here in the UK, and has resulted in mothers losing custody of their children to abusive fathers.
Gardner, who died in 2003, was a psychiatrist with highly controversial and misogynistic views. Amongst other beliefs aired in his work, he argued child sexual abuse is not necessarily traumatic, and implied that mothers who don’t sexually fulfil their partners bear some of the blame for fathers sexually abusing their daughters. He believed many women who accuse their partners of abuse are liars. In the 80s, he coined the term “parental alienation syndrome” to describe his unevidenced thesis that women often fabricate allegations of abuse in order to turn children against their fathers. He asserted that this confected “syndrome” was more harmful to children than sexual abuse.
His theories belong on the scrapheap. But despite not being empirically tested, and reflective of grim attitudes towards women and paedophilia, they have somehow influenced family court processes around the world. Conveniently, the symptoms of “parental alienation”, as described by Gardner, map exactly what you might expect to see in children who may reject their fathers because they have experienced abuse at his hands themselves, or witnessed him abusing their mother, which is today itself recognised as a form of child abuse.
Fathers’ rights groups like Fathers4Justice latched onto the idea of parental alienation. From the 2000s onwards, the pattern increasingly became that allegations of abuse against a father in the family courts would be met by counter-allegations by the father of parental alienation. As a result of campaigning by these groups, Cafcass, the independent agency that represents children in the family courts, incorporated parental alienation into the framework its social workers use to assess family conflict, despite the lack of any evidence base and its dodgy inception. And a group of unregulated psychotherapists and psychologists sprang up, badging themselves as “parental alienation experts” and becoming the go-to for fathers accused of abuse in the family courts looking to counter the claims.
Some family court judges placed an extraordinary amount of stock in these so-called experts, relying on them to provide diagnoses and recommendations for the courts. This was despite the fact that they were relying on unevidenced theories to recommend removing children from their mothers, and even cutting off all contact with them unless those mothers acknowledged they, not the father, were the abuser in the family relationship. This is how we got to the situation where one where one mother was banned by the court from having any contact with her 12-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son back in 2019, in an important case reported on by Hannah Summers for The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
The facts of this case are chilling. The children’s mother had alleged that their father had abused and r***d her. Instead of undertaking a fact-finding into whether these allegations were true on the balance of probability – which would have revealed that the abuse and r**e claims were corroborated by police and medical evidence – the judge in question relied on the opinion of Melanie Gill, an unregulated psychologist without any clinical or ther**eutic practice.
Gill was nominated by Cafcass and was paid £16,000 for her assessment, in which she expressed the opinion that the mother was alienating the children from their father, and recommended they be removed from her in order to live with him. The judge adopted Gill’s findings and recommendations without hearing from any other witnesses or properly assessing the abuse allegations. As a result, the mother was not allowed any contact with her children for five years, was stripped of all parental responsibility, and was not even allowed to see photos of them.
That ruling was at last overturned by the country’s most senior family judge, Sir Andrew McFarlane, earlier this year. In an excoriating judgment, he called it “fundamentally flawed” and made clear the court should never have relied on Gill’s opinion in taking a drastic decision to separate a mother from her children, and place them in their father’s custody, following her allegations of abuse against him. He also said that courts in future must not rely on psychologists in this way unless they are registered with a statutory body, or chartered by the British Psychological Society.
There have been some changes since the original judgment in this case: in 2024, new guidance for judges was issued on parental alienation, reinforcing that domestic abuse by a father can create the context in which a child is more likely to reject him. Its aim was to unwind the Kafkaesque situation created by parental alienation theories whereby a woman knows that if she alleges domestic abuse but the court does not make findings that it occurred, those allegations can be turned against her to remove her children from her – thus discouraging domestic abuse victims from raising their abuse, or even from leaving their abusive partner in the first place.
But we simply don’t know how many children have been cruelly separated from their mothers by a family court system that has proved far too credulous of parental alienation and the so-called experts hawking their trade in recent years. The children in this case were allowed no contact with their mother between the ages of 12 and 17, and nine and 15 respectively. There are likely many other cases where this has happened. At what cost to their wellbeing? Who will be held accountable for these damaging decisions made by the courts? And what about the mothers who did not have the extraordinary tenacity or money needed for a protracted fight with the legal system lasting years?
The origins of these decisions lie in Gardner’s harmful views of child sexual abuse and women. His beliefs about parental alienation have meant British children have been blocked from living with or even seeing their mothers, causing them immeasurable pain and damage.
But the responsibility for this extends well beyond Gardner. There are much bigger questions for the family courts and child welfare agencies as to how his quack theories have been allowed so much influence over judicial practice. And what the system must now do to unravel its effects, including on the children harmed by unthinkably brutal and unjustified court rulings.
