A video showing a child describing how the unscientifc belief system 'Parental Alienation' was used to deny the child sexual and other abuse her father exposed her to, resulting in her being removed from her safe mother due to false allegations of 'PA'
A video showing a child describing how the unscientifc belief system 'Parental Alienation' was used to deny CSA
Trigger warning on video content - disturbing footage of unethical / harmful child treatment
'Parental Alienation' is an unscientific belief system. It is not a scientific theory or concept. It is the notion that a child has been brainwashed by one parent to report abuse from the other parent. It is rejected broadly by the scientific community, having no robust evidence, with many studies being methodologically weak, non-random, not generalisable and based on unreliable applications of the label (Saini et al., 2016; Doughty, 2018, Barnett, 2020, Meier et al., 2020 and Mercer and Drew, 2022).
It is denounced by the United Nations, The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), Women's Aid, Group of Experts on Action against Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (Council of Europe), The European Association for Psychotherapy, The American Psychological Society, The New Zealand Psychological Society and has received much negative media attention recently including comments from the Association of Clinical Psychologists UK Chair Professor Mike Wang who stated to the Guardian Newspaper on 12th June 2022
"The organisation is aware of unregulated experts making findings of so-called parental alienation and doing tremendous harm. I’ve seen children taken away by the force of the state on the basis of PA. But what the public needs to know is that there is an international consensus that the evidence-base on parental alienation is not sufficiently robust to be making decisions about child-contact arrangements."
The following video shows footage of a child, Addyson Bender, describing being taken away by force of the state, based upon this harmful pseudoscience belief system:
