State promoted parental alienation

- Plus Fiona Girkin muzzled by university

First an update on the Dr Fiona Girkin fiasco. Regular readers will know Fiona is an academic at the University of Tasmania who has been stood down from her job teaching police about the investigation of domestic violence. This followed a video interview with me where she explained her evidence-based approach to the subject and reported that, as expected, the police were seeing just as many female as male perpetrators.

We were awaiting the results of the university’s “assessment” to determine if she had breached the institution’s Behaviour Policy. But when I approached Fiona seeking news of her meeting with university officials this week, she told me she wasn’t permitted to discuss what happened. The university had decided matters must be kept confidential.

That’s the tactic being employed by all Australian universities now. Even though these institutions are required by law to protect academic freedom, whenever a free speech case blows up, they muzzle the person in the spotlight and drag investigations out, hoping the fuss will die down and the troublemaker will resign and slink away.

So, Fiona can’t talk and she’s still in limbo regarding her future employment, with her personal and professional reputation immensely damaged.

As expected, it’s been a struggle getting any media coverage of this important free speech battle. It helped that the Macron slap was heard around the world, leading to some remarkable coverage of male victims of domestic violence. This gave a way in for Angela Shanahan to get a story about Fiona into her column at The Weekend Australian. Damian Coory did a great job covering the story on his YouTube program, as did Topher Field, and I wrote it up for Quadrant.

Thanks to all of you who sent letters complaining about Fiona’s treatment to the ABC, Press Council, university and police. We noted that, in the police response, they distance themselves from Fiona’s evidence-based approach to domestic violence and boast the police service responds in a “trauma-informed way.” Hmmm, remember that Brittany Higgins thanked Judge Michael Lee for his “trauma-informed” judgment after he declared Bruce Lehrmann a rapist. This buzz word speaks volumes, signalling allegiance with feminism’s believe-all-women creed.

We won’t give up. Please write to our conservative media such as Sky News and The Australian asking why they are ignoring this important free speech story, when they normally give extensive coverage to such campus battles. We’d like you to also approach Tasmanian politicians asking them to pressure the university to do the right thing – here’s a draft letter you can use. Yes, we realise Tasmanian politics is imploding right now but we still feel it’s worth getting it out there and perhaps you can adapt it to send to other prominent Tassie citizens as well.

But now for a very different topic….

It’s always flattering to be approached to speak at a conference but talking about parental alienation really isn’t my bag as I’ve had very little recent involvement in family law.

But the request came from Dads in Distress, which is one of the most important organisations we have supporting men in this country – even though, in my view, they made a huge strategic error in rebadging as Parents Beyond Breakup (PBB) pitching for government funds by taking a women-inclusive approach, and for a while being led by a female CEO.

Now my friend Pete Nicholls is in charge and steaming ahead, trying to get the organisation back on the map. His latest venture is ANZPAC, a roadshow across Australia and New Zealand, bringing together experts, frontline professionals and those personally affected by parental alienation to create policy recommendations for federal and state lawmakers as well as best practise guidelines.

The PBB organisation is a national suicide prevention charity and their main game is to raise awareness of the link between parental alienation and male suicide - which struck me as a very worthy goal.

So, I gave my little rant at the ANZPAC’s recent Perth event, letting loose on what I called “state-promoted parental alienation of children” - a consequence of the current weaponisation of the justice system against men. Here’s the video. Sorry about the sound quality – the tech gremlins were causing problems with the PBB recording system.

My familiar themes were all there: the incentivisation of false violence allegations used to get dads removed from the home and denied contact with children; the draconian supervised contact system; the status quo argument which rewards mothers who manage to distance dads from kids with more custody; courts which refuse to enforce contact orders or take action over perjury.

All the other speakers played it carefully, assuring the audience that mothers as well as fathers suffer parental alienation. This is true, but the bottom line is the parent who has the power, namely the custodial parent, is the one best placed to alienate the other parent from the children. And in our court system, as is true across the Western World, we have handed that power to mothers in spades. And boy are they making the most of it.

My tirade was no doubt not what this earnest audience of lawyers and other professionals was expecting. But it certainly doesn’t hurt for them to have heard the truth about these broader societal issues which are doing far more damage to children than all the dreadful battles taking place between individual couples.

The whole circus which has grown up around domestic violence is immensely troubling. I recently read a review of parental alienation literature, summarizing over 300 peer reviewed studies conducted in 32 countries around the world. Every week, books and articles appear, adding to the vast publishing empire propping up the gurus in the field.

There’s a massive industry of lawyers employing so-called experts as hired guns for both sides – trying to prove whether a child is being deliberately alienated from a parent, or not. But, as former Family Court judge Stewart Lindsay pointed out in my recent video interview, in our courts none of this matters any more. The Labor government last year ensured our laws are only focussed on ensuring that allegations of violence, including emotional abuse, trump any other consideration regarding the best interests of children.

When it comes to legal tactics, parental alienation has been utterly gazumped by even the most trivial, or even utterly false allegation suggesting the mother has been abused or threatened by the father.

Game set and match for Australia’s feminists.

What makes this situation even more depressing is that across the world there is a huge amount of public agitation trying to ensure parental alienation is taken seriously in family courts. This year organisations in 18 countries including the USA, UK, Australia, Canada, India, Argentina, Bulgaria, Iceland, Trinidad and Tobago, Spain and Bermuda held events for Parental Alienation Awareness Day (April 25).

In January the parliament in Denmark strengthened laws already in place which determine parental alienation must be seen as psychological violence in criminal law. Their new laws specify it is now the responsibility of the parents and the entire family court system to ensure that parental alienation is not permitted - with appropriate sanctions - and contact between the targeted parent and child must be secured within 4 weeks.

The Romanian government last year passed similar laws decreeing parental alienation as psychological violence and ensuring new efforts to combat this type of abuse.

There’s been successful fight-back against feminist efforts to claim parental alienation doesn’t exist. Two years ago, a vigorous global campaign by DAVIA, coordinating efforts from organisations in 189 countries to fight current domestic violence laws, succeeded in preventing the UN Human Rights council from approving a report by UN Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem which characterised parental alienation as an “unscientific pseudo-concept”, and recommended countries should “legislate to prohibit the use of parental alienation or related psycho concepts in family law cases.”

Huge numbers of people are involved in this important effort to get parental alienation onto the map, and more importantly to ensure this damaging form of child abuse is recognised in family courts. Pity none of this is going to help in Australia, where our courts and legislators are so clearly in bed with the other side.

But what’s really troubling is how much energy is going into publishing books and building expert careers, rather than helping the children who suffer when alienated from a parent, usually a dad.

Madison Wellbourne is an adult survivor of parental alienation whose mother denied her a relationship with her father for 20 years. I recently watched one of her videos - No One Is Helping the Kids — Because the Experts Won’t Work Together. She makes a heart-felt plea that a lot of the battles going on are a distraction, “a way of kicking the can down the road while children continue to suffer.”

Madison describes the divide between experts convinced there must be a predictable set of symptoms of parental alienation that must be recognised in DSM – the bible of classification of mental disorders – and others who claim this isn’t important, given that there are already categories describing these behaviours, like child psychological abuse, pathogenic parenting, etc.

“I’m speaking directly to any professionals, mental health experts, clinicians who are too busy choosing sides to save the children trapped in this abuse,” she says, touching on just one of the many divides which splits the parental alienation industry. The whole thing has become an utter bunfight, being torn apart by ideologues pushing feminist ideology, self-defined experts financially exploiting desperate parents, academics building illustrious careers, and lawyers padding their wallets.

“You don’t need to rename the fire to know the house is burning down,” says Madison, speaking on behalf of the children trapped inside.

It is a salutary lesson to listen to this young woman and understand her rage that so many experts are out there fighting over whether her immense loss – twenty years without her dad – was real.