Edit: On the occasion of the publication this Wednesday of the report of the Independent Commission on Incest and Sexual Violence against Children (Ciivise) which makes three recommendations to “better protect children”, in particular through better support for mothers who lodge a complaint, we suggest you reread this article which returns to the controversy “parental alienation syndrome”.
Did actress Mia Farrow “coach” her daughter Dylan to accuse Woody Allen of incest? The “parental alienation syndrome”, according to which a child denigrates one of his parents in an “unjustified” way, has returned to the news. The broadcast in France, on the OCS channel, of a documentary devoted to the accusations of sexual assault targeting Woody Allen helped to revive the debate around the SAP. Episode 3 of this series, produced by HBO, is entirely devoted to it.
In 1992, when the famous director was accused of incest by Dylan, his adopted daughter, and Mia Farrow, his companion at the time, his defense was built around this notion. According to Allen, the actress wanted “revenge” and would have “brainwashed” their daughter to wrongly accuse her. Thirty years later, what remains of this concept? Having arrived in France at the turn of the 1990s, SAP is today the subject of strong criticism. “Wrongly demonized”, for certain associative actors who defend the existence of this notion, parental alienation would help “hide” the facts of domestic or sexual violence, denounce on the contrary magistrates, psychiatrists or sociologists.
What is parental alienation?
The term first appeared in 1985, in the United States, from the pen of a controversial child psychiatrist, Richard Gardner. He defines parental alienation as a disorder “which arises primarily in the context of a custody dispute in which a child engages in a smear campaign against a parent, which is not justified”. In France, it was not until the 1990s and the media coverage of several large-scale cases of violence and sexual crimes, such as the Outreau affair, for the “SAP” to emerge in the public debate.
Distributed in parallel by several French-speaking psychiatrists like Paul Bensussan, the syndrome of parental alienation has never enjoyed real scientific recognition. Mentioned in May 2019 in the International Classification of Diseases index (ICD-11), it was finally withdrawn in 2020.
Taught for a time to magistrates in training, this notion has infused the professional practices of the judicial chain. “Parental alienation is recognized in dozens of judgments of the ECHR and in hundreds of expertises, in France and thousands in other countries”, underlines Olga Odinetz, founder and president of the association Acalpa, which militates for the recognition of the SAP as a “psychological abuse of minors”.
A “misappropriated” responsibility
Beyond its scientific non-recognition, it is above all the taking into account of this syndrome of alienation by the police or the courts that worries those involved in the protection of children. In the collective work Sexual violence, end impunity, published on March 3, the judge for children Edouard Durand, co-chairman of the commission on incest, warns about “the dangers” of parental alienation. “The dissemination of this concept […] diverts the responsibility by directing attention to the mother, suspected of manipulating her child, ”he writes.
Pierre-Guillaume Prigent, doctoral student in sociology at the University of Western Brittany, Brest, is carrying out an exploratory study among 20 mothers accused of parental alienation. A work carried out with Gwénola Sueur, listening in several structures intended for separated or divorced mothers. “Our goal was to contact women accused of parental alienation and analyze the context. All those we have met also turn out to be victims of domestic violence. We do not rule on whether or not parental alienation generally exists. But when it is used, there is a context of domestic violence that is ignored or minimized. “
Gender bias or gender perspective
According to them, the SAP is based on a gender bias, according to which “many fathers are the subject of false accusations and that mothers lie and manipulate children”. In 2001, however, a study commissioned by the Ministry of Justice based on 30,000 cases of family judges (JAF) estimated at 0.8% the cases of false sexual assault.
“Not only are accusations of sexual violence against the father by mothers rare, but when they are made, they are very rarely false,” said Pierre-Guillaume Prigent. And the consequences of these accusations of parental alienation are even more serious, they continue: “We have in particular cases of women who have lodged a complaint for violence, and who are forced by the courts to visit the media to see their child, because they were accused by the father of parental alienation. “
An analysis swept away by the president of Acalpa: “It is a gendered vision of the phenomenon. We are also regularly contacted by women who are also rejected by their children at the instigation of the father. “
A note to alert the magistrates
In 2017, the SAP interfered even in the political debate under the impetus of the senator of the Oise, Laurence Rossignol, former Minister in charge of the Family under the quinquennium of François Hollande. In a written question addressed to the former Keeper of the Seals, Nicole Belloubet, she explained that “the taking into account of the alleged parental alienation syndrome (SAP) in the judgments rendered by the judges for children […] leads to discredit the words of the mother, exceptionally of the father or the child, and consequently to deny the status of victim by reversing the responsibilities ”.
A speech which led the Chancellery to distribute a note on the intranet of the ministry, intended for magistrates. The note, specifies the Ministry of Justice in its response, aims to “inform the magistrates of the controversial and unrecognized nature of the parental alienation syndrome and encourage them to look with caution at this means when it is raised in defense and remind them that other tools are available to them […] to cope with the sometimes real situations of a parent who would try to gradually remove the child from the other parent ”.
A training deficit
Very opposed on the merits, Gwénola Sueur and Olga Odinetz agree on the same observation: the lack of training of police officers or magistrates. “The mechanisms of domestic violence are still very poorly understood in France while international research is much more advanced,” said Gwénola Sueur. With her colleague Pierre-Guillaume Prigent, she pleads for multidisciplinary training “on coercive control and post-separation violence” and for a reform of the co-parenting regime imposed in certain cases on mothers who are victims of domestic violence.
The president of Acalpa believes for her part that this lack of training contributes to distorting the notion of parental alienation: “The reaction of a child to a violent parent is completely different from that of a parent whom he rejects in a context where there is no violence. The tools to put in place are different when it comes to simply a conflict of loyalty in the context of a separation. However, it is often necessary to act quickly to ensure that the child does not find himself trapped in his parents’ story. “
And the debate in the field of research should continue in the coming months. In her report on the assessment of the 2018 law on the fight against sexual and gender-based violence, the deputy LREM Alexandra Louis proposed to the ministers concerned to “re-examine the theory of parental alienation […] through a public hearing bringing together all the professionals concerned, under the aegis of the French Federation of Psychiatry ”.