The cancellation of the nuclear family

THE Government is planning to ‘re-educate’ boys in case they grow up to harm women, Bruce Newsome reported in TCW on New Year’s Day. This same Government remains silent, however, about a present and pressing harm devastating children and families right now.

It is a harm that parents are inflicting on their children — enforced separation from one of their parents with the near to total exclusion of that parent from the child’s family life.

Over the festive period, thousands of children simply disappeared from view as far as one side of their family was concerned. Ungiven and unopened presents, grandparents staring at the phone willing it to ring — and parents alone grieving the loss of children who are alive but absent and often unreachable, infants and children, sons and daughters, they are prevented from seeing.

These children are not ‘missing’ because their safety is at risk. They are missing because they have been drawn into a world of adult warfare and told — subtly or explicitly — that their loyalty requires rejecting the other half of their family. Every year the number of children experiencing this grows.

Some ‘alienated’ parents describe going for years, even decades, without seeing their children. When a child ‘disappears’ in this way, the loss extends beyond the parent to grandparents, siblings and cousins. The child is cut off from his or her family history, identity and belonging. Whole branches of family life are amputated. 

These are the uncounted children. If we did count them, the scale would be politically explosive.

This is what ‘parental alienation’ means. It is not about safeguarding a child from a violent or neglectful parent, though that may be claimed. Estrangement due to violence is very different — and it matters. Parental alienation is a concept that refers to one parent, whether through fear, psychopathology, unresolved childhood trauma and so on, demands loyalty, rewrites history or relentlessly denigrates the other parent, quite regardless of any consideration of the child’s and other parent’s needs and rights, and in so doing turns a child against a safe parent to the point the child wants no contact with him or her.

It sounds like this:

‘He never wanted you anyway.’

‘If you go, it will break my heart.’

This is how it happens. Frequently cancelled visits, ‘lost’ messages, last-minute dramas and retelling the past so the other parent is always the villain. Eventually, the child repeats the script: ‘I don’t want to see them. It’s my decision.’

To outsiders this can look like the child’s preference or choice. To many professionals working in family law it also looks like that too. But to those who understand developmental and attachment science, that preference can be indicative of coercive control of and through a child (an intentional pattern of parental behaviour whereby that parent exerts a controlling behaviour over the child), which is far more common than people realise. A major UK study led by Professor Ben Hine, an academic psychologist specialising in this field, found that almost 60 per cent of separated parents had experienced such alienating behaviours. It is an unacknowledged public health crisis — increasingly denied and hidden. 

As detailed elsewhere in these pages here, here and here, a large percentage of separated parents report alienating behaviours, nearly half go six months or more without seeing their child, and high numbers report serious mental or physical health decline as courts fail to enforce breaches of contact. This happens in fewer than 1 per cent of cases.

Such damage does not vanish when children grow up. They become adults carrying unresolved trauma into their own relationships and parenting. We are not witnessing ‘family breakdown’. We are witnessing family erasure on a monumental scale. 

Christmas should root children in love and tradition. In alienating households it becomes a test of loyalty.

‘You don’t have to go.’‘He doesn’t deserve to see you.’‘If you loved me, you’d stay here.’

Children learn instantly: love for both parents = danger; loyalty to one = safety.

Newsome’s article also pointed to a fundamental and deeply worrying change behind this trend — how Britain is being reorganised according to radical feminist theory around the belief that males are inherently dangerous and must be controlled.

This same ideology which has seeped into family law over the last decade, as Newsome documented in his ‘Where is the justice for fathers?’ series, is aggressively promoted and believed. Over the past decade, radical feminist campaigners have pushed this one simple story: women are victims, men are perpetrators, and children must side with the mother to be safe.

Today domestic abuse policy refuses to acknowledge the existence of male victims — despite ONS data showing men comprise more than 40 per cent of them, and of those in relationships often slightly more than women. Feminist campaigners fought ruthlessly to keep the notion of parental alienation out of the 2021 Domestic Abuse Act claiming, during the Bill’s passage, that recognising alienation would allow abusive men to silence women and arguing that the very idea of parental alienation applied to a father was ‘misogynistic’ or ‘discredited’. Instead of examining the evidence, the Government retreated. Alienation was left out of law, and alienated parents were left without recourse.

Since then, the campaign against the use of the concept in family law disputes has escalated from blocking its recognition in the Act to openly attacking the concept itself. Professional bodies have been pressured into not using the term, experts smeared, and a narrative introduced to entrench the belief that ‘parental alienation’ insight is nothing more than a tactic to undermine women. The children caught in loyalty conflicts and their needs have vanished from the conversation. The exclusive focus is on women as victims. This is not safeguarding. It is a political narrative masquerading as child protection.

Highly adversarial family cases rarely ‘cool off’ or simmer down. They harden. Allegations multiply. Children feel and are trapped — loving one parent risks losing the other. Targeted parents develop trauma symptoms. Some give up. In a devastating minority, long-running conflict spirals into abduction, suicide or murder. These tragedies do not erupt suddenly. They grow from years of unchecked alienation — and a system too afraid to confront it. 

It does not have to be like this. World-renowned neuroscientist Allan Schore has presented clear evidence of the problem and its impact: how the chronic obstruction of a loving parent by the other leads to attachment trauma. 

Click the link for a video of Dr Allan Schore on attachment trauma and the effects of neglect and abuse on the brain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB51V3fAAvs

It is high time he was listened to. 

Yet the political response is to try to re-engineer boys rather than repair systems that damage families. It is easier to police thought than to admit policy failure.

Parental alienation is not a courtroom gimmick. It is not a misogynistic invention. It is a form of coercive psychological abuse that can be inflicted by either parent — and suffered by either parent and by every child involved. Worst of all, it abuses powerless children, depriving them of half their family. This is not protection. It is the silent dismantling and atomisation of family life.

By Melanie Gill

Melanie Gill is a UK-based attachment specialist, psychologist and forensic consultant, working as an expert witness in complex family proceedings for nearly two decades. Despite an ongoing feminist-inspired campaign to ‘cancel’ her from her family court work she continues to campaign for children and families and remains passionate about bringing psychological science and knowledge into policy and family law.

This article was first published The Conservative Woman. It is available at: The cancellation of the nuclear family - The Conservative Woman