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42 J. Soc. Welfare & Fam. L. 1 (2020)

handle is hein.journals/jnlosclwl42 and id is 1 raw text is: JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WELFARE AND FAMILY LAW Routledae 2020, VOL. 42, NO. 1, 1-4 https://doi.org/10.1080/09649069.2020.1702409 Taylor &Francis Group Introduction to the special issue The suggestion that a special issue might be produced to present critical perspectives on parental alienation was first raised at the Law & Society Association Conference in Toronto in June 2018. In the session entitled 'Comparative family court practices in cases involving domestic violence, child abuse, and parental alienation', Joan Meier (George Washington University), Susan Boyd (University of British Columbia) and Elizabeth Sheehy, Simon Lapierre and Patrick Ladouceur (University of Ottawa) pre- sented findings from quantitative and qualitative studies conducted in the US and Canada. These papers highlighted the need to interrogate parental alienation for its impact on claims of family and domestic violence, at both national and international levels. This special issue brings together scholars whose work presents a critical perspective on parental alienation, with a particular focus on women and children who have experienced domestic and family violence. The contributors represent diverse countries and disciplines, and use the terminologies of their jurisdictions. For example, in England and Wales the term 'residence' is used; in the US 'custody' would indicate where the child lives; and in New Zealand the term 'care arrangements' refers to both child residence and parental access. The literature on parental alienation stems from Gardner's work on what is termed the parental alienation syndrome (Gardner 1985, 1987, 1992). In essence, parental alienation refers to a situation where a child demonstrates a strong affinity for one parent and rejection of the other parent, in a context where 'the negative behaviours the child attributes to the alienated parent are trivial, highly exaggerated, or totally untrue' (Faller 1998, p. 100). This situation was attributed by Gardner to the behavior of the alienating parent, which he thought involved false allegations of child sexual abuse. However, the term parental alienation is now used much more broadly, to designate any situation where a parent is perceived as engaging in strategies to exclude the other parent, particularly in the context of high-conflict separation, regardless of whether the child actually rejects the other parent (Hayez and Kinoo 2005, Farkas 2011). Moreover, Bruch (2001) argues that this term 'has been extended dramatically to include cases of all types in which a child refuses to visit the non-custodial parent, whether or not the child's objections entail abuse allegations' (p. 528). In this context, experts in the field of domestic and family violence have expressed serious concerns regarding the recourse to the concept of parental alienation by family court and child protection services (Lapierre and C6t6 2016, Neilson et al. 2019). In the context of domestic and family violence, women may have well-grounded reasons to want to limit father-child contact due to their ex-partners' violent behaviour and threats to their own and to their children's safety. They may oppose father-child contact, express serious concerns for their children's safety, or request safe and supervised contact arrangements (Johnson et al. 2005, Brownridge 2009). And children who have been © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

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