| The President of the
Family Division, Sir Andrew McFarlane P considered the
issue of a court appointed expert and the issue of
parental alienation in in
Re C (Parental
Alienation: Instruction of Expert)
[2023] EWHC 345 (Fam)
The President acknowledged at paragraph 2:
‘It is not the purpose of this
judgment to go further into the topic of alienation. Most
Family judges have, for some time, regarded the label of
‘parental alienation’, and the suggestion that
there may be a diagnosable syndrome of that name, as
being unhelpful. What is important, as with domestic
abuse, is the particular behaviour that is found to have
taken place within the individual family before the
court, and the impact that that behaviour may have had on
the relationship of a child with either or both of
his/her parents. In this regard, the identification of
‘alienating behaviour’ should be the
court’s focus, rather than any quest to determine
whether the label ‘parental alienation’ can be
applied’
|
| For parental
alienation to occur, there needs to be a situation where
a child is refusing, resisting or reluctant to engage
with a parent, and the resident parent has engaged in
behaviour that has impacted on the child and led to the
child’s refusal, resistance, or reluctance to engage
in a relationship with the other parent, as per the
observations of Sir Andrew McFarlane P in Re C
(‘Parental Alienation’; Instruction of
Expert)[2023] EWHC 345 (Fam).
|
