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Parental Day
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Today is International Parental Alienation Awareness Day, concerning a very serious matter, a life trauma that we could so easily protect our children and families from.
It is a desperately sad situation of social rejection to create for a family, in particular children who even as grown-ups can be shattered by the realisation that the parent they have been taught to despise or hate was just a parent who loved them. Experts on this pathology are increasingly disturbed by its spread and depth, as it has disastrous consequences for social cohesion and the integration of all ages and both sexes in the wider community.
We, parents and victims, ask you the following: please protect our children, victims of parental alienation. In order to protect human rights, one ought to protect, first and foremost, children's rights to their family, they say.
And ask:
- For enhanced and decisive regulatory decisions such that it is recognised that a child has the right to both parents, and that such family ties must be protected.
- That child abduction or obstruction of contact should be recognized as human rights abuses under both national and international law, whether practised by parents against each other or by officials against an individual parent, so that an alienating parent or an alienating official can be taken to court and tried for these crimes, with the degree of alienation taken into account, thereby tilting the balance in favour of caring parents, irrespective of their sex.
- That items 1 and 2 be integrated into the framework for dealing with both international and domestic child removal. For too long we have lived under a child abduction r?gime.
Concerning non-respect of contact rights and parental kidnappings to which a blind eye is turned by the judiciary, in order to get conventions and laws on co-parenting to be respected, we must have a "no-delay" justice system where non-compliance is felt to be a risk. It is not acceptable that a judge delays reaching judgment when such delay may result in extended periods of loss of contact. Neither the children, nor we, have the time for this any more.
CHILD ABUSE
The signatories below - lawyers, doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists participating in the First National Symposium on Parental Alienation Syndrome, conclude that:
The manipulation of children by one of the parents, or within the family circle of this parent, with the intention that they reject the other parent, is a type of Psychological Violence which qualifies as Child Abuse.
This abuse process includes obstruction of the relationship between the children, their parent and this parent?s side of the extended family, false accusations of sexual aggression and abuse, physical distancing mechanisms and inculcation of denigrating and injurious arguments which construct in the mind of the child beliefs, emotions and behaviours which the children believe they themselves have created, in which they express hatred against the rejected parent, together with an extreme form of defence of the alienating parent.
It is necessary to reinvigorate the investigation of these actions within the judicial ambit, medical, psychiatric and psychological, with the objective of developing analytical tools which can serve to prevent the development of such behaviours, interfering in this process and providing treatment.
The Professional Representative bodies for Lawyers, Doctors and State-registered Psychologists must pay attention to this type of child abuse so as to deny it the ability to establish itself and thus develop into a fully elaborated form. They must train their professionals in recognizing its existence, within the framework of their professional codes of conduct.
This present declaration is signed in Madrid, in the Distinguished College of Medical Practitioners, 25th March 2006.
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