The Federal Government has led the way to pass long-overdue national legislation that appropriately labels family violence/domestic violence as criminal behavior. Domestic violence is not merely that of men abusing women.
Alienating behaviors are horrific examples of family/domestic violence and domestic violence by proxy. These horrific domestic violence behaviors are being committed by alienating parents and inflicted upon their children.
This article will show that alienating behaviors meet the standard definitions of domestic violence (DV) and domestic violence by proxy (DV by Proxy). Alienating parents must therefore be recognized to be engaging in criminal behavior.
Parental Alienation Meets the Standard Definition of Domestic Violence
Domestic violence involves the abuse of unequal power by exploiting another party to their intimate interpersonal relationship. Alienating parents easily and readily exploit their exceedingly unequal power over their children, who are virtually dependent for survival upon their alienating parent.
Catastrophically for children, alienation is an exceedingly underreported and commonly unrecognized form of domestic violence. The creation of a generation of future DV perpetrators is an avoidable and thereby unforgivable consequence of the failure to recognize parental alienation as a form of domestic violence.
Because of the child’s long dependency period upon parents for survival, it is part of the instinct for survival to want and need a parent. It is anti-instinctual to override this instinct and to thereby reject a parent.
It therefore requires extreme coercion and manipulation by alienating parents to force their children to think negatively about their alienated parent and to reject their alienated parent. In fact, the brainwashing/programming in alienation is analogous to the brainwashing in a cult.
Alienating parents’ exceedingly unequal power over their children is magnified when they restrict or eliminate contact between their alienated children with their alienated parent.
Parental Alienation Involves Coercive Emotional Control of the Child
Alienating parents’ emotional control of the child requires the child to replace loving and positive feelings for and beliefs about the alienated parent with the alienating parent’s hateful and negative feelings for and beliefs about the alienated parent.
Among these negative feelings are: anger, hatred, disappointment, frustration, enmity, disgust, distrust, fear, and more.
Alienating parents engage in coercive emotional control of the child that robs the child of the child’s own feelings and beliefs and replace them with those of the alienating parent. This is truly a severe boundary violation of at the child by the alienating parent. This is a severe psychiatric condition for the child characterized by “pathological enmeshment with the alienating parent.
This alienating behavior meets the standard definition of “domestic violence.”
FURTHER READING: Child Maltreatment & Parental Alienation
Alienating Behaviors and the “Duluth Model of Power and Control Wheel”
Alienating behaviors are virtually the same as the DV behaviors found on the “Duluth Model of Power and Control Wheel,” which is used to assess for domestic violence.
In alienation, alienating parents rob their children of their feelings, opinions, and wishes about and for their alienated parent. Alienating parents then implant in their children that parents feelings, opinions, and wishes about and for the alienated parent.
The extreme coercion employed by alienating parents over their children to accomplish their mission of turning their children against their other parent meets the standard definition of domestic violence emotional abuse.
FURTHER READING: Alienating Behaviors – Domestic Violence Upon the Child
How extreme is the coercion employed by alienating parents? Consider the following:
Children Counterintuitively Bond to an Abusive Parent
It is so anti-instinctual to reject a parent that even severely physically abused children do not do not reject their abusive parents. Indeed, abused children do just the opposite of rejecting their abusive parents – they seek attachment enhancing behaviors to their abusive parents.
Extensive research and my evidence-based practice of having worked with 3000 abused and neglected foster children find that children counterintuitively bond to an abusive parent. Even more counterintuitive is that, the more intense was the abuse, the more intense is the bonding.
FURTHER READING: Abused Children Attach to Their Abusive Parents
Alienating Behaviors Meet the Standard Definition of Domestic Violence by Proxy
Alienated parents are being emotionally and physically assaulted by their alienated children at the behest of alienating parents. This includes alienated mothers who are being physically assaulted by their children – especially teenage sons.
As a result of alienating parents’ extreme abusive coercion over their children, alienated children are hurting, defying, emotionally abusing, and even physically assaulting their alienated parent. These behaviors meet the criteria of DV by Proxy.
Parental Alienation Involves Manipulation of Children to Commit Violence Upon Their Alienated Parent
Alienating parents employ coercive manipulation that requires their children to maltreat and physically assault their alienated parent. This cowardly and cynical exploitation of children is to facilitate alienating parents’ mission to drive the alienated parent from their children’s lives.
I have frequently witnessed alienated children employ antisocial behaviors to hurt, humiliate, defy, and emotionally and physically abuse their alienated parent.
Not only do these behaviors meet the standard definition of domestic violence by proxy; these behaviors meet the DSM-5-TR definition of “child or adolescent antisocial behavior.”
What Alienated Mothers Want From Domestic Violence Professionals
Alienated mothers wish for their sons to get the desperate help they need to relinquish their antisocial, battering behaviors and have the expectation for becoming law-abiding, socially responsible adults.
Alienated mothers are desperately attempting to save their physically violent sons from themselves and from the influence by their alienating fathers.
Alienated mothers fear that if their sons do not get preventive help in their youth, they will grow up to be the next generating of perpetrators of DV in their intimate relationships.
Alienated Mothers’ Cry for Help for Their Abusive Sons & Daughters
The concerns of alienated mothers are screaming for remedy.
By denying the very real existence of parental alienation, a generation of potential adult DV perpetrators is being promoted and produced – however unintended – by the very professionals committed to end DV.
It is incomprehensible to me that so many of these professionals, who have made the protection of women their life’s work, yet ignore the potential conflagration of minor boys – and even daughters – becoming adult DV perpetrators.
Prevention of the perpetuation of DV begins with recognition that parental alienation is real, is abusive of mothers as well as of fathers, and is most of all abusive of alienated children for whom DV behaviors are being normalized by their alienating parents.
FURTHER READING: Response to “Parental Alienation Primer for Advocates”
Conclusion
Family/Domestic violence is correctly characterized as criminal behaviors.
Alienating parents are committing domestic violence and domestic violence by proxy upon their children.
Alienating parents are engaging in criminal behaviors, and justice for alienated children require that their alienating parents be charged, adjudicated, and penalized for their criminal behaviors committed upon their children.
