A call to the domestic abuse field to accept conceptual parity with parental alienation, and to embrace evidentiary governance and relational ethics in family policy

The Child is Still in The Middle

This essay is more direct than my recent writing on relational ethics and future families. I have mostly avoided the parental alienation versus gendered domestic abuse battleground, where possible, because children are not helped by professional culture wars. But there comes a point when refusing the battle forfeits the decision about agreed language and governing categories to others. My argument is simple: domestic abuse is real, parental alienation is real, and children are harmed when either is denied.

Battlelines

 In engaging this battleground, I have also defined the battlelines. However, it is fair to say that neither the parental alienation field nor the gendered domestic abuse field is entirely homogeneous. I have chosen the order of battle for each field based on its dominant narratives, whilst recognising that there may be a range of views within each field.

The dispute between parental alienation and domestic abuse is often described as a culture war. This essay argues that this description is too narrow. The conflict is an ideological and policy battleground over the categories that will govern family law, domestic abuse legislation, public health policy, evidence translation and the future moral meaning of family relationships.

A dominant critique of parental alienation frames it as a legal tactic used by abusive fathers to counter allegations of domestic abuse. That critique should not become a policy shortcut. At its best, the parental alienation field does not deny domestic abuse but insists that parental alienation can also constitute psychological abuse, coercive control and relational harm. The existence of tactical misuse does not disprove the phenomenon, just as tactical misuse of domestic abuse allegations would not disprove domestic abuse.

This essay identifies three battlegrounds: the term “parental alienation”; the gendered definition of coercive control; and the role of family relationships in children’s development. It argues that children do not need winner-takes-all policy. They need conceptual parity, evidentiary governance and relational ethics that recognise domestic abuse, parental alienation, justified estrangement, hybrid cases and ordinary conflict. The parental alienation field should stop apologising for its existence. It should insist that domestic abuse and parental alienation are real, and that children are harmed when either is denied.

No more Winner-Takes-All Policy

The danger of the current ideological battleground is that it invites a winner-takes-all settlement. If the gendered domestic abuse frame wins outright, parental alienation is assimilated, renamed or dismissed. If the parental alienation field were to respond in kind, domestic abuse would be minimised, treated as tactical or subordinated to contact restoration. Both outcomes are unacceptable.

Children do not need one ideology to vanquish another. They need systems capable of recognising multiple forms of harm simultaneously.That requires three commitments.

• First, conceptual parity. Domestic abuse and parental alienation must both be available as possible explanations. Neither should be presumed. Neither should be excluded.
  
• Second, courts, services, policymakers and legislators must embrace evidentiary governance. They must distinguish evidence, advocacy, ideology, expert opinion and legal findings. They must not allow slogans to do the work of assessment.
  
• Third, family policy should incorporate relational ethics and hold safety and relationships together.

A child’s best interests are not served by unsafe contact. Nor are they served by the unnecessary destruction of safe and meaningful relationships.That is not a demand for the domestic abuse field to surrender its achievements. It is a demand that it accept the same evidentiary discipline it asks of others.

The parental alienation field holds that line. Can the domestic abuse field do the same?

Korosi, S. (2026). Essay: The Child is Still in the Middle: Parental Alienation, Domestic Abuse and the Battle for the Future of Family Policy: Dialogue in Growth. In. Australia: University of the Sunshine Coast.https://doi.org/10.25907/01037

• Ethics Approval for Research into Parental Alienation as a Social Phenomenon
• Response to UN Special Rapporteur’s Call for Input: Custody Cases, Violence against Women and Children
• The Growth of Parental Alienation Advocacy and Support Groups in Australia
• Important Changes for Parental Alienation Services in Australia
• Family Violence Orders: Should You Really Apply For Them?

Parental alienation cannot be addressed only through courts, clinicians and private family disputes. It requires prevention, early identification, accessible remediation and institutional accountability.

Dialogue in Growth has released White Paper No. 2, Beyond the Psycho-Legal Paradigm: A Social and Public Health Policy Framework for Alienation in Families, proposing a significant shift in how parental alienation and related forms of family alienation are understood in public policy.

The paper argues that alienation in families is not only a clinical, forensic or family-law problem. It is also a relational, social, economic and public health concern. When a child is drawn into narratives that vilify, erase or morally disqualify a parent or family member, the harm does not remain confined to a private dispute. It can reshape the child’s family identity, damage safe and developmentally important relationships, impose severe burdens on targeted and rejected parents, and contribute to wider mental health and social costs.  

The new White Paper follows White Paper No. 1, The Alienated Society: Parental Alienation, Relational Harm and the Future of Families, which situated parental alienation within the broader problem of relational harm in changing family networks. White Paper No. 2 develops the policy implications of that argument. It asks a blunt question: what policy architecture is required when alienation in families is foreseeable, harmful and often preventable, yet current systems tend to respond only after relational damage has become entrenched?  

Why the current psycho-legal approach is not enough

Parental alienation is usually recognised late: during litigation, in expert reports, through a child’s resistance or refusal, or after a parent-child relationship has already substantially collapsed. By then, the matter has often become legalised, pathologised and polarised.

Courts ask what orders should be made. Clinicians ask what formulation or intervention might apply. Those questions remain necessary. But the White Paper argues that they are not sufficient.

A broader social and public health framework asks different questions:

• What conditions allow alienating behaviours to develop and spread?
• Why are early warning signs missed?
• How does delay consolidate relational rupture?
• Why is remediation so often available only to families who can afford prolonged litigation?
• How do institutional narratives, misinformation and policy blind spots reinforce rather than interrupt family alienation?

The central claim is not that legal and clinical responses should be discarded. It is that they should be located within a wider policy architecture that includes prevention, public education, timely intervention, accessible repair pathways and institutional responsibility.  

Alienation in families is a public policy problem

The White Paper uses alienation in families as an inclusive concept. It encompasses parental alienation and related alienating behaviours that affect targeted and rejected parents, children, siblings, grandparents and wider kin networks. It describes parental alienating behaviours as actions that vilify, devalue, exclude, frighten, recode or erase a parent or family member from the child’s relational world.  

These behaviours are not merely expressions of conflict. They operate through narratives. A previously safe and meaningful relationship may be recast as dangerous, contemptible, unnecessary or morally forbidden. In this sense, alienation is not only behavioural. It is also discursive: it reorganises the child’s moral map of family belonging.

That is why the problem cannot be left entirely to private remediation after the fact. The social conditions that allow children’s family relationships to be manipulated, delayed, misclassified or left without repair pathways are matters of public concern.

The White Paper therefore proposes that alienation in families be treated as a multidimensional policy problem involving:

• child safety and development;
• coercive control and family violence;
• human rights and family life;
• parental identity and children’s belonging;
• socio-economic access to assessment and remediation;
• misinformation and evidentiary governance;
• public health monitoring and suicide-risk research;
• institutional accountability across family law, health, education and child protection. 

Anti-alienation and de-alienation: two policy tasks

A central contribution of the White Paper is its distinction between anti-alienation and de-alienation policy.

Anti-alienation policy is preventive. It concerns public education, professional training, evidence governance, policy design and early recognition of alienating behaviours before family relationships collapse.

De-alienation policy is remedial. It concerns assessment, therapeutic intervention, court-linked responses where necessary, relational repair, reunification work, narrative correction and support for children and parents where repair is safe and developmentally justified. 

This distinction matters. A society that acts only after a child’s relationship with a parent has collapsed is not practising prevention. Equally, a system that names alienation but provides no accessible means of repair is not protecting children.

The White Paper argues that both policy tasks are required if governments, professional bodies and family services are serious about children’s relational safety.

Evidence-sensitive, not ideological

The paper is explicit that an anti-alienation policy framework must not become a new ideology. It must remain evidence-sensitive, non-gendered and capable of distinguishing different forms of harm.

That means recognising:

• domestic abuse and family violence;
• coercive control;
• justified estrangement;
• ordinary post-separation conflict;
• parent-child contact problems;
• alienating behaviours;
• hybrid cases in which more than one mechanism is operating at the same time.  

The White Paper rejects two unsafe shortcuts.

The first is to dismiss alienation as pseudoscience before the evidence in a case is assessed.

The second is to treat every child’s resistance to a parent as alienation before violence, abuse, fear, neglect or justified estrangement have been examined.

Both errors substitute pre-classification for assessment. Both can harm children. The paper therefore argues for differential assessment: systems capable of asking what has happened, by what mechanism, with what effect, and what response best protects the child’s safety and relational development.  

The problem with gendered pre-classification

The White Paper also challenges policy frameworks that pre-classify victimhood, perpetration and coercive control by gender or parental role before the facts of a family are known.

Gender remains relevant in some cases. Structural inequality remains real. Domestic abuse remains a serious policy concern. But, the paper argues, gender is not sufficient as a categorical explanation for alienation in families.

Policies that treat men and fathers as inherently risk-bearing actors, and women and children as a unified victim class, may narrow inquiry before relational facts have been established. The same criticism applies to any framework—whether therapeutic, legal, parental-rights oriented or child-autonomy based—that decides the answer before evidence-sensitive assessment has occurred.  

This is not a retreat from family violence policy. It is a demand that policy become more precise, more inclusive and more capable of recognising multiple forms of relational harm.

Delay is not neutral

One of the paper’s strongest policy claims is that institutional delay should be treated as a harm amplifier.

Where alienation is occurring, delay can consolidate rejection, normalise relational exclusion, entrench false or exaggerated narratives and make later repair more difficult. A system that waits until a child’s relationship with a parent has collapsed may then mistake the consequences of delay for the child’s settled and autonomous preference.  

This has direct implications for family law, child protection, family dispute resolution and therapeutic services. Timely investigation matters. Early identification matters. Systems that are slow fragmented or conceptually confused may become unwitting participants in the harm they are meant to prevent.

Relational repair should not depend on wealth

The White Paper also confronts the economic reality of remediation.

Alienated families may face years of legal fees, expert reports, therapeutic costs, travel expenses, parenting coordination, time away from employment and repeated procedural delay. Families with resources may be able to pursue repair. Families without those resources may be left with rupture.

The paper argues plainly that children’s relational safety should not become an economic privilege. If alienation is a child welfare and public health concern, then assessment, early intervention and safe relational repair should not depend solely on a parent’s capacity to fund prolonged private litigation.  

This is where a social and public health framework offers a different policy imagination. It requires governments to consider affordable assessment pathways, subsidised repair services, court-linked intervention models and the wider economic settings that may interact with gatekeeping, conflict and delay.

A nine-pillar policy framework

White Paper No. 2 proposes a nine-pillar social and public health policy framework for alienation in families:

1. Recognition — acknowledging alienation as relational, psychological, social and public health harm.
2. Prevention — public education, professional training and early-warning guidance.
3. Differential assessment — distinguishing alienation from abuse, estrangement, conflict and hybrid cases.
4. Timely intervention — treating delay as a harm amplifier.
5. Accessible remediation — making safe relational repair available beyond wealthy litigants.
6. Human rights and identity — protecting children’s family life, belonging and relational continuity where safe.
7. Evidentiary governance — addressing misinformation, advocacy overreach and ideological pre-classification.
8. Public health monitoring — tracking prevalence, mental health outcomes, suicidality, service access and intervention results.
9. Institutional accountability — evaluating whether courts, schools, family services and child protection systems interrupt or consolidate alienation.  

The framework does not subordinate domestic abuse to alienation, or alienation to domestic abuse. Its organising concern is the child’s safe relational development.

From white paper to policy agenda

The White Paper is intended as a platform document for further policy and research work. It proposes a staged implementation pathway:

• establishing alienation in families as a legitimate object of social and public health policy discussion;
• convening cross-disciplinary policy conversations;
• developing early intervention and differential assessment guidance;
• creating accessible de-alienation pathways;
• examining economic barriers to remediation;
• embedding alienation within public health, child protection, suicide prevention and family policy frameworks;
• building an evidence repository and monitoring intervention outcomes.  

It also identifies major evidence needs, including prevalence research, longitudinal studies, validated assessment tools, intervention outcome studies, economic cost modelling, suicide-risk research and evaluations of legal and therapeutic responses. The paper is careful not to claim more than the present evidence allows. Its argument is that evidentiary incompleteness is not a reason for policy inaction where foreseeable and preventable harm exists.

The policy test

 White Paper closes with a simple policy test:

Does policy help children remain safe, connected and able to belong, or does it allow relational harm to become normalised as part of family life?

That question should concern family law, public health, child protection, family violence services, schools, governments and every professional system that encounters children and families after separation.

Alienation in families cannot be resolved by arguing endlessly over labels while children’s relationships collapse around us. Nor can it be addressed through courts and clinicians alone. A serious response requires policy architecture: prevention, evidence-sensitive assessment, timely action, accessible repair and institutional accountability.

That is the conversation this White Paper seeks to open.

Read the full White Paper

Korosi, S. (2026). Beyond the Psycho-Legal Paradigm: A Social and Public Health Policy Framework for Alienation in Families Anti-alienation, de-alienation and evidence-sensitive family policy White Paper No. 2. SSRN Preprint. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6742500 Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6742500

• Sociological Implications of Social Alienation and its Demon Spawn Parental Alienation in Families
• What Happens When Men become Alienated from their Children?
• Parental Alienation – Faster Than The Speed of Love
• Overturning The “Ban” on Overnight Stays for Alienated Toddlers
• False Allegations and Parental Alienation in Australian Family Law

The family of the future need not be nuclear, traditional or fixed. But it must not become a social form in which children’s safe and meaningful relationships are made disposable.

Dialogue in Growth White Paper No. 1 argues that parental alienation is not only a post-separation family-law issue. It is a warning about what happens when children’s relationships become disposable.

Dialogue in Growth has released White Paper No. 1. The Alienated Society: Parental Alienation, Relational Harm and the Future of Families (available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6732958)

The paper is a major conceptual and policy proposal that places parental alienation within a broader social question: what relational ethics will guide the families of the twenty-first century?

The paper argues that parental alienation should no longer be understood only as a contested clinical or family-law concept. It is also a concentrated expression of a wider problem: relational harm in increasingly diverse, fluid and narratively constituted family networks.

fContemporary families are changing. They are more likely to span separated households, blended families, step-relations, donor and surrogacy arrangements, kinship care, same-sex parenting, transnational ties and digitally mediated relationships. These shifts create new possibilities for care, belonging and family life. But they also create new vulnerabilities. Where relationships are held together less by fixed household form and more by narratives of recognition, memory, obligation and belonging, those narratives can be captured, narrowed and weaponised.  

Parental alienation matters because it shows what happens when that process turns destructive.

Why parental alienation travels beyond the family court

Parental alienation is often discussed in the language of proof, diagnosis, expert evidence and remediation. Those matters remain important. But the White Paper argues that this problem-saturated focus is now too narrow.

Alienating behaviours do not merely obstruct contact or express conflict. They can reorganise a child’s moral map of the family. A parent may be recoded as unsafe, contemptible, unnecessary or no longer real as a parent. The child may come to experience love, memory and affiliation with that parent as disloyal, dangerous or forbidden.

In this sense, parental alienation is not only a post-separation dispute. It is a social mechanism of relational erasure. It reveals how family relationships can be made conditional, how parental identity can be cancelled, and how institutions may either interrupt or consolidate that process.  

The paper therefore asks the parental alienation field to take up a larger task. It must continue to defend the reality of alienating behaviours where necessary. But its broader contribution is to help define the relational ethics of future families: safe connection, developmental continuity, non-violence, parental identity, family belonging and institutional responsibility.

Not nostalgia for the nuclear family

The White Paper does not argue for a return to one historical family form. It does not defend the nuclear family as the only legitimate model, nor does it treat family diversity as a problem.

Its claim is sharper and more future-oriented: as family forms become more diverse, it becomes more—not less—important to identify the relational conditions children need across all family configurations.

A child may flourish in a nuclear family, a separated family, a blended family, a same-sex-parented family, a kinship care arrangement, a transnational family network or another stable care arrangement. The question is not whether the family form satisfies an ideological preference. The question is whether the child’s safe and meaningful relationships are recognised, protected and allowed to develop.  

The problem is not family diversity. The problem is relational disposability.

A future family policy worthy of children must hold two commitments together:

• openness to plural and evolving family configurations; and
• resistance to narratives, systems and adult projects that erase safe, developmentally important relationships.

The future family as a relational network

White Paper No. 1 proposes that families of the future are likely to be organised less as fixed household units and more as relational networks. These networks may include biological parents, social parents, step-parents, siblings, grandparents, donor relations, cultural communities and geographically dispersed kin. Some will be resilient and nurturing. Others will be vulnerable to instability, conflict or capture by a single adult’s account of who belongs and who does not.  

In such families, the child’s relational map becomes a central developmental asset. That map tells the child:

• who they are connected to;
• who may be trusted;
• who matters;
• who may be loved;
• and who must be rejected for safety’s sake.

Alienating processes attack that map. They turn complexity into moral prohibition. They reduce a family relationship to a settled identity claim: this person is not your parent, not your family, not safe, not worthy, not part of you.  

A future-oriented family policy should protect children from unsafe relationships. But it should also protect them from the avoidable erasure of safe and meaningful relationships through adult grievance, ideological presumption, institutional delay or economic incentive.

The politics of alienation and family policy

Family policy is never neutral. It carries assumptions about harm, power, autonomy, parental responsibility, gender, children’s needs and the proper role of the State.

The White Paper acknowledges the important contribution made by domestic-abuse and coercive-control frameworks in naming patterns of violence and structural inequality that were historically minimised. That contribution should not be dismissed.

But it also argues that policy becomes unsafe when any framework turns categorical rather than evidentiary—when it recognises only one kind of victim, one direction of coercion, one authorised narrative of harm or one morally approved account of family life. In that setting, policy stops investigating relational harm and begins to pre-classify it.  

This critique applies not only to gendered domestic-abuse frameworks where they become doctrinaire. It applies equally to simplistic parental alienation advocacy. Not every child’s rejection of a parent is alienation. Some children resist contact for sound reasons, including violence, coercion, neglect, fear or accumulated relational injury.

The paper’s position is therefore deliberately symmetrical:

Future family policy must recognise domestic abuse without converting every resisted relationship into proof of danger. It must recognise parental alienation without treating every abuse allegation as tactical.

That is not a compromise between safety and relationship. It is a more complete account of child safety. 

The risk of institutionalising relational erasure

The White Paper warns that laws, policies and professional frameworks may unintentionally help consolidate parent-child rupture when they are not sufficiently evidence-sensitive.

It discusses developments in the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States and Canada that seek to address family violence, domestic abuse and allegations of alienating behaviour, while noting that some approaches risk treating parent-child relationship repair with suspicion where alienation may in fact be present.  

The issue is not whether family violence should be taken seriously. It must be. The issue is whether family policy can take violence seriously without losing the ability to recognise coercive relational harm when it presents through alienation, narrative foreclosure and the unnecessary destruction of a child’s relationship with a parent or family network.

If institutions accept exclusionary narratives too readily, delay timely intervention or fail to distinguish alienation from justified estrangement, they may become part of the alienating process. What begins as a private relational injury can then become institutionally validated family rupture.

Human rights and the child’s right to belong

The White Paper situates future family relationships within a human rights frame. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognises the family as a fundamental group unit of society. The Convention on the Rights of the Child recognises the importance of children’s family relationships and identity. European human rights jurisprudence has also affirmed that the State may have positive obligations to act in a timely way to preserve or restore parent-child relationships where this serves the child’s best interests.  

Alienation matters in this context because it threatens more than contact. It threatens identity, belonging, memory and developmental continuity.

Where a child’s safe and meaningful relationship with a parent or family network is unnecessarily erased, the child loses more than time. They may lose access to part of their own social identity and family history.

The White Paper does not argue for forced reconciliation or contact at any cost. It argues that where restoration is safe, developmentally beneficial and evidence-supported, relationship repair should be treated as a legitimate responsibility of socio-legal institutions, not as a private luxury left to families who can afford it. 

Call to Action: A relational ethics framework for future families

At the centre of White Paper No. 1 is a Relational Ethics Framework for Future Family Networks. This framework provides seven principles for policy, law, practice and public debate:

1. Children’s relational safety

Children must be protected from violence, coercion, abuse, intimidation, neglect and psychological harm. No claim for relational continuity can justify unsafe contact.

2. Relational continuity where safe

Safe, meaningful and developmentally important relationships with parents, siblings, grandparents and wider kin should not be treated as disposable because of adult grievance, ideology, institutional delay or adversarial advantage.

3. Evidence-sensitive assessment

Courts, services and professionals must be able to distinguish alienation, justified estrangement, domestic and family violence, coercive control, parent-child contact problems, ordinary conflict and hybrid cases.

4. Narrative accountability

Professionals should attend to the narratives children are asked to live within. Are children permitted to love both parents where safe? Or is love for one family member framed as betrayal of another?

5. Institutional timeliness

Delay should be treated as a harm amplifier. A system that waits until a child’s relationship has collapsed may then mistake the effects of delay for the child’s settled preference.

6. Symmetrical assessment of coercive control

Coercion should be assessed by behaviour, context and effect—not presumed from gender or parental role.

7. Relationship repair where safe and developmentally justified

Where relational harm has occurred, and repair serves the child’s safety and developmental needs, the State should support restoration, reunification or relational repair through proportionate, evidence-based pathways.  

Taken together, these principles offer a framework that is neither nostalgic nor ideologically rigid. It does not restore the nuclear family as the only legitimate model. Nor does it abandon children to adult autonomy, grievance, institutional indifference or ideological capture. It argues that diverse family networks require a stronger relational ethic, not a weaker one.

Why this White Paper matters

Parental alienation has often been forced into a defensive posture: proving that it exists, rebutting claims that it is merely a litigation tactic, and contesting policy frameworks that dismiss it out of hand.

That defensive task remains necessary. But the White Paper argues that it is no longer enough.

The larger contribution of the parental alienation field is to reveal one of the central vulnerabilities of contemporary and future family life: the capacity for children’s relationships to be captured, narrowed and reorganised through narratives of exclusion.

That problem is not confined to separated heterosexual families. It is not confined to the family court. It is a broader problem of relational harm in a society where family relationships are more fluid, more negotiated and more vulnerable to social, political and institutional contestation.  

The future family need not be nuclear, traditional or fixed. But it must not become a social form in which children’s relationships are rendered disposable by adult grievance, ideological doctrine or institutional failure.

The challenge is not to choose between safety and family relationships. The challenge is to build policy, law and practice capable of seeing both forms of harm at the same time.

Read the full White Paper

Korosi, S. (2026). The Alienated Society: Parental Alienation, Relational Harm and the Future of Families White Paper No 1. SSRN Preprint. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6732958. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6732958 

• False Allegations and Parental Alienation in Australian Family Law
• Family Law Amendment Bill 2023: An Anti-Family and Anti-Child Law
• Response to UN Special Rapporteur’s Call for Input: Custody Cases, Violence against Women and Children
• Parental Alienation – Faster Than The Speed of Love
• Overturning The “Ban” on Overnight Stays for Alienated Toddlers

Why the DFSV–Suicide Inquiry Must Widen Its Lens: Supplementary Submission to the Australian House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs

By Stan Korosi, PhD
Dialogue in Growth | Policy and social analysis

Australia’s new parliamentary Inquiry into the relationship between domestic, family and sexual violence (DFSV) victimisation and suicide is important, timely, and necessary. But if the Inquiry remains conceptually narrow, it risks missing a significant and preventable subset of suicide deaths.

Supplementary Submission (Corrigendum)

My original submission (https://doi.org/10.25907/01015) to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs has now been replaced with an updated version (https://doi.org/10.25907/01031 ).

There is no substantative change in the development of concepts, focus or policy direction.

It uses more accurate suicide statistics for 2023 published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) in 2024.

The 2023 suicide statistics reinforce that, in absolute terms, men’s deaths from suicide across all psychosocial categories are substantially greater than for women and that men’s and women’s suicide deaths coded in the Z63.5 psychosocial suicide category are proportionally more similar.

As previously it argues that, current policy settings are not yet sufficiently specified to explain — or prevent — a substantial subset of suicides associated with family relationship rupture during separation and divorce. The dominant DFSV victim–perpetrator framing captures important harms. It should be retained. But on its own, it may not be enough.

The central problem is this: some suicides appear to occur at the intersection of family rupture, coercive relational dynamics, social narratives, and institutional interpretation. If policy only sees one part of that intersection, it will underperform in the real world.

The suicide prevalence signal policy should not ignore

A major blind spot in public discussion is the psychosocial suicide category ICD-10 Z63.5: “Disruptions to family relationships by separation or divorce.” In the updated submission, I highlight Australian 2023 data showing this category recorded in a substantial number of suicide deaths for both men and women, with markedly higher male mortality. This is not a fringe issue. It is a population-level signal that our current approach to DFSV and suicide is missing a significant at-risk group.

This matters because such coding does not tell us whether cases involved victimisation, perpetration, bidirectional conflict, coercive dynamics, parental alienation, institutional misreading, or some combination of these. It identifies a high-risk psychosocial presentation. What it does not do is explain the pathway.

That is the policy gap.

Why conventional framing of suicide can be incomplete

Much of suicidology and DFSV policy examines trauma, violence, coercive control, and social determinants. However, broad frameworks can become too generic when they are applied to severe family rupture during separation and divorce.

The issue is not whether existing frameworks are “wrong.” The issue is whether they are sufficiently granular.

Where policy is too broad, high-risk presentations become flattened into generic categories such as “relationship problems,” or interpreted through pre-existing templates that may not fit the facts of a specific case. In practice, this can obscure coercive relational dynamics, identity degradation, and institutional responses that intensify suicidality.

That is especially relevant where the parent–child relationship itself becomes the site of coercive conflict.

Parental alienating behaviours as one possible coercive pathway

The submission argues that parental alienating behaviours (PABs) should be examined as one possible (but not the only) under-recognised coercive pathway within family relationship rupture. This argument includes all forms of DFSV that meet evidentiary standards and are gender-inclusive.

It is an argument for empirical investigation of this hidden suicide presentation.

If coercive parenting and relational behaviours are contributing to suicidality in some separation/divorce contexts, then policy must be capable of identifying that pathway and responding to it. If not, an entire high-risk presentation can sit in plain sight in national data while remaining poorly specified in a prevention strategy.

In my submission, I frame PABs as coercive communicative practices that can restructure family relationships and identity — including, in some cases, inducing child rejection of a parent without reasonable justification. The policy question for the Inquiry is whether such dynamics are currently under-recognised in suicide prevention settings.

The missing suicide mechanism: identity degradation and institutional uptake

One of the most important gaps in the current debate is the role of social and institutional meaning-making.

Suicide risk is not always reducible to individual pathology or immediate interpersonal conflict. In some cases, suicidality may be intensified by a cumulative process in which:

• Parental identity is degraded;
  
• Claims are filtered through delegitimising templates;
  
• Gendered scripts shape credibility;
  
• Institutions stabilise these interpretations; and
  
• Alternate non-stigmatised identities become harder to sustain.

That is a sociological and policy problem, not merely a clinical one.

The submission proposes a pathway model in which coercive relational dynamics, including but not limited to parental alienation, gendered social scripts, and institutional uptake, can combine to create entrapment, burdensomeness, defeat, and loss of belongingness — all well-known suicide-relevant constructs in the literature. The point is not to presume causation in every case, but to specify a mechanism that can be tested, rather than ignored.

This is not a zero-sum argument about gender

A recurring mistake in policy discourse is to treat recognition of one form of harm as denial of another. That is intellectually lazy and policy-destructive.

My submission explicitly argues for a gender-inclusive approach. Men are overrepresented in suicide mortality in this presentation, which warrants focused attention. But women are also significantly affected and may experience different forms of identity foreclosure and institutional misrecognition.

The relevant policy question is not “Which gender counts?” The question is: Which coercive pathways are operating, how are they institutionally interpreted, and what interventions reduce deaths?

That is the standard that a serious inquiry should apply.

Where the current National Suicide Prevention Strategy appears under-specified

The submission uses Australia’s National Suicide Prevention Strategy 2025–2035 as an example of a broader structural issue: a high-risk psychosocial presentation is recognised, but pathway-specific responses remain underdeveloped.

The Strategy addresses DFSV as a major public policy concern and recognises family relationship disruption as a suicide factor. However, in my assessment, it does not yet provide a sufficiently targeted response for suicidality associated with severe family relationship rupture during separation and divorce — particularly where coercive relational or parenting dynamics may be involved.

In practical terms, this can lead to:

• risk recognition without pathway-specific intervention design,
• generic service responses where specialist responses may be needed,
• insufficient service mapping/commissioning for this presentation, and
• limited evidence-building on causal pathways and intervention effectiveness.

If we want outcomes to improve, strategy language must connect to operational design.

What a serious policy response should look like

The answer is not ideology. The answer is better specification, better evidence, and better implementation.

My submission recommends a targeted policy package to complement — not displace — existing DFSV work. Key elements include:

• an independent evidence review on suicide associated with family relationship disruption (including coercive relational and parenting dynamics and parental alienation as testable pathways);
  
• improved data linkage and case-review capability;
  
• gender-inclusive risk identification at family law, mediation, counselling and related touchpoints;
  
• targeted interventions for high-conflict/coercive presentations (beyond generic counselling-only responses);
  
• specialist service mapping, commissioning and evaluation;
  
• evidentiary safeguards to assess claims and counterclaims, especially of DFSV and parental alienation without presumption; and
  
• practitioner training that is gender-inclusive, evidence-disciplined, and capable of working under evidentiary uncertainty.

In plain terms: if a risk pattern is visible in national data, but invisible in service design, policy is not finished.

The Inquiry has an opportunity — and a responsibility

This Inquiry can do more than restate known harms. It can improve the evidence base by testing under-recognised pathways and sharpening suicide prevention design where family relationship rupture is the presenting context.

That requires conceptual courage and evidentiary discipline at the same time.

Australia does not need a false choice between DFSV prevention and a more complete account of suicidality in family rupture contexts. It needs a framework capable of handling complexity without collapsing into ideology, and a prevention strategy capable of matching the real-world patterns visible in the data.

Lives depend on whether policy can do that work.

Selected references (as cited in the underlying submission)

• Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (2022). Psychosocial Risk Factors and Deaths by Suicide.
• National Mental Health Commission. (2025). National Suicide Prevention Strategy 2025–2035.
• Harman, J. J., Kruk, E., & Hines, D. A. (2018). Parental alienating behaviours: An unacknowledged form of family violence. Psychological Bulletin, 144(12), 1275–1299. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000175
• Cleary, A. (2019). The Gendered Landscape of Suicide: Masculinities, Emotions, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16634-2
• Van Orden, K. A., Witte, T. K., Cukrowicz, K. C., Braithwaite, S. R., Selby, E. A., & Joiner, T. E. Jr. (2010). The interpersonal theory of suicide. Psychological Review, 117(2), 575.
• Poustie, C., Matthewson, M., & Balmer, S. (2018). The Forgotten Parent: The Targeted Parent Perspective of Parental Alienation. Journal of Family Issues, 39(12), 3298–3323. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192513X18777867
• Lee-Maturana, S., Matthewson, M. L., & Dwan, C. (2020). Targeted parents surviving parental alienation: Consequences of the alienation and coping strategies. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 29, 2268–2280. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-020-01725-1

• The Schlock Horror Alienation Show-National Suicide Prevention Day
• What Happens When Men become Alienated from their Children?
• Parental Alienation Gets Publicity In The Australian
• Accredited Professional Development in Parental Alienation Presentations and Behaviours
• Parental Alienation: A Violent and Potentially Lethal Social and Psychological Phenomenon

International Parental Alienation Conference Focusing on Families, Family Relationships and Preventing Harm.

I am one of several keynote speakers, featuring the next parental alienation conference, PASG 2026, to be held in Perth, 11-13 October 2026. This conference will continue to provide a platform to present the latest developments in the social science, practice, policy and law in this field.

I will speak on several subjects:

• International perspectives on parental alienation,
  
• The future of families in an alienated world, and
  
• How alienating behaviours can coerce those exposed to them into suicide.

International Perspectives on Parental Alienation

I will address some important questions, such as:

• How is parental alienation regarded in different jurisdictions around the world?
  
• How is it that it is accepted within the framework of family violence and coercive control in some countries, but faces trenchant opposition in others?
  
• What do claims that the concept of parental alienation is “contested” mean?
  
• What are the ideologies and politics of those areas that accept parental alienation alongside other forms of family and domestic violence?

The Future of Families in an Alienated World

Parental alienation (PA) is a contested yet increasingly recognised phenomenon at the cutting edge of contemporary families. The PA field straddles the intersection of family dynamics, power, gender, and politics. Family networks transcend national boundaries, geography and historical structural forms.

This presentation will explore PA as a social dynamic driving family configuration and the family narratives that constitute the contemporary family. We will also discuss how PA also drives adverse societal change as an alienation discourse.

How Parental Alienating Behaviours (PABs) can Coerce Those Exposed to Them Into Suicide

Research on parental alienation has repeatedly linked exposure to PABs with adverse psychosocial outcomes, including suicidality with parents, especially alienated fathers, who are frequently identified as high risk.

I will propose a possible mechanism linking PAB exposure to suicidogenic conditions, including a plausible account of why male suicide mortality is overrepresented in family-relationship disruption and how this pathway may vary by gender.

• What Happens When Men become Alienated from their Children?
• Parental Alienation in Australia, A Year in Review
• Parental Alienation: What is Wrong with Your Family Assessment?
• Join The Parental Alienation Study Group
• ‘The Pinball Machine’: How The ‘House’ Wins The Alienation Game

The word “contestable” and the notion of “contestability”  are increasingly used as a political lever to delegitimise parental alienation (PA) in government and court settings. Yet, gendered theories of family violence (GFV) are largely untouched by the same standard. 

The brief responds to reporting that in 2025, a UN delegate questioned the Irish Government’s use of PA because PA is “highly contested.” The report in the Irish Examiner (https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/courtandcrime/arid-41655221.html) referred to alleged risks from “contested” claims of PA to women and children experiencing domestic violence. 

To put it bluntly: if “contestability” is treated as a disqualifier for policy, GFV should face equal—or greater—scrutiny. GFV is also contested on conceptual, empirical, and policy grounds. 

What is Different About Contestability?

“Contestability” has a special meaning in this debate. It is not merely disagreement about a concept’s usefulness. Contestability disputes the nature of the underlying reality (ontology) and how we can know it (epistemology)—a deeper challenge than conventional critique. 

In summary, contestability is framed as a typical rhetorical move in some strands of feminist theory. It shifts the argument from evidence and mechanisms to the claim that the phenomenon itself cannot be stably defined or objectively verified. 

PA critics apply this move selectively. PA research has been subject to sustained scientific and legal scrutiny since the 1980s. It has developed advanced and validated assessment frameworks and behavioural indicators. Meanwhile, GFV—often anchored in ideological origins and policy orthodoxy—can be difficult to critique without professional or reputational risk. The political and ideological orthodoxy about GFV make it less open to correction. 

What Are The Policy Implications?

The policy implication is straightforward: public institutions should not treat “contestability” as a one-way veto. The same scrutiny should be applied to all fields affecting children’s welfare. When formal bodies exclude PA from public health and policy frameworks on contestability grounds, they may inadvertently harm children and families by denying recognition, services, and evidence-based remedies to those affected—across genders and family structures

For the full article, please refer to :
https://doi.org/10.25907/00940

• Anti Parental Alienation Protestor Kicks Own Goal
• Sociological Implications of Social Alienation and its Demon Spawn Parental Alienation in Families
• Response to UN Special Rapporteur’s Call for Input: Custody Cases, Violence against Women and Children
• Should Alienated Parents Abduct Their Alienated Children?
• Parental Alienation Professional Development

—and Policy must catch up

Parental alienation (PA) is not just a private family dispute but a structural social phenomenon. It is actively reshaping family relationships, family narratives, and the future configuration of families. 

How is Parental Alienation a Problem?

One parent uses PA behaviours (PABs) to manipulate a child into rejecting the other parent without reasonable grounds. PA theory, practice and research have reached a turning point; it is now a distinct field. It is moving beyond a purely “problem-fixing” stance. Instead, the PA field could lead the public dialogue on family narratives and configurations that meet children’s developmental and relational needs now and into the future. 

Parental Alienation and Families

The PA field is situated in the broader context of rapidly evolving family structures. These evolving structures include blended families, single-parent households, and increasingly diverse parenting networks. It leads to thinking about how these shifts can make relationships more fluid and, therefore, more vulnerable to manipulation through coercive narratives. 

What Type of Abuse is Parental Alienating Behaviour (PAB)?

 PA behaviours are a form of power exercised through discourse, where one adult uses discursive strategies to normalise vilification and exclusion within the family system. Crucially, family law and child support settings can provide perverse incentives; these incemtives unintentionally reward vilification and exclusion and destabilise family moralities.

The PA Field Challenges Anti-Family Initiatives

The PA field brings to light adverse family relationship moralities. These anti-family moralities include:

• an unsettling norm where the State enforces child support while the parent receiving child support coaches the child to hate or reject the paying parent, and
  
• where social and legal agencies no longer consider parent-child relationships and a child’s relationship with family members as central to children’s development and welfare.

Public Policy and legislation should stop treating alienation as an oddity to be contested. Our social and legal agencies should treat it as a societal issue affecting children’s long-term health. It is time for structural reforms to ensure that children can maintain meaningful relationships with both parents, where safe, and for our institutions, such as family law, to repair family relationships rather than adjudicate conflicts about who cares for the children. The message from the PA field is clear; it is time to recenter families and family relationships in society.

For more information: download the full article at: https://doi.org/10.31124/advance.175869940.09833509/v1

Or at https://research.usc.edu.au/esploro/outputs/991198251002621

• Ethics Approval for Research into Parental Alienation as a Social Phenomenon
• Sociological Implications of Social Alienation and its Demon Spawn Parental Alienation in Families
• False Allegations and Parental Alienation in Australian Family Law
• Important Changes for Parental Alienation Services in Australia
• Progress on Research into The Lived Experience of Parental Alienation in a Social Context

Why Gendered Theories of Family Violence Are As Contestable—If Not More So—Than Parental Alienation Theory

Like many social science presentations, gendered theories of family violence and parental alienation may be considered contested concepts. They both rely fundamentally on the subjectivity of lived experience and assessment of structural factors that cannot be directly discerned. If, as the Irish Examiner claims, the Irish Government should not rely on contestable theories, then governments cannot rely on the gendered theory of violence to guide their policies either.

This false contestability argument has significant adverse implications for formal bodies responsible for legislation and public health policies. The WHO accepting GFV as an essential public health issue affecting women but not accepting PA as a public health issue affecting men, women, and children is contradictory. It is an example of how the false claim that PA is contestable but GFV is not (or that GFV is contestable but PA should still not be accepted) drives policies that harm significant populations that GFV regards as politically incorrect.

Gendered theories’ systemic entrenchment, ideological rigidity, and dogmatic nature render them more contestable. The same rigorous scientific explanation applied to PA should also apply to GFV. A shift towards inclusive, evidence-informed policymaking is essential for equitable justice and support for all affected families.

Please refer to the full article at https://doi.org/10.25907/00940

Key points: Gendered Family Violence and Parental Alienation

• Gendered theories are a political concept about reordering social and political structures to eliminate patriarchy. They rely on the ideological doctrine of patriarchy and male control, which discounts empirical evidence that disagrees with its doctrine.
  
• Large-scale studies indicate that bi-directional and female-perpetrated intimate partner violence is more prevalent than gendered theories acknowledge.
  
• Parental alienation, despite controversy, some of which is politically manufactured, has a growing interdisciplinary evidence base. It includes assessment instruments and behavioural tools for identification, clinical validation, social theories, and measures of its structural implications.
  
• Public polices rely on social determinants such as gender, race and other demographic factors, to perpetuate the doctrine of male-perpetrated violence against women and children.
  
• Public policies exclude PA because PA is independent of gender or other demographic factors. It is a relational and structural phenomenon using narratives that structure abuse across social determinants.
  
• Policy frameworks based on gendered models marginalise male victims, non-binary individuals, same-sex families and families experiencing non-gendered forms of violence.
  
• Gendered theories of violence harm the women and children they claim to protect by denying their experience. These theories insist on reframing their lived experience through their doctrine, which does not fully encompass the lived experience of parental alienation.
  
• A pluralist, evidence-based approach and the adoption of non-gendered public health initiatives would better serve all families and children, indeed all victims and reduce politicisation in family law and child welfare systems

• Response to UN Special Rapporteur’s Call for Input: Custody Cases, Violence against Women and Children
• Sociological Implications of Social Alienation and its Demon Spawn Parental Alienation in Families
• What Happens When Men become Alienated from their Children?
• False Allegations and Parental Alienation in Australian Family Law
• Family Violence Orders: Should You Really Apply For Them?

The report on Intimate Partner Violence (IPV), the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) released in June 2025, relies on tired, male-gendered tropes that skew its findings and may mislead the public and policymakers.

It reports that in 2022, one in three Australian men used IPV,  mostly against their female partners or family members. According to the study, these figures indicate a worsening trend compared to the previous report in 2013-2014, in which one in four men used IPV.

Summary Critique

The AIFS report, part of AIFS’s Ten to Men longitudinal study, reinforces outdated gender stereotypes in its portrayal of IPV as male-only. It ignores female factors associated with all forms of IPV, including parental alienating behaviours as a form of coercive control. Men and women, and mothers and fathers, equally use parental alienating behaviours.

The report is deeply flawed, best described as misleading, and gender-discriminatory for ignoring the roles women may play in perpetrating IPV and coercive control. Notably absent is any mention of parental alienating behaviours. These behaviours are a form of emotional abuse and control that research suggests is used by both mothers and fathers.

Proponents of gendered family violence will use this research to call for even more punitive and discriminatory laws. This research falls short by not telling the whole story. It is the wrong platform for policy, guidance, and legal changes.

The AIFS is simply recycling a simplistic narrative that casts women and children solely as victims. They undermine more balanced, evidence-based understandings of family violence. We call for future studies to include the experiences of all genders, especially in cases involving alienation and coercive control.

What the AIFS report is not telling us

• Women engage in IPV against their male partners at nearly equal prevalence with certain types of coercive control (parental alienating behaviours). They are also significantly represented in other forms of IPV against men and children. The AIFS research does not investigate female IPV and its links to male health or male IPV.

• One of the largest categories of suicide deaths is men suffering family relationship breakdowns from separation and divorce. In Australia, women are involved in manufacturing some of those relationship ruptures. Their behaviours are a coercive-controlling form of IPV against men. It was within the AIFS’s capability to address the situational factors leading to suicide. But the AIFS chose not to.

• IPV is also intergenerationally transmitted to male children by exposure to emotionally abusive mothers. The AIFS study only investigated links with abusive fathers. It is misleading only to examine the factors with which the AIFS agrees.

Female IPV Against Men: The Other Untold Story

This research and its parent research program, Ten-to-Men, do not tell the story of female IPV. Women use particular forms of coercive control (parental alienating behaviours) at a similar prevalence to men. Studies show that men are also victims of female IPV. Some international studies show that a quarter of women and 11% of men report being survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) during their lifetimes^[i].

The AIFS’s failure to address female IPV, especially female emotional abuse and coercive control, misdirects the reader. By excluding female IPV, readers may conclude that adverse male health and male violence are only related to male factors and not to their exposure to female violence and emotional abuse.

The AIFS study gives a free pass to abusive and violent women. The AIFS dogmatic approach cannot recognise that women and mothers can also be emotionally abusive and that their behaviour is harmful to both male and female children.

Are Suicidal Men Potential IPV Perpetrators?

The AIFS study does not explore situational factors for suicidality, such as family relationship ruptures due to separation and divorce. It excludes the possibility of a linkage between female coercive control, suicidality and men’s use of IPV. In certain circumstances, a type of coercive control may induce suicide in both men and women. Such induced or coerced suicide could be considered proxy murder^[i]. This presentation requires further research. 

It is inappropriate, if not unethical, to design a research program using suicidal men as a variable without also inquiring into the psychosocial nature of that suicide. Such a simplistic research design leads to shallow results. The outcome, “Men who had had suicidal thoughts, plans or attempts were 47% more likely to use IPV against their partner” is one example. It implies that suicidal men are also likely to be IPV perpetrators, simply because they are suicidal. This conclusion is misleading and is not the whole story.

What Happens When You Are the Son of an Abusive Mother?

Many studies into the linkage between childhood exposure to emotional abuse, emotional maltreatment, and domestic and family violence identify a link with children, who then go on to perpetrate forms of IPV as adults^[i]. Many of these studies do not differentiate by gender. They are open to the assumption that male children become violent adults because they witnessed their mothers being subjected to family violence by their fathers. 

On the other hand, the absence of gender differentiation leaves the question open to male children becoming violent, misogynistic adults after exposure to female violence, emotional neglect, and maltreatment. Overall, the literature implies that any severe family violence, including maternal coercion and emotional abuse, may lead to future IPV.

There is growing recognition of the prevalence of abuse against men from emotionally abusive mothers^[ii]. There is much research in this field available to the AIFS suggesting adverse mental health outcomes and misogynistic views because of emotionally abusive mothering. The AIFS study could have explored this dimension. Instead, they focused only on how children, especially male children, may socially learn abusive and misogynistic behaviours from witnessing their fathers’ abuse of their mothers.

Conclusion: The AIFS Misled the Public with Biased Research

The AIFS chose to mislead the public with an adverse male-gendered view. They did not investigate factors that could have provided a more nuanced, if not different, guidance to policymakers. Their study poses difficult questions for the AIFS.

• Why did the AIFS only research factors associated with male-gendered IPV? 

• Why did the AIFS not investigate links between male-gendered IPV and female-gendered emotional abuse and maltreatment? 

• How does the AIFS justify demonising suicidal men as IPV perpetrators using research bias to demonstrate its preconceived conclusion?

The most plausible reason is that the AIFS, similarly to the National Suicide Prevention Strategy^[i],   had already decided that men are violent because of their gender. They were already addicted to the extremist gendered violence cult’s dogma, and their research program was designed to confirm their adherence to it. 

Implications for the AIFS Research

This approach enables the AIFS to overlook the harm that such biased and poorly designed research can cause. It empowers the AIFS to ignore research that does not support their dogma. Their study may mislead policymakers to recommend initiatives to screen suicidal, depressed, and anxious men seeking help as IPV perpetrators. So, why would men seek help when support services’ priority is to establish whether they are violent instead of saving their lives?  

New Policy Directions to Address All Forms of IPV

We need public policies to address all forms of IPV, not just the politically attractive ones.

• Service providers to men and women seeking help must guarantee that they will not screen or treat men or women as potential perpetrators without a valid reason. 

• Family law and family violence legislation must be de-gendered and de-politicised, not just in the words used but in the interpretation of the law^[i].

• There should be no preventive protective measures taken without investigation.

A public health approach considers a social issue, such as IPV, as a multifaceted problem that affects the population in various ways. Such an approach considers the situational, demographic, social, and economic factors relevant to any presentations that require a collective social response.

Policy Implications

Research into parental alienating behaviours demonstrates that this is independent of gender, occurs more or less equally across all genders, across different forms of employment, education, age, sexuality, etc. So, using these types of social determinants simply doesn’t work as a basis for policy laws about emotional maltreatment, abuse and coercive control in family relationships, that deliberately rupture the parent-child relationship.

Policy development should not assume that a socio-economic issue such as IPV is only related to demographic factors such as gender, but may require responses addressing how relational power is abused in family settings, regardless of gender.

^[i] Korosi, S. (2025). The End of Gendered Policy: A New Public Policy Framework for Alienation in Families (Parental Alienation). Advance. https://doi.org/10.31124/advance.174524965.51184766/v1 

[i] Korosi, S. (2025, 24 March). NOT A National Suicide Prevention Strategy For Parental Alienation!  https://dialogueingrowth.com.au/not-a-national-suicide-prevention-strategy-for-parental-alienation/

^[i] Mbilinyi, L. F., Logan-Greene, P. B., Neighbors, C., Walker, D. D., Roffman, R. A., & Zegree, J. (2012). EXPOSURE TO DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND CHILDHOOD EMOTIONAL ABUSE: Childhood Domestic Violence Exposure among a Community Sample of Adult Perpetrators: What Mediates the Connection? J Aggress Maltreat Trauma, 21(2), 171–187. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926771.2012.639203

^[ii] Goldsmith, B. (2023). Being the Son of an Abusive Mother. Psychology Today. 

^[i] Korosi, S. (2024). Proxy Murder: How Parental Alienating Behaviours Lead to Suicide.  https://dialogueingrowth.com.au/proxy-murder-how-parental-alienating-behaviours-lead-to-suicide/

^[i] Adair-Russell, R., Reed, K., & Torres, M. F. (2025). The Role of Defendant Gender and PTSD Diagnosis in a Battered Spouse Case. J Interpers Violence, 40(5-6), 1112–1134. https://doi.org/10.1177/08862605241257594

• Parental Alienation: A Violent and Potentially Lethal Social and Psychological Phenomenon
• Anti Parental Alienation Protestor Kicks Own Goal
• Response to UN Special Rapporteur’s Call for Input: Custody Cases, Violence against Women and Children
• False Allegations in Parental Alienation Cases: Misleading Family Law
• Are Mothers and Children being Silenced in the Family Court?

Australia’s National Suicide Prevention Strategy has now been published, but it is not for men or women dying from suicide due to disrupted family relationships from parental alienation during separation and divorce.

Australia’s National Suicide Prevention Strategy is gendered. It fails to address the leading causes of male suicide, particularly those related to family relationship disruptions that include parental alienation.

As a result, this strategy abandons women and children enduring the same presentation.

The strategy focuses on preventing violence against women and children as a solution to male suicide. It implies that men die by suicide because they are perpetrators of gendered violence. 

The national strategy all but fails to address the single largest number of suicides in Australia (men experiencing separation and family breakdown.

This failure raises questions about competency and ideological blindness. It represents dogmatic adherence to a policy that devalues and lacks empathy for half of the Australian population. The other half are no better off!

Summary: How The National Suicide Strategy Fails

• Gendered misinterpretation of data: The document acknowledges that 75% of suicide deaths are male but does not provide a targeted prevention strategy for men.
  
• Bias Toward Women: Suicide prevention efforts focus on factors like intimate partner violence against women while ignoring similar risks for men. 
  
• Lack of Response to Family Separation: The strategy recognises that separation and divorce contribute to male and female suicide,. Nearly twice as many men as women die from suicide. Still, it does not address this psychosocial category with targeted measures for both men and women.  
  
• Exclusion of Male-Specific Causes: The strategy does not consider that men may die by suicide due to disrupted family relationships, coercive control, abuse, or family disruptions caused by their ex-partners. 
  
• Selection of support services that do not address the most significant number of deaths by suicide. Instead, it addresses comparatively smaller populations.
  
• Outdated policy frameworks that dogmatically focus on gender inequity rather than factors common to all genders.
  

Why The National Suicide Prevention Strategy Fails 

It assumes suicide is always linked to male violence

It ignores the broader and non-gendered psychosocial factors.  The National Suicide Prevention Strategy excludes the possibility that men may die from suicide because their ex-partners have been violent, abusive or coercive to them. For example, it openly acknowledges that:

• “in 2023 in Australia, just over three-quarters of all suicide deaths were among males. 2,419 male deaths at a rate of 18.0 per 100,000. Suicide is the leading cause of death for males aged 15-55”.

At the same time, when it comes to prevention strategies, it cites safety and security as a key factor. What solution do you think they proposed?

• “Advance gender equality and address the drivers of all forms of gender-based violence, including through initiatives aimed to improve community attitudes and norms toward family, domestic, and sexual violence.”

 It relies on an outdated policy framework

It uses inappropriate social determinants such as gender, sexuality, employment, and education as associated factors to suicide. These factors do not account for power imbalances in relationships beyond gender.  

This framework presumes that social problems are always associated with inequality and inequity in social factors such as age, gender, employment, and education. Therefore, the social determinant approach to policy and strategy concludes that one gender is disadvantaged by the other gender.

This outdated approach does not respond to power abuses in relationships independent of these social factors. Instead, it isn’t very objective.

On the one hand, despite its gender bias, its framework does not lead to a specific gendered strategy to address disruptions to family relationships engineered by parental alienating bejaviours. Yet it acknowledges that nearly twice as many men die than women from suicide due to family relationship disruption.

On the other hand, it claims that women die from suicide as a result of male-gendered family violence. It then provides a strategy to address just this factor.

It proposes generic suicide prevention programs without specialised interventions for men or women.

According to the National Suicide Prevention Strategy:

• Disruption of family by separation and divorce has been identified in around 1 in 6 male and 1 in 10 female suicide deaths. Intimate partner relationship problems such as romantic break-ups, arguments and conflict are also common factors in adult suicide

This psychosocial category must include parental alienation. Yet, the proposed prevention strategy is:

• “continue to provide subsidised access to counselling for people going through separation and divorce, promoted through family law services and other key touchpoints in the family law system”.

This strategy is too generic; it does not address this psychosocial factor. The reader can easily assume that such disruptions result from gendered family violence. It ignores non-gendered, bi-directional forms of violence, abuse, and coercive control.

Those statistics are serious. Nearly twice as many men as women die from suicide in this psychosocial category. “Disruption of family by separation and divorce” must, by definition, include parental alienation that significantly affects both men and women. Parental alienation is a non-gendered, bi-directional form of coercive control.

It Knows About Specialised Support Services But Refuses to Identify Them

In its listing of support services, it fails to list the one service specialising in suicidality for both men and women from disruptions to family relationships and specifically for the most significant number of suicides. It appears to use ideological considerations instead of actual risk, and the population needs to select support services.

Instead, to prevent suicide among men, who represent 75% of national suicide deaths, the National Suicide Prevention Strategy proposes ending violence against women and children. This strategy focuses on:

• “Reducing the prevalence and impact of key drivers of distress” such as ” experiences of childhood abuse and neglect, alcohol- and drug-related harm, and intimate partner violence (against females)” (P.21)

It Assumes That Men Don’t Matter Because They Are Perpetrators

The National Suicide Strategy does not explain how “reducing the prevalence and impact of […] intimate partner violence (against females) would prevent men dying from suicide. The only logical conclusions are:

• That men are perpetrators of gendered violence who then die from suicide

• Male death from suicide does not matter. The strategy should only focus on women dying from suicide.

What About Women?

Yes, the National Suicide Prevention Strategy identifies that women are especially at risk for adverse mental health outcomes such as self-harming, more so than men¹.

Given the gendered bias of the strategy, we could surmise that women are at higher risk of these adverse mental health outcomes because they are victims of gendered family violence.

Still, as previously identified here, family relationship disruption is not explicitly recognised with targeted strategies for both men and women. Even though more men than women die from suicide in this psychosocial category, the fact is they BOTH DIE!

It is acceptable for women and mothers to die from suicide due to disruptions to family relationships from separation and divorce.

We can only conclude women, mothers, and their children are acceptable casualties in the dogmatic pursuit of the ideology that makes the male gender perpetual perpetrators of gendered family violence and which refuses to accept the validity of parental alienation.

How to Make the National Suicide Prevention Strategy Effective for All Genders 

A genuinely national suicide prevention strategy should:  

• Be gender-inclusive and address suicide risk factors for both men and women.
    
• Acknowledge bi-directional abuse in relationships rather than assuming a one-sided narrative or relying on political theories that make one gender the victim of the other. 
  
• Target specific psychosocial factors, such as family disruptions and parental alienation, with appropriate interventions.  
  
• Include specialised support services, such as programs for those affected by separation and divorce (e.g., Parents Beyond Breakup).

Endnotes

1. In 2022–23, females made up almost two-thirds (66%) of intentional self-harm hospitalisations.
   Reporting of ambulance attendance data indicates higher rates of suicide attempt and self- injury (without suicidal intent) among young females compared to young males. ︎

• Anti Parental Alienation Protestor Kicks Own Goal
• The Schlock Horror Alienation Show-National Suicide Prevention Day
• What Happens When Men become Alienated from their Children?
• Response to UN Special Rapporteur’s Call for Input: Custody Cases, Violence against Women and Children
• Parental Alienation On The Air