Six practical reforms for safety, evidence and institutional accountability.

A government plan to end domestic violence can count services, programs and reports. The more important question is what its interventions produced:

• Did people become safer?
• Was repeat harm reduced?
• Were children protected?
• Did institutions remain accountable for the consequences of their decisions?

These questions are not abstract. The stakes are life and death. The next Action Plan must respond seriously to gendered and potentially lethal violence against women and children. It must also recognise forms of family violence that do not conform neatly to dominant gender patterns and test whether institutional interventions actually improve safety for every person. Repeating activity is not the same as improving outcomes.

The Relational Justice Project has lodged six practical reforms with the consultation on Australia’s Second Action Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children.

What you can do

The Relational Justice Project is currently free to join. Subscribing means receiving the Project’s work and joining its public-policy conversation; it is not presently a request for financial support.

Read the short explanation, download the submission and participate in the next step:

• Response to UN Special Rapporteur’s Call for Input: Custody Cases, Violence against Women and Children
• Parental Alienation Symposium-Adelaide, Australia
• Parental Alienation On The Air
• Alienation and COVID-19: Business as ‘Unusual’
• Parental Alienation Australia and New Zealand (PAANZ) Launches Website

The latest essay from The Relational Justice Project asks a prior question

Australia is developing the next phase of the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children.

The consultation asks necessary questions about prevention, evidence, children’s safety, institutional capability and the creation of more connected systems.

But before asking how systems should become more integrated, there is a prior question:

What is the system organised to see?

Greater coordination will not produce justice if institutions share information through the same partial theory of harm. An integrated system can still misclassify a family. It can also spread and entrench that misclassification more efficiently.

This is the subject of my newly published essay, Ideological Capture and the Family, the fourth essay in The Relational Society: A Manifesto for Relational Justice.

A framework is useful when it helps us see. It becomes dangerous when it decides in advance what can be seen.

Family policy must take seriously the gendered and sometimes lethal patterns of family violence. It must also determine what conduct occurred in the particular family before it, how a child’s views were formed, which relationships are dangerous or protective and what an intervention actually produced.

The full essay examines:

• how population evidence can become an individual verdict;
• how domestic abuse and alienating behaviour become rival ideological doctrines;
• why safety and belonging have been turned into opposing causes;
• what evidence-sensitive relational assessment would require; and
• why institutional activity should not be confused with successful outcomes.

It also sets out the fourth proposition of the Relational Justice manifesto:

Ideology must not decide the facts.

Dialogue in Growth will continue to cover professional practice, research and human development. The Relational Justice Project is where I am developing the manifesto, public-policy program and constituency for systemic reform. If this argument speaks to you, please read Essay 4 and subscribe there.

Read Essay 4 and become one of the founding subscribers to The Relational Justice Project: https://alienatedtoo.substack.com/p/essay-4-ideological-capture-and-the?r=3rl5f5

Reading is only the beginning.

If this argument describes something you have experienced, observed or encountered professionally, I invite you to join the founding constituency of The Relational Justice Project.

When you subscribe, reply with one sentence: “The relational injustice I most want this project to address is…”

Your responses will help determine the Project’s priorities, policy work and next public actions.

• “Parental Alienation Becomes a Successful Tactic”, Parental Alienation and False Allegations Discussed in The Australian Senate
• Anti Parental Alienation Protestor Kicks Own Goal
• Should Alienating Parents Be Punished?
• Parental Alienation Symposium Adelaide University 2017
• Alienation and COVID-19: Business as ‘Unusual’

Why The Relational Justice Project is about more than readership

The Relational Justice Project is growing. Most of those subscribers have come through the Dialogue In Growth community.

That tells me something important.

There is an audience for the proposition that family relationships are social infrastructure and that relational harm deserves public recognition, institutional accountability and repair.

But audiences are not constituencies.

That is the challenge now:

• To turn opens into clicks.
• Clicks into subscribers.
• Subscribers into constituents.

A subscriber receives writing. A constituent recognises that the issue matters beyond one essay, one family, one court case or one private experience.

The Relational Justice Project is therefore not simply seeking readers. It is seeking people who believe that relational harm should become visible, that family relationships should not be treated as disposable, and that these ideas deserve public force.

I have written more about the difference between a subscriber and a constituent here: https://substack.com/@alienatedtoo/note/p-206260036?r=3rl5f5&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web

If this speaks to you, please read it. Every constituency begins somewhere. Start here.

And if you believe relational justice matters, subscribe.

• CLOSING: Research into the Lived Experience of Parental Alienation in a Social Context
• Overturning The “Ban” on Overnight Stays for Alienated Toddlers
• Family Law Amendment Bill 2023: An Anti-Family and Anti-Child Law
• Parental Alienation at the APS College of Counselling Psychologists Conference 2015
• Alienated Children: The ‘Humpty Dumpty’ Factor

I have published a short note on The Relational Justice Project asking: what does relational injustice look like?

Read about some examples of relational injustice at :https://substack.com/@alienatedtoo/note/c-290336920?r=3rl5f5&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web

Dialogue In Growth readers who want to follow the development of the Relational Justice Manifesto can subscribe there.

• Overturning The “Ban” on Overnight Stays for Alienated Toddlers
• Important Changes for Parental Alienation Services in Australia
• Parental Alienation: What Doesn’t Family Law and Family Violence Know?
• Parental Alienation Services and Support is now available to Parents, Children and Practitioners through the Australian Family Law system 
• Anti Parental Alienation Protestor Kicks Own Goal

The Relational Justice Project has now reached its third essay:This essay turns directly to the child.

Debates about separated families are too often conducted as contests between adults, institutions, ideologies and legal categories. The child is invoked constantly, but not always understood relationally.

Family Relationships are Social Instructure

The central proposition of The Relational Justice Project is that family relationships are not merely private attachments. They are social infrastructure.

When institutions fail to recognise, protect or repair those relationships, private suffering becomes public harm.

What Alienation Takes From Children

Essay 3 follows from the moral corruption of relatiuonal diss;posability that Essay 2 exposes. It asks what is taken from children when a meaningful relationship with a parent, grandparent or wider family is obstructed, denigrated, weakened or lost.

It is not only time that is taken:

• It is identity.
• It is continuity.
• It is belonging.
• It is memory.
• It is inheritance.
• It is the child’s right to stand in an honest relationship with the people and histories from which they come.

The Relational Justice Project Moves Forward

Interest is growing in The Relational Justice Project. That tells me two things.

• First, there is already a wider readership interested in serious work on family relationships, institutional harm and social change.

• Second, the Relational Justice Project now needs its own constituency.

Dialogue In Growth Pty. Ltd will continue to share related news and commentary. But the main home for the Relational Justice Manifesto is now The Relational Justice Project on Substack.

Read Essay 3 here:https://open.substack.com/pub/alienatedtoo/p/essay-3-what-alienation-takes-from?r=3rl5f5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

If you want to follow the twelve-essay series and the development of the Manifesto, please subscribe there.

• Ethics Approval for Research into Parental Alienation as a Social Phenomenon
• Parental Alienation Awareness Day: Be Aware of the Social Pandemic!
• Hope for Reconnection and Reunification after Parental Alienation
• False Allegations and Parental Alienation in Australian Family Law
• Parental Alienation: A Matter of Social Pathology and Social Justice

A New Direction

Over the past several months, a particular line of work has taken clearer shape.

Many of you will know me through Dialogue in Growth and my work on family relationships, post-separation harm, parental alienation, institutional failure, suicide prevention, and the social conditions that turn private suffering into public harm.

That work is now developing into a more focused public project.

It is called The Relational Justice Project.

The Relational Justice Proposition

The project begins from a simple proposition: family relationships are not merely private attachments. They are social infrastructure. When institutions fail to recognise, protect, or repair those relationships, private suffering becomes public harm.

This is not only a family law issue. It is not only a mental health issue. It is not only a parental alienation issue. It is a wider social and political issue about how institutions recognise harm, how evidence is governed, how children’s relationships are protected, and how families are damaged when systems become captured by partial theories of harm.

The Relational Justice Project has been established as a dedicated public social and policy forum for this work.

The Relational Justice Manifesto

The first phase of The Relational Justice Project is a twelve-essay series developing the foundations of a Relational Justice Manifesto.

That manifesto will name a constituency that is currently dispersed, isolated and politically under-recognised: parents, children, adult children, grandparents, partners, practitioners and others who have experienced relational dispossession, institutional indifference or system-enabled family fracture.

The first essay, The Alienated Society Ends Here establishes the basis for the project.

The second essay, Relational Disposability, develops the central claim that modern institutions too often treat family relationships as disposable.

If you are reading this article, you may already be part of this currently unrecognised constituency.

The first task is to recognise ourselves as more than isolated cases. We are a public constituency with shared interests, shared harms and shared claims for justice.

The Relational Justice Movement

The purpose of this project is not merely to publish commentary.

Its purpose is to build a public constituency: people prepared to say that relational harm is real, that institutional failure matters, and that family relationships deserve protection, repair and justice.

Dialogue in Growth will remain open as a broader professional and organisational channel. I will continue to use it for related news, policy commentary, research updates and organisational work.

But, The Relational Justice Project is now the main home for the relational justice essays, the manifesto work, and the emerging movement around family relationships as social infrastructure.

A Stand Against Relational Disposability and for Relational Justice

The current system too often treats relationships as disposable.

The Relational Justice Project exists to say that they are not.

If this work matters to you, I invite you to subscribe to The Relational Justice Project on Substack.

Subscribing matters because the next stage of this work depends on more than writing. It depends on whether there is a visible public constuency prepared to say that relational harm is real, that institutional failure matters, and that family relationships deserve protection, repair and justice.

You can subscribe here, its free:

Thank you for reading, supporting, sharing, and helping this work find its public constituency.

• False Allegations and Parental Alienation in Australian Family Law
• CLOSING: Research into the Lived Experience of Parental Alienation in a Social Context
• Sociological Implications of Social Alienation and its Demon Spawn Parental Alienation in Families
• Parental Alienation: A Matter of Social Pathology and Social Justice
• “Parental Alienation Becomes a Successful Tactic”, Parental Alienation and False Allegations Discussed in The Australian Senate

The Emergence of Ministers for Men is Not a Threat — It is a Test of Whether Gender Policy can Grow Up

The emergence of ministers, envoys and shadow ministers for men should not be treated as a threat to women’s policy or competition for resources. It should be treated as a test of whether Australia’s gender-policy architecture is mature enough to recognise more than one form of vulnerability at a time.

Women’s and men’s safety and dignity matter. Children’s relational security matters. A serious public policy system should be able to hold these truths together without converting them into a hierarchy of moral worth and locking them into a victim-perpetrator binary.

This letter should be read alongside the open letter to aspiring Ministers for Men. Together, they call for a civic compact on relational violence because, in the end, women and men cannot do this work without each other.

A serious Minister for Men and a serious Minister for Women would jointly commit to:

1. Women’s safety without male demonisation.
2. Male identity and dignity without denial of violence, coercion or abuse experienced by women.
3. Children’s relational security without adult ownership claims.
4. Protection, repair and restoration of family relationships where this is safe, evidence-supported and consistent with children’s developmental needs.
5. Evidence-sensitive assessment of violence, coercion, alienation and abuse on an equal basis.
6. Recognition of all victims and perpetrators, including male victims and female perpetrators.
7. Protection of masculinity and femininity as lived identities, not ideological caricatures.
8. Institutional trust, so people can seek help without being pre-classified.

What These Commitments Ask of You

These commitments do not ask Ministers for Women to compromise women’s safety. They ask them to lead the next stage of gender policy.

The “Women and Children” Narrative is No Longer the Basis for Policy

The phrase “violence against women and children” names serious harms but it narrows women, narrows men, and risks subordinating children’s independent relational needs to adult gender conflict.

A Minister for Men is an Opportunity

A serious Minister for Women should not treat the emergence of Ministers for Men as competition. She should treat it as an opportunity to build a better settlement.

Are You Ready?

The test is whether a Minister for Women can sit down with a Minister for Men and ask a harder question: what would it take to build a relational-violence policy capable of recognising all victims, all perpetrators, all children’s relational needs, and the civic dignity of both women and men?

See The Full Letter

• Anti Parental Alienation Protestor Kicks Own Goal
• Parental Alienation On The Air
• Response to UN Special Rapporteur’s Call for Input: Custody Cases, Violence against Women and Children
• What Happens When Men become Alienated from their Children?
• Family Violence Orders: Should You Really Apply For Them?

Why Private Suffering Must Become Political Action

A father recently left a comment on my website asking how any of my essays apply in the real world. What, he asked, can a father like him do to protect his children from what he experiences as systemic child trafficking?

I would not use that phrase as my policy description. But I understand why a parent reaches for it, their child’s relationship can feel captured by processes they cannot control, cannot afford and cannot make accountable.

This question is not only a father’s question. It is the question asked, in different forms, by every parent, grandparent and adult alienated child who has watched a safe family relationship become institutionally disposable.

• This is Bigger Than Psychology and Law
  
• That failure is moral. It is also political.
  
• The answer is political.

A Call to Political Action

• Parental Alienation at the APS College of Counselling Psychologists Conference 2015
• Alienated Parents: Reclaim Your Identity, It’s Not For Sale!
• Alienating Father Makes Mother Terrified of her Son
• Parental Alienation On The Air
• Alienation Abuse: Suddenly She Wanted to See Her Father

Before You Accept the Title, Understand the Job

Australia is beginning to appoint ministers, envoys and shadow ministers for men. That could matter. It could also become another symbolic accommodation: a new title attached to old policy habits, a few grants, a men’s health campaign, a promise to get men talking, and no serious reckoning with the systems that make male disadvantage politically awkward to see.

So, you want to be Minister for Men? Then, understand the job.

1. You must understand that male disadvantage is not reducible to health literacy.
   
2. You must be willing to address male identity, not merely male pathology.
   
3. You must treat fatherhood as an essential relational and social good, not merely a legal or financial status.
   
4. You must insist that violence policy remains evidence-sensitive, non-stigmatising, and able to recognise all victims and perpetrators.
   
5. You must be prepared to disappoint the people who want this portfolio to remain harmless.
   
6. The final test: are you prepared to take a stand?
   

To Read the Full Letter Please Go to My Substack

Subscribe: Analysis

• Anti Parental Alienation Protestor Kicks Own Goal
• What Happens When Men become Alienated from their Children?
• Parental Alienation in Australia, A Year in Review
• Accredited Professional Development in Parental Alienation Presentations and Behaviours
• Parental Alienation: What is Wrong with Your Family Assessment?

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?