Overcoming Parental Alienation

When family law recognises relational harm too late

Stan — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:10:43 +0000

When family law recognises relational harm too late Overcoming Parental Alienation

What selected Australian cases reveal about safety, delay and the shrinking possibility of relational repair: international implications

The Relational Justice Project has published a new article and accompanying case-law analysis. It examines how delay and the lack of a rapid response pathway to relationship undermining conduct such as parental alienating behaviour within family-law proceedings can make safe relational repair increasingly difficult.

A harmful asymmetry in family law

Alleged relationship-undermining conduct may also be visible at the same early stage as alleged family violence. Yet unless it is identified as abuse, psychological harm, or another safety risk, its effects may accumulate. The result is an asymmetry in institutional response: one category is selected for prompt action while the other may not be.

A serious design flaw in family law

This research identifies evidence of a serious potential design flaw. Australian institutions appear better equipped to impose protective separation than to examine how protection itself alters a child’s relationships

The research reviews selected Australian parenting decisions by allegation status, conduct, evidence, risk, remedy and outcome. It identifies a recurring problem: courts may recognise serious relationship-undermining conduct only after a child’s routines, attachments and beliefs have changed. By then, restoring the relationship may itself be considered too psychologically risky.

A Relational Justice approach

The analysis does not argue that relationships should be preserved at the expense of safety. Nor does it ask courts to accept family-violence or parental-alienation claims without evidence. It proposes a safety-and-relationship institutional approach that preserves safe and beneficial relationships where possible; and holds institutions accountable when delay or misidentification compounds relational harm.

The article places the Australian findings within a wider international context, drawing on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, guidance from the Family Justice Council of England and Wales, and European human-rights jurisprudence.

Its central question is not whether safety or relationships should take priority. It is whether institutions can protect people from immediate danger without allowing interim arrangements to determine the outcome before competing explanations have been properly tested.

Read “When Family Law Entrenches the Relational Harm It Cannot Repair” and download the accompanying case-law analysis.

Professionals and researchers are invited to examine the analysis, test the proposed safeguards and contribute to the developing Relational Justice framework. Please do not send identifying case material, confidential documents or information about active proceedings.

The Relational Justice Project Substack is the substantive publication platform for this work. Dialogue in Growth is supporting its circulation by bringing the research to the attention of legal, policy, research and helping professionals.

Important security notice: fraudulent, scam and phishing emails

Stan — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 10:01:27 +0000

Important security notice: fraudulent, scam and phishing emails Overcoming Parental Alienation

I have become aware that fraudulent messages may be using my name, email address, or the names of Dialogue in Growth and The Relational Justice Project™ to obtain money or personal information.

Our Policy on fraudulent, scam and phishing communications

Please be assured:

Neither I, Dialogue in Growth, The Relational Justice Project™, nor anyone authorised to act on our behalf will ever contact you unexpectedly to coerce from you, demand money or ask you to transfer funds, purchase gift cards or cryptocurrency, disclose banking details, provide passwords or verification codes, or pay an invoice.

A displayed sender name or email address is not proof that a message is genuine; these details can be impersonated or falsified.

Fraudulent e-mails or messages may use information or contact details from other sources or data breaches to lend credibility to a false story that forms the basis of an extortionate, coercive demand or request.

Dialogue in Growth and the The Relational Justice Project™ may legitimately ask you to subscribe to services from platforms that you can independently verify. Please contact me through official Dialogue in Growth or Relational Justice Project channels if in doubt.

What should you do or not do?

If you receive such a message:

Do not reply, send money, click links, or open attachments.
Do not use contact details supplied in the suspicious message.
Report it as phishing through your email service and block the sender.
If you have already sent money or disclosed information, contact your bank immediately.
Verify any communication through an official Dialogue in Growth or Relational Justice Project channel.

Any message requesting money in my name, or in the name of Dialogue in Growth or The Relational Justice Project™, should be treated as fraudulent.

International support

For independent international guidance on recognising and responding to phishing and online scams, visit INTERPOL’s Be Cyber Aware resource.

Suspicious phishing emails may also be forwarded to the Anti-Phishing Working Group at reportphishing@apwg.orgfor analysis. APWG is an international cybercrime-response coalition, but it is not a police or financial-recovery service.

Urgency should trigger responsibility, not end it.

Stan — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 12:20:38 +0000

Urgency should trigger responsibility, not end it. Overcoming Parental Alienation

Australian institutions can act urgently to protect a child but remain unclear about who must gather the evidence, review the restriction, correct the record and repair avoidable harm afterwards.

Human rights must protect people from dangerous relationships

They must also prevent interim action, institutional delay or error from causing avoidable rupture of safe and significant family relationships.

My new Relational Justice article proposes one governing rule:

Institutions should use the least relationally disruptive effective intervention consistent with safety and relational continuity—and remain accountable for what their intervention produces.

Read the article at https://alienatedtoo.substack.com/p/human-rights-should-protect-family?r=3rl5f5.

If you want to help test this framework against law, research, practice and institutional experience, subscribe free and reply RIGHTS.

From Relational Rupture to Relational Justice: A PASG2026 Conversation

Stan — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 20:51:40 +0000

From Relational Rupture to Relational Justice: A PASG2026 Conversation Overcoming Parental Alienation

Dr Stanley Korosi introduces The Relational Justice Project and asks how parental alienation research can contribute to safer practice, better law and accountable policy.

Dr Stanley Korosi will speak at PASG2026, the international conference of the Parental Alienation Study Group, in Perth from 11–13 October 2026.

His presentation will introduce The Relational Justice Project, a public-policy initiative that asks what knowledge developed through research and practice in the parental alienation field can contribute to the wider challenges facing children, families, professionals and institutions.

The Project begins with a clear principle:

No one should be kept in a dangerous relationship, and no child or adult should lose a safe and beneficial relationship.

Relational Justice calls for dangerous relationships to be recognised and addressed. It also asks institutions to protect relationships that are safe, beneficial and important to children’s safety, identity, belonging and development.

From labels to individual children and families

This requires more than adopting or rejecting particular labels. It requires careful assessment of conduct, context and consequences; evidence-informed professional practice. It also requires institutional accountability for whether decisions reduce harm and produce sustained safety.

In a new two-minute video podcast, Dr Korosi explains why the parental-alienation field has an opportunity to move from identifying relational rupture toward a constructive, child-centred and rights-based conversation about family relationships, professional practice, policy and law.

Watch or listen to the video podcast and read the transcript:

https://alienatedtoo.substack.com/p/from-parental-alienation-to-relational?r=3rl5f5

Take action:

Attend the PASG2026 conference in Perth 11-13 October 2026

Conference information and registration: https://PASG2026Perth.au

The Relational Justice Project is also inviting researchers, practitioners, policy contributors, advocates and people with relevant lived experience to help develop and test its proposals.

Subscribe free and reply PASG2026 if you would like to contribute evidence, raise a policy or practice question, review a proposal, make an introduction or help circulate the Project’s work.

Please do not include identifying information about children, families or legal proceedings in public comments.

What should Australia’s next domestic violence plan actually do?

Stan — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 06:56:14 +0000

What should Australia’s next domestic violence plan actually do? Overcoming Parental Alienation

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:

When policy decides what harm it is permitted to see

Stan — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:27:49 +0000

When policy decides what harm it is permitted to see Overcoming Parental Alienation

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.

The Relational Justice Project: From Opens to a Constituency.

Stan — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 21:17:03 +0000

The Relational Justice Project: From Opens to a Constituency. Overcoming Parental Alienation

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.

What Does Relational Injustice Look Like?

Stan — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 06:02:54 +0000

What Does Relational Injustice Look Like? Overcoming Parental Alienation

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.

The Relational Justice Project: What alienation takes from children

Stan — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 11:37:02 +0000

The Relational Justice Project: What alienation takes from children Overcoming Parental Alienation

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.

This is not simply a publication list.

It is the beginning of a constituency for relational justice.

Subscribe to The Relational Justice Project here:

Introducing The Relational Justice Project

Stan — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 22:45:36 +0000

Introducing The Relational Justice Project Overcoming Parental Alienation

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.