Parental Alienation is in the Meantime an Endemic, Worldwide Health Problem
In a severe case of parental alienation, a child will radically and
without objective reasons refuse contact with one parent-father or
mother (this is not a gender-specific issue!) with whom s/he previously
had a loving attachment, because s/he has internalised a false negative
image of the parent.
This is usually found in the context of highly acrimonious separation or divorce of the child’s parents, or in “aggressorvictim relationships” in family violence cases with an inequality of power. In such cases, the child is -consciously or unconsciously instrumentalised and controlled by one parent against the other, i.e. s/
he suffers psychological abuse [1-9].
In some cases of severe parental alienation unsubstantiated sexual
abuse allegations by alienating parents and their alienated children are
found. Fabricated allegations have been considered to be a weapon
used by a separating parent, to effectively end the child’s relationship
with the other parent. This is an extreme pressure and stress for the so
confronted and affected victim parent [7,10,11-13].
