 Karen Woodall – Psychotherapist, Writer, Researcher, Trainer.Read on blog or ReaderThe silencing of the lambs: On straw men, red herrings and hidden harm at homeBy karenwoodall on 19 Aug 2025 There is a distinct harm which is caused to children who are said to be alienated, this is evidenced by their maladapted and maladaptive attachment relationships and the way that the harm which is being caused is normalised. This is never so concerning as when it is presented by academics without any psychological training, who advocate for parents who have been found to have abused their children. The problem is rife around the world right now and it obfuscates the distinct harms which are seen in children who as adults, show the impact of what alienation does to them.I have worked in the family court system for a very long time and some of the young people who I was unable to help a decade ago, are now seeking my help. When they do they show all of the symptoms of abuse that we would expect to see in young people who have been in coercive relationships, enmeshed family systems and who have been told that their experience, of having to regulate an unpredictable caregiver, is either nothing to worry about or worse, they are gaslighted to believe that their experience is either in their imagination or their own fault. I am, these days, repeatedly contacted by young people who are recovering from having been abused by a parent who caused them to believe that their other parent was harmful, during a time in childhood which was both frightening and impossible to navigate. These young people tell me that their experience of rejecting a parent was not because that parent had caused them harm, it was because the parent who had control over them was actively terrorising them, making use of their developmental anxieties or leaking their own feelings about the other parent to the child. Some of the young people tell me their experience of having a parent control them and instruct them to hide that, of having all of their choices taken away from them, of having a parent so enmeshed with them that they were unable to choose their own clothing even at the age of sixteen. These are the children of the parents who some academics advocate are safe parents, they are the children of the women who are represented by groups without any psychological understanding or experience of direct work with families. These are the children who are being harmed by the advocacy groups who proclaim that all mothers are safe and protective and all fathers are abusive. These groups cause harm when they make these claims, especially when they are substantiated by the opinions of women who have been found to have abused their children and mothers who abduct their children from safe and loving parents as being victims. These are the perpetrators dressed up as victims, the real victims are the forgotten children whose needs have been overlooked because they were groomed in their younger years to remain silent about the harm they were suffering. Children like Josh, children like Alex Dean, children like those who are removed from abusive parents to be placed with their true protective carers, the parents they have been forced to reject. Forced rejection is a real thing and it doesn’t matter what we call it, the underlying cause of it is leakage of adult feeling into vulnerable children’s daily experience for the purpose of meeting the adult needs not the child. The mechanism by which a child is manipulated into this state of mind is not difficult to understand, it is coercion at its best, the placing of a completely dependent person into an environment they cannot escape from and relentless exposure to another person’s wishes. Most children in divorce and separation are exposed to mild versions of this kind of dynamic at some point in the separation process but only some are vulnerable to the onset of psychological splitting, which is a regressive defence which removes the child’s capacity to move through developmental stages normally. Some children are exposed to the dynamic systemically so that they grow and develop with it as a developing part of their personality. After all, when you feed a flower with poisoned water, depending upon how strong it is, it will still grow but it will do so in distorted ways and so it is with some children who are forced to reject a parent, they grow but they do so in maladapted ways. This is because when a child is regulating an unpredictable caregiver and when they are exposed to negative narratives, either consciously or otherwise, they carry on as much as they can and act as if life is normal, when it is anything but. Their development slows but still grows but it does so with the hidden impact of the harm they have suffered at home. A child or a young person who is forced to reject a parent will show the markers of being forced in the same way as any child who is being forced to do something against their will. When children are forced to do something and are hiding that, they maladapt their attachment relationships and they signal to the outside world that something is wrong through acting out behaviours. Children who are being sexually abused may show sexualised behaviours, children who are being forced into an abusive alignment with a parent may show adultification, acting as if they are entitled to demean the other parent. Professionals who understand child abuse, know when children are being harmed through the signals they show us in their behaviour.Understanding behaviour is all we have, because we cannot see behind closed doors and because abusive parents do not wear hats with the word abuser written on them. A very long time ago I learned how to listen to the abused child’s voice behind the scripts they were repeating and I learned to observe parents to whom the child was aligned very carefully. Parents who groom their children into abusive alignments show their underlying behaviours through conflicted behaviours, seemingly charming and collaborative on the outside whilst being obstructive and deliberately obtuse on the inner. Observing family systems where children align and reject soon shows where the problem is and one of the key ways of illuminating that is to ask the aligned parent to do something that it is clear they do not want to do, such as bringing the child to see the parent they are rejecting in clinical observed settings. When an abuser is hiding their manipulations behind a facade of cooperation, they need to be able to stay close to the child to maintain the threat and the pressure in the intersubjective relationship. What child abusers do not want children to do is be alone and out of reach of their ability to manage them. Observing children in a room with a parent in the rejected position has blown the cover of many abusive parents in my work over the years, and watching the way that the grooming patterns unravel, has taught me a lot about how this coercive dynamic is created around children. The manufactured furore around the label parental alienation is a great example of how manipulation occurs in these family systems and even though I do not use the label in my work these days, it is always worth pointing it out because if we do not, the projection grows in its energy and power. The label parental alienation, which is really just a way of saying forced rejection, abusive alignment, pathological enmeshment, attachment trauma, relational trauma or child abuse, has been set up as a straw man and attacked repeatedly – to the point where if I am honest, I am surprised there is any straw left to attack – and yet the attacks still go on and on and on. They do so because where the label parental alienation exists, fogging and obfuscation is possible. This is because the label has been made toxic by its association with things that its creator said and wrote in the eighties. It is a straw man argument, manufactured to keep everyone looking in the wrong direction.It is a fact, for example, that a lot of feminists were also writing unsavoury things in the past, including Patricia Hewitt who advocated for the age of consent to be lowered to the age of ten and Eve Ensler who wrote about the statutory rape of a 13 year old girl by a 24 year old woman. We don’t, however set up the label ‘Child and Mother Sabotage”, created by feminists as being suspect because of its connections to unsavoury feminist commentary in the past. We know that the past is the past and that feminism has moved on since the days when women believed that girls as young as ten were capable of giving consent, we know that feminism has developed, has been shaped and changed by women with a greater sense of the needs of children and the need to protect them. We don’t go around proclaiming that anyone who is a feminist must believe the same as Patricia Hewitt and Eve Ensler and if we do, then we know that we look slightly silly because we are using a straw man argument.We also know that people set up straw men arguments when their case is too weak to defend on its own merits and so we focus upon setting out the evidence for the harm that children are suffering when they are manipulated, misrepresented and maligned because of it. Our aim is to show that under the negative narratives and ad hominen attacks, there is another truth, a silent tragedy which is undermining the welfare of children in divorce and separation, children who are forced into rejecting their loved and loving parents to placate unpredictable and often frightening parents who have total control over them.I heard these children’s voices many years ago and I hear the voices of young adults now. Past, present and no doubt in the future, in the fifty years since the changes in the divorce law, the lives of some children have been blighted by triangulation into adult matters and then abandonment to the fate of having to cope with the harm they have suffered alone. As the academics and advocates angle for a system which once again prioritises women’s rights and do so by fair means or foul, by hook or by crook by straw men and red herrings too. Who, I wonder, will be listening to these children now? |
Avskilda barn - Secluded children 