Elodie, a mother in the net of “parental alienation”

By Xavier Deleu and Stephanie Thomas

Posted today at 1:00 p.m.

Benjamin* sits in front of his computer screen, concentrating on his game. It’s the year of the baccalaureate, but distance learning, in these times of a pandemic, got the better of his motivation. His big brother, Hugo, 20, has just gone out for an errand. The two little ones, Maxime, 9, and Inès, 6, have been at school for more than two hours. The house is quiet.

His mother is busy in the kitchen. Suddenly, a scream echoed through the apartment. Benjamin rushes into the living room and sees his mother behind the bay window, stepping over the railing, ready to jump from the 8and stage. The boy catches her in extremis by the arm. Holds her close to him. He understood.

This Thursday, November 5, 2020, Elodie, 38, was awaiting the decision of the children’s judge regarding the custody of the last two. On the phone, the school principal has just told him that educators from child welfare (ASE) have come to pick up Maxime and Inès in the middle of class, in front of their classmates. The judge decided to place them in foster care. He believes that their mother manipulated them to gain custody. His children would, according to him, suffer from a “parental alienation syndrome”. The fatal argument for separating a mother from her children.

A criticized syndrome

The parental alienation syndrome was defined in 1985 by an American child psychiatrist, Richard Gardner, who acts as counsel for couples in conflicting divorce situations. According to him, statements of sexual abuse made by a child in the context of litigation are most often false.

“His theory consists in saying that, when a child accuses his father of incest, he is necessarily on a mission ordered by his mother, who wants to remove the other parent from the life of the child to take revenge, summarizes Christine Cerrada, the referent lawyer of the association L’Enfance au cœur. This concept has been used a lot by the justice system, which has led to the invisibilization of sexual violence against minors and has serious effects on the protective parent, accused of “brainwashing” their child. »

The use of the parental alienation syndrome is today decried: it is not based on any scientific basis. In 2018, Senator Laurence Rossignol, former Minister for Families, Children and Women’s Rights, obtained the distribution of a note on the website of the Ministry of Justice for “inform the magistrates of the controversial and unrecognized nature of the parental alienation syndrome”. Yet it continues to be invoked by psychiatrists and magistrates.

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