MOJ’s Response to Parental Alienation & Law Changes
I received a response from Ministry of Justice (MOJ) which can be found below the letter/email I sent to them on the 11/05/2019.
Topic: Reply about a Petition
RE: To introduce a law that recognises Parental Alienation as a criminal offence
Dear Rt Hon David Gauke,
I am writing to you in regards to the response from the Ministry of Justice issued on the 10th May 2019. This was about the introduction of a law to recognise Parental Alienation as a criminal offence. The Ministry of Justice stated that they do not believe that it is necessary to introduce parental alienation as a criminal offence as the courts can deal with this type of behaviour, so does the Ministry of Justice recognise emotional abuse as a criminal offence? Furthermore, are there laws in place for emotional abuse and physical abuse towards adults and children? My question to you is therefore, does the Ministry of Justice believe that Parental Alienation is a form of emotional abuse?
In my experience, when you are going through the court process and you mention the word Parental Alienation, parents are met with silence, have their claims ignored or they are told that their ex-partner is just being difficult. This is happening to thousands of parents in the UK but the courts, Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass), Social Services and Child Maintenance Services fails to recognise this. In fact Cafcass state they have implemented frameworks to deal with Parental Alienation but in reality, this is not the case. As far as I am concerned, Social services have no clue about Parental Alienation at all. Even when I provided them with information from experts on the subject they did nothing about it. I can only think that someone is clearly misinforming the Ministry of Justice or they are refusing to acknowledge the scale of this problem.
The Ministry of Justice claimed the government is confident that the family justice system can address this type of behaviour in a robust way, yet parents are still not seeing their children after three years. Parents then have to keep going back to court only to have the issue of Parental Alienation ignored by the family justice system again and again. Can you explain why this still occurs?. As stated in your response, I quote “The Government is confident that the family justice system can robustly address such behaviour when it is alleged in child arrangements cases and we are continuing to strengthen our work in this area”. So if the court robustly addressed such actions why am I having to now think about reapplying back to the courts to deal with the matter of parental alienation which has been ignored every single time?
Please can you explain what laws are in place which addresses Parental Alienation?
The Ministry of Justice also stated “The legal framework which governs family law cases is gender neutral”. This is an outright lie as if this was the case the majority of cases going to court would be equal and the majority of child arrangement orders would not be mainly from fathers. The family law in the UK is biased and always has been. It fails to recognise parents from same sex partnerships or knows how to deal with them in the event of Parental Alienation. The system is archaic and needs up to date laws that move with the times and are not based on laws that are over fifty years old that do not represent today’s relationships and families in the 21st century.
When an alienator denies access to the other parent, makes false allegations, refuses to provide an address to the targeted parent, stops grandparents and extended family having contact with the child, then goes to Child Maintenance Services to claim money for a child, they are being emotionally abusing.
What action do you believe the family justice system should be taking to address such behaviour in a robust way?
To conclude, we believe the laws are outdated and do not know how to handle Parental Alienation in a clear and robust manner as previously claimed. That is why the petition was setup to address such issues.
If you believe we have the laws in place, please tell the thousands of parents who are suffering from Parental Alienation what they are. This will then enable us to share them with Cafcass, social workers and judges that refuse or cannot be bothered with the additional workload of Parental Alienation which in turn causes insurmountable damage to children in today’s society.
I look forward to your reply,
Yours Sincerely,
Mark Sheppard
MOJ’s Response Letter
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Direct Link to letter incase you cannot view it above https://drive.google.com/open?id=1tFj8h3ED8PdJFp3DhUNIXCjrFx6jHevy