Ayeb-Karlsson, Sonja;
(2024)
‘We Have Lost our Humanity’: Incomplete Citizens, Dangerous Experts, and ‘(Residential) Reunification Interventions’ that Entrap, Punish and Harm the So-Called ‘Alienated’ Child within England and Wales Family Court System.
Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law
10.1080/09649069.2024.2414625.
(In press).
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Abstract
The ‘good’ post-separation child is an ‘incomplete citizen’ targeted by family court associated interventions to guide their decisions. This article revisits this hypothesis through a High Court case law analysis of three private and public proceedings involving six court-determined ‘alienated’ children. Court instructed experts and Judges sought to redirect the children into normative values. The so-called ‘alienation’ expert has become a dangerous family court element. Their control over ‘alienation’ assessments and children’s social liberties and rights, through so-called ‘reunification treatments’, and often without external oversight or regulation, caused harm to all six children. The article shows how the ‘Alienation and (Residential) Reunification’ industry has become a legal disciplinary and punishing system to ‘deal with’, ‘coerce’ or ‘break’ so-called ‘alienated’ children to re-engage with even court determined violent fathers. When these ‘interventions’ failed, the court went as far as to interfere with criminal investigations and justice to maintain the so-called ‘treatment’ plan. The children found themselves legally entrapped where their voices were withheld from influencing the proceedings (despite deemed Gillick competent). The rebellious ‘alienated child’s’ wishes and feelings were perceived as a threat to the patriarchal family order. The child was therefore punished and regulated back into normative social family boundaries.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | ‘We Have Lost our Humanity’: Incomplete Citizens, Dangerous Experts, and ‘(Residential) Reunification Interventions’ that Entrap, Punish and Harm the So-Called ‘Alienated’ Child within England and Wales Family Court System |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/09649069.2024.2414625 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1080/09649069.2024.2414625 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). |
| Keywords: | Children; domestic violence and abuse; family law; experts; legal entrapment; reunification interventions; parental alienation |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10205750 |
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