Parental Alienation Syndrome Doesn't Exist, Alienating Behaviors Do

Within the complex crisis the family has been undergoing in our country for decades, a distorted interpretation of family conflict in separating couples takes on particular significance, because it often produces a paradoxical effect. There are, in fact, numerous cases in which, in order to defend a child's right to a relationship with both parents as a primary value, the behavioral differences between the two parents are disregarded. When a child does not want to be with a violent parent, it can seem as though the central issue is not who is committing the violence, but the child's refusal to be with the violent parent — so that the accusation falls on the parent who has already suffered violence. A perfect automatism has been created, whereby the parent who has suffered violence and wishes to protect the child from vicarious violence becomes the target of a further form of violence. That parent is accused of wanting to alienate the child from the violent parent, simply because the frightened child refuses to spend time with them. It is clear that the two roles are only apparently interchangeable, and that the violent parent can be either the father or the mother — but the statistics offer irrefutable data: in 80% of cases, the violent parent is the father, while in these same cases the mother suffers a further, secondary form of violence, defined as the theft of her child.

Often the child is placed with a foster family, or — the paradox of paradoxes — even with the violent father, while the mother can no longer care for him. These are children in whom a profound emotional disharmony takes root, tied to the ambiguity of parental behavior and to the contradiction in how that behavior is morally assessed, including at the institutional level. An emotional tangle is created that makes it difficult to establish healthy, balanced relationships in the period following such a traumatic approach. From that point on, relationships tend to swing between toxicity and inconsistency, between emotional detachment and learned violence. And it is precisely these behaviors that must be examined closely, in order to understand how the spiral of violence to which women — mothers — are increasingly and increasingly subtly subjected takes shape and develops.

In cases recently brought to public attention, it is always the mother who is accused of being alienating — not so much through a diagnosis like PAS, which has been thoroughly discredited on scientific grounds, but by hiding behind a kind of linguistic makeover: the possessive mother, the overprotective mother, escalating to the obsessive and hostile mother. A very recent ruling by the Court of Cassation equated this kind of treatment — of which the woman is doubly a victim — with genuine torture. For her, a victim of domestic torture, the ultimate punishment follows: the taking of her child. At first there is only a subtle violence made up of gestures and words meant to undermine her self-esteem, to humiliate her in public and in private, belittling her abilities and competence. In the case of a woman who works and earns her own income, this violence takes on a distinctly economic character: household expenses — starting with the ordinary costs concerning the family and the child — always fall to her. This is how a slow, progressive impoverishment begins: economic, psychological, and in her capacity to make decisions. What happens backstage within a family, behind the scenes of apparent normalcy, actually reflects a deeply ambiguous situation. The woman experiences, day after day, how nothing she has truly belongs to her, because everything is tied up in the family budget — expenses that are necessary and often urgent, and cannot be postponed. A long chain of repeated micro-traumas is created. The father's income, meanwhile, tends to appear framed within medium- to long-term investments, surrounded by a fog that is difficult to pin down.

Today more than ever, the onset of family crises appears closely tied to this insidious assault on the mother figure — to her systematic devaluation, which begins within the family and extends into the professional sphere as well. There are many wounded, mistreated women, victims of alienating behavior — women who often find themselves defending their own children within a social ecosystem increasingly unable to grasp how difficult it is to be a mother today. And it should come as no surprise that this widespread social attitude translates into a fear of becoming a mother, as the frustrations of motherhood accumulate and multiply, having to reckon daily with systematic devaluation. Today, more than ever, it is necessary for the fight against violence to expose these alienating behaviors, which set the stage for family crises to erupt at the very moment a woman has already lost her sense of identity and dignity. What is needed is great solidarity from the whole of society, grounded in the recognition that a mother simply cannot be dispensed with. Nor can a father — but that is exactly why the mother cannot be erased.

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