A worrying network

Mar 4th, 2021 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Jean Hatchet on Blame the Woman for Everything:

I have been objecting to the term “parental alienation” for a long time now. This is a term, backed by a growing section of the counselling/therapeutic industry, which is being used against women in the Family Court by men who have abused them.

When a woman, in an effort to keep her children safe, reveals to the Family Court the domestic abuse she has suffered, an abusive man will now frequently counter this by suggesting that, instead, it is the woman who is abusive because she is using “parental alienation” to prevent him having rightful access to his children. He and/or his legal representatives will allege that she is lying about the abuse she says she has suffered.

And he and/or his legal representatives will likely be believed, because it’s astonishing how many people think that women are lying “personality disordered” witches.

One in four women between the ages of 16-64 will suffer some form of domestic abuse. The odds themselves suggest that the majority of these women are not lying.

Abused women are often more inclined to hide the abuse than to go public about it…until it becomes a matter of protecting their children.

Against this court backdrop, and faced with a determined perpetrator, the poor woman will be fighting like hell to make sure he does not have access to her children so that they can be free of his abusive and controlling presence. His barrister will most likely be well aware that the claim of “parental alienation” is very useful in ensuring their client gets what he demands. Cafcass appear to be complicit and accept the term. This is despite the term itself having no statistical validity and with a lack of any robust research to confirm its existence. It is like a particularly vicious whisper that has been spread like gossip through the Family Court system until it is believed. It is becoming an effective way to further distress women who have escaped an abusive male partner with whom they had children.

And it joins up with the diffuse, taken for granted contempt for or loathing of women that is so unpleasantly accessible in the news and commentary and social media.

The men who claim “parental alienation” are organizing.

I have encountered these men online. They have a worrying network. One of them in particular has become a fairly unhinged stalker of a number of women, revealing, in a repetitive and obsessive fashion, details about them such as their real name and workplace and even where they live in some cases.These dangerous men organise in groups and give themselves legitimacy with titles such as “Parental Alienation UK” etc. But access to some of their “secret” groups reveals a far darker side to them. On Facebook they can be found discussing the women they have abused as “c*nts” and discussing how they “didn’t really abuse my kids I only smashed things at the side of their heads, I only ever hurt her!” and many of them empathise.

You know how the insurrectionists organized the insurrection on social media? Misogynist men organize on social media too. (So do feminists, but, you know…We’re kind of outgunned, sometimes literally.)

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