PARENTAL ALIENATION

India Joins Family Courts Around the World to Fight Child Emotional Abuse

- Ashish S Joshi

Parental Alienation (PA) is a scourge that indoctrinates, brainwashes, and manipulates a child into rejecting a parent. The phenomenon of parental alienation is found all over the world - across classes, continents, and cultures. PA causes significant cognitive and behavioral distortions in a child and research studies have demonstrated serious long-term consequences for an alienated child. Courts around the world have acknowledged PA as child psychological abuse and have intervened to not only save the children from this horrific abuse but also to save the parent-child relationship. Indian courts are no exception to growing awareness and collaboration around the world to confront and remediate PA. In 2017, the Supreme Court of India in its judgment Vivek Singh v. Romani Singh defined PA as “a disorder that arises primarily in the context of child custody disputes. Its primary manifestation is the child’s campaign of denigration against a parent, a campaign that has no justification. It results from the combination of a programming (brainwashing) parent’s indoctrinations and the child’s own contributions to the vilification of the target parent.”1