‘I left my abuser – and then the family court gave him custody of my children’

When Veronica met her abuser, she was 19 and he was 50. 

“If you’ve ever seen the film Sleeping with the Enemy, that was my 11 years,” says Veronica, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy. She lists out the abuse she and their three children endured – she claims he restricted her food intake, measured her wrists, strangled her son with toddler reins, made comments about her children’s genitalia, and only used sexual language around their six-year-old daughter.

After two and a half years in family court and £250,000 spent on legal fees, Veronica’s abuser gained full custody of her children after he accused her of parental alienation – a pseudo-concept that refers to when a parent has manipulated their child to become estranged against the other.

Veronica says that it often plays out like this. “It’s a very concrete pattern which the perpetrator will use, which is to deny it [domestic abuse] from the very beginning, then flip it [the allegation] with parental alienation, before going for full custody. And then these women lose their children.”

Campaigners have long been calling for reforms to the family court system. This year, the government announced the biggest reform in three decades with the introduction of Child Focused Courts, which will be rolled out over the next three years. The new system restructures the family court process and places the child’s experience at the centre of proceedings.

The pilot trials showed a reduction in the time it takes to get from application to final decision down to six to nine months, but campaigners are concerned that this reform does not fully address the systemic abuse that women and children face, and the shortened time frame may mean that domestic abuse allegations are unable to be properly investigated.

The Child Focused Courts model flips the former system on its head. After a standard background check and risk assessment, the new process begins with an early-stage child impact report written by the independent Children and Family Court Advisory Service (Cafcass). Their social worker will meet the child and parents to provide the judge with a report before a court case begins, as opposed to the previous system, where the report is processed further down the line.

The child impact report is where mothers and children have especially suffered at the hands of Cafcass, as women report having their disclosure of domestic abuse brushed under the rug. 

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Co-founder of campaign group Familicide UK, Christina Rose says: “Social workers are telling us they are under significant pressure from their supervisors to make reports balanced. That means they have to minimise or ignore domestic abuse allegations, usually from the survivors or children.”

As a result, the voices of abusers are given equal weight to their survivors, who often use parental alienation as a tactic to fight back against their allegations of abuse. 

Before deciding to leave, Veronica sought advice from charities, she says she was warned very early on about parental alienation, and that “he will go for this straight away”.

Although parental alienation was officially discredited in a statement published by the Family Justice Council (FJC) in 2024, campaigners say that the concept remains in use within courts and by social workers. Its statement recognised that parental alienation “has no evidential basis and is considered a harmful pseudo-science”, and was increasingly being exploited in family courts.

A recent survey by Right to Equality of mothers who had a child removed through family court found that more than 72% of parental alienation allegations were made by fathers. Other people or agencies who made allegations of parental alienation were Cafcass (43.4% of cases), social workers (40.6% of cases) and experts (22.6% of cases).

Veronica claims that a judge often prioritises the views of psychologists and guardians, who she believes are “the loudest voices in court proceedings”.

When parental alienation is alleged, Rose says it often takes over the court case. “It is seen as severe psychological abuse of the child. If parental alienation is diagnosed, the courts see that as far more abusive than anything that would have previously occurred in these domestic abuse situations.”

She adds that with the new reform, she is concerned that disclosures of abuse are not investigated properly and the same use of parental alienation continues, just at a faster pace.

Following FJC’s discrediting of parental alienation, Cafcass reports that they no longer use the term, instead they refer to them as “alienating behaviour” from parents. When approached for comment, Cafcass directed Big Issue to its webpages on ‘alienating behaviours’ and domestic abuse practice policy.

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “Domestic abuse causes profound and lasting harm and it is crucial that the family court protects children from abuse. 

“We do not recognise ‘parental alienation syndrome’ and we do not believe it can be diagnosed. The government is working to stop unregulated alienation ‘experts’ from influencing life-changing decisions in family courts, hand-in-hand with the responsible committee.” 

The ministry claims its new VAWG strategy “demonstrates our clear commitment to support and protect victims of domestic abuse, while a further £550m in victim support services will help brave survivors get justice”.

Yet Rose says she still sees people making accusations of ‘parental alienation’ in her work at Familicide.

“If you or your child have reported domestic abuse to a domestic violence advocate, your legal professional, social worker or the police, that is seen as a factor of parental alienation syndrome,” Rose says.

Dr Elizabeth Dalgarno, lecturer at the University of Manchester and Director of SHERA Research Group, says: “Too often, protective mothers are separated from their children, despite acting to safeguard them from harm.”

As an active advocate for reform in family court, Dr Dalgarno says: “The court system remains highly misogynistic, [and] has historically prioritised parents’ needs over those of children.” Beyond a full prohibition on the use of alienation frameworks, Dr Dalgarno says that a cultural change is needed, without which, she expressed concern that “the same issues will persist under new labels.”

The co-founders of Familicide say that this problem is not singular to the UK. Their campaign mirrors a French campaign group called Incesticide, who have successfully triggered an inquiry into the judicial handling of parental incest cases following 600 testimonials from survivors of abuse; it will also investigate the treatment of protective mothers, who attempted to shield their children from abuse, but were instead prosecuted, fined or imprisoned.

Following in their footsteps, Familicide has been campaigning to gather 500 testimonials to trigger a United Nations investigation into the UK’s family courts, on the grounds that UK family courts violate the human right to live free from abuse. 

“Essentially, what they have been doing is trafficking children to predators and to perpetrators of abuse,” says Familicide co-founder Emma Roberts. “Five hundred testimonials is a drop in the ocean. Some of the women are so traumatised by what they’ve been through that they can barely string a sentence together.” 

Roberts adds that they regularly receive messages from survivors seeking advice and from women who are looking to replicate their campaign in different parts of the world.

Now working with Familicide, Veronica says she sees a clear pattern of systemic abuse against survivors. During her time in family court, charities and lawyers advised her to “play the game”, encourage contact, or wait until her children aged out of the system, even though they knew she was dealing with paedophilia and child abuse at home.

She lists the mothers who are left destitute as a result of alienation accusations – living out of their cars, yet paying for psychiatric evaluations, supervised visits at contact centres and court-ordered corrective therapy to “accept that there was no abuse, [and] that their abuser is a safe person”.

“I still haven’t cried over what’s happened,” Veronica says. “I’m just funnelling it into exposing it. These women are suicidal because you can’t fulfil the most basic instinct, which is to keep your kids safe. That is a killer.”

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