Woke feminists look to eliminate men as a category of victim
A petition to bar the use of 'parental alienation' in custody cases would make it easy for deceitful mothers to deny fathers their parental rights
You may have friends — as I do — who, as parents following a separation, have suffered the anguish of seeing beloved and formerly loving children turn into hostile strangers for no apparent reason, or through no fault of their own. All too often, the child’s hostility never abates, and the bond is irreparably severed.
Parental alienation has been defined as, “A mental condition in which a child — usually one whose parents are engaged in a high-conflict separation or divorce — allies himself or herself strongly with the preferred parent (the alienating parent) and rejects a relationship with the other parent (the targeted parent) without legitimate justification.
Having read dozens of parental-alienation cases, all joined by the common threads enunciated in the definition above, I understand this phenomenon to be a sadistic genre of former-partner punishment and a repugnant form of child abuse.
I was therefore incredulous to learn that a coalition of 250-plus Canadian feminist organizations recently called on Justice Minister Arif Virani to reform the Divorce Act, with a view to banning accusations of parental alienation in family law cases.
Suzanne Zaccour, director of legal affairs at the National Association of Women and the Law (NAWL), disparaged the concept as “pseudoscience,” arguing that in custody battles, fathers exploit the claim as a weapon — often, she claims, successfully — in trumping mothers’ accusations of abuse.
Gene C. Colman, managing partner of the Gene C. Colman Family Law Centre, told LegalMattersCanada that, “Parental alienation is real, despite what woke feminists have to say.” Far from being a “pseudoscience,” Colman points to “robust academic literature,” including “peer-reviewed articles, social science literature (and) a healthy body of case law authored by respected judges.”