Stan Korosi

Selected Australian parenting decisions show that family law may identify serious relationship undermining harm only after delay and interim protective arrangements have changed the child’s circumstances. By then, cumulative relational rupture can make safe repair substantially harder and, in some cases, no longer practicable.

Australian family law operates within a wider state and territory protective-order system. Protective separation can therefore occur before allegations of family violence or child abuse have been fully investigated or finally determined. When those allegations enter federal parenting proceedings, s 67ZBB separately requires the court promptly to consider what evidence-gathering and protective orders, if any, are appropriate.

These processes do not legally establish the allegations as true, but they can materially change the child’s circumstances while the evidence is being tested. No equivalent named and rapid pathway ordinarily responds to alleged relationship-undermining conduct unless it is identified as child abuse, including a risk of serious psychological harm. This creates an asymmetry in the timing and practical effect of the system’s response.

Relational Justice is best understood as a framework for implementing established rights to family life, safety, identity, participation, equality, fair process, and effective and accountable state action. The framework is not a claim to five new, independently enforceable human rights. Family relationship ruptures, especially ruptures in parent-child relationships arising from parental separation and divorce, are the context that tests Australian public institutions' implementation of human rights for children, parents and families. Central proposition: When public institutions exercise power over children and family relationships, they must consider safety and relational continuity together. They should protect children and adults from established or credibly imminent harm while avoiding unnecessary rupture of safe and significant relationships. Any restrictive intervention should be evidence-informed, necessary, proportionate, minimally disruptive, time-limited and reviewable, with identifiable responsibility for its relational consequences.

™ A public social and policy reform project seeking recognition, accountability and repair for relational harm. OUR PRINCIPLES

1 Family relationships are social infrastructure. Safe and meaningful family relationships are not merely private interests. They are a public good.

2 Family relationships have continuity across family configurations. Separation and family restructuring change relationships. They should not unnecessarily erase them.

3 Relational harm is real harm. The avoidable destruction, obstruction or severance of meaningful family relationships—including alienation and harmful family estrangement—can damage identity, belonging, memory, continuity and intergenerational connection.

4 Evidence requires equity and integrity. Claims of alienation, abuse, coercive control and relational harm should be assessed through consistent evidentiary standards, without prejudging credibility or assigning evidentiary weight by category alone.

5 Institutions must be accountable for avoidable relational harm. Courts, governments and professional systems should be accountable when their actions, assumptions, delays or failures contribute to unnecessary relational destruction.

Recognition is the first step. Collective action turns recognition into reform.

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This submission adapts the principles-led framework previously developed for the Second Action Plan to End Violence against Women and Children to the narrower statutory task under section 54J of the Crimes Act 1900 (NSW). It focuses on the policy objectives and terms of Part 3, Division 6A, its operation, its impact on communities, and the evidence needed to determine whether change is justified.

This submission also addresses broader systemic matters only to the extent that they bear directly on the policy objectives, operation, training, monitoring or community impacts of Part 3, Division 6A and the matters specified in section 54J. It does not ask this review to determine family-law disputes or create a separate offence of ‘parental alienation’ or any other offence.

It asks the review to ensure that serious conduct which intentionally uses a child or a safe parent–child relationship to coerce or control a current or former intimate partner is recognised and investigated under the existing offence where its elements may be satisfied.

The Second Action Plan is unlikely to improve substantially on its predecessor if it intensifies the same gender-led organising model while adding services, coordination and enforcement. Additional activity does not itself demonstrate improved safety for women and children. Greater integration can reproduce the limitations of the existing model more efficiently unless the theory guiding assessment also changes.

The central proposition of this submission is that relational power abuse is not a gender category. It is a social and relational phenomenon expressed through conduct: a person uses violence, coercion, fear, dependency, a child, a valued relationship or an institution to dominate another person or destroy a safe and beneficial relationship.

Its forms, severity and population distribution vary. Its existence and responsibility in an individual case cannot be determined by sex, gender or another population characteristic.

Population evidence remains essential. It shows that women experience some serious and lethal forms of violence at higher rates, and should shape prevention, service capacity and initial screening. It also shows that men experience partner violence and abuse, including violence and abuse by female partners.

Population patterns cannot establish who used relational power abusively in a particular family. That requires case-specific evidence.

Relational justice therefore places domestic-violence coercion and parental alienation, a form of coercive relational exclusion, at the same level of analytical recognition. This does not assert equal prevalence, identical conduct or equal severity. It means that neither category is presumed true or dismissed in advance. Each is treated as a possible manifestation of relational power abuse and assessed through the same requirements of source attribution, evidence, context, proportionality and review.

The victim-perpetrator distinction is indispensable when describing an established and instrumental act, and assigning responsibility. It becomes misleading when converted into a permanent identity applied to every relationship and contested event. A person may be victimised in one context and use relational power abusively in another. Available evidence shows that coercive behaviours occur across gender boundaries and family configurations. Recognising that complexity does not mutualise all violence or erase asymmetry. It attaches responsibility to conduct rather than identity.

Children are not made safe simply by eliminating the parent accused of family violence, just as they are not made safe by preserving contact regardless of evidence. An allegation should trigger protection, inquiry and proportionate caution; it should not automatically become proof. Safety and relational continuity must be assessed together through the least relationally disruptive effective intervention.

Contemporary families are becoming more diverse, fluid, networked and narratively constituted. These changes create new possibilities for care, belonging and kinship, but they also expose children and parents to new forms of relational vulnerability. Parental alienation is a concentrated expression of this wider problem. It shows how family relationships can be reorganised through narratives of exclusion, danger, contempt and erasure, producing relational harm that is simultaneously psychological, social, legal and political. This white paper argues that the parental alienation field should move beyond a problem-saturated focus on diagnosis, proof and remediation, without abandoning those tasks. Its larger contribution is to help define the relational ethics of future families: safe connection, developmental continuity, non- violence, parental identity, family belonging and institutional responsibility. The future family need not be nuclear, traditional or fixed. But it must not become a network in which children’s relationships are rendered disposable by adult grievance, ideological capture or institutional indiUerence.

Alienation in families, commonly discussed as parental alienation, is usually treated as a clinical, forensic or family-law problem. That psycho-legal framing is necessary but insufficient. Parental alienating behaviours also constitute relational, social and public health harms. They reorganise children’s family relationships through narratives of fear, contempt, rejection and exclusion; undermine parental identity; impose economic and legal burdens on targeted and rejected parents; and may contribute to adverse mental health outcomes, including suicidality. This White Paper proposes a multidimensional social and public health policy framework for alienation in families, while retaining the necessary contribution of clinical and legal responses. It argues that policy should address interacting domains of relational power, child safety and development, human rights and family life, misinformation and evidentiary governance, socio-economic access to remediation, and anti-alienation and de-alienation practice. The paper does not replace clinical or legal responses. It situates them within a broader public policy framework capable of prevention, early identification, timely intervention, relational repair and institutional accountability.

A call to the domestic abuse field to accept conceptual parity with parental alienation, and to embrace evidentiary governance and relational ethics in family policy.

This essay is more direct than my recent writing on relational ethics and future families. I have mostly avoided the parental alienation versus gendered domestic abuse battleground, where possible, because children are not helped by professional culture wars. But there comes a point when refusing the battle forfeits the decision about agreed language and governing categories to others. My argument is simple: domestic abuse is real, parental alienation is real, and children are harmed when either is denied.

 In engaging this battleground, I have also defined the battlelines. However, it is fair to say that neither the parental alienation field nor the gendered domestic abuse field is entirely homogeneous. I have chosen the order of battle for each field based on its dominant narratives, whilst recognising that there may be a range of views within each field.

Parent-child contact problems (PCCP) are a recurrent and contested presentation in family law, child protection, and domestic-abuse (DA) contexts. This article argues that PCCP is increasingly organised through a binary conflict between parental alienation (PA) and gendered DA, and that this binary is not simply discovered in the field but produced, stabilised, and politically mobilised through discourse. Gendered DA paradigms foreground structural patriarchy, male violence, survivor testimony, safety-first reasoning, and institutional minimisation. PA paradigms foreground relational power, child psychological abuse, induced rejection, loyalty conflict, and the possibility that children’s expressed wishes may be shaped by coercive family dynamics. These frameworks are not inherently incompatible. They become functionally incompatible when translated into exclusive explanatory regimes that require one framework to disqualify the other. Drawing on conceptual critical discourse analysis, the article identifies six mechanisms through which PA is made more contestable than DA: category collapse, genealogical tainting, moral asymmetry, asymmetric scepticism, case-horror evocation, and forensic translation. It concludes that PCCP requires evidentiary governance capable of testing competing explanations without allowing either DA or PA to monopolise post-separation harm.

The recent UK position on parental alienation (PA) is clearer in procedure than in principle. Recent guidance and family-law case law reorient the field toward a more disciplined model in which allegations of parental alienating behaviour (PAB) are treated as matters for judicial fact-finding rather than psychological diagnosis or expert-made fact. In that respect, the Re Y “modern approach” is an advance. This article argues, however, that the same framework also embeds a substantive hierarchy in which domestic abuse (DA) is given conceptual, analytical, and sequencing priority, and allegations of PAB are reviewed through a DA-first lens. The article contends that Re Y is correct to reject expert substitution for fact-finding, the current scientific literature does not establish a reliable comparative basis for treating DA as the dominant causal frame, as a general rule, in mixed DA/PA cases, and the hierarchy is better understood as a statutory and safeguarding choice than as a conclusion compelled by settled comparative science. The result is a framework that is statutorily authorised and procedurally improved, but conceptually incomplete and analytically contestable. The article concludes by considering the implications of this position for current UK practice and for the international uptake of UK family-law models.