This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 40, Winter 1999/2000.
The ‘fathers’ rights’ movement has dreamt up various ‘syndromes’ in order to achieve their political goals. One of these is ‘Parental Alienation Syndrome’ wherein they accuse mothers of brainwashing their children against their fathers. In this article, based on a presentation to a domestic violence conference, Anne Morris suggests that the truth is that women’s abusive ex-partners continue their attempts to control them by deliberately alienating children from their mothers.
In this article I want to discuss some of my current thinking that has arisen out of some action research I am undertaking. I have been working at Northern Women’s Community Health Centre in Adelaide, doing project work, counselling and group work with women. Most, if not all, of the women who attend the Centre wish to deal with the effects of present or past violence and abuse in their lives. One of the effects of violence that women speak of is the alienation that has occurred between themselves and their children. The alienation has come about not just as a ‘by-product’ of abuse, but because wedges have been deliberately put in place between mothers and children, in a context of abuse against the mother and/or the children. This has meant in many cases, that women have ‘lost’ their relationships with their children, and to most of these women it has been as though their children had died.
Let me tell you about ‘Anne’, one of the women I interviewed. She had had close and loving relationships with her two daughters, but when her emotionally abusive marriage broke up, her husband, who had barely had anything to do with the girls, began a vicious campaign to win them, one by one, away from their mother. Her younger daughter returned from holidays with her father, and her relationship with Anne had completely changed. As Anne describes it, ‘the child that came to my door was not the child that I’d sent away. This child was cold. This child that came back was basically… It was like, the anger in her eyes…’, and from that point Anne’s daughter refused to have anything more to do with her. Anne describes her reaction to this:
I started banging my head against the cupboards. And I would have kept on doing that until I killed myself. I stopped for 30 seconds, and I said, ‘I am going to kill myself if I don’t get help’. So I rang my friends up. It was a very special friend I had, an elderly couple. And she said, ‘Don’t leave this phone’… they raced over to me, presented me with a bottle of Scotch, and wouldn’t leave until I’d come good, which was about 3 o’clock in the morning, until I’d knocked myself out with the Scotch to go to sleep. Then, first thing the next morning, they were back over there with me… I wouldn’t be here today if they hadn’t been there. I would have suicided… There was that huge hole in my life, which, to this very day, has not gone away.
Another form of abuse
To women, the effects of this alienation were devastating. But what compounded this grief further were the many messages that women received from family, friends and professional workers, that the changes in their relationships with their children were due to their bad mothering, that they reflected their failure as mothers, and as women. Anne said, ‘At that time, I did blame myself for everything, because everybody had told me I was to blame. I was bad. My husband had told me I was bad for sixteen years that we were married. He told me I was bad afterwards… My doctors were telling me that I was bad… The neighbours were all saying, “Well, what have you done? You’ve done something. You’re to blame.” My in-laws were saying the same thing. At that time, my mother was blaming me… my father definitely blamed me’.
This alienation has caused women enormous amounts of grief and pain, through the loss of their children and the compounding of this with mother-blaming. I find it curious that, while this alienation is not an uncommon event for women, women find that their experiences of it are generally not listened to or acknowledged. And indeed, I have found that this is reflected in the relevant literature, where this phenomenon has been invisible as a component of abuse and has not been named.
As Liz Kelly has pointed out, when something doesn’t have a name, it tends to remain invisible and without reality. Without a name, we have nothing with which to recognise a phenomenon, or acknowledge it, or explore it, or validate the experience for others. Neither can we develop theory about it or practice that addresses it appropriately. I gave this phenomenon the name ‘maternal alienation’, and I have attempted a working definition of it as the phenomenon of children being alienated from their mothers, within a context of abuse, through the deliberate use of tactics such as mother blaming. Not surprisingly, once we had noticed and named this phenomenon at Northern Women’s, we saw it more and more in our work.
So therefore, in order to develop an understanding of maternal alienation and to draw attention to its occurrence, a research project was set up at Northern Women’s, jointly supervised by Northern Women’s and the Department of Social Inquiry (Women’s Studies), University of Adelaide. The project poses the questions: What are women’s experiences of being alienated from their children by abusers of the women or the children, and how do systems further perpetuate this? In particular, what are the strategies and tactics used by abusers in maternal alienation, and how do they relate to wider discourses that inform professionals’ views and beliefs about mothers?
To accommodate the differing orientations of feminist scholarship and Women’s Health, the project needed to become inclusive of aims and styles of working that were appropriate to both. Other writers have written about the tensions in so-called ‘action research’ in the relationship between social science and social action. As Dobash & Dobash pointed out in 1988:
Social science is largely lacking in models of how to develop scientific work within this context [social action], how to analyze the social and political consequences of the messages inherent in research, and how to participate with community groups and social agencies in the collective creation of social change (53).
In trying to deal with these tensions, I have designed this project to include multiple strands. Firstly, I am using feminist qualitative research based on a small number of interviews and focus groups with women to explore their experiences of maternal alienation, mainly from the mothers’ perspectives, but to a lesser degree, also from the perspective of adult ‘survivors’ of child sexual abuse. Further to this, from a Women’s Health perspective, I intend to develop a project or projects based on consultations with the women involved, and in partnership with them, if they want to be active in this. This would offer back to the participants opportunities to become involved in the project, and to direct how the results of the research are to be used by the Centre. All the women involved have indicated that they want the idea of maternal alienation to be publicised so it can be recognised, and ‘put on the agenda’ as a social health issue. They want a training package to be developed, which will challenge the pervasive mother blaming in professional practice. They are interested in publishing their stories, and also in the idea of producing a video. We have talked about developing models of practice so that practitioners can adequately address the effects of maternal alienation in their work with women and children. These are early ideas, and there will be more meetings with the participants when the research itself is finished. What guides these initiatives, and this works towards resolving some of the tensions present in action research, is, as Sandra Harding says, ‘If one begins inquiry with what appears problematic from the perspective of women’s experiences, one is led to design research for women’ (p 8).
I believe that a feminist analysis offers the possibility of understanding what maternal alienation is about, because of the way it understands male violence within a context of gendered power relations and cultural beliefs that tend to maintain and support violence. I have used Liz Kelly’s concept of a ‘continuum’ of violence to locate maternal alienation within a broad spectrum of violence against women. This enables me to acknowledge the interconnectedness of emotional, physical and sexual abuse (against women and children) and how maternal alienation can be a companion to these at any point along a continuum. The concept of a continuum of violence also allows me to consider a spectrum of abuse ranging from interpersonal to institutional violence, so that it is possible to look at how institutional violence, such as mother-blaming, contributes to the alienation between women and their children. Further to this, an exploration of discourses of mothers and mothering, and their close connection to mother-blame, can give us some idea of how mothers so easily become the butt of blame, and also how this tends to be obscured.
Deliberate strategies
The women that I have interviewed in this research, and also other women I have seen in counselling, have been quite clear about the fact that maternal alienation had happened in their relationships with their children. What these women describe shows that deliberate strategies are used by men who perpetrate abuse against women, to alienate their children from them. For example, ‘Carol’ told me about the early years of her marriage to a lawyer, who was physically violent to her and who undermined her relationship with her children:
He would say things to them like, ‘Don’t do as she says’. And it was all done in a way that was making the children laugh, and making the children think it was a joke. But the underlying message was, ‘Be disrespectful to your mother; don’t do as she says — your mother’s stupid. Her family is stupid.’
Carol described how later, after the marriage had split up, every time her ex-partner had the children visit, he would drive them past a huge billboard of a garage with a picture of a gorilla on it. He named the gorilla ‘Carol’, and this was all part of a ‘great big joke’ that was constantly repeated.
Another woman, ‘Andrea’, described her situation with a violent husband before she left the relationship. Her children ‘sat back and watched him verbally abusing me, saying that I was Hitler, Mussolini. And telling them, or telling me in front of them, that he wasn’t going to eat anything that I cooked because I was trying to poison him. And that I was trying to use all of these other methods of killing him.’ After she left, the children visited him, and there was, in Andrea’s words, ‘a sign of — a picture — a caricature of a woman with wild hair, wild eyes, looking really crazy, and written on that is, “Just remember, this is what Mum looks like”, and my telephone number written in his handwriting on it’.
All the women interviewed talked about the everlasting battles waged by these men against them. ‘Jenny’ says, ‘I have thought about the relentless nature of his pursuit of me, which is ten years now. It still seems to be festering along in its full bloom.’ For every one of the women I interviewed, years after they had separated from these men, these campaigns were still being carried out against them, with the minds of their children as the battleground.
Abusers as ‘victims’ and ‘heroes’
This study established that men set out to alienate children from their mothers using a web of words and actions that both demean the women and elevate themselves in children’s eyes. The strategies they use fit with other research findings, for example by Ptacek, that men’s violence can be ‘motivated by a desire to silence their partners; to punish them for their failure as “good wives”; and to achieve and maintain dominance over these women’ as well as intending to hurt and frighten them (p150-1). The women interviewed all believed their ex-partners used maternal alienation as a way of exercising control over their families, of punishing their partners and of winning at all costs. The men competed with their children’s mothers to form exclusive relationships with their children based on the destruction of their children’s other relationships of trust, affection and loyalty, particularly with their mothers. A potent strategy used by all the men described was to turn the mothers into objects of revulsion and disgust. Both Ptacek and Lundgren identify this assault on a woman’s identity as a gendered being as a key ingredient of violence against women. One of the women, ‘Hannah’, pointed out that her ex-husband’s ‘strategy of dehumanising me’ always elevated him. Furthermore, women who are mothers commonly have a strongly invested sense of identity and self-worth related to being a mother, which makes mothering an easy target for men who wish to injure and punish, and to inflict a further ‘assault on her identity as a woman’ (Ptacek, p147).
As well as using blame and insults that demeaned the mothers, the men that were spoken of in these interviews used strategies that elevated themselves in certain ways. The men emerged from their own portrayals as victim/heroes, wielding a potent mix of unpredictable and punishing behaviour, with a refusal to accept responsibility and a need for sympathy. All the men spoke of themselves as victims, needing support from their children — support (they said) that had been denied them by their wives. Echoing some of the women who spoke about this tactic, I have called this the ‘poor me’ strategy. The men appeared to bond with their daughters in ways that set them up as replacement spouses, to look after them. The ‘poor me’ strategy was a key part of this. The men tended to bond with their sons in different ways, where they joined around their common male-ness, with contempt for things female, particularly their sons’ mothers. All of these men were better off financially than their ex-wives, most of whom lived below the poverty line. In most cases, the men had well-established careers in the highest income brackets, yet most of these men persuaded their children they were poor, and that they had been impoverished by the children’s mothers.
From hearing the women’s stories it became obvious that the degree of alienation that the women experienced with their children varied. Some stories showed that the success of the tactics used to alienate children from their mothers was sometimes total and at other times less successful. This variation in the ‘success’ of alienation even varied within families. Where alienation had been more successful with one sibling, this child was used to work on the others by replicating the father’s tactics. More often, in families with children of both genders, it tended to be the boy who became more alienated from his mother than his sister, possibly because the girl had been excluded by the tactic of male bonding. But it was not always the case that sons were more alienated from their mothers. A possible area of future research could be to focus on the factors that contribute to this variation in the ‘success’ of maternal alienation, but it has been beyond the scope of this study to do this.
Recognising the problem
One has to ask, when women themselves are so clear about the existence of maternal alienation, why is it that professional practice or writings don’t name it? Even within the feminist and pro-feminist literature on violence against women, and feminist writings on constructions of mothering, the closest I have come to a recognition of the existence of maternal alienation are hints that it exists. For example, studies of child sexual abuse offenders have illustrated their use of deliberate and manipulative intentions to destroy a child’s relationships of trust. Laing & Kamsler say, ‘the relationship problems between mother and child victim which are so commonly seen after incest is disclosed, are more likely to be the result of a campaign of “disinformation” orchestrated by the offender, under the cover provided by the secrecy which he imposes on the victim’ (p169). Jude Irwin & Marie Wilkinson reiterate Liz Kelly’s finding in drawing attention to the damage done to the mother-child relationship in abuse, when they say, ‘Abusive partners often isolate children from their mothers in a number of ways, such as involving children in supporting and participating in the abuse/degradation of their mother’ (p18). But there is little more than this. Why is it, I ask myself, that maternal alienation has been virtually invisible in the literature and in practice?
Societal constructions of men and women, and particularly, of mothers and fathers, appear to play a large part in this. Hays describes the contemporary model of motherhood as ‘an ideology of intensive mothering’ which expects mothers ‘to expend a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money in raising their children’. It is through the almost exclusive attachment of mothers to children that women could be, as McMahon expresses it, ‘regulated through discourses of precious children and proper motherhood’ (p28). Hays analyses the advice routinely given to mothers, such as in child-rearing books. She says:
Spock, Brazelton and Leach, along with their coworkers in the advice business, tell mothers to be constantly attentive to the child’s needs, to be alert to each new developmental stage, and to learn how to read the child’s cries and to organize the child’s play activities. If mothers fail in the task, other ‘experts’ may charge them with child neglect, emotional abuse, and ‘toxic parenting’ or denounce them for creating a ‘dysfunctional family'(p71).
In a society that constructs ‘good’ mothering as the continual and unconditional provision of sole care and protection for children, mothers must always be in deficit. They are made responsible, indeed culpable, when abuse is perpetrated by others against children or, indeed, against the women themselves. Within our welfare system in South Australia, to the extent that a male perpetrates abuse against children or their mothers, mothers are deemed ‘neglectful’. As Thorpe describes, ‘the violence of others towards children is redefined as a mother’s failure to protect her child(ren)’ (p109). I think that service providers often recognise the existence of alienation between mothers and children in abuse, but see this as evidence of the mother’s ‘neglect’ or deficient mothering. The men involved are not even a part of this equation. Thus the extent and pervasiveness of mother-blaming within societal and professional discourses can blind us to the part played by male abuse and violence in maternal alienation. It has operated as an elaborate smoke-screen, closing off opportunities for recognising maternal alienation as a further abuse of women and children, while also reinforcing it.
Of course, mother-blaming is a part of the broader picture of a society that pathologises women and minimises or denies their voices. How often have we, as practitioners, heard stories like the stories I have quoted from today, and disbelieved them, or labelled these women ‘hysterical’, or ‘personality disorders’? Is it that for us, too, the voices of the men resound as truth, as they do in the courts, as they do in children’s ears? This research has illustrated to me how, in all areas of life, women’s voices for the most part go unheard, and in their place are professional constructions of what women say. This is certainly true within systems, but my research has shown me that for the most part it is so also in personal relationships, in families. Within mother-child relationships, women’s voices and experiences are mostly not listened to, and are even less likely to be acknowledged or validated. In their place stand male constructions of women and their utterances, which are heard. These are the powerful foundations of maternal alienation — the privileged status of the male voice, which largely excludes and replaces the female voice, added to the constructions of mothering and mother-blame in our society. It seems that these factors make it difficult for children to step into the shoes of their mothers, and see life through their eyes, something they seem to easily do with their fathers.
I question what all this means for women as daughters, as well as for women as mothers. ‘Mary’, an adult survivor of abuse told me of how, for most of her life, the memories of her mother were lost to her — her mother was a shadowy figure that never had a face or personality. As she started to recognise the tactics used by the man that abused her to alienate her from her mother, she started to remember her mother as a constant and loving figure in her life, and felt that in re-claiming this lost relationship, she could begin to heal from the effects of abuse. She said that making visible the strategies used by the perpetrator to separate her from her mother had her seeing the abuse in new ways: that being horrifically abused wasn’t the worst tragedy of her life, but losing her relationship with her mother was. In reclaiming loving memories of her mother, she also reclaimed a knowledge that she was loved and was loveable and worthwhile, and reclaimed knowledges and memories of her abuse that acknowledged her own experiences, not the victim-blaming, mother-blaming, abuse-denying versions of the perpetrator that had been privileged over any other ‘realities’.
Imaginary syndromes
For all these reasons, maternal alienation has been a potent weapon used against women and children, and for these same reasons, it seems, it has remained invisible. Ironically, while maternal alienation had not previously been recognised, it had already been colonised — by ideas of ‘Parental Alienation Syndrome’ and ‘Malicious Mother Syndrome’, that have arisen in the US in legal and psychiatric discourses. ‘Parental Alienation Syndrome’ is a term coined by psychiatrist, Richard Gardner, to describe the brainwashing of a child by one parent, ninety per cent of whom are mothers, to alienate the child from the other parent. This is a syndrome, according to Gardner, that arises in custody disputes, and usually involves an accusation of child sexual abuse against the father. Gardner asserts that the first step towards treatment for ‘Parental Alienation Syndrome’ is removal of the child from the mother’s home and placement with the father. In a number of cases in the US, the Family Court has acted on Gardner’s advice, even when there has been overwhelming evidence of child sexual abuse by the father. Turkat has created a similar syndrome, which he calls ‘Divorce-Related Malicious Mother Syndrome’. Malicious mothers, he asserts, ‘not only try to alienate their children from their fathers, but are committed to a broadly based campaign to hurt the father directly’. They are ‘skillful liars, highly manipulative, and quite adept at recruiting others to participate in the campaign against the father’ (1997, 19).
So these syndromes utilise ideas of ‘pathological’, ‘malicious’, ‘manipulative’ and ‘vengeful’ mothers who falsely make accusations of child sexual abuse against their ex-partners. While attracting much criticism from psychiatric and psychological experts on child abuse, these syndromes seem to sit harmoniously within an adversarial legal system that constructs mothers who act to protect their children as ‘implacably hostile’, and scrutinises their mental health (Wallbank, 1998), while depicting ‘family men’ as ‘safe’ and ‘respectable’ (Collier, 1995), a system which tends to support the ‘rights’ men may seek to exercise authority over ‘their’ family as property.
Perhaps the irony of these syndromes is that, while women are readily described as neglectful, malicious, conniving and vengeful, and as liars, men are not. Yet there is much evidence that many men manipulate children and systems in their favour, assert their rights to ‘win’ at all cost, and to punish ‘their’ family members for ‘wrongs’ they have defined. The women I interviewed described their male partner’s relentless and punishing and brutal attempts to ‘get back at them’ in the way that they felt hurt them most. Yet while doing this, these men managed to look like victims. Their children saw a poor, helpless man who had been victimised by his partner, a man who had had no hand in creating the situation he lived in — the victim/hero. As ‘Mary’ says, ‘My sister thinks our father was a hero. All of us were always on a quest to save his life — except we didn’t know it. We were all actively engaged in this saving him, because the world was too hard and awful and he was so gentle… He certainly blamed everybody for everything… But we all knew what we had to do so that he wouldn’t get upset, or he wouldn’t get angry’. Can’t this behaviour — of turning children against their mother, yet appearing to be the victim and blameless — be described as ‘cunning’, ‘vengeful’, ‘manipulative’, ‘malicious’ or ‘conniving’? How is it that constructions of dominant masculinity, and even of men who perpetrate abuse, manage to avoid these descriptions? Even within perpetrator programs, it seems that men are still constructed in ways that dignify them — they ‘exercise power and control’, are ‘punishing’ and ‘angry’, like biblical depictions of God the Father. They are not ‘conniving’ or ‘lying’ or ‘vengeful’ or ‘malicious’.
Is it that these dominant constructions of masculinity, by describing men as (at the worst) controlling and angry, render men’s use of maternal alienation invisible, both within personal relationships and in professional discourse? Do such gendered constructions not only render maternal alienation invisible, but also ‘unmentionable’ because there has been no language with which to express it, and ‘inconceivable’, because dominant discourses do not allow us to think that men might behave in these ways? These are questions I have been asking as this research has unfolded.