Unregulated experts can cause harm to children in family courts

From University College London:

The study, published in the Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, describes three devastating cases where older children (aged nine to 17) were removed from their mothers against their will, and were forced to live with their fathers despite allegations and sometimes court findings of abuse.

These family court orders were made on the advice and guidance of unregulated experts who proposed to have identified so-called “alienation” – or that the mother was manipulating the children and had unjustly turned them against their father.*

In one of the cases analysed, two children were removed from their mother to live with their father and undergo a “therapeutic residential reunification plan”. The children, who had described coercive and controlling behaviour from the father, escaped in the middle of the night by smashing and jumping through a first-floor window.

In another court case, two children were forced to live with their father and saw contact restricted with their mother despite a previous court having determined that their father had been “coercive and controlling”.

The author Dr Sonja Ayeb-Karlsson (UCL Risk & Disaster Reduction, UCL Everyday Disasters and Violences Research Group) said: “In these shocking cases, the children expressed clear wishes to stay with their mother but were ignored. Once they had been labelled as ‘alienated’, they ended up legally entrapped with their voices silenced and thereby unable to influence proceedings determining their lives.

Read more here.