In recent past, divorce cases have been on the rise with more couples parting ways by the day. As a result, children are often caught in the standoff between parents who rival each other in ugly court battles for custody.
The Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass) is working on a revolutionary process where parents going through divorce could risk losing total contact with their kids if they try to paint a bad picture of their ex-partner. In divorce cases, parents try to use all manner of tactics to get custody of their children. One such tactic is parent alienation where one partner tries to plant bad things about their ex-partner in their kid’s head.
The aim of such a move is in order to eliminate one parent’s presence from the kid’s life. According to reports by Cafcass, each year, there are an alarming number of over 125,000 cases involving parental alienation. Parental alienation has a detrimental effect on a kid’s life and may result in bad behaviour in the future. Kids are to be nurtured and more often than not believe what their parents tell them. A parent who uses this virtue of kids maliciously in order to win a court battle may end destroying their child. Unfortunately, most parents view divorce as battle they have to win without considering its impact on the kids.
How can you rebuild that trust?
UK judges have continued to acknowledge this phenomenon and are keen to curb it before it destroys more children. Most have come out to term the manipulation of kids during divorce cases as harmful and destructive to the kids.
These itemized steps will provide a framework on when to take the child away from the manipulating parent and hand them over to the other parent.
Towards this end, the following are some of the measures that are being proposed to help fight parent alienation:
• Equipping Cafcass caseworkers with a new set of guidelines that will help them deal with any suspected alienation in a divorce case.
• Cafcass has also come up with a twelve week programme aimed at positive parenting. The program is designed to help a parent empathise with their child and hopefully correct their destructive behaviour.
• In the event that the above measures don’t work, psychologists will be brought in to try and rehabilitate the alienating parent. Continued abuse by the parent will result in supervised visits with limited contact with the child.
• In the worst case scenario, the child will be completely taken away from the parent for an indefinite period of time.
Many are happy with the new approach by Cafcass to deal with parent alienation which has damaged the lives of so many children. Demonising a parent to a kid can have a damaging effect to the particular child even in their adult life. Hopefully, this process will help salvage kids from parent alienation.
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