Essay 2: Relational Disposability: The Moral Corruption at the Centre of Current Family Policy
The problem is that our society is becoming comfortable with the erasure of safe and meaningful family relationships.
This is the second essay in The Relational Society: A Manifesto for Relational Justice series. The first essay named the alienated society. This essay names the moral corruption that makes relational harm possible: the treatment of safe and meaningful family relationships as disposable. The next essay will examine the child’s relational map and what alienation destroys.
What happens to a society that forgets its families?
A society that treats family relationships as disposable is not merely failing families. It is corrupting the relational foundations on which children, communities and civic life depend.
Relational disposability is the moral condition that makes relational dispossession possible. It is the cultural and policy assumption that certain family relationships can be allowed to disappear without serious public concern. It assumes that a child’s safe and meaningful relationship with a parent or family network can be treated as optional, replaceable, politically inconvenient, or administratively expendable.
Relational dispossession is the lived consequence: a child, parent, grandparent, or family network is deprived of a safe and meaningful relationship due to adult conduct, including alienation, institutional delay, ideological capture, economic exclusion, or policy failure.
The mechanisms for doing so may include, but are not limited to, alienating behaviour. Such behaviour occurs at the individual and family levels but may also be institutionalised. A society implicitly fosters alienation when it assumes that children’s family relationships are optional and disposable. That assumption manifests in social policies and laws that weaken expectations of continuing family relationships where safe, fail to invest in relational repair, and perpetuate incentives that rupture family relationships and exclude relatives and other family members.
Family relationships as social infrastructure
Family relationships are often treated as private matters. In one sense, they are. The State should not own the family, even though some ideologies believe otherwise. It should not dictate affection, enforce intimacy, or impose one family form on a plural society.
But family relationships are not merely private lifestyle arrangements. They are social infrastructure.
They form identity, belonging, memory, obligation, care and intergenerational continuity. They are where children first learn trust, responsibility, attachment, difference, forgiveness, conflict and repair. They are also where harm can occur. That is why family relationships must be scrutinised. Violence, coercion, intimidation, neglect and abuse must be recognised and acted upon.
But protection from harm must not become a doctrine of relational disposability.
Children need safety. They also need belonging. Both are conditions of child development. They are not rivals or competitors.
It is in this manufactured competition between safety and belonging that much contemporary family policy becomes morally confused. It can speak fluently about risk, rights, autonomy, trauma and safety. It is less fluent in the language of continuity, kinship, memory, parental identity, repair and belonging. Yet a child’s life is not built from safety alone. A child also needs a coherent relational world.
When a safe and meaningful family relationship is unnecessarily erased, the child does not simply lose contact. The child may lose access to part of their own story.
How Society is Failing Children
The family of the future need not be nuclear, traditional or fixed. That is not the argument. Children can flourish in many family forms: separated families, blended families, same-sex parented families, kinship networks, step-families, donor families, transnational families and other arrangements of care. The test of a family is not whether it satisfies an ideological preference for the past.
The test is whether children’s safe and meaningful relationships are recognised, protected and allowed to develop.
Contemporary family policy fails that test. It fails not only because courts are slow, services are fragmented, or legal remedies are expensive. Those failures matter, but they point to something deeper.
The deeper problem is relational disposability
Relational disposability is the assumption that a child’s relationship with a parent, grandparent, sibling or wider family network can be treated as optional, replaceable, politically inconvenient or administratively expendable. It is what happens when a system grows comfortable with the disappearance of relationships that should have been protected. It does not always announce itself as hostility to the family. More often, it appears as caution, delay, neutrality, risk management, professional process or ideological confidence. It is explained away as being in the child’s best interest.
But its effect is the same. A child’s relationship is allowed to wither. A parent is recoded as unnecessary or dangerous. A grandparent, uncle, auntie, or cousin disappears from the child’s world. A family history is narrowed. A child’s capacity to love across family lines becomes conditional on the approval of others.
This indifference to the need for family relationships is not merely private sorrow. It is a public failure.
White Paper No. 11, The Alienated Society, argues that parental alienation is a concentrated expression of a wider social problem. Families are becoming more diverse, fluid, networked and narratively constituted. That creates new possibilities for care and belonging. But it also creates new vulnerabilities. If relationships are held together not only by household structure or legal status, but by narratives of belonging, recognition and obligation, then those narratives can also be captured, narrowed and weaponised.
Parental alienation reveals this vulnerability with unusual clarity. It shows how a child’s relational world can be reorganised through narratives of fear, contempt, exclusion and erasure. A parent may be made to appear unsafe, morally disqualified, unnecessary or no longer real as a parent. The child may come to experience love as betrayal and family connection as danger.
But the mechanism travels beyond parental alienation. Any family network can become vulnerable when one person, one coalition, one institution or one ideology controls the narrative through which children are permitted to love, trust, remember or belong.
That is why the problem is not family diversity. The problem is relational disposability.
A plural society should not require one family form. It should, however, require a serious commitment to the child’s relationships within whatever family form exists. The family need not be restored to some imagined past, nor assume that the nuclear family is the only viable form. But neither should it be dissolved into adult preference, institutional convenience or ideological doctrine.
A society that cannot say why a child’s safe relationship with a parent matters has lost more than a policy argument. It has lost part of its moral vocabulary.
The false comfort of neutrality
Much relational disposability hides behind the language of neutrality.
A court delays because it must manage the process. A service refuses to intervene because the matter is contested. A school accepts one parent’s account because conflict is uncomfortable, threatens teachers, and impedes the educational process.
A policy framework treats one category of harm as visible and another as suspect. A professional avoids the term “alienation” because they perceive it as controversial. A child’s resistance is treated as self-explanatory because listening to the child sounds morally sufficient.
Each act may appear cautious, and in caution, these acts are not tested. Together, they can consolidate rupture.
Relational dispossession occurs from the accumulation of over-caution. It is a sequence of omissions: the assessment not ordered, the contact not restored, the false narrative not tested, the safe parent not supported, the grandparents not considered, the delay not treated as harmful, the repair pathway not funded, the ideology not challenged.
By the time the system is ready to decide, the relationship may already have been irretrievably ruptured. That rupture becomes self-justifying.
Then the system performs its final act of moral evasion. It treats the result of its own inaction as evidence of its benevolence.
The child no longer wants to see the parent. The relationship now appears too damaged. Repair may be too difficult. The child sounds settled. The rejected parent sounds distressed. The matter is described as complex. The institution steps back. It rests on its self-justification that it acted in the child’s best interests. Yet that best interests calculation does not include the preservation of a child’s family relationships.
This practice is not neutral; it has little to do with the child’s best interests. It is relational abandonment.
The right to family life requires timely protection
Family life is not only a private sentiment. It is also recognised in human rights law as a protected interest. The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly held that respect for family life requires more than passive non-interference by the State. In appropriate cases, it may require authorities to take practical and timely measures to preserve or restore family relationships.
Pisică v. the Republic of Moldova2 illustrates the point. In that case, the European Court of Human Rights found that Moldova violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights after the authorities failed to take effective measures in response to alienating behaviour and failed to enforce a final judgment awarding custody of the children to their mother. The Court treated the authorities’ failure to respond to the mother’s complaints about alienation and to deal urgently with the custody case as contributing to later difficulties in enforcing the judgment.
Although not binding in Australia, the case is useful because it shows how a human rights court can understand delay, non-enforcement and institutional passivity as threats to family life.
The point is not that every allegation of alienation proves a human rights breach. It does not. The point is narrower and more important: where institutions fail to act with sufficient urgency, their delay may help produce the very relational rupture they later treat as irreversible. Family life is then not destroyed only by one parent’s conduct. It is also destroyed by institutional inaction.
Relational justice, therefore, has a human rights dimension. If family life matters, the State cannot treat children’s safe and meaningful relationships as private losses that become relevant only after they are gone.
The ideology of replacement
Relational abandonment and disposability go together. They carry an unspoken theory of replacement.
The child will adapt. Another adult can fill the gap. The rejected parent was probably either unimportant or dangerous. Grandparents and other kinship relationships are secondary at best. The father is optional. The mother is replaceable. The sibling bond can be ignored. The child’s past can be rewritten. The family line can be narrowed without consequence.
This is a dangerous fiction. It becomes dangerous when it recasts family relationships primarily as a threat to be managed rather than as relationships to be assessed, protected and repaired where safe.
Relationships are not interchangeable units. A parent is not simply a service provider. A grandparent is not merely an occasional visitor. A sibling is not just another child in the network. Family relationships carry history, identity, memory and symbolic meaning. Some are unsafe and must be limited or ended. But where they are safe and meaningful, their removal is not a minor administrative consequence. It is a developmental event for which the State and society at every level should commit to preserving.
The critical role of family relationships in children’s secure development is why parental alienation matters beyond the field of parental alienation. It exposes the social mechanism by which family relationships are rendered morally removable.
A child is not only kept from a parent. The child is often taught why the parent no longer counts and why family relationships are disposable. These teachings are the ideology we should reject.
The political failure and the birth of a new constituency
The constituency affected by relational disposability is large but fragmented. It includes alienated fathers, alienated mothers, grandparents cut off from their grandchildren, adult children trying to understand why a parent disappeared, practitioners who see children recruited into adult narratives, family lawyers frustrated by delays, counsellors trying to repair relationships after years of institutional inaction, professionals silenced by ideological capture and misinformation, and policymakers who know that current categories do not adequately capture the harm.
These people do not yet speak as one constituency. Some use the language of parental alienation. Some use the language of family violence. Some speak of court failure, child loss, coercive control, institutional betrayal, men’s mental health, children’s rights, grandparents’ rights, or social fragmentation.
They are not identical experiences, and they should not be collapsed into one story. What unites them is not sameness of experience, but a common public failure: the failure of institutions to recognise, protect and repair safe and meaningful family relationships before they are lost.
The manifesto’s task is to give this fragmented constituency a common language. That language is relational justice.
Relational justice begins with a simple proposition: children’s safe and meaningful family relationships are not disposable private interests. They are a common good. Institutions should therefore be accountable when they allow those relationships to be unnecessarily erased, obstructed, delayed, misclassified, or made accessible only to the wealthy.
Relational justice does not mean forced contact. It does not mean ignoring abuse. It does not mean restoring the nuclear family as the only legitimate form. It means that a society serious about children must be able to protect them from both unsafe relationships and the avoidable destruction of safe ones.
From disposability to dispossession:
Relational disposability is the attitude. Relational dispossession is the outcome.
A child is relationally dispossessed when they lose access to a safe and meaningful relationship because the adults and institutions around them fail to protect it.
A parent is relationally dispossessed when their parental identity is erased not because they are unsafe, but because the system allows exclusion to harden.
A grandparent and other kin are relationally dispossessed when kinship is treated as peripheral, and the child’s wider family world is narrowed without scrutiny.
A society is relationally dispossessed when it loses confidence in the family as a place of belonging, obligation and continuity.
Disposability and dispossession are the social realities for an ignored constituency.
Societies are not held together only by markets, laws, rights or institutions. They are held together by relationships. If those relationships become disposable at the most intimate level, the effects do not remain private. They travel outward into loneliness, distrust, alienation, mental distress, grievance politics, institutional disillusionment and social alienation.
The family is not everything. But without some coherent account of family relationships, the rest of society becomes thinner, colder and more bureaucratic.
What must change: A demand for relational justice
The answer to relational disposability is relational justice. That requires a different policy imagination.
First, family relationships must be recognised as social infrastructure. They are not merely private arrangements to be noticed only after they collapse.
Second, children’s relational continuity should become a policy and human rights concern wherever relationships are safe and developmentally beneficial.
Third, systems must distinguish alienation, domestic abuse, coercive control, justified estrangement, poor parenting, ordinary conflict and hybrid cases. Ideology cannot be allowed to decide the facts before assessment.
Fourth, delay must be treated as a harm amplifier. Institutions should be judged not only by their final decisions, but also by what their delay allows to happen.
Fifth, the conditions for relational repair must become a public responsibility, not something that depends on wealth. If a child’s relationship can be protected only by parents who can afford years of litigation, then family policy has converted relational safety into an economic privilege.
Finally, institutions must be accountable for relational outcomes. Courts, schools, family services, child protection systems and policy frameworks should be asked a direct question: did they interrupt relational harm, or did they help consolidate it?
White Paper No. 23 calls this a social and public health framework for alienation in families. It does not replace clinical or legal responses. It places them within a wider architecture of prevention, early identification, timely intervention, relational repair and institutional accountability.
That is the policy direction. But the moral foundation comes first. That is the subject of the next essay. A society must decide whether children’s safe and meaningful family relationships matter enough to protect before they are gone.
Manifesto proposition: Relational Justice
Relational disposability is the moral corruption at the heart of family policy. The problem is not family diversity, nor the decline of a particular historical family form. The problem is a society growing comfortable with the erasure of safe and meaningful relationships. Relational justice begins by refusing that comfort.
Korosi, S. (2026). The Alienated Society: Parental Alienation, Relational Harm and the Future of Families White Paper No 1. SSRN Preprint. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6732958
European Court of Human Rights. (2019). Case of Pisică v. the Republic of Moldova (Application no. 23641/17). Judgment, 29 October 2019.
Korosi, S. (2026). Beyond the Psycho-Legal Paradigm: A Social and Public Health Policy Framework for Alienation in Families Anti-alienation, de-alienation and evidence-sensitive family policy White Paper No. 2. SSRN Preprint. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6742500