Essay 4: Ideological Capture and the Family
When policy decides what harm it is permitted to see
This is the fourth essay in The Relational Society: A Manifesto for Relational Justice. It examines how ideology defines the harm that society and its systems recognise. It follows the third essay, which identifies the child’s relational map and what alienation takes from children. It also completes the manifesto’s first movement: naming the alienated society before turning to the institutional machinery through which relational dispossession is produced.
Why this essay matters now
Australia is developing the next phase of the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children1. The consultation asks how systems should become more connected, how children should be recognised in their own right, and which evidence, workforce and institutional gaps must be addressed.
These are necessary questions. But they raise a prior question.
What is the system organised to see?
Greater coordination will not produce justice if institutions share information through the same partial theory of harm. An integrated system can still misclassify a family. It can also spread and entrench that misclassification more efficiently.
This essay examines the point at which a framework stops helping institutions interpret evidence and begins deciding in advance which harms, victims, perpetrators and relationships are permitted to exist.
When ideology decides what harm is
The great failure of contemporary family policy is not that it fails to take harm seriously. It is that it increasingly recognises only the harms its ideology permits it to see. A framework is useful when it helps us see. It becomes dangerous when it decides in advance what can be seen.
No policy framework is value-free. Nor should it be. Family policy must value safety, dignity, evidence, procedural fairness, children’s development and accountability for harmful conduct. The danger begins when those values are converted into a closed explanatory system: when the framework no longer helps the institution test the evidence, but determines what the evidence is allowed to mean.
That is the point at which policy stops assessing relationships and starts sorting families into authorised categories of victim, perpetrator, danger, protection and credibility.
An ideological lens should not be a verdict
Family policy requires more than one kind of evidence.
Population evidence identifies patterns. It tells us that family violence is gendered in important and sometimes lethal ways. Women are more likely than men to experience intimate-partner violence, sexual violence, multiple forms of abuse and severe forms of physical violence, and they remain disproportionately the victims of intimate-partner homicide2. This evidence should shape prevention, service capacity, professional education and initial risk screening.
Case-specific evidence performs a different function. It determines what conduct occurred within a particular family, who presents a risk, which relationships are dangerous or protective, and what intervention is required.
Outcome evidence performs a third function. It tests what the intervention produced: whether it secured sustained safety, reduced repeated harm, implemented the decision effectively and avoided unnecessary secondary harm.
These forms of evidence do not compete. But they are not interchangeable.
A population pattern cannot establish an allegation in an individual case. An individual case does not invalidate a population pattern. Institutional activity does not establish that an intervention produced safety.
Alienating behaviours are forms of relational conduct that may contribute to a child’s unjustified resistance to, or rejection of, a parent. They must be distinguished from justified estrangement, ordinary conflict, deficient parenting and other causes of parent–child contact problems. Where they occur, they may distort the child’s relational world and disrupt a safe and beneficial relationship3.
Gender may be relevant to behaviour, risk, context or effect. But it should not become the primary explanatory vector before the relational facts have been assessed. It should inform vigilance without becoming a verdict. The relational facts of the individual family must still be assessed.
In policy terms, family relationships require an evidence-sensitive approach that can recognise relational abuses of power regardless of gender or other social determinants, while giving gendered population evidence the policy function it can properly perform.
Anti-totalising, not parental alienation versus gendered domestic abuse
The tension between parental-alienation and gendered domestic-abuse frameworks is often presented as a contest between rival truths. It should not be.
The categories are not equivalent. They need not occur with equal frequency. They may nevertheless coexist, be alleged by different parties, be misidentified, or operate together within the same family.
A parental-rights framework becomes unsafe when it treats children as instruments of adult entitlement. A child-autonomy framework becomes unsafe when it treats children’s expressed wishes as if they were formed outside fear, pressure, attachment, loyalty conflict or misinformation. A therapeutic framework becomes unsafe when it pathologises family conflict without attending to evidence, institutional power and rights. A gendered domestic-abuse framework becomes unsafe when a population pattern is allowed to predetermine credibility, responsibility or risk in an individual family.
Any framework becomes unsafe when it treats family relationships only as oppressive structures rather than as possible sites of identity, care, memory and belonging.
The issue is not which ideology should win. The issue is whether any framework should be permitted to decide the facts before assessment occurs.
An abuse of relational power
Abuse of relational power occurs when a person, institution or system uses its position within a relationship to dominate, frighten, isolate, erase, recruit, silence or control another person’s family life, identity or relational belonging.
Domestic abuse is one form of relational power abuse. It may be exercised through violence, coercion, intimidation, fear, surveillance, economic control, degradation, isolation or the use of children and institutions to continue control after separation.
Coercive interference with a child’s safe and beneficial relationships is another possible form. It may be exercised through narrative capture, loyalty pressure, exclusion, denigration, fear induction, moral recoding and the recruitment of the child against a parent or family network.
Institutional power may compound either form of harm4. Delay, evidentiary shortcuts, fragmented responsibility, procedural exclusion and the uncritical repetition of disputed information can alter the child’s relational world as decisively as a private act.
These harms are not identical. Relational justice does not collapse them into one category. It requires each alleged mechanism to be identified, evidenced and assessed.
The policy question is therefore not, “Which doctrine do we believe?”
It is: what conduct is occurring, who is using relational power, through what mechanism, with what evidence and effect, and what response will protect the child’s safety, identity, belonging and development?
Ideo-policy: When ideology becomes the evidence
Ideo-policy is policy built to preserve an ideological frame rather than to test evidence. It pre-selects what counts as harm, what counts as evidence, who counts as credible, and which relationships and relational losses are allowed to matter.
It can operate in opposite directions.
Some policy positions treat an allegation of parental alienation as presumptively tactical, misogynistic or pseudoscientific before examining the alleged conduct. Other positions treat a child’s rejection of a parent as presumptive proof of alienation before examining violence, seriously deficient parenting, fear or justified estrangement.
Both errors convert a hypothesis into a verdict.
The first can make coercive interference with a child’s relationships institutionally invisible. The second can expose a child and protective parent to genuine danger. Neither is evidence-sensitive. Neither is child-centred5.
The relational question is not whether a preferred label applies. It is what conduct occurred, what evidence supports it, how the child’s views were formed, which relationships are dangerous or protective, and what the consequences of action, inaction and delay are likely to be.
How safety and belonging became enemies
Ideological capture often works by dividing necessary values into opposing camps.
In family policy, safety and belonging have too often been cast as enemies. Safety becomes the authorised language. Belonging becomes suspect. Relationship repair becomes a risk. A rejected parent becomes an alleged danger. The extended family becomes peripheral. Delay becomes caution. Relational loss becomes unfortunate but acceptable.
Ideological capture imposes a false choice.
We have already established that children need safety. They also need belonging. They need protection from violence, coercion, intimidation and abuse, as well as from avoidable relational erasure. A child’s safe and beneficial relationship with a parent, sibling, grandparent or wider family network is not a luxury to be protected only after every ideological anxiety has been satisfied. It is part of the child’s identity, memory and developmental continuity.
A safety-only framework may protect children from some harms while leaving them exposed to others. A relationship-only framework may preserve contact while minimising danger. Both errors are serious and can harm children.
Relational justice refuses the false choice between safety and belonging.
Its governing rule is to select the least relationally disruptive effective intervention consistent with safety.
This does not mean the mildest intervention. Effectiveness is the threshold; least disruption is the selection rule. Where only removal, reversal of care or cessation of contact can secure safety, that intervention may be required because lesser measures would not be effective.
Nor does relational continuity create a presumption of reconciliation, mediation, direct contact, equal parental responsibility or equal time. It creates a duty to consider the value, safety and possible form of the relationship rather than treating its destruction as an administratively convenient default.
Where risk can be managed through supervision, indirect connection, staged restoration, enforceable conditions, treatment, behaviour-change requirements or prompt review, permanent severance should not occur merely because it is simpler for the institution.
A policy framework that cannot hold safety and belonging together will eventually harm some children in the name of protecting them.
A better way: evidence-sensitive differential assessment
The alternative to ideological capture is disciplined, evidence-sensitive relational assessment. It is not ideological neutrality. There is no such thing. Every system carries values.
Evidence-sensitive assessment takes all reasonably available explanations seriously and then discriminates among them through evidence. It does not give every hypothesis equal weight. It prevents a preferred hypothesis from eliminating the others before assessment begins.
Before making or maintaining an intervention that affects family relationships, an assessor or decision-maker should ask the following six questions:
What conduct is alleged or established, and what pattern of power, coercion or relational harm does it disclose?
Who faces harm, from whom, and with what immediacy and severity?
Which relationships are dangerous, which are protective, and which may be capable of safe repair?
What are the foreseeable consequences of action, inaction and delay?
What is the least relationally disruptive effective intervention consistent with safety?
Which institution is responsible for implementation, enforcement, review and the consequences of the decision?
Such an assessment may identify domestic abuse, coercive control, coercive interference with a child’s relationships, justified estrangement, ordinary conflict, poor parenting, child anxiety, loyalty conflict, institutional reinforcement or a hybrid pattern involving more than one mechanism.
It does not split the difference between domestic abuse and alienating behaviour. It distinguishes among alleged forms of harm through evidence appropriate to the conduct alleged.
Domestic abuse must be recognised where it is present. Coercive interference with a child’s relationships must be recognised where it is present. Justified estrangement must be recognised where it is present. Hybrid cases must be recognised when more than one form of harm operates simultaneously.
Relational justice does not subordinate one harm to another. It requires systems capable of seeing what is actually happening before ideology turns uncertainty into a verdict.
A constituency against false choices
The constituency for relational justice must become a constituency against false choices. Parents who have lost relationships with children through alienating conduct know what happens when relational erasure goes unrecognised. Adult alienated children know what it means to discover, too late, that part of their family world was narrowed before they could understand what was being taken. Grandparents and kin know that children lose more than a parent when family relationships are severed. Parents and children exposed to domestic abuse know what it is like to be ignored. Practitioners know that real cases rarely arrive in pure ideological form.
This constituency should not have to choose between safety and belonging. It should not have to choose between recognising domestic abuse and recognising alienation. It should not have to choose between listening to children and understanding the relational world in which their views were formed. It should not have to choose between evidence and compassion. Above all, it should not allow policymakers and legislators to impose such false choices.
A serious system must be able to say more than one thing at once. This child may need protection from abuse. This child may also need protection from alienation. This child may need protection from both. This parent may be unsafe. This parent may also be falsely erased. This child’s stated wishes may be sincere. They may also have been shaped by fear, loyalty conflict, misinformation or institutional delay.
Relational justice gives this fragmented constituency a public language and a common demand:
Do not decide the harm before the facts are known.
Do not let population evidence become an individual verdict.
Do not let one doctrine own the child.
Do not allow shared jurisdiction to become unowned responsibility.
Do not judge institutions only by what they intended or how many processes they completed. Judge them by what the whole system produced: sustained safety, accountability, procedural justice and the protection of beneficial relationships wherever that could safely occur.
From naming the alienated society to exposing the machinery
This essay completes the first movement of the manifesto: naming the alienated society.
The argument so far is straightforward. A society becomes alienated when family relationships are treated as disposable. Children are harmed when their relational maps are narrowed, distorted or erased. Policy becomes unsafe when ideology decides in advance which harms are real, which victims are credible, which perpetrators are imaginable and which relationships no longer deserve protection.
But naming the harm is not enough.
Relational dispossession is produced through institutions. A court, police service, child-protection authority, school, health service or private professional may each perform its assigned function while no institution remains responsible for the cumulative consequences experienced by the child and family.
The problem is not only fragmented information. It is fragmented responsibility.
The next task is therefore to expose the machinery through which relational dispossession is produced and normalised: delay, risk protocols, professional incentives, evidentiary shortcuts, incompatible timeframes, private enforcement, service cultures and the disappearance of responsibility between institutional mandates.
The manifesto’s second movement turns from naming the alienated society to examining that institutional machinery.
Its first mechanism is delay.
When institutions misclassify harm, postpone assessment or wait for certainty while a child’s relational world collapses, delay is not neutral. It becomes the means by which ideological misrecognition is converted into relational loss.
Manifesto proposition: Ideology must not decide the facts
Family policy becomes unsafe when ideology pre-classifies harm before the relational facts are known. Relational justice rejects every totalising framework that recognises only the harms it is prepared to acknowledge.
Before public power substantially alters a child’s relational world, the system must identify the conduct alleged or established, the status and source of the evidence, the people facing harm, the relationships that are dangerous or protective, and the foreseeable consequences of action, inaction and delay.
It must select the least relationally disruptive effective intervention consistent with safety.
It must identify who remains responsible for implementation, enforcement, review and foreseeable consequences.
The organising question is not which doctrine should win. It is what abuse of relational power is occurring, by whom, through what mechanism, with what evidence and effect, and what response will protect the child’s safety, identity, belonging and relational development.
Join the founding constituency
The Relational Justice Project is building a constituency of parents, adult children, grandparents, practitioners, researchers and citizens who believe that safety and belonging must not be turned into opposing causes.
If you believe institutions should protect people from violence without making safe and meaningful family relationships disposable, become one of the founding subscribers to The Relational Justice Project.
And please share it with one person who should be part of the emerging constituency for relational justice.
Sources and further reading
[ii]
[i] [i]
Australian Government, Evidence to action: informing direction for the Second Action Plan, May 2026. https://engage.dss.gov.au/second-action-plan/
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Intimate partner violence (updated 24 February 2026). https://www.aihw.gov.au/family-domestic-and-sexual-violence/types-of-violence/intimate-partner-violence . Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Domestic homicide (updated 23 April 2026). https://www.aihw.gov.au/family-domestic-and-sexual-violence/responses-and-outcomes/domestic-homicide.
South Australian Royal Commission into Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence, With Courage: South Australia’s vision beyond violence (2025), Recommendations 92–93. https://royalcommissiondfsv.sa.gov.au
Janet R Johnston, “Parental Alignments and Rejection: An Empirical Study of Alienation in Children of Divorce” (2003) 31(2) Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law 158–170, https://jaapl.org/content/31/2/158. Barbara Jo Fidler and Nicholas Bala, “Concepts, Controversies and Conundrums of ‘Alienation’: Lessons Learned in a Decade and Reflections on Challenges Ahead” (2020) 58(2) Family Court Review 576–603, https://doi.org/10.1111/fcre.12488
Family Justice Council Guidance on responding to a child’s unexplained reluctance, resistance or refusal to spend time with a parent and allegations of alienating behaviour-December 2024. (2024). United Kingdom: Family Justice Council. Retrieved from https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Family-Justice-Council-Guidance-on-responding-to-allegations-of-alienating-behaviour-2024-1-1.pdf
EXCELLENT INITIATIVE BY DR KOROSI – THE NEED FOR STRATEGY
Dr Korosi is applauded for his excellent initiative of this Blog to improve family relationships.
I broadly agree with his plan however at present like minded people such as us who have the broader communities interest at heart sadly have negligible influence in the policy debate. Reasonable people sharing thoughts and discussing issues is the greatest way to achieve improvements for society however society is not ready for us at the moment.
The majority of society would I suspect be very supportive of our belief about the benefits of improving family relationships however this is what we are up against: sirens, screaming, blood and scared children clinging to their mother from the media. It etches very traumatic images and audio into our brains. So many people might be very sad to hear that some children cannot see fathers, grandparents, uncles and aunts however it ranks so much less of a problem than women and children being brutally murdered by fathers. Despite an ongoing avalanche of publicity in the media to support the DV religion that underpins government family policy every now and then someone gets a story into the media supporting families. I used to think great: every bit helps, slowly the issue will get traction and then politicians and society will wake up and fix the problem. I was wrong, it took me more than a couple of decades to realise that often any media coverage about strengthening families is just an invitation for the anti family side to get more media coverage reminding people how much more important women's and children lives are than the occasional nice father who doesn't get to see his kids. The mothers and other family members who are victims of this system are just seen to be collateral damage.
If we want to achieve any fundamental shift in public policy in the foreseeable future we need to be much more strategic.
My two cents worth.
Michael Derry
GOOGLE AI on KAYDEN's LAW
Did Kayden's Law campaign actually have more public support and hence more political support to over-rule the supporters of parental alienation or did the Kayden's Law campaign succeed for other reasons.
ANSWER GOOGLE AI
The success of the Kayden’s Law campaign was not a simple matter of one side having "more public support" in a popular vote sense. Instead, the campaign succeeded because it fundamentally altered the battleground, weaponised federal financial leverage, and leveraged an undeniable narrative of systemic failure. [1, 2, 3, 4]
While supporters of parental alienation concepts historically held vast systemic influence inside family courtrooms (via custody evaluators, specific legal associations, and gender-equality groups), the Kayden’s Law advocates outmanoeuvred them through several key political and structural strategies: [1, 2, 3]
1. Shifting the Focus from "Parental Rights" to "Child Homicide"
For decades, the debate around parental alienation was framed by its proponents as a fight for equal parental rights and protecting children from being brainwashed by an angry ex-spouse. This framing was highly effective with judges who naturally desired to promote post-separation shared parenting. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
The Kayden’s Law campaign—named after 7-year-old Kayden Mancuso, who was murdered by her biological father during a court-ordered unsupervised visit despite active protection orders—completely flipped this script. [1, 2]
The Narrative Shift: Advocates stopped arguing about the psychological nuances of parental alienation. Instead, they focused entirely on preventable child fatalities. [1, 2]
The Impact: When confronted face-to-face by a grieving mother (like Kayden's mother, Kathy Sherlock), politicians could no longer hide behind abstract legal theories. Opposing a law named after a murdered child is a political nightmare, which is why bills like Pennsylvania’s Senate Bill 55 ultimately sailed through with unanimous or heavy bipartisan backing. [1, 2, 3, 4]
2. Utilizing Federal "Carrot-and-Stick" Financial Incentives
The true political masterstroke of the Kayden’s Law campaign was embedding its core principles into the Federal Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) Reauthorization Act. [1]
How it worked: Rather than fighting 50 separate, gruelling battles to ban parental alienation evidence in individual state family courts, the federal campaign tied state family court funding to child safety metrics. [1, 2]
The Leverage: Kayden’s Law explicitly offers increased federal grant money (under the STOP Grant program) to states that pass legislation prioritizing child safety over parental reunification. States that continue to let unscientific parental alienation claims override documented abuse allegations lose access to these major federal funding pools. Money, more than public opinion, drove swift legislative action in states like Colorado, California, and Pennsylvania. [1, 2, 3, 5]
3. Re-Defining the "Friendly Parent" Factor
In most US state family codes, judges are legally bound to evaluate the "Friendly Parent Factor"—which dictates that custody should favor the parent most likely to foster a relationship with the other parent. Proponents of parental alienation heavily weaponised this clause, arguing that a mother reporting abuse was being "unfriendly" or "alienating," often leading judges to strip custody from the protective parent. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
Kayden's Law campaign succeeded by surgically amending this specific language in state statutes: [1]
In states that passed the law, the first legal custody factor considered by a judge was explicitly rewritten from "Which party is more likely to support the child spending time with the other party" to "Which party is more likely to keep the child safe." [1]
It also codified that a parent attempting to protect themselves or a child from documented abuse can no longer be legally interpreted as an "unwillingness to cooperate" with the other parent. [1]
4. Overwhelming Scientific De-Legitimization
While groups supporting parental alienation theories fought back using heavily funded legal defense networks, the Kayden’s Law coalition successfully allied with mainstream global scientific authorities. [1, 2, 3]
Advocates leveraged formal declarations from the American Psychological Association (APA), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations—all of which officially classified "Parental Alienation Syndrome" as an empirically unfounded pseudo-concept that is frequently misused to mask domestic violence. By handing lawmakers authoritative, peer-reviewed international declarations, advocates made the defenders of court-room alienation claims look fringe and unscientific. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Summary
The Kayden’s Law campaign did not win a popularity contest; it won an institutional flank attack. By framing the issue around child homicides, attaching massive federal financial penalties for states that ignored the warning signs, and systematically altering the specific statutory definitions of "cooperation" inside family codes, they rendered the traditional arguments of parental alienation groups politically useless. [1, 2, 3]