The illusory correlation between parental alienation and other forms of family violence

Abstract

There has been considerable public discourse around courts allegedly “dismissing” mother's allegations of domestic violence and child abuse when a father alleges that he is being alienated from his children by their mother. The purpose of this project is to test whether this discourse is based on an illusory correlation. Published court decisions from 200 family court cases in Canada were sequentially selected if parental alienation was alleged to have happened to the father and abuse was alleged to have been perpetrated by the father. Independent coders recorded the investigative outcomes of the court cases regarding alienation and abuse, and whether the mother lost child custody. Results indicate that there is an illusory correlation between family court cases involving both allegations of abuse and parental alienation, and that mothers are generally not losing custody to abusive fathers in such rarely occurring cases.