An excellent piece. It starts:
You heard it here first folks, the dumbing down of parental alienation has already begun in the UK, with the announcement in the Guardian yesterday that CAFCASS are trialling ‘intense therapy’ for parental alienation cases. This ‘intense therapy’ is being proposed alongside punitive measures such as the ‘permanent loss of contact with a child’ and a training course is being flagged as the solution to the problem. Sarah Parsons, assistant director of CAFCASS is quoted as saying “We are increasingly recognising that parental alienation is a feature in many of our cases and have realised that it’s absolutely vital that we take the initiative. Our new approach is groundbreaking.”
Groundbreaking. I will let that word sink in for a moment.
This ground breaking initiative, which is based upon something called the high conflict child arrangements cases handbook, is little more than a cut and paste project in which CAFCASS have decided to claim the PA space for their own.
A later extract:
After years of denying its existence, after well over a decade of aiding and abetting the complete erasure of parents from a child’s life, here come CAFCASS, pronouncing that they are ‘increasingly recognising that parental alienation is a feature in some cases’ and waving their new project and their high conflict pathway training. A training which has all the features of the same kind of ingrained bias and lack of understanding that has been the fault-line in this government funded body from the start.
On the basis of absolutely no consultation with experts in this field, a cut and paste document produced in house, complete absence of the most up to date research, no mention of any of the expert evidence which exists, this ‘groundbreaking’ announcement is welcomed by Families need Fathers, who once again are seen to be appeasing a body with disproportionate power, which has made a misery of their members lives for far too long.
I understand that individual branches of FnF do excellent work, but the central organization is just one of many in a variety of fields which kowtow to feminist organizations (often state-run, as here) which attack men (and sometimes their children too) ruthlessly and relentlessly.
Justice for Men & Boys 
I’m not sure I trust Karen Woodall any more than I trust CAFCASS. The direction of reform currently is towards a presumption of no contact unless a father can ‘prove’ it will be safe; this is driven by Women’s Aid, but has been adopted by government and the judiciary – the 2000 report by Claire Sturge is still dominant and will continue to drive reform. I suspect Woodall’s analysis of the CAFCASS proposals is correct, though she clearly has a vested interest in this area and most campaigners resent any initiative by anyone else. What FNF have done may be a significant step forward or it may be another capitulation in their long history of grovelling appeasement. They have worked with CAFCASS before on a legal presumption of shared parenting and that didn’t exactly get off the ground. CAFCASS are more than capable of putting a worse system in place if they allow it to be driven by the usual prejudices and misinformation; they are not an organisation which has EVER relied on up-to-date research or evidence, and I don’t believe they will start now. I’m also suspicious of fathers’ groups which seem to be obsessed with PA to the exclusion of everything else. There are many issues which affect contact and PA is only one of them; Woodall used to be aware of this and warn that pure PA was a rare phenomenon, but she now seems to have tied her colours wholly to this particular bandwagon – to mix a couple of metaphors.
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Yes I think my thoughts on this would be that even if the CAFCASS management are serious about this their workforce is steeped in “anti oppressive practice” (AKA feminism ) from their training. I suppose it is a step forward it is now acknowledged. As a social worker myself I know the profession is incredibly bad at using research (being cynical it could be because a lot of it conflicts with the isms but actually it could be as simple as most are innumerate ). Organisations like FNF are rolling boulders up hills facing a deeply gynocentric society combined with professions almost uniformly convinced males are oppressive.
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Figures that the feminazis would have well placed supporters in other organisations who move to frustrate or water down any pro-male reforms. I loathe them and their programmes, but you really have to admire the efficiency of their networks. Without any form of central organisation they’ve spread throughout the body politic like a cancer, migrating to wherever they find space, no matter how obscure. In many ways one can compare them to the old school mob, or even a deep state network of corrupt businessmen, politicians, gangsters and police/intelligence agents. Not as in a hierarchy, but as in a shared culture/way of thinking. Frightening stuff.
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Sadly there is a classic Grauniad misprint here.
Parsons meant to say that this a “wind breaking” initiative intended to “corrupt a process we now recognise as inevitable, just and unstopable”.
Apart from that, ok.
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