Kate Molan discusses how best to address implacable hostility & the increase in parental alienation
- Intractable contact cases are some of the hardest to resolve.
- Parental alienation can include belittling, brainwashing and other strategies.
After a relationship breaks down, the task of agreeing arrangements for any children can be a complex one, and many separating parents struggle to come to terms with the new dynamics and mutual respect that co-parenting entails. Indeed, there are some cases in which extreme, negative behaviour is exhibited by one parent with the aim of undermining a child’s relationship with the other. Such characteristics and behaviour have come to be known as implacable or intractable hostility—a term that should only be applied to a parent who will do almost anything to frustrate a relationship between the child and their other parent.
Implacable hostility can often result in parental alienation. Parental alienation describes a situation where a child has been deliberately manipulated, coerced or otherwise pressured to align themselves to one parent by the other. The impact on children has been recently highlighted by the Children and Family Court
