PARENTAL ALIENATION: CANADIAN COURT CASES 1989–2008
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To gain a sound understanding of the dynamics and best responses to cases of children resisting contact with a parent, it is necessary to consider both the legal and psychological aspects of the situation.There is a small but important and growing body of empirically based psychological research about children resisting contact with parents, but there have been no published empirically based studies of the responses of the family justice system to such cases.This article is intended to begin to address this lacuna in the literature, reporting on a study of all reported Canadian cases between 1989 and 2008 that dealt with claims of "alienation" of children in the context of parental separation.The use of the concept of "alienation" in Canadian courts increased dramatically over these two decades, but this study reveals a complex and multifaceted set of cases with a range of responses depending on the judicial perceptions and the resources of the parents.fcre_1296 164..179 WHY IS ALIENATION A CONCERN FOR THE FAMILY JUSTICE SYSTEM?The starting point in Canadian law for dealing with the relationship between a child and a noncustodial parent is the "maximum contact principle" of the Divorce Act: 16(10) . . . the court shall give effect to the principle that a child of the marriage should have as much contact with each spouse as is consistent with the best interests of the child and, for that purpose, shall take into consideration the willingness of the person for whom custody is sought to facilitate such contact. 1 The maximum contact principle has two aspects.First, the courts should ensure there is as much contact with each parent as is "consistent" with the best interests of the child.Second, if one parent is thwarting contact with the other parent or alienating the child from the other parent, that is an important factor in deciding whether to award custody to the parent who will facilitate contact with the other parent (known as the "friendly parent principle").The maximum contact principle reflects a significant body of social science literature which establishes that children in general have better outcomes after parental separation if they continue to have a close relationship with both parents; 2 however, in a high-conflict separation, frequent contact may be stressful for children.Canadian judges sometimes assert that "access is the right of the child," 3 and this type of rhetoric may be useful for reminding parents that it is in their children's interests to promote a relationship with the other parent.The use of "children's rights" terminology can, however, be problematic in alienation cases as it may suggest to the child or the alienating parent that not seeing the other parent is a distinct possibility, and that it is the "right" of the child to decide whether it will happen.4 Children may genuinely believe that they are making an independent decision to reject a parent, and that it is their "right" to do
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".