Examining the Prevalence and Impact of Parental Alienating Behaviors (PABs) in Separated Parents in the United Kingdom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Purpose There is limited research on the prevalence of parental alienating behaviors (PABs), with previous studies limited to the United States and Canada. It is critical that such research is conducted in and expanded to various countries and jurisdictions to further support the identification of alienating behaviors as a serious form of domestic abuse that is experienced by a significant proportion of separated or divorced parents. Methods Using a sample of 1005 separated or divorced parents in the United Kingdom, this study examined the prevalence of PABs, the manifestation of behaviors in children and their contact refusal (as measured by the five-factor model), and the relationship between PABs and mental health and other forms of abuse. Results Results showed that, depending on how they were asked, between 39 and 59% of the sample had experienced PABs, with 36.5% identified as non-reciprocal targeted parents. This percentage dropped to 3.5% when assessed in the context of other factors (i.e., prior good relationship). Nearly all (96.7%) of participants reported manifestations of alienation in their children, but this again dropped (to 2.9%) when taking other factors into account. Finally, parents reporting higher levels of PABs also reported greater mental health issues (i.e., depression, PTSD, suicide ideation) and higher levels of other forms of abuse. Conclusions It is argued that these results add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that PABs are a form of abuse and a significant public health emergency, but that further debate on how alienation is measured in relation to the process (i.e., PABs) versus the outcome (i.e., contact rejection).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".