How Do Family Court Judges Theorize about Parental Alienation? A Qualitative Exploration of the Territory

Abstract

Parental alienation (PA) and its conceptualization or understanding of the process underlying this dynamic has long been controversial, but it has also been frequently brought to courtrooms. This study provides an account of how legal professionals conceptualize “parental alienation” and how they describe the characteristics of the phenomenon. Using a qualitative design, 21 family court judges (range 33–60 years; 11 men and 10 women), working with child custody cases, participated in an individual in-depth interview. A qualitative analysis based on Grounded Theory basic procedures revealed a complex picture of alienation dynamics with five interconnected results. First, PA contexts and landscapes, which included the judges’ perceptions on the PA nurturing contexts, its strategic behavior patterns and functions, portraits of PA and clues for its identification; second, considerations on PA severity; third, the influential factors, including those related to the emergence of PA; fourth, individual and relational impact of being exposed to PA; and fifth, perceived signs of change. The results also allowed for the complexification of the judges’ theories, revealing six properties of the PA concept: elasticity, intentionality and camouflage, power asymmetries, multifactorial nature, and destructiveness. Directions for future research are expanded from these results and pragmatic contributions of knowledge on judges’ critical thinking on PA issues and its manifestations in legal practice are discussed.