Parentectomyfirst a jolt when reading the word in an article by Italian psychologistswhich are subject to a common code of ethics even though they are known to be proponents of the parental alienation, aka PAS. Then, coldly, the assessment that there could not be a more appropriate terminology for the intervention that PAS advocates (G.B. Camerini, T. Magro, U. Sabatello, L. Volpini of the universities of Padua and Rome) propose in cases of parental alienation: the 'parental alienation'.removal of the parent as if it were a tumour, a diseased organ in the context of a child's life. (see text here).
Parentectomy, surgery to remove something pathological. This is what the alleged parental alienation syndrome leads to, that a syndrome in which one parent against the other armed inoculates the child from outside, even only at an unconscious level and therefore indemonstrably, with a rejection of one of them. But let us be even more precise: parental alienation is a legal tactic to save paedophiles and rapists from prosecution by their victims. It is most common in the context of civil separation proceedings, when in cases of domestic violence that statistically predominantly affect women (30% of the world's female population, WHO data from 2013 and 2017) children reject their fathers because they have seen their mothers mistreated or because they have been directly involved in physical, psychological and even sexual abuse.
Here then happens in the courts what the Istanbul Convention call secondary victimisation against women: being accused of crimes that were never committed, being considered guilty, for example, of rejecting the child's father and not being a friendly parent towards the other ensuring easy access or contact with the child (friendly parenting). Well, what would be self-evident, i.e. the fact that the child rejects the violent father because he fears him for himself or for his mother, becomes something completely different thanks to this group of consultants who are advocates or disciples of the advocates of violence. PAS (a theory which, we repeat, has no scientific merit and has been rejected by the scientific community).) that overturn the relationship between cause and effect.
The fact that the father is violent does not interest these psychologists and the judges who support them, at most it concerns the criminal trial and its final outcome in the Supreme Court. In civil proceedings, on the other hand, it is necessary to affirm a principle (which does not exist either, Constitutional Charter in hand): that of bigenitoriality. And if it is not possible to enforce the principle of bigenitorial responsibility, then it is not possible. the child's refusal to stay with one parent after separation (the father, in general) is the fault of the parent who was placed at the time of separation (the mother, almost always) manipulating the child's conscience, indoctrinating him, transferring to him his feelings of revenge and resentment towards his father, alienating him from a relationship, without representing the violent matrix of this relationship and the just desire of the child to keep away from the offending parent.
Once this responsibility has been placed on the woman, the psychologists mentioned above indicate the appropriate intervention: Immediately remove the child from the alienating parent and place him or her with the alienated, i.e. rejected, parent, by any method, including the deployment of police forces. All the heartbreak of a child taken by force (the image of the child in Cittadella being taken by the feet and hands to be separated from his mother is still vivid in our eyes) and torn away from his usual context of life, from his mother, grandparents, school which has been attended up to that moment, can be well encapsulated in the pain of a 'surgical' intervention that its inventors have rightly called 'parentectomy'.
Elvira Reale
