Paper short abstract:

We explore how the use of the so-called “Parental Alienation Syndrome” (PAS) constitutes a pattern of discrimination in the Spanish state justice system. Its use aggregates gender, childhood, family, mental-health, and sexual violence-based stereotypes that are the basis for legal decisions.

Paper long abstract:

In this contribution, we explore how the use of the so-called “Parental Alienation Syndrome” (PAS) constitutes a gendered pattern of discrimination in the Spanish state justice system. Drawing on an interdisciplinary research that brings together anthropological, sociological and legal gazes to analyze 47 complete cases’ files plus one hundred sentences, we analyze how psychologist, social workers, forensics, public prosecutors and judges are influenced by moralities when working with cases of gendered violence and child sexual abuse within the family.

When such decisions are made, the closure of the penal case on family violence is just the beginning of a legal process whose examination shows the long-term consequences of using PAS. For the mothers and children involved in the research, “lived law” equates gendered institutional violence. Their experience is that public institutions, especially the state legal system, fails to protect them from violence and turns the process against them, using the prism of spurious interests to examine how they relate the violence, giving credibility to the widely discredited PAS’ argument, and prescribing the so-called “threat therapy”— that is, adopting civil measures to separate mothers and children. Even though current law does not allow for the use of PAS, its persistence in the world of justice is an extreme yet privileged case study of how law emerges as a practice that supersedes written word, and impacts on access to justice in different ways and degrees, from disaffection to forms of institutional violence.