moved that Bill C-223, An Act to amend the Divorce Act, be read the second time and referred to a committee.
Mr. Speaker, I feel enormously honoured to stand here today with significant amendments to the Divorce Act in a bill entitled the “keeping children safe act”.
This bill would give children a voice in divorce proceedings and stop the increasing and egregious practice of disregarding children's views and preferences under the pretense they have been manipulated or alienated by a parent. It would prevent judges from restricting a child's time with one parent to improve the relationship with the other parent, and it would prevent courts from forcing children to attend so-called “reunification therapy”.
This bill would require legal advisers to remedy the effects of domestic violence and coercive control rather than discount them or even punish disclosures. It would change the existing premise in family courts that children are property that must be split equally between parties in a divorce.
I want to thank the National Association of Women and the Law, and particularly Suzanne Zacour, for first raising with me the extreme and widespread issues in family court about a year ago. NAWL introduced me to survivors, parents accused of alienation and children forced into bizarre programs that seem like the conversion therapy this House banned four years ago. I was horrified. I brought them all to testify at the status of women committee last year during our coercive control study, and I am sure all members who were there during their testimony will remember it vividly.
NAWL worked with me throughout the summer and early fall on crafting this legislation. I note that the government is calling for some amendments, which do seem reasonable to me, to maintain the integrity of the system while staying true to the main concepts of this law, as I have just outlined.
While I was working on this bill, I got so many calls from victims and survivors who wanted to share their stories with me that I could not find time to hear them all. There was one woman in Hamilton who was about to lose her child due to accusations of parental alienation, so I went to her house. I met with her and her nine-year-old daughter. They clearly had a loving relationship. They were both terrified that the police would show up to force her into the custody of her father, whom she did not know well, had never lived with and about whom she had disclosed a disturbing story that suggested sexual abuse.
The transfer did not happen that night, but the next day when the mother and daughter were at the hospital dealing with anxiety, that is when it happened, and the mother wrote to me afterward. She said, “12 cops made me force her down seven floors, kicking and screaming, and told me I would be arrested in front of her if I did not take her to her father's truck. I can't make her last memory of me being physically forcing her into danger, and I also can't fight for her if I get arrested.”
This mother has not had any contact with her daughter for months upon months. She says that this bill would break the chains of our silenced children and set them free from abuse and slavery.
Children's opinions cannot be left out of a divorce. They are part of the divorce. They should have a say. Canada ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1991. Article 12 guarantees children the right to express their opinions on matters affecting them and emphasizes the need for them to have an opportunity to be heard in any judicial proceeding that affects them.
Canada ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in 1981. That is monitored by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, also known as CEDAW. Last year CEDAW called on Canada to prevent the use of parental alienation allegations. They said in a news release, “Shelters, researchers, service providers, legal professionals, and experts all agree that parental alienation accusations are being weaponized against victims of domestic violence.”
Many survivors point to the 2023 report on violence against women and girls and its causes and consequences, by UN Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem. She argued that all countries should adopt legislation to prohibit the use of parental alienation allegations in custody disputes. She said the following about parental alienation:
1) It has been dismissed by medical, psychiatric and psychological associations, and in 2020 it was removed from the International Classification of Diseases by the World Health Organization. Nevertheless, it has gained considerable traction and has been widely used to negate allegations of domestic and sexual abuse within family court systems on a global scale.
2) The report demonstrates how the discredited and unscientific pseudo-concept of parental alienation is used in family law proceedings by abusers as a tool to continue their abuse and coercion and to undermine and discredit allegations of domestic violence made by mothers who are trying to keep their children safe.
Let us look at what other countries are doing. In Brazil, parental alienation is actually a civil offence with potential criminal implications. The University of Manchester did a study that found that in Brazil, irrespective of abuse reported by mothers and children, fathers maintained direct contact with children. Multiple mothers lost custody and even all contact with their children. Five out of eight criminal investigations into child sex abuse, child rape and domestic violence by fathers were closed once there were parental alienation allegations. There has been so much controversy over the harms to women and children that this year, Brazil has a new bill to remove the concept of parental alienation from the country's laws.
Spain is the opposite, with legislation that specifically prohibits accusations of parental alienation. Ireland this year vowed to follow Spain's example. In the U.K., family law prioritizes the best interests of the child, and allegations of domestic abuse take precedence over allegations of parental alienation.
In the U.S., responsibility falls to individual states. Arizona, California, Colorado, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Utah have all implemented President Biden's 2022 Keeping Children Safe from Family Violence Act, which prohibits remedies associated with parental alienation. Several U.S. cases have made the news, including a story last year in The Denver Gazette where a man facing criminal charges for repeatedly raping his three daughters got court-ordered reunification therapy while his wife went to jail for objecting.
Parental alienation was a concept developed in the late 1980s by psychiatrist Richard Gardner. He said at the time that it often involves malicious and false sexual-abuse allegations made by the mother against the father to gain sole custody and remove the father from their children's lives. It was all about fathers' rights, regardless of circumstances and regardless of abuse.
The American Psychological Association says, “there have been no well-controlled empirical studies that confirm the phenomenon, nor have a standardized assessment process and specific diagnostic criteria been established for it.”
The APA is concerned about this concept's influence in legal settings.
The remedies for parental alienation that the courts have been ordering have been found to be seriously damaging to children. Reunification therapy is also called reintegration therapy, multi-faceted family therapy, multi-modal family therapy, reconciliation therapy and therapy for the intractable resist/refuse dynamic. There is a proliferation of names used interchangeably, adding to the ambiguity and controversy of these approaches. Possibly most concerning is the lucrative nature of these therapies, causing an explosion of so-called experts. Last year, in the Family Law Quarterly, Chadwick and Sloan wrote:
Undeterred by a lack of sound scientific evidence, a cottage industry of reunification camps has capitalized on the popularity of the concept of parental alienation, charging thousands of dollars to allegedly deprogram children who have been alienated from a noncustodial parent.
Orders can include transport agents who will remove a child from a home, courthouse or wherever they happen to be and send them to the camp. To avoid human trafficking implications, guardianship of the child is transferred at each point in the operation. The children often do not consent to this treatment, which violates the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Canadian health care consent acts.
Other remedies to parental alienation are equally harmful, including forced contact with a parent estranged for good reason, immediate custody reversals, prohibition of contact between mother and child, police enforcement and cost orders against mothers deemed to be alienators. That is why this bill would do more than just ban allegations of parental alienation in family court.
Witness after witness who appeared at the status of women committee last year disclosed how rampant parental alienation allegations are in Canadian courts. Abusers do not stop trying to control and dominate just because their partner has left; in many cases, the abuse gets worse. Carrie Leonetti, professor at University of Auckland law school, told committee that violent fathers are more than twice as likely to seek custody of their children after separation than non-abusive fathers. They are awarded custody approximately 70% of the time.
She said:
In the past two decades in family courts, the pendulum has swung from believing children and protecting them to disbelieving, silencing, and punishing their disclosures...re-entrenching fathers’ rights at the expense of women’s and children’s safety. The ideology of “parental alienation” has been the driving force behind this retrograde shift.
She said that “parental alienation is gender bias masquerading as junk science” and that more than 90% of those accused are women and most of those are victims of intimate partner violence. She said, “Judges and psychologists are obsessed with the idea that, when children disclose abuse by fathers, resist being in their care, and ask for protection, it is their mothers who are the real problem.”
Now people in Canada are being told by professionals not to claim abuse or seek protection because it puts their child at further risk. We heard this at committee. The Ottawa Victim Services and the Elizabeth Fry Society of New Brunswick told us many victims feel “the price for leaving the violent environment is even higher than the price for staying at home”. Witnesses said reunification therapy was akin to forced reprogramming of children, often resulting in psychological trauma, not a healed family relationship.
One researcher told us that children are silenced and that mothers are found to be “alienating” for normal reactions to abuse or normal behaviour such as not having pictures of their ex-partner in their house. Another warned that several U.S. providers of reunification therapy are moving into Canada because states are adopting child safety laws like the one I am presenting today.
One mother who was labelled an alienator told us, “Not one mode of contact is permitted. Imagine not even being able mail your child a birthday card or Christmas presents for years.... Children are not permitted to say last goodbyes or attend funerals.” Child survivors of the therapy told us, for example, “When we described emotionally abusive episodes, our dad told the therapist they didn't happen. The therapist told us that we needed to think of things from our dad's perspective, that we weren't remembering things correctly”. They were blamed for the abuse.
A professor from the University of Calgary told us, “sometimes the people who are testifying as experts in parental alienation cases are the same people who run the reunification camps, and they stand to profit directly from those camps.” Another professor from Stockton University told us that a “cottage industry” of lawyers and mental health professionals who profit from parental alienation accusations in custody disputes often resist any limitations on the use of such claims. She said that this is done by people without particular training or qualifications, and that it is not a regulated industry; it is just very profitable.
I mentioned how much outreach I started receiving when I was working on this bill and since it has passed first reading, I can say that hundreds of organizations have indicated their enthusiastic support, like Women's Shelters Canada, the Alliance of Canadian Research Centres on Gender-Based Violence, YWCA Canada and dozens upon dozens of women's shelters across the country.
These are some quotes sent to me on social media.
One person said, “This is so, so necessary. I couldn't stop weeping reading this bill. Our children must be heard and the court system must be transformed from being yet another tool for abusers to abuse, control, demean and devalue their victims.” Another person said, “This change cannot come soon enough. Anyone who is surviving the Family Court System learns quickly that 'children's rights' don't exist. They value parental equity above all. The term 'parental alienation' is thrown out by an abuser like a vengeful 'hail Mary'.” Another said, “You don't know me, but thank you so much. I am a sexual assault survivor and this Bill is going to change lives and protect so many kids from abuse.” The woman from Hamilton I mentioned earlier said, “My daughter was silenced and placed under the control of someone she explicitly said she feared. Bill C-223 gives children their voices back.”
These changes are desperately needed and I implore all members to support this bill.